A note from our Gurgaon office:
Diwali, the festival of lights was celebrated in the Gurgaon office in a colorful way. The dress code was ethnic Indian dresses as the “fun group” organized a bay decoration competition and also got a few stalls put up by the employees. The ambiance was fun-filled with good food around as enthusiastic team members came up with amazingly creative decoration ideas.
Our industry modeling team won by a slight margin over the source management team, with both depicting the various facets of celebrating the Diwali festival. The games put up and the stalls were equally exciting.
Overall, it was great to see the technology and research savvy team show off their creative and artistic abilities.
Guest post: Marty Betz, VP Technology
Today, YY and I attended ReadWriteWeb’s Real-Time Web Summit. It was held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, hosted by Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb.com.
Like many conferences recently, they’d adopted a structure based on an open, spontaneous agenda which gets filled in by the participants during the first hour. It turns the meeting into a focused networking event that fosters exchange of technical questions and information between the attendees, and minimizes the time spent having one person speak at a large audience. This worked surprisingly well. It seems this is a natural evolution of conferences. Now that much of the information that was once delivered from a lectern can now be found online, meeting new people and discussing specific problems is where unique value is found. I’m always impressed by how many attendees are willing to put themselves out there and deliver a semi-impromptu presentation, or run a discussion.
The talks ranged widely, from protocols underlying real-time communication, to human factors associated with information processing, to data extraction and natural language filtering techniques. Of course, there was also a good share of “how do we monetize this” chitchat.
My initial observations are that, even though the crowd was self-selected for real-time web interest, there was healthy cynicism about it’s value. One talk was even titled “Why do you hate real-time…” On the other hand, there was a palpable sense that something important will emerge out of the web’s new, faster and denser information flows; we just can’t predict what it is yet.
The host, Marshall, started by proposing a spectrum on which ideas were organized based on whether they focused on person-person communication, person-machine communication, machine-to-person, etc.
Every hour had several different talks to choose from. I first dropped in on a talk about the service PubSubHubbub from Google, and then another about linguistic techniques for filtering twitter feeds. My next hour included discussion of structured information and tools for collecting and deriving structured entity relationships.
YY ran a great session on how to make use of the way the web changes, over the course of the day — and longer time periods. It raised questions about how can you distinguish the significant change patterns from the incidental ones? It evolved into discussions of when and how long “old” information remains valuable, and it gives valuable context to recent data. Others in the group talked about filtering highly noisy sources, the practical requirements and limits of human attention, questions of push vs. pull information delivery, and the frequency with which people can really ingest and make use of content streams.
I finished the conference attending two light afternoon talks. The first was on the importance of “emotion” in the value we attach to real-time content. There was animated conversation about how data you get from another specific individual can come with the baggage and the benefits of your immediate relationship and that person’s mood. Finally, I enjoyed a round table discussion of how soon “augmented reality” will become a reality.
Overall, I thought the conference was a great experience. As usual, the web continues to change year after year, and new problems arise, raising new opportunities. I am confident that the increase in real time data will, like other changes in the past, inspire FirstRain to find unique loads of derived value in the web.
Got email from a client last week really pleased with the information they had found on FirstRain to help them with a campaign.
Here’s the story: A small software company selling to a large energy utility. They sell software to help automate and improve customer communications.
In this case the sales team was doing a detailed business process analysis to show the utility how much money they could save by upgrading their customer communications, and how they would also improve their quality.
Friday afternoon – meeting with the CIO to present their findings. The CIO walks in, out of sorts, the company had just been in the news as losing customers because of their inability to invoice customers correctly (right in the sweet spot for this sale). On a break during the meeting the sales team looked for the news story – wanting to make sure they understood the severity of the issue and how to use it in their sales cycle. They looked on Google – not there – then on FirstRain – straight to the link and then able to use the research engine to understand the background.
The sales team is now using their additional knowledge to help the customer get on top of their billing issues quickly – and sent us an email saying “Thank you FirstRain”.
