A Quickening Pulse

Last year, Alacra introduced Alacra Pulse, with the initial focus on Street Pulse, a free service which tracked analyst and blogger comments on companies, culling information from traditional and alternative web-based sources.

 The initial response to Street Pulse has been positive, and we’ve been hard at work expanding the product offering.  Tomorrow, we’re officially launching PulsePro, a new version of Pulse, aimed at the professional investor and business user.

PulsePro adds three additional Pulse events to the existing Street Pulse:

• Deal Pulse spotlights M&A rumors, announced deals and “deal ideas”
• Chief Pulse captures comments by C-Suite executives
• Weak Pulse identifies distressed company events such as debt restructuring, layoffs, downgrades and potential bankruptcies

And, FOR THE NEXT 30 DAYS, we are having a FREE open access period, where anyone can use the full PulsePro at http://pulse.alacra.com.

PulsePro offers users the ability to create portfolios and profiles and to receive email and Blackberry alerts on companies, people and topics of interest. It also offers two free email newsletters.  One covers M&A Ideas and Rumors; the other covers Upgrades and Downgrades by sell-side and rating agency analyst. There are global and European versions of each, and you can sign up for them here: http://pulse.alacra.com/newsletter-signup.

Through the open access period, PulsePro subscriptions are available at a special introductory rate of $995 per year, with significant multi-user discounts via http://pulse.alacra.com/subscribe.

PulsePro drives Idea Generation and Current Awareness.

For investment bankers, professional services executives, wealth management and business development professionals, idea generation is all about providing reasons to call a prospect or customer.

From a current awareness standpoint, PulsePro ensures that users don’t miss key market-moving events on their customers and prospects.  Or, as one of our clients put it “I can’t know everything, but I never want to look like an idiot”.

PulsePro has many other potential applications. The Wall Street Journal today wrote about how PulsePro analyst sentiment feeds may be used as input for algorithmic trading.

At its core, Alacra Pulse takes a “less is more” approach to information aggregation. We’ve heard from our customers that the typical “boil the ocean” method of mining hundreds of thousands of sources just doesn’t work. So, we’ve focused our efforts on identifying just the critical information our customers want, taking a four-pronged approach:

Curation: There aren’t 100,000 blogs that matter, from a business perspective. There probably aren’t 20,000. So, the first thing we do is use Alacra editors to carefully identify the right sources. Today, Alacra Pulse includes roughly 3,000 sources, half being traditional media (NYT, WSJ, the Guardian, the Telegraph, MarketWatch and more); the other half being a hand-selected group of influential blogs. These blogs cut across a wide swath of industries but all provide breaking news and/or deep analysis and commentary. Blogs include Pharmalot, Business Insider, Green Stocks Central, Flightglobal, Mashable, and blogs from industry analyst firms like Forrester, Gartner, Yankee, NPD and more.

Event detection: in separating the signal from the noise, it’s not enough to limit the number of sources; you still need to discern impactful business events from simple mentions of a company. If I’m tracking Bank of America (BAC:NYSE), I need to know if Moody’s puts them on credit rating watch, but I don’t need to know that they open a new branch somewhere. Using state of the art semantic technology, Alacra Pulse detects and spotlights impactful, market-moving business events.

Tagging: Matching company names is a fairly trivial task for any information retrieval system. Unfortunately, relying on simple name matching isn’t good enough. It generates false positives (Apple, Inc. vs. the fruit) and misses a high percentage of mentions. Alacra leverages semantic tagging technologies, combined with our existing knowledge base, to generate superior results. In our knowledge base, we have deep information about companies. We know alternate names (e.g. Woolies = Woolworths plc; Kirk Kerkorian = Tracinda Corporation), products (iPad=Apple) along with numerous details about company location, executives, competitors and partners. Together, these allow us to tag companies at a much higher level of accuracy than off-the-shelf tools.

Editor review:  While state-of-the-art technology drives Pulse, we know that technology alone is not enough. We employ editors to review the tagged results to ensure overall quality.

I invite you to try Alacra Pulse for free through April 15 and welcome your feedback in the comments