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Introducing the FirstRain API

It’s All About Them. Time to Delight Your Users with FirstRain API

Sep 2014/in /by

Understanding customers and markets has become one of the most effective ways to empower business professionals to be more engaged and productive. Unfortunately, either building or integrating with noisy content solutions creates apps that users quickly disengage with. That is why we are pleased to announce our newest product, FirstRain API.

FirstRain Personal Business Analytics™ has become the most effective tool in the decision making process among business professionals. With FirstRain API, it is now easy to deliver just-in-time analytics, designed to increase customer engagement and grow revenue, within your own enterprise mobile, e-tablet and web applications.

FirstRain API now provides enterprise developers with real-time data-level and/or application access to our powerful proprietary business graph – generated using big data analytics across millions of sources, documents and social media from across the global web. The FirstRain business graph extracts the deep, interconnected relationships between companies, businesses and markets.

With FirstRain API, your users can see and engage with their own personal and predictive analytics profile across all channels and access points that you develop. With FirstRain, you can advise your users on key developments deep in their customers that can drive growth or identify risk, all through a very personal lens and information experience.

You can read the full Press Release Here.

Interested in setting up time with one of our Sales Engineers to learn more? Drop us a line !

Overloaded 2014

Overloaded 2014: Tackling Role-Based Information Overload

Jul 2014/in , /by

Overloaded 2014 has come and gone, and our presentation about role-based information overload was a great success!

Nima Niakan, Executive Fellow and Faith Chiang, Director of UX at FirstRain spoke about how context affects information architecture. People process information differently—we process it given the situation we are in and the task we are trying to accomplish. It’s not the amount of information that’s the problem, then, but the form in which it’s presented to the user. It’s critical to personalize what sort of information to deliver, and how to deliver it, to each business role—because role, device, origin and situation are the difference between information overload and information paradise.

For most sales and marketing professionals, there is too much content on the Web to be able to efficiently find useful, relevant business intelligence. Being able to find what you need to know, and knowing why you need it, are essential to do your job better. But in today’s world, it’s a problem of noise. And we at FirstRain are solving information overload every day with our personal business analytics solutions.

Watch the video below to see the whole talk!

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Get personal: not all business intelligence is equal

Apr 2014/in /by

Most company executives know they need to jump on the big data bandwagon.  They understand that having access to big data analytics can help them raise sales productivity, and so they’ve sourced a solution to take advantage of gathering and indexing their internal data. Maybe they’re even enlightened enough to look outside of their own sales data into the wild, wild Web for information on their customers.

But is the data they’re collecting really helping their employees? In an enterprise—and even within the same sales organization—it’s unlikely that employees will all benefit from the same business intelligence. A sales rep is unlikely to care about the buying activity of another account; and a VP certainly doesn’t have enough time to look at every customer and prospect in great detail (that’s why they have sales reps and account managers in the first place!).

It’s well known that if someone doesn’t find a product useful to them personally, even if it’s a great product in and of itself, they simply won’t use it—and that’s not helping sales productivity, which is the reason it was introduced in the first place. But what if they could customize the product to fit their needs exactly? The same holds true for big data: for data to be truly helpful to each and every employee, the business intelligence has to be personal.

Let’s take a deeper look at the differences between what an SVP needs to know versus what an account manager needs. According to Anthony Iannarino on SalesGravy, his number one non-personnel focus is ensuring a healthy pipeline. To do that, he is focused on:

  • Driving sales strategy. He needs to know what the movers and shakers in a particular industry or area are doing to know in what direction to take the sales team.
  • The company’s top prospects and accounts. The SVP should be able to see, with just a quick glance, the major trends and critical events affecting the company’s major customers.
  • Having the ability to deep-dive into any specific account. The SVP needs to get involved in a sale if the rep is dealing with a particularly large, complicated, or difficult deal. In that case, he needs to be able to easily understand the target’s business and market so his conversations with them are as effective as possible.

