At FirstRain our customers are business people – people looking for high quality real-time intelligence – and so they include both marketing and sales, and investors. Within the investing community we are considered a type of independent research. Independent because we just supply research, we don’t trade or sell you positions, unlike the big banks.
Investorside is an industry association that was formed to help investors find and consume independent research – especially important after the scandals of the early 2000s when sell-side analysts had been pushing stocks they did not believe in.
This month FirstRain is featured on the Investorside site – you can read their newsletter here.
and here is an excerpt:
Smarter than Google or Traditional Intelligence Databases
According to Herscher, business professionals struggle between incomplete and inflexible news or intelligence systems — or Google — as choices for decision content. So they are faced with either incomplete information, or such a quantity of irrelevant information that they cannot find the useful intelligence.
“If you are trying to do an in-depth analysis on Domino’s Pizza as an investment candidate – looking for company strengths and weaknesses, competitive positioning and market demand drivers – in a Google search you will have to wade through store locations, coupons and menus,” Herscher explains. “Conversely, if you use a news service, or even an intelligence database like Factiva or Lexis Nexis, you will be missing critical web content.”
FirstRain monitors and then extracts, filters and organizes only relevant intelligence from the web. The information is delivered to users as efficient reports about a company’s business environment including recent events, industry trends, competitive dynamics and management turnover.
“FirstRain is particularly valuable in helping clients keep track of fast-moving industries such as technology and clean energy,” Herscher continues. “Users can monitor critical industry topics and lists of companies and receive monitors to keep them up to date with the important changes impacting their holdings.”
We released out first free version of FirstRain on the brand new Seeking Alpha app store last week – and today we are the #1 app with over 2500 downloads!
The reviews are terrific — like “This is brilliant. You can see in an instant all the important news on any ticker and know what happened to the stock and the volume when the news was released. Probably the fastest way to get familiar with any new stock.”
It’s easy to try it out for yourself. Go to the Seeking Alpha App Store and install it.
You can see two views of a company – a short overview of what’s hot and happening:
and then if you click through to Read More – you see a whole page of the company brief – an in depth and very relevant view of what’s impacting the company, it’s competitors, it’s management, and then from there review the top industry topics that are trending on the web.
In one page you can quickly and easily review, or come up to speed on, a company and it’s market (this is the chart at the top of the page showing the critical events).
Today more people than ever can use FirstRain to monitor and understand their stocks – or the companies and markets they care about.
The news is we announced our FirstRain Snapshot application on the newly released Seeking Alpha App Store (which is in itself a terrific new capability for all Seeking Alpha users). The press release is on our website – check it out. But more importantly – down load the app and try it for yourself. It’s free.
It’s exciting for us to make our unique brand of dynamic, in-depth market intelligence available to the millions of business-savvy bloggers and readers at Seeking Alpha. The Snapshot provides embedded Quote and Portfolio analysis — as well as up-to-the-minute briefings generated on companies and trending topics, seamlessly within Seeking Alpha.
To download it for yourself — go to: http://seekingalpha.com/store/app/87-firstrain-snapshot
We’re making a snapshot of FirstRain intelligence available for free on Salesforce.com AppExchange today – so everyone can get access to intelligent business search results within their accounts, contacts, opportunities etc.
Today’s announcement is the new free applet – a snapshot – that shows What’s Hot for each account. What are the most important business topics impacting the customer? (for example breast cancer in the Pfizer example below) What are the most recent management changes? Who are the top competitors and what are the latest developments with them?
The snapshot is designed to help the sales person figure out what to say on a call or in a meeting – how to help the sales person make their conversation relevant to the customer and their business. Arming the sales person to talk about the changes impacting the customer’s business (and how he/she can help) rather than speed-and-feed a product.
Why should you care? Because unlike typical databases, FirstRain uses the web as the most dynamic, real time source of updates and intelligence for your sales campaigns. But unlike typical web search it extracts out the events that are impacting your customer… and de-junks, filters and ranks what’s hot for you, so you only see what matters. This means you can
- Prepare for a call instantly
- Understand your account in context
- See competitor events and top news and blogs
- Know the top hot industry topics impacting your accounts
- See key unannounced management changes
- Link into deeper intelligence and reports
=> Know what you should know — but never have the time to research
We have a number of customers who have already downloaded the applet and they are telling us that not only is the information immediately useful – but also downloading the applet was easy and it runs fast! Great to hear.
