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Re: SEC Award
- To: Melvyn Ciment <mciment@nsf.gov>
- Subject: Re: SEC Award
- From: Stephen Wolff <steve@mon.cise.nsf.gov>
- Date: Mon, 25 Oct 1993 08:24:44 -0500 (EDT)
- Cc: jcavines@nsf.gov
- In-Reply-To: <199310241856.AA16057@note1.nsf.gov>
> Please provide me with a statement in case I am asked to explain to the
> Director why NCRI made this award to (NYU) that allegedly competes with the
> private sector. (Mead data).
Mel -
I'll provide you with the project summary from the proposal before your 11 o'clock meeting. But here's a little elaboration.
This is a two-year award in response to an unsolicited proposal that combines research and a demonstration project. The research is into management and access tools based on Internet technology for large and changing datasets. The demonstration uses the SEC data.
SEC has given an exclusive ($15,000,000) contract to Mead to distribute the data. Mead in turn not only provides value-added versions of the data to corporate and private consumers, but also resells the raw data to other value-added companies who furnish differently enhanced information based on the same SEC data, competitively in an open market. The awardee, NYU's Stern School, uses grant funds to purchase the data from Mead just as any other of Mead's customers. The awardee does NOT plan to duplicate any of Mead's (or any other reseller's) data products, but will use existing and enhanced versions of Internet resource-discovery tools. The intended audience is NOT the same as the commercial services, but rather individuals, private citizens, and academic institutions.
Not only is the intended customer set different from Mead's and resellers' of the SEC data, competition with them by this project is minimized in another way: Mead sell TWO versions of the SEC data - a "real-time" version aimed at traders, and a day-old version on mag tape suited primarily for research. It is the latter version which our awardee is using.
A subscription to the magtape version costs about $80k per year from Mead; one may accordingly expect that Mead's products based on the data are therefore even more expensive. While such expense is not a problem for Harvard Business School or Wharton or Sloan, the Mead data are probably out of reach for a very large academic community of departments of business administration and even the smaller business schools. So not only is this project well-aligned with the new OMB A130 (according to Mike Nelson) and with the general goals of reinventing government, it is also supportive of NSF's role in improving educational practice.
We and the awardee hope that at the conclusion of the two-year project, a corporate sponsor can be found to donate the magtape subscription so that the service can be continued, using the tools developed under the project (which will be placed in the public domain). But NSF does not contemplate further support.
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