(the story is anonymous until they win the contract – then we can name them)
Regular readers of this blog may remember that the FirstRain team likes to take on physical challenges together – like last year’s AquaBike. Well this year (yesterday) ten of us completed the San Jose Rock And Roll Half Marathon and I am very proud of them all for taking it on and every one of them for completing the course.
It was a perfect day for it. The FirstRain team and 15,000 people lined up at 8am in downtown San Jose to try to conquer the distance each in our own way. Hats of to our controller Eugene who ran the race in 1 hour and 42 mins – we were still walking in the first half when we saw him running the last stretch and cheered him on from across the road. Also hats off to Ana, David and Dennis who did their best distances and times – very impressive.
A few of us walked it, some in more pain than others, and YY comically awarded me the “Stubborness” award for doggedly finishing with the slowest time of the team. After the race we retreated to BJs for much needed food, water and alcohol (purely for medicial purposes of course).
Next FirstRain race is a 7km in Delhi on November 1 – the Great Delhi Run. David is planning to be in Delhi that week anyway so he’s challenged a team from our Gurgaon office to run it with him. We’ll see how many sign up for it!
Now we have to decide what race we’ll chose for 2010 in California. Frankly I found the half ironman aquabike last year was easier to finish than the half marathon this year so I’ll be lobbying for something in the water next time.
Me leaning against the post for relief at the 9th mile marker
Exciting news for us this morning. We are announcing that Mergent has partnered with us as the source of business news into their Mergent Online information platform. Mergent provides a very rich information platform used by libraries, corporate and government functions and academic institutions and approached us to improve the quality of the business news they were providing their customers.
Our data feed version works well in a case like this. Our customer tells us the type of content they want – what companies and what topics the content should be categorized against – and we produce a high quality feed of links to the appropriate web documents which we continually update. This is a similar approach to the way we provide content to our partner Capital IQ and to other customers (who wish to remain nameless).
Obviously we are delighted with this partnership – and I admire management teams who have the vision and the courage to buy their company (as the Mergent team did when they bought it out from Xinhua Finance last year) so I am very pleased to be able to support them.
Here is the press release from this morning.
FIRSTRAIN PARTNERS WITH MERGENT TO DELIVER STREAMLINED WEB CONTENT THROUGH MERGENT ONLINE
Search-Driven Research Provides a Broader Perspective of Web Coverage
San Mateo, Calif., September 14, 2009 – FirstRain® today announced it has partnered with Mergent, Inc., to deliver unique web content through their market-leading Mergent Online platform. The FirstRain research engine will provide a continually updated data stream of high quality web results that will allow Mergent Online clients to quickly and efficiently discover web information that is essential to their research. This partnership represents an expanded data set of web sources, to include not only mainstream sources, but also differentiated and targeted content—such as industry journals and blogs.
FirstRain is the leader in identifying, extracting and analyzing qualitative information from the web on companies, business topics and markets for professional business users. The research engine technology allows users to be confident in the precision, relevancy and cleanliness of the content that is retrieved. FirstRain’s proprietary algorithms identify and extract content from a vast range of web sources from around the world. Categorization then identifies and creates relationships between companies and among business topics creating an ecosystem – a holistic approach to company research and monitoring. This allows FirstRain to provide comparative and meaningful analytics by highlighting trends and relationships from qualitative data.
“Our partnership with FirstRain significantly improves the qualitative intelligence we are able to provide by identifying content from a broad range of sources,” said John Pedernales, Mergent’s Executive Managing Director and Director of Equity Research. “Integrating results from FirstRain into our platform for academic, corporate, public and government libraries allows our clients to have a richer, more complete research experience. The business relevant content delivered by FirstRain complements our offering and empowers our clients to quickly and efficiently find information that is most relevant to their research.”
“We are delighted to have been selected by Mergent to power the business news capabilities on the Mergent Online platform,” said Penny Herscher, President and CEO of FirstRain. “This partnership takes advantage of FirstRain’s unique ability to deliver quality, new and interesting – and highly categorized – web information that provides value to users doing qualitative research in any information platform.”
We just passed through our half year point at FirstRain and I brought the whole US company together here in San Mateo this week. My purpose was two fold – first for training on the new research engine, how to sell it, where to sell it, and what’s coming next – and second team building across the company and some celebration for the success we are already seeing with the new research engine – just a few weeks into it’s beta.
