Content Matters

Alacra Street Pulse has been named a finalist in the Best Content Aggregation Service category for the 2009 CODiE Awards, sponsored by the Software and Information Industry Association. The annual SIIA CODiEs are peer-awards, voted on by members of the industry association. Voting by SIIA members begins today, with the ultimate winners announced at the SIIA NetGain conference in early May.

 

The Pulse Platform, which was launched four weeks ago, combines content from traditional news sources with a group of about 1,000 hand-selected blogs. The content is then run through our proprietary semantic tagger, which extracts entities, such as companies or people, and events, such as analyst upgrades or downgrades, mergers and acquisitions, corporate bankruptcies and more.

 

Street Pulse, the first application on the Pulse Platform, aims to answer the question “what do key opinion leaders have to say…” about a given company. By aggregating comments from sell-side, credit and industry analysts, along with key bloggers, Street Pulse provides a single view into what’s being said by key opinion leaders about a company or industry.

 

Street Pulse uses a freemium business model. There’s a completely free version available at http://pulse.alacra.com. That version is supported by advertising and the sale of contextually relevant content from the Alacra Store. A professional version, available for license, provides additional functionality such as portfolios, email alerts, enhanced sharing capabilities and advanced search.

 

In the coming weeks, Alacra will be introducing additional applications on the Pulse Platform, including Deal Pulse (M&A events), Legal Pulse (law firm mentions in the news) and Weak Pulse (events for distressed companies). As with Street Pulse, each of these will have a free and a professional version.

 

Alacra always gets its best ideas from our customers. I welcome you to use Street Pulse and send us your feedback.