Credit Suisse access to GLG consultants: Tom Hutchinson at Integrity Research points out that the partnership is a shift from GLG’s longstanding policy of not providing sell-side analysts with access to their network. Sell-side research has been slowly dying over the last several years as experienced analysts have departed for hedge funds. Hutchinson theorizes that the deal could improve the quality of CS analysis and piss off existing GLG customers. I agree that CS idea generation will likely improve but it will still be produced within the broken commission based model. This aspect of the arrangement an interesting way for GLG to utilize members of their network to non-subscription paying customers with CS analysts as conduits in the middle, shouldering the risk of getting paid via commission.

GLG client access to Credit Suisse analysts: The addition of Credit Suisse analysts to the GLG roster is not terribly significant since the bulk of GLG customers are hedge funds that would be able to get the ear of a Credit Suisse analyst simply by picking up the phone. That said, CS will be able to lease out their analysts through GLG to consulting firms, PE shops and corporate clients that don’t typically deal with prime brokers or consume sell-side research. However all of these types of researchers are extremely savvy and use services like GLG to drill into specific investment theses so it’s unclear how much macroindustry input they are really looking for. It would be helpful for a PE shop to have access to a sell-side analysts for specific merger analysis, but that may fall into the prohibited “investment advice” part of the deal.

GLG access to Credit Suisse clients and distribution: The potential for broader distribution has significant potential for GLG and likely the primary reason why they were interested in the deal. The sell-side has very little to sell right now. Selling GLG services and getting direct commissions on those sales would be an effective way for CS to monetize their sales force separate from the trade commission game. That said, structuring the cost, discount, fees, and commissions for something like this will likely be a bit of a shot in the dark and will be hard to execute without angering existing GLG customers. However these factors are minimized in the instances where CS sales keeps pushing CS analysts’ ideas which utilize GLG consulting hours. This aspect of the deal is similar to the GLG/Morgan Stanley AlphaWise partnership announced in March.

Congrats to both companies in completing what I’m sure was a very sticky deal. At the end of the day this is massive validation of expert networks. Over the last several years the sell-side has lost inside access to companies and as a result has been forced to do deep primary research alongside everyone else…and they’re using expert networks to do it.

Edit: Great post from Mike Mayhew at Integrity put up last night.

Last.fm built their network in a very intelligent manner – the network is a sidenote to a very effective service. Last.fm works great for anyone who comes to use it…and by joining the network and tuning your “station” to your likes and dislikes the service only gets better. It is the second step that built huge value for the service.

When I tried to embed the Wallstrip video here, but it didn’t work (the embed link went to this dead link: wallstrip.cbsnews.comtheshow). Wallstrip was acquired by CBS on Wednesday, and now there are lots of dead links to Wallstrip out there, all with CBS in them, including the one on Wallstrip investor Fred Wilson’s blog linking to the acquisition announcement. Ironically, in his Wallstrip interview Costolo also said he was long on CBS…

Either way, Feedburner is great. I “burn my feeds” with them for this site and use their site to monitor my blog traffic. I’m a bit doubtful that Google will make $100M in feed based advertising from them, but history has shown that they don’t seem to care about such things.

When he was a student at the University of Michigan School of Law, Mr. Zell spent part of his time managing apartment buildings, so he had contacts in real estate. But he had every intention of carving out a career in law. After graduation, he joined [Yates Holleb and Michelson] in Chicago. The starting salary was $116 a week, but an ambitious young lawyer could supplement that by bringing new business to the firm.

“I spent my first week drafting a contract,” Mr. Zell recalls. “It was deadly.” That weekend, he got in touch with some of his real-estate contacts, and “the following Monday I brought in my first deal, an apartment project in Toledo, Ohio. The partners liked it so much they all invested.” Thanks to deals like that one, Mr. Zell earned $100,000 his first year out of law school — $93,000 in commissions and $7,000 in pay — more than any of the firm’s senior partners. Never again would he formally practice law.

While they generate great data, there are inherent flaws in this system, namely that they are only able to track traffic from those that download their spyware. So, their panel is skewed towards those that don’t care about downloading spyware (novice web users) and those that might want to download their app in order to impact the ComScore rankings (webmasters). Matt Cutts of Google has a great post summarizing his view on “an unnamed web metrics businss” and their interactions with Google in the early days here.