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We announced some important new capabilities to our service today: FirstRain Blog Impact Reports and Capital Market Reports. The key breakthrough is that we can now detect spikes in blogs – which are based on normalized trends over time so you can see when there is truly a change in posting volume – and so quickly see what the blog chatter is that may be impacting the market.

This is an enormous time savings for our users. No more need to set up thousands of RSS readers and troll through them. No more wondering if you are missing rare posts on quiet companies. We’ve determined the most influential blogs at the time, based on our MarketScore algorithms which consider prominence, authority and reach to figure out which blogs to include in your report – and then they are tightly presented as lists linked to the original posts and the FirstRain system.

It’s the first time there is an automated way to systematically include blogs into the investment research process!

The second set of reports are about the capital markets themselves and their interaction with the web. We correlate web results with hedge fund trends, market movers and the short interest – presenting web results directly tied to one of these effects – and in an automated, thorough but prioritized way so our users don’t have to look anywhere else and can quickly see what’s being reported on the web related to the trend.

From our press release:

“… today announced the release of two new qualitative analytics packages-FirstRain Blog Monitor and FirstRain Capital Markets Monitor-that report on the interaction between web results and the market to enable better decisions. These products build on FirstRain’s cutting-edge qualitative analytics technology which distills unstructured data from across the vast web into concise data points and trends that matter to professionals.

“The investing and management communities have largely been without a comprehensive strategy when it comes to understanding and exploiting rich information from the web, particularly the impact that blogs have on the markets,” said Sean O’Dowd, capital markets senior analyst at IDC Financial Insights. “FirstRain’s reports are an important step to bridging this gap in the research process, allowing the analysis of qualitative data on the web beyond just tactical means of tracking names at the peak of market focus.”"

We’re headed to SIFMA in New York this week and very excited to show this new way of using the web as a research database to our users and prospects.

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