The Digital Edge Blog » InfoNgen

Introducing Curator HD…

John — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 21:43:18 +0000

One of the things that has been keeping me so busy recently is the release of our new iPad app – Curator HD. Curator HD is the first full featured curation application for the iPad, combining a great feed reader with commenting and sharing options for social channels, email, and even custom newsletters. It also allows for the creation of folders to store and organize stories that you might not be ready to share yet.

I put together a video overview of Curator HD, both to introduce it to the market and to help people get started using it:

Curator HD is available now for FREE in the productivity section of the iTune App store.

Just click here to download.

A Downside Of The App Store Model…

John — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 16:12:39 +0000

About a month ago we launched a newsletter publishing app – Publisher HD – on the iTunes App Store. We were really pleased with the response we got to the app, and were jazzed that it even spent some time in both Apple’s “What’s Hot” and “New & Noteworthy” sections for productivity apps.

Publisher HD allows you to hook in to your free Google Reader account (or your professional InfoNgen account) and use content you find there to assemble and customize newsletters for redistribution. It lets people act as web curators, picking out things of interest that they find, commenting on them, and packing them up for redistribution to a targeted audience. (This is effectively the same model some popular publications like the Huffington Post use to serve their readers).

About two weeks ago, Google decided to make a change to the technical methodology they use to authenticate with Reader. Since Google doesn’t publish a formal API to access Reader, this change ended up breaking Publisher HD in a significant way – feeds from Google Reader would no longer refresh. Once we found out what happened, we were able to push out an update, test it, and upload it to the app store all in less than three hours.

Unfortunately, the rest of the App Store process doesn’t move as quickly.

We had to wait about 9 days before the updated version of Publisher HD became available for download. During that time, our download count went way down, and those folks that did download it ended up with an application that probably didn’t work for them. We had to modify our application description on the iTunes Store to let people know that there was an issue and that an update for it was done and awaiting approval. (We didn’t want to pull the App from the store since our professional InfoNgen clients were not affected). It was incredibly difficult to watch all this play out, knowing that we’d already made the fix but were powerless to influence it’s release.

While the App Store’s 7-10 day review window is manageable when dealing with planned updates and enhancements, it can end up being incredibly damaging when something urgently needs to be updated. There should be some avenue made available to developers for the delivery of critical fixes, even if it involves additional costs or an upfront certification that would let them do this directly. Perhaps it would make sense for Apple to allow a certain number of updates with a ‘post release’ review, and with severe penalties for anyone that abuses it. Though situations like this will ideally be infrequent, their typical severity when they do arise should earn them some special consideration.

The fixed version has now been available on the app store for about a week. Even though this episode dampened some the incredible momentum we had from the initial app launch, downloads have started picking up again and I’m optimistic that everything will get back on track. We’ve been lucky in this regard.

Despite having gone through this, I still love the entire app store concept. It provides a delivery and service platform that we could never realize alone as a small development shop – especially in the mobile space. Hopefully, Apple will consider the impact of these kinds of situations as they evolve their app store policies. I’m sure many other development teams have found themselves in a similar situation and have their own tales of woe to tell.

Sadly, some of them probably have a less happy endings.

InfoNgen 'Publisher HD' Is Now In The App Store…

John — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 20:31:36 +0000

I wanted to let everyone know that the first cut of InfoNgen’s iPad newsletter generation application – Publisher HD – is now up and available in the Apple App Store. Equally exciting is the great reception the app has received. It was even featured in the New & Noteworthy section for productivity apps:

If you get the chance to download it, I would welcome whatever feedback you have. There are a lot of things we want to add, refine and extend in the current release of Publisher HD, and we are already hard at work on putting that next version together. You can leave suggestions in the comments section for this post, or just email me directly.

Best of all, Publisher HD is free – just bring your own iPad. You can download it via the link below:

InfoNgen Publisher HD

Click here to download from iTunes…

Release Date: Jun 12, 2010
Genre: Productivity
© 2010 Instant Information, Inc.

ENJOY!

InfoNgen Named a 2009 CODiE Awards Finalist…

John — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 17:11:53 +0000

We received some good news yesterday…

My company, InfoNgen, has been named a finalist in the 2009 SIIA CODiE Awards in the category of Best Content Aggregation Service:

For those not familiar with them, the CODiE Awards were established over 20 years ago by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), as a way to showcase the software and information industry’s best products and services.

