Alacra Pulse has been designed to identify, aggregate and present business events (such as rumors of upcoming mergers or acquisitions, bankruptcy filings, layoff announcements or analyst comments). At launch the service will be tracking 2000 mainstream and alternative media sources which have been selected by the Alacra team for their quality and influence on the marketplace. Pulse was built using Alacra’s proprietary Knowledge Extraction Technology, a semantic engine. Additional applications currently in development include Deal Pulse (focused on M&A transactions), Weak Pulse (focused on companies in a state of distress), Credit Pulse (comments on credit ratings) and Legal Pulse (tracking mentions of law firms).
The new Pulse service demonstrates Alacra’s real understanding of the needs of users in the markets which it serves, namely financial services. That’s evident in the range of content options the company already offers (subscription services, or a chance to buy one off reports from the Alacra Store), but Pulse takes it a step further with an acknowledgement that the way in which investors and finance professionals obtain information about companies is evolving. Pulse essentially mimics and then expands the water cooler nature of the industry, and the emphasis on only allowing sources which have been pre-approved by Alacra’s editors is vital. In any industry there are only a limited number of real opinion drivers – enabling easy access to those voices is a vital first step. Street Pulse clearly plans to build further on this – sources can be rated and stories commented upon, and Alacra’s semantic technology will no doubt be used at a later stage to flag up the real market influencers, with the potential to do this at a niche level. Source: Outsell Inc.
BIIA Newsletter March 2009 Issue
