MAID and The Dialog Corporation

The problem

In the early 1980s, market research and business information existed mostly on paper, in expensive reports sold one at a time by individual publishers. A corporate researcher who wanted to compare sources had to buy each report whole. MAID, for Market Analysis and Information Database, set out to put those reports into a single searchable online service and charge only for the pages a user actually read.

The approach

The hard part was commercial rather than technical. Publishers had to be persuaded, one contract at a time, to let their content be sold by the page alongside their competitors'. The service launched in November 1985 with nine publishers, on the dial-up online networks that preceded the World Wide Web. Once the publishers were in, MAID had something a rival could not quickly copy.

The technology followed the contracts. InfoSort, MAID's system for structuring and indexing content, became the basis of Profound, a Windows application launched in the mid-1990s that combined market research, company data and news in one interface. An internet version of Profound followed in March 1996, and within a year a quarter of the service's usage had moved to the web. Distribution deals with Microsoft, IBM, CompuServe and others put the service in front of the first generation of online business users.

Roles

Dan founded MAID in 1984, at the age of twenty, and led it as chief executive throughout. He took the company to the London Stock Exchange in March 1994 and to Nasdaq in December 1995, one of the first British online companies to list there. In 1997 he led the acquisition of Knight-Ridder Information, the American owner of the Dialog databases, a business several times MAID's size, and renamed the enlarged group The Dialog Corporation.

Bright Station did not exist as a separate company during these years. The Bright Station name was born from them: when Dialog's information business was sold to Thomson in 2000, the remaining listed company was renamed Bright Station plc, and the name was carried forward by Dan for the private company he incorporated in 2002.

Outcome

The acquisition of Knight-Ridder Information for $420 million in November 1997 made the company one of the largest online information businesses in the world, with offices in more than fifty locations and customers in dozens of countries. Integrating a business of that size while servicing the debt that financed it was demanding, and the group's shares fell heavily in 1998 and 1999. In March 2000 Thomson agreed to buy Dialog's information services division, and the sale completed on 4 May 2000 in a transaction reported at $500 million. The Dialog name remains in use today, more than fifty years after the service was first created in California.

Today

The Dialog service passed from Thomson to ProQuest in 2008, and ProQuest was acquired by Clarivate in 2021; it is sold as ProQuest Dialog. The listed company Dan founded was renamed Bright Station plc in 2000 and Smartlogik Group plc in 2001, sold its remaining software assets in 2002 and was dissolved in 2012. Neither MAID nor Dialog is connected with Bright Station Limited today. Status checked 24 September 2026.