The second purpose was by far the most interesting and fun. I wanted to team build both at a professional level by working problems together and also at a personal level to develop stronger relationships between people who work in different offices and across different time zones. So Sunday was family bonding, Monday was training and planning, Tuesday was everyone team building.
Here’s an overview of the agenda – it really worked well.
Sunday afternoon – Bar-be-que at my house for all employees with families and swim gear. Food, wine, beer, music, swimming, teenage life guard, dogs overeating – everyone had fun.
Monday all day – Sales training
Each rep – present on 1H results, Q3 pipeline, key learnings, top 3 accounts
Marketing – training on market segments and how to work our value in each segment
R&D – next 90 days of product enhancements
Discussion – deep dive on a key capability sales needs and R&D is developing – ensure they are on the same page
Monday afternoon – Ops planning (separate from sales)
Ops team (R&D and analytics) working through near term and long term product and IP plans
Tuesday morning – Everyone together
1H review – financial results, major milestone – releasing the research engine
Problem solving #1 – teams of 2 – each speak uninterrupted to the other for 3 minutes about what is challenging right now
Problem solving #2 – group into teams of 6 – share what each heard – pull out the top 3-4 challenges we face right now
Problem solving #3 – new teams of 6 – chose 2 challenges to solve – bring back the solution
Long term technology and product vision – passionate and interactive discussion about where FirstRain is headed
Tuesday afternoon – Treasure Hunt in San Francisco
Tuesday evening – Dinner at Fior d’Italia – and awards
The whole session was great fun but the best part was the problem solving exercises. Everyone threw themselves passionately in and not only was it important to hear the challenges people are facing but it was also terrific to hear the ideas and solutions the teams came up with for some of our more pervasive challenges.
And the treasure hunt in San Francisco was absolutely fantastic. We broke up into 5 teams – each team was given a set of clues to solve and a map of the area – we did the hunt in North Beach. It was run by Mr Treasure Hunt and it was much, much better than any of us had imagined it would be. The clues were mentally challenging and winning took strategy and the willingness to hoof it fast around the city. Now maybe I enjoyed it so much not only because of the team building but also because my team won and brought all the right answers back 30 mins ahead of the nearest team – but I did have some big brains on my team (not including me)!
Finally dinner at Fior – the oldest Italian restaurant in the US (hard to believe it is in San Francisco and not New York or Boston but it is). We had created awards and plaques for all everyone who had worked so hard to bring the research engine out in June and made it such a hot product for us. Great fun, and much wine, for all.
The FirstRain application keeps growing in functionality and today we have announced yet another way you can get to it. We’ve announced our integration with RMS – research management systems.
Todays RMS platforms organize research for the user. Sorting their sell-side research, independent research, internal research etc. into a file folder type of application making it easy to find based on what document is about. Now our research can now be organized and retrieved in the same way.
We have announced our ability to integrate into any RMS platform today – and specifically partnerships with Code:Red and Wall Street On Demand. In both cases, our research results and reports are provided already automatically categorized (tagged) by both the companies they are about and the investment topics they’re about so they easily integrate into the user’s RMS workflow.
The approach we’ve taken is a little different in each case though – as a result of what workflow the end user wants.
In the case of Code:Red we provide an XML feed of our research but we have also integrated our user interface embedded into the Code:Red UI. This means a user can pull up windows into FirstRain – looking at company data, competitor data, management data etc. and they are linked to the companies or topics the user has up in Code:Red system. If the user updates the company in Code:Red, the FirstRain windows also update. All very efficient – and this is the way FirstRain is also integrated into the FactSet Marquee platform today.
In the case of Wall Street On Demand, we provide an XML feed of research results, again pre-tagged by company and topic, which is integrated straight into the end user’s platform so the results show up natively instead of in a FirstRain window. WSOD builds platforms for their client partners and our results are available to our mutual customers. This approach of taking the FirstRain results and using them natively within the end platform is similar to the way FirstRain results are integrated into the Capital IQ platform today.
