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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.”

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