Here’s a link to the press release….. and here are some samples of how the applet works inside salesforce CRM. As you would expect – it also has many links into FirstRain so licensed users can easily jump into company briefs and deeper views of their customer’s business to use during meeting and campaign planning.
You can see a demo and screenshots – or download the app for yourself – on our page on AppExchange.
“What’s hot” smart summary – FirstRain chooses what goes onto the front page of the snapshot based on where the hot activity is for the account
Who are the top competitors – and what’s happening with them?
What are the hottest issues in the industry and what’s been happening?
What is the trend in management turnover – who recently joined and left – plus a link through to extracted management team lists
We’ve released a new version of FirstRain today which has a number of new features to provide our users even more depth on their companies and markets – even more quickly. You can read about all the features on today’s blog post on ignite.firstrain.com.
One of the very new, beta capabilities is Industry search and analytics. This is intended for marketing and sales people and analysts who need to quickly review an industry and what’s hot and changing in that industry — for example a salesperson coming up to speed on an industry because they have a new prospect, or analyst who wants an RSS feed of the important changes impacting the companies in an industry.
The industry brief generates top news, recent events, corporate governance indicators, industry health indicators, management turnover, top moving stocks, analyst comments etc. for the industry – all in one place – or sent to you through an RSS feed.
But more than that – it also shows you a market map for the industry – which are the top companies? What are the hot topics? What are the top business lines? All very useful to stay on top of an industry that is impacting your business. It’s up to the minute, automated and generated from the web.
Here are some images from the Internet Information Providers industry:
Guest post: Michael Prospero, Director of Research at FirstRain
As an analyst, one of the things I struggled with was the vast amount of information coming at me each day. A large part of my job was to read anything from or about my companies, competitor companies, industry bellwethers, thought leaders and of course the overall economy.
I set up Google alerts, but depending on the companies/stocks I entered I got a lot of junk both old and irrelevant. Also, there still isn’t a way to set up the types of sources you would like to read (e.g., no press releases or wire news) — the number of sources alerts covered is relatively small. The stated information from Google is that it watches more than 4,500 English-language news sites. and the number of alerts can become annoying if you have large portfolios of companies you’re tracking.
Additionally, I would have my stock ticker service up on my screen with the stock prices of my portfolios and this would provide an icon if there was news on a stock I had set up on the screen. A large part of my day was spent reading financial publications, checking news from the alerts on my companies, talking to customers and companies. When I had time in between those tasks, I spent my time working investment ideas.
As you read, you come up with ideas (idea generation), which leads you to search for other stories to either support or invalidate your theory. To find those stories, you would of course use Google search. Obviously, Google is very good at finding content, but because it’s most every source on the internet, you have to really hunt for something interesting and timely.
Oftentimes, you will find an article that is exactly what you were looking for in your search only to realize that it’s from 2006. Google search is comprehensive, but it’s tedious and extremely time consuming to dig through the clutter of totally irrelevant as well as non-business relevant content.
It’s been nearly three years since I was an analyst now and the one thing that has drastically changed is the number of blogs (and overall number sources on the internet) and their authoritativeness. In the beginning, the number of blogs was sparse and at best the authors of them were questionable. Now, we have blogs from extremely knowledgeable, connected, intelligent people and micro-blogging (e.g., Twitter) is yet the next step in the evolution of news.
So this leads to why I am at FirstRain: I believe if a system could have gathered all of the news that was business relevant, categorize it by company and topically, and allow me to personalize its delivery along with other preferences, it would have helped my process enormously. I could have spent more time on the phone and more time working on idea generation. Time spent on new ideas rather than time spent covering your butt is the way to create alpha.
We’ve formally announced the research engine to the press today – you can see the press release here.
I’ve been briefing editors for a few days now, and expect I will be through this week to. It’s the first time we’ve talked with the press about our new capability and the category “intelligent business search” – although our customers have been using it for several months now. We decided to wait to announce it until we were very confident of customer adoption and that the value we had planned to build was actually being experienced by our customers. And we’re there today!
