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Rocket Ship Launch Rise

FirstRain Launches Market Insights

Jul 2013/in , /by

On this day in 1984, the space shuttle Discovery took off on its maiden voyage.

And just as the Discovery launch was another important step forward for NASA, FirstRain made another big advancement today with the launch of our newest product, Market Insights!

Our sales-focused solution, Customer Insights, is revolutionizing the big data analytics market and has become a valuable part of the daily workflow at many Fortune 500 companies. But some of these companies are already finding that sometimes customer intelligence alone isn’t enough—in order to truly put their go-to-market strategy into action, their marketing teams need market-focused intelligence as well.

And that’s why we created FirstRain Market Insights. Developed over the last year in collaboration with two of our leading enterprise customers (both major, Fortune 100 technology companies), Market Insights leverages our powerful semantic analytics technology in order to provide relevant, real-time market insights that CMOs, strategic leaders and entire marketing teams need about their specific lines of business.

The combination of our new Market Insights solution with our already popular Customer Insights product (not to mention our recently launched FirstRain for Touch) now makes a powerful suite of enterprise solutions providing unmatched business insights into your target markets and your top customers, helping you grow revenue and (finally!) putting your go-to-market strategy into action.

As with the rest of FirstRain’s products, it doesn’t matter if you’re on the road, at a customer site, on your iPads, iPhones or Android phones, via email, or integrated directly into company CRMs or social enterprise portals such as salesforce.com—we can deliver insight wherever and whenever you need it.

FirstRain Market Insights is available now. For more information, you can visit its product page or drop us a line at sales@ignite.firstrain.com.

We’re over the moon about our new product. In fact, it’s left us starry-eyed with wonder—and our early adopters are, too—we hope you’ll let us know what you think of it!

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]

Introducing new Industry pages

Jun 2010/in /by

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:

landscape

Teambuilding FirstRain style

Jun 2010/in /by

We have a history of taking on whacky athletic challenges at FirstRain – both to get and stay fit and also to play together as a team.

Yesterday was no exception, although we were a small team this time. Three of us competed in the Splash and Dash in the Stevens Creek Reservoir in Cupertino CA. It was supposed to be a 1.2 mile swim and 3 mile run.

Well, it turned out a little different than we had expected. First off the water was really cold – which meant we were gasping for the first leg as we got accustomed to the temperature. And then the swim was not 1.2 miles – it was closer to 1.6-1.7 miles. We only knew this because it took me so much longer than last time I did it and so we asked around some of the more experienced competitors who estimated the distance for us based on their swim times.

It’s no wonder that at the end we didn’t run. We’d had enough. But we enjoyed it, we didn’t come last, and we are signed up for two more races this year!

Here we are before the race (we didn’t look as good afterwards!)

Eugene, me and David

You can see some of our other events here: The 2008 Vineman Aquabike, The 2009 San Jose Rock n Roll Half Marathon and The 2009 Great Delhi Run.
Retail Fashion

Search as an application is coming into fashion in the general case

May 2010/in /by

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.

FirstRainFactSetImg

FactSet to sell FirstRain directly

Jan 2010/in /by

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.

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