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platform

Integrating FirstRain into RMS platforms

May 2009/in /by

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.

data

Quality of (re)search – it’s all about the Metadata

Apr 2009/in /by

Your average search engine user has the patience of a toddler – they expect to leverage one or a few keywords to get the answer they are expecting and they’ll only try once or twice before giving up. If the results are bad, they’re not likely to try again – you’ve lost a user, or customer.

This is a hard problem to solve when the user is a senior professional looking for business information about a competitor – or the market trend behind a stock’s movement.

FirstRain is all about only the highest quality, high precision results for professional users and a critical piece of our system behind our results is our rich Metadata library. To put it simply, Metadata is data about data; for us, it’s the information architecture that captures what the documents in our system are about – and they can be about any number of concepts drawn from the thousands we’ve modeled. They can be literal (this is about Apple Computer) or they can be crossed by any number of building blocks (this is about layoffs at Motorola in Illinois).

The base layer of FirstRain is the categorization engine that identifies and tags what an article is about – a company, a market trend, an event. Since these tags determine what users see when doing research in our system (and remember – no patience with poor results), the rules that go into identifying them need to be spot on. For example, it’s necessary to ensure a new video game launch from a company like Electronic Arts is tagged appropriately, but a blog about how to reach new levels in one of their games is ignored. A single web document may have any number of tags reflecting the content in it. The article about Electronic Arts could also mention other relevant information about competitors and partners, as well as trends like video game sales; and it’s important to identify and tag each appropriate facet.

But just tagging the data to the right topics is only half the magic. Imagine what you can do if you can also analyze the frequencies of the Metadata. Keep in mind we have millions of documents in FirstRain, each containing numerous tags telling us what it’s about and where it’s from. Go back to the Electronic Arts example: FirstRain can identify the number of times EA is mentioned in conjunction with any related topic, such as new products, or any other company. We highlight spikes in these counts for our users and so show up emerging trends in number of mentions above or below their competition. These counts can give great insight into what a company is doing, or is about to do.

By treating the Metadata as a database in itself, and analyzing it for spikes and patterns we can identify emerging trends for users that they simply could not see from even the highest quality individual search results.

yahoo

Yahoo layoffs will add to the management exodus

Dec 2008/in /by
I did some interesting analysis of management churn in advance of the rumored Yahoo layoffs tomorrow. Check this comparison out:

We’ve seen (and I’ve blogged about) the brain drain at Yahoo, but over the past few months it’s continued and it is dramatically severe when compared to their competition and other major tech players. On this chart red is detected departures – that means it’s visible somewhere on the web whether announced or not; green is detectable arrivals. The right hand column show the data normalized by number of employees.
And looking at the last month’s worth of data, Yahoo managers aren’t necessarily leaving for big names, they are just getting out!
And a side oberservation – Microsoft has turnover but relative to the size of company it’s not critical — but HP shows what a stable company it truly is. Some turnover as you’d expect but it’s insignificant relative to the number of employees.
Architecture Structure Plan

Why would a CMO care about the web?

Jul 2008/in /by

We have a client who is CMO of a large enterprise software company – and he and his team’s use of FirstRain is an excellent example of the power of the web as a database for corporate decision making.

In this case we have build a model of the company and it’s ecosystem that includes

- the company itself
- each of it’s major competitors
- important industry trends (like business models and delivery mechanisms) and standards
- all web sources – both differentiated like blogs and industry media, plus the commodity like PR and news wires – effectively organizing all possible sources of information
- industry events
- industry trade shows
- companies of personal interest to the executives (you never know what someone will want to track)

The result is a rich intelligence system for the team that not only
a) finds them interesting information about their market and their competitors that they would have missed that impacts their product decisions, and
b) categorizes all information so it is useful, easily accessible and stored for historical review, but
c) also helps them shine in front of their peers because of the information they have at their finger tips when debating decisions.

And we have a happy customer which is what we care about.

investorside

Joining the board of Investorside

Jun 2008/in /by

As we announced today – I’ve joined the board of the non-profit group Investorside. This is a trade association with a mission to “increase investor and pensioner trust in the U.S. capital markets system through the promotion and use of investment research that is financially aligned with investor interests”.

The need for a group like Investorside grew out of the mistrust investors felt for research after the research/banking conflicts became visible in 2001. Sellside researchers were promoting stocks long after they knew they were a bad investment, in order to keep the investment banking fees, and so their own fees going.

Today the group’s members are investment research firms “providing research that works purely for investors”.

FirstRain is used by investors and by corporations today – both when the goal is to do institutional grade research from the web. When I was approached to get involved in Investorside, and to serve on the board, I thought it was a very good fit. It’s an opportunity for me to help the research community using my experience in web 2.0 and growing markets, and it’s an opportunity for me (and FirstRain) to continue to grow in our understanding of the research needs of the investment community.

Here’s the expanded mission:
The Investorside Research Association serves its members through three primary functions:
Certifying Research Providers — Investorside certifies that its members are free of investment banking, consulting, and research-for-hire conflicts and provides certified member firms with the trademarked Investorside Seal.

Promoting the Growth of Independent Research — Through Investorside.org, annual conferences and regular media communication, Investorside markets its member firms to individual and institutional investors.

Promoting Government Policy that Encourages the Use of Independent Research — Investorside represents its members’ interests before regulators, law-makers and members-of-industry, promoting the use of investment research that is aligned with investor interests.

Missing Piece Pattern

How much information is missing?

Jun 2008/in /by

We’ve been doing studies of the volume of unique information on blogs and some interesting facts are coming out. With the exception of prominant tech blogs like TechCrunch, there’s a general lack of understanding/belief in the investment community about whether blogs matter or not so we’ve set out to quantify how often original and meaningful information is published on a blog first.

The challenge with blogs is that while they are exploding in volume, they are often junky and duplicative. And sometimes they are outright copies, called Splogs, designed solely to generate advertising revenue.

It takes technology, like ours, to make sense of the blog world and to identify both the quality of the source and the frequency of original posts so we can quickly identify when a unique (original) piece of information appears on a blog first (and earliest). We not only identify uniqueness, we normalize it to typical volumes by company so we can identify when a change in volume is occurring and so alert our user that there is a change in blog volume, from quality blogs, about his/her company.

When we do exhaustive analysis of blog content vs. news content, across all news sources we process (many, many thousands and far broader than retail aggregators like Google News), we see typically one new, material post per month for 80% of the large cap companies. So, if you are managing a portfolio of 100 equities, we are talking about 80 unique, meaningful pieces of information per month that you will miss – completely unacceptable for the institutional investor. And using RSS readers won’t cut it because of the level of junk and duplication – you’ll miss the one in a thousand that was different and original.

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