Customers are telling us how much they like it:
- the helpfulness of the information and the time it saves sales in finding new opportunities and preparing for meetings
- the time it saves marketing in staying on top of everything happening in their market
- the ease of configuring for all our users – just what they want to see in the form they want to see it
- the freshness of the management change data, especially in comparison to traditional tools
- the freshness and breadth of intelligence because the web is the source, especially in comparison to the market intelligence services most users have access to today.
Bottom line – you can find higher quality intelligence in minutes instead of hours, and exactly what you need for your job. If you want to try it you can request a free trial here.
Google just entered the world of faceted search, following in Bing’s footsteps, and it’s a good move. John Battelle, wrote a strong piece on what they are doing “Google Steps Gingerly Toward Search As Application” and on why this is a necessary move for Google — to deliver search as an application rather than as purely simple keyword search. I couldn’t agree with him more.
It’s good that Google is taking this step for the consumer, and it’s a step professional search based applications have already taken – they just have to be a great deal higher productivity than consumer applications, because in the office time is money.
If you are a FirstRain user you know the benefits of this approach are to get you instantly to the businesses, ecosystem and analytics around your question to help you make a decision quickly. The wind power example Google used in it’s announcement is a good one to look at.
In the Google case here are the results you get:
The results include news and information from traditional media sources, nongovernmental organizations and online sources such as Wikipedia. The left-hand navigation offers the ability to refine results by time and by news, blogs, images, books and more. Related search terms such as solar power, hydropower and geothermal energy are also listed. It’s definitely a big improvement over early technologies.
But for a sales or marketing person what you need is fresh, business relevant results and navigation for the businesses in the industry and the ecosystem of companies engaged in the wind energy industry — wind power generation and distribution. Recent events, industry trends, people-related changes and management turnover are all detectable and attached to the search results. For example, users can identify planned commercial wind-turbine installations; track key components, parts and raw materials used in their construction; and identify suppliers poised to benefit from investments in wind power. Up-to-the minute reports can be delivered regularly via email or mobile phone so that users stay on top of new developments.
Here’s the contrasting screen shot – and in FirstRain you can navigate through management teams, competitors, hot topics and all the other elements of the ecosystem from here – which is what intelligent business search can give you.
We are announcing an exciting extension to our Capital IQ partnership today. We started this partnership almost 2 years ago – with this announcement – and over the last two years we have both grown our service to Capital IQ’s end clients and grown our relationship with the excellent team there. My guys really enjoy working with them and we’re delighted they want to include our service in their offering.
And so today we have announced that Capital IQ is now reselling FirstRain to their clients. We have embedded a FirstRain window into the Capital IQ platform that looks like this (with annotations):
and is a very similar integration to the approach we took with FactSet except that in addition to linking through to the search results of the research engine, Capital IQ has chosen to provide quick links directly into key pages like the management turnover page for a company – like this analytic on Pfizer:
This expansion of our relationship is good for both companies. It allows Capital IQ to add the rich experience of business intelligent search into their users research process, and it provides us with access to a new market. Capital IQ is widely used through the banking world, private equity and venture capital, as well as in many small investment firms.
As Randy Winn, executive managing director of Capital IQ said: “Over the past two years we have partnered with FirstRain to bring the most powerful business and financial intelligence to Capital IQ clients. FirstRain’s ability to identify, synthesize and rank critical business information that is scattered across the web provides a competitive advantage to our customers. We are pleased to extend our partnership and to be able to deliver the full range of FirstRain search and analytics to our end users.”
FirstRain is starting out the year with some exciting news – we are expanding our relationship with FactSet and enabling FactSet to sell the FirstRain research engine directly to its customers.
You may recall that in 2008 we began our partnership with FactSet – allowing their users to access FirstRain directly in FactSet Marquee. Now, to coincide with the new FactSet interface, and our expanding mutual customer base, FactSet has the ability to sell and support FirstRain and we’ll support their customer support team.
It’s easy to get to FirstRain within FactSet now – you can see a recorded demo on our web site and see some screen shots – both here. We’ve implemented it in a way so that every FactSet user get’s a snapshot of web data on any company and then can click through to FirstRain easily from the snapshot.
Here is the link to our press release.