According to the SIIA’s website:

The CODiE Awards hold the distinction of being the industry’s only peer-reviewed awards program, which provides member companies with a unique opportunity to earn praise from their competitors. Now in its twenty-fourth year, the CODiE Awards program has raised the standard for excellence and serves as prestigious representation of outstanding achievement and vision in the software and information industry.

There are a lot of people at InfoNgen who have worked very hard to get us to where we are today, and it’s great to see their effort recognized by our peers in the technology space. And though we’re excited by what we’ve been able to accomplish this past year, we’re even more excited about some of the new features and capabilities we’ll be rolling out in the coming months. This is a fantastic time to be involved with textual analysis and information discovery.

We have a lot of good things planned for 2009.

NOTE: If you’d like to do a review of InfoNgen, just contact me (email, twitter) with your details and I’ll get in touch with you right away to follow-up.

Best Practices In A Bad Market…

John — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 20:56:12 +0000

Without a doubt, it’s a tough market out there…

I’ve been a tech entrepreneur for nearly 25 years. Over that time, I’ve seen some incredibly good markets as well as some incredibly bad ones. And while I most certainly prefer operating in a good market, I know from experience that it is possible for your business to be successful even through a downturn.

The key is to be sure you focus on the right things.

While there is no way to guarantee success in business – even in good times – here are five “best practices” that I believe can improve your odds of successfully navigating today’s choppy markets:

1. Deliver immediate, measurable value:

Realize that you aren’t selling a product – you’re selling a solution. The “product” is just the packaging the solution comes in. You need to understand in detail what a prospect is focused on now, and be able to explain in very specific ways how your company offers them the best solution to deal with it. Also remember that “value” is a function of both “capability” and “cost”. People will only be willing to pay for the specific capabilities they need regardless of what else may come packaged with it.

You’ll need to price that capability competitively, but avoid the temptation to do whatever it takes to close a deal. Even in a down market, not all business is good business.

2. Treat existing clients like gold:

First, they can offer you real market feedback on what you are doing. This can help you refine the capabilities you bring to the market, and give you a better sense of where to focus and what to prioritize. Some of the best features I’ve developed in products have come directly from client suggestions. And those features helped me win new clients.

Another value you get from having a resume of clients is credibility. Prospective clients are much more comfortable doing business with someone that is already selling into their marketplace. The fact that others are willing to pay for your service can instill confidence in people considering doing business with you. The clients you already have are a measure of your success. And in any market, success attracts more success.

Happy clients are also likely to recommend you to other people in the business, helping you grow by word of mouth. Referrals from satisfied clients can be powerful.

So what do you need to do?

I have a simple rule for taking care of clients. Stop looking for ways that they can make you successful and instead look for ways you can become an invaluable part of making them successful. Good things will follow from that.

3. Listen, listen, and listen some more:

To make this exercise worthwhile, check your ego at the office before you head out. Don’t go out looking to justify your own perspectives and plans. Explore the outliers and seek out opposing points of view. Welcome criticism. Reality may not always be flattering, but it’s what you ultimately need to deal with if you want to be successful.

Be open to being wrong, and willing to make adjustments. Talk less and listen more.

4. Grow your “contact footprint”:

Hardly! People just tune that out, especially in a tight market.

The key here is to aggressively network. Scour through your contacts looking for potential opportunities. Leverage sites like LinkedIn to target people you’d like to reach and looks for ways on- and off-line to get introduced to them. Become involved in industry groups and organizations that improve your odds of connecting with people that can help you. Reach out to relatives, friends, and even fellow commuters – they can all be sources of leads and opportunities.

If you’re thinking that this is standard operating procedure for everyone on your sales team, you’d probably (hopefully!) be right. The point here is that networking like this isn’t something that just sales should be doing. Programmers, secretaries, administrators, and managers – people at all levels within your company – have something of value to contribute here, and you need to find ways to capture it.

You need to develop a “networking culture” across your entire organization. Reward people that bring in new opportunities or open doors to difficult to reach prospects. Make it a habit to brainstorm as teams for new, specific opportunities. Challenge people to make creative suggestions.

Most people tend to do what is expected of them, so create an expectation here. If you’re not tapping into the networking value of everyone in your company, you’re leaving money on the table.

