I’m excited this morning to publicly announce the launch of Alacra Street Pulse, the product that we’ve been working on for the past 6-9 months.
Street Pulse was borne of two related trends that we’ve been following for the past 12-24 months:
- The diminishing role of sell-side research; and
- The rise of the professional blogger
In discussions with clients, we’ve heard that there is a strong interest in alternative media, but that there was an even greater concern about quality. Our clients were not ready to turn on a fire hose of blog content for bankers and other professionals to consume.
So, today, we introduce the Alacra Pulse Platform and its first application, Street Pulse.
Alacra Pulse has two parts. The underlying platform reads web-based RSS feeds – from newspapers, magazine, trade publication sites and blogs – and extracts information from each article or post. We first extract or tag entities (companies) from each piece of content and then we look for business events such as an analyst comment, a bankruptcy filing, news or rumors of an M&A transaction, or a quote by a CEO. On top of the platform sit a series of event-specific applications, which drive current awareness, competitive intelligence and idea generation for users.
Alacra Street Pulse, our first app on the new platform, answers the question “what do key opinion leaders have to say about…” a company today? Street Pulse brings together comments by traditional analysts – sell-side, industry and credit analysts – with those of a group of hand-selected bloggers.
Alacra Pulse uses the freemium business model. There’s a free version at http://pulse.alacra.com. That version is supported by advertising plus links to contextually relevant content for purchase at the Alacra Store.
There’s also a professional version, which provides added functionality like portfolios, email alerts, information sharing features and advanced search capabilities.
In the coming months, we will launch additional event-specific applications focusing on M&A deals & rumors, distressed companies, CEO quotes and more.
I'd love to hear your feedback on Street Pulse. Please visit Street Pulse and play with the app. Let me know what you think, either in the comments below or drop me a note at barry-dot-graubart at alacra-dot-com.