Both workflows greatly increase the efficiency for the user if the user wants to use RMS as the primary way to organize and access research.
We did these integrations at the request of several end users. Many firms want RMS to work. They want help sorting through the firehose of research they see every day and having it automatically categorized so they can find it easily saves them time, no question. Many users use their email systems today – Outlook or Lotus Notes – and so we are very interested to get involved in helping users find a better way. These partnerships are an important step forward for us, our partners and our mutual customers.
Last month’s announcement by Newssift (part of the Financial Times Group) of its meaning-based vertical search engine was an important new way to look at search for business professionals – you can quickly see how it’s different if you try it at www.newssift.com.
This morning, Newssift and FirstRain announced that FirstRain’s technology provides the business-relevant content: news, blogs, and other original, authoritative pieces of web content that Newssift consumes. We drive business content into the Newssift search application – here is the press release.
Why does this matter to Newssift? Well at the heart is the quest for quality of search results. If you’ve ever tried to use Google for business research you know how nearly impossible it is. You just get too many old and junky results back so you can’t sort the good from the bad – and so you can’t solve your research problem. In contrast, FirstRain has built its name providing highly relevant finance and market research information, extracted and analyzed from the web, to professional investors and corporate users. This matters because some of the smartest people in the world manage money. They run hedge funds, they manage billions of dollars of assets in mutual funds and pension funds – and they have a lower tolerance for junk or irrelevant data than any other group of users in the world. They have driven us to produce only the highest level of quality of research from the web.
As a result of our user’s demands, we’ve built considerable expertise in the quality of the content coming in which we are now making available to Newssift. The quality and classification of the sources, sorting out useful and authoritative blogs from junky promotional ones. Sorting out the highest quality journalism sources from countries all over the world. And now that content is flowing into Newssift so if you use Newssift you’re getting access to the first stage of the FirstRain advantage.
Newssift has led the way, and other media leaders now have a template. We read daily of publishers of every stripe struggling to build and retain their online audience. Whether it’s a technology trade journal, a leading voice of the blogosphere, an investing website, or a major metro newspaper, new tools are coming up to make the web useful for business research in the new generation of publishing that’s emerging. And Newssift won’t be the last.
Exciting times ahead.
We’ve expanded our coverage today to include a number of topics our customers have been requesting to help them with their fixed income investing.
There are two major new areas covered
- Municipal bonds – this includes adding research on the bonds themselves, government infrastructure plans which are critical for modeling the risk on the bonds, municipal budget activity and job and employment trends – all tagged by state so you can just see research for the states you are interested in. In addition, we already have significant real estate coverage and so we’re tying that into the real estate impact on the tax base. More later – but we’ve introduced FirstRain content widgets onto http://ignite.firstrain.com/ for the first time and you can see samples of the type of data we’re finding in the Municipal Credit Crisis box.
- Corporate debt – this includes our usual coverage of companies and markets, but now extended to include the topics that would impact the risk of the bonds and convertible securities.
The second area is a new trend for many traditional equity investors. They wouldn’t have invested in corporate debt in the past but there is a new combination of events making it compelling. We have a number of hedge fund clients who look at the volatility of the equities markets and then compare them to the relative security – and significant rates of return like 15%+ available on some converts. Given that comparison – 15% from a senior convertible note or a crap shoot investing in the stock they understandably want to get research to help them decide on the risk profile of the convert. (If you are a Cadence employee/investor the Cadence converts are good examples of this trade off).
So if you have interest in the fixed income market and what original research is coming from the web check out the new FirstRain web site or read the press release here.
Satyam’s disastrous news of financial fraud two days ago – which sent the stock plummeting again – could have been seen in advance in the turnover at the top at the end of December. The company had struggled with two acquisitions last year – which we now learn were intended as a last ditch effort to fill the gap – but you can see here in the FirstRain management turnover chart of the last 90 days that 4 board members resigned in December, after very little top level turnover for years.
Board of directors mass turnover only usually happens in a private equity buyout where the board is replaced, otherwise mass turnover is a huge leading indicator that something is very wrong – as was clearly the case at Satyam.