The sales rep, on the other hand, is involved in the nitty gritty:

  • Getting insights into specific accounts and/or geographies.
  • Understanding what his customer’s customers are doing so he can appropriately direct and focus his conversations with them.
  • Knowing, in real time, when something significant happens to a target company and/or their market and gives him a reason to call.

It’s clear that the two have very different priorities, so giving them the same information is not only inefficient, they won’t use it—so it won’t be effective. By giving each of them business intelligence customized to their needs, however, allows each of them to target what’s most useful to them. The account managers can see their target accounts and geographies to help plan out their next sale, and the SVP can strategize a more informed direction of attack, raising the sales productivity of the entire organization.

FirstTweets 2012

Delivering Unique Business-Relevant Tweets: Facebook IPO

May 2012/in , , , /by

Today’s Facebook’s IPO although a more consumer focused interest story then what most of our customers are interested in, brought a huge amount of tweets on the subject as expected. (I would even venture to say that it was more then a ‘consumer interest story’ but rather a ‘human interest story’). None the less, being that FirstRain is a Silicon Valley based company, the buzz is also being felt strongly outside the digital world for those of us that live here and have friends and acquaintances that are being directly impacted by facebook’s IPO. Exciting times.

Yesterday, prior to Facebook’s IPO we ran some stats using our FirstTweets™ technology and then redid the same exercise at the close of the market today. FirstTweets™ uses our patented FirstRain technology to uncover and deliver only high-quality, business-relevant tweets to sales and marketing professionals across the enterprise. Our analysis shows that less than 0.1% of daily tweets contain quality, business-related content, yet this still represents more than 200,000 tweets per day of business-focused intelligence.

The picture painted by the stats that we captured, aren’t surprising but are interesting and illustrative on why our customers are seeing value in our FirstTweets- as YY Lee our COO tweeted this morning allowing them to “cut through the frenzied roar to net out the actual business discussion…”.

On the day before Facebook’s IPO:

At the close of Market on the day of Facebooks IPO:

signals

The latest web search development: from intentions to insights

Jul 2010/in /by

John Batelle, one of the gurus of Search, wrote as early as 2004 that the secret of Google’s success was its understanding of the web as a database of intentions. He described the web as “a place holder for the intentions of humankind – a massive database of desires, needs, wants and likes that can be discovered, subpoenaed, archived, tracked and exploited to all sorts of ends.”

Fast-forward to the present and Batelle has observed that “web search as a pure signal has been attenuating of late – overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of data on the web, for one, and secondly by our own increasingly complicated expectations.” Batelle goes on to speculate, quite compellingly, on other new “little signals” such as who I know (Social Graph), what I am doing (Status Update), or where I am (the Check-in) that are emerging to make sense of the “Database of Intentions”. Bing and more recently Google have introduced contextual information to their searches as a way to make more sense of the web and better meet the expectations of users. Even so, Bing and Google are still operating in a web that represents a database of intentions – and the new intentions are social and status updates.

In the business world, people are interested in different signals and so require more sophisticated search capabilities than Bing or Google. I believe the compelling “little signal” in the business world is what has changed and it is generated by the detection of what I call events, which are patterns, connections and anomalies of interest to business decision-makers. What has changed about a business and it’s market is a powerful signal. When detected by sophisticated search capabilities, it can transform the web from a database of intentions to a database of actionable business insights.

Detecting the “what has changed” signal by finding, sorting and making sense of relevant events requires a new class of search technology called intelligent business search. Intelligent business search turns the unstructured, messy, duplicative and rich content available online into an analyzable data set of business ideas, relationships, facts and trends. It derives the implied business structures of companies, industries, management, markets and the relationships that connect them. And it applies trend and anomaly detection to discern what may be emerging, unusual or material.

Intelligent business search quickly returns relevant results that can create new insights and facilitate smart, fast business decision-making. It transforms the web into an incredibly valuable database of actionable insights. Tapping into that database has the potential to transform the way you sell, market, strategically plan and think about your business.

[Posted on the Huffington Post earlier today]

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