5. Sell to markets and relationships, not just to customers:

So go beyond just selling to them as if they were isolated entities.

Approach the market the same way an M&A firm does. Look for opportunities that exist between various people or various companies and start selling both side of it. Look for compelling combinations of content or capabilities that are being sold independently, and find ways to package them for customers that can increases their value or reduce their integration costs.

You’ll find opportunities like this in every market once you start looking for them.

While these types of opportunities may be more complex to pull together than ‘single client sales’, they do offer some meaningful advantages. These “strategic sales” can let you leverage the selling power of other individuals or organizations, extending your reach and helping you grow more quickly than you could on your own. Many of them can having multiple revenue streams associated with them, making them more dependable sources of income. These types of deals also become ‘stickier’ for clients since the cost of unwinding them tends to be much higher than the cost of replacing just a single vendor. You’ll also find that deals based on relationships between a firm and its clients can be less price sensitive then deals done directly with one firm. They are also less likely to be unwound when times get tough.

Exploring opportunities like these should become a component of your overall selling strategy.

Hopefully, these “best practices” will inspire you think more creatively about things you can do to optimize your own business. I’ve tried to make each one specific enough to be meaningful, but general enough to remain relevant to most corporations. That said, there’s no “one size fits all” when it comes to running a business.

The title of this post not withstanding, I think the points I’ve made here are applicable during both good and bad times. I’m visiting them now because bad times can be a lot less forgiving, and demand that we pay a lot more attention to the business decisions we need to make. Good times have the grace to cover a multitude of sins.

To wrap up, I’d like to share two quotes that I think really capture the spirit of what it takes to be successful, regardless of the market:

“I’d rather be lucky than good.”

– Lefty Gomez

“The harder I work, the luckier I get.”

– Samuel Goldwyn

There’s a lot of wisdom packed in a those few simple words…

Good Luck!…

News Flow, Public Opinion, And Trends…

John — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 21:12:23 +0000

There seems to be an interesting relationship here…

This is trend chart from our product InfoNgen plotting significant media mentions of both John McCain and Barack Obama for the period July 3rd to November 3rd.

Click Chart To Enlarge

You can see from the chart that Obama tended to have more media coverage than McCain for most periods outside of a brief window following the announcement of Sarah Palin as the Republican Vice Presidential nominee. You can also see a significant Obama spike that happened around the Democratic national convention.

After looking at that chart, I wanted to see how this media centric view to election coverage compared with contemporaneous public sentiment. To do that, I grabbed this chart from Pollster.com showing polling data trends for the two candidates over that same period.

While not identical, there are some interesting similarities between the two charts…

Both charts follow roughly the same shape, though with less overall volatility in the polling data. You can see the same brief crossover for McCain at the same point in both charts, as well as the broadening gap in favor of Obama as the election drew closer.

There isn’t enough evidence here to draw any hard correlations between the two data sets, but the similarities do suggest that the two are not completely unrelated.

There are three possible factors at work here:

Advertising spend by the two campaigns influenced both public sentiment and media coverage. That would certainly be an interesting additional pair of trend lines in the chart.
Media coverage directly influenced public sentiment. Media bias has often been cited as a factor in various election cycles.
The media is simply responding to swings in public sentiment. This could raise some interesting questions about the balance in media between integrity and profits.

No doubt, the truth here lies in some combination of each of these.

But this does point to something broader and very significant…

As we start to collect more and more data points around any complex subject we follow, we’ll start to see trends, patterns, and relationships emerge that were never apparent to us in the past. Some will help to illuminate the causes of past behaviors, and some will even be useful in predicting future behaviors. Our continually improving ability to connect the dots in these data sets is probably one of the most exciting area in information discovery.

Finding the data that is in no one place, but is hidden everywhere…

*Many thanks to Karen Smith, one of my colleagues at InfoNgen, for originally sending me the trend chart of media coverage of the candidates.

Cutter Associates' Technology Alliance Conference…

John — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 20:14:22 +0000

For those not familiar with Cutter Associates, they are a premium provider of objective analysis and consulting services in the financial marketplace. I had the chance to deliver the keynote talk today at their Technology Alliance Conference in Boston.

This conference explores a broad range of issues related to the operational infrastructure financial firms need to support. I decided to focus my talk on some of the significant trends that I believe will shape the way that firms will discover information in the future. Of the seven big trends that I covered, there are three key ones that I’d like to share with you here:

Discovery Will Become Personal – It will become increasingly important for individuals to be able to discover information using personal taxonomies that reflect their unique perspective on the key topics that they need to follow. These personal taxonomies will complement the shared global taxonomies that are provided broadly, and create a more effective and efficient way for people to discover and organize the information that is really relevant to them.

Text Search Will Become Secondary – Though it’s central to the way the web is mined today, text search will fade in importance as a tool for information discovery. It is simply too imprecise and delivers way too much noise in the results it returns. I believe that it will be replaced by tools that provide more thematic based discovery. These tools will be based on weighted, non-Boolean matching, rules based qualifications, and statistical analysis. These approaches will make information on complex concepts much easier to find in the future.

Discovery Will Become Pervasive – While most discussions around content discovery focus on the web, effective discovery actually needs to embrace ALL of the content sets you have available to you. This includes the content on your own desktop and email, as well as in corporate file repositories and data stores that you may have access to. Having a contextually rich framework that encompasses all of these sources will allow a new discovery model to evolve that transcends the silo limited approach most people need to deal with today.

At the heart of each of the trends I discussed in the keynote is the creation of more detailed and more personalized context that can power new approaches to information filtering. The core technologies required to create this contextual backdrop are actually all available now. They can be leveraged effectively in many of the most challenging information discovery domains firms are struggling with today.

The future of content discovery is at lot closer than most people realize…

Content Discovery: Bridging The Gap…

John — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 19:50:32 +0000

The internet has transformed how information is published…

There are no “gatekeepers” anymore. Anyone, anywhere, can create and distribute all manner of content to a global audience. It happens in real-time and at almost no cost. The breadth and depth of content that is freely available today is testament to transformative power of this new publishing model.

It has left traditional media struggling to adjust to the “new order”…

But while the web has redefined the way content is published, it has had a far less significant impact on the way it is consumed. Advances in information management and discovery simply haven’t kept pace with the explosion of new content – and new content channels – that advances in publishing have enabled.

But I believe that gap may soon start to close…

I gave a talk yesterday at Enterprise Search Summit West discussing some of the changes in the content arena that advances in technology are starting to enable, and the impact those changes could have on the way we discover and consume content.

During the talk, I called out three key attributes of this evolving “discovery framework” that I would like to share with you here:

It needs to be Persistent: Given the continuing growth in content production, discovery can’t be a transactional exercise. It needs to be a continuous process – a framework that makes us aware of any content specifically relevant to our interests. For this to happen, it needs to create a sufficiently rich contextual framework around all the content we need to connect with, allowing for effective filtering and ranking.

It needs to be Pervasive: The content we need to work with every day comes to us in many formats, is delivered across many channels, and is stored in many different information silos. Discovery needs to happen seamlessly across all of them, and still provide granular insight within each of them. To become really effective, it needs to be a natural extension of every aspect of our daily workflow. – not an isolated portal or a bolted on feature.

It needs to be Personal: While having common, global taxonomies is an essential dimension to information discovery, on their own they aren’t sufficient. We all think about information differently. We may look at certain subjects with expansive depth and breadth, while barely acknowledging that others even exist. The taxonomies we use to discover and navigate information need to reflect this personal perspective. These global and personal taxonomies can effectively coexist – but they do both need to be there.

This is an incredibly interesting and rapidly evolving area of knowledge management. It offers the potential for totally new ways of navigating and consuming content.

The days of the traditional content portal are numbered…

I am planning put together a video (or several) covering the full presentation I made. Stay tuned.

Targeting Events…

John — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:01:25 +0000

Having a presence at select industry events can be important for your business…

As old-school as it may sound, becoming involved in conferences and trade events is an important component of establishing a growing business. That said, it typically isn’t the best use of your money and time to go to the mega-shows that are out there. They are expensive to attend, and small companies tend to get swallowed up in the noise and dwarfed by the scale. I’ve also found that at these types of shows, you can end up with more competitors than prospects coming to watch your presentation or visit your booth.

And that won’t do you a lot of good…

A better approach is to choose smaller events that are important to your target market. The theme of the conference should align well with your value proposition to the marketplace – that should be one of your top criteria. As you research potential conferences and events, the organizers will typically give you lists of the companies that have attended in the past. Remember that is only part of the story. Companies don’t come to these conferences – people do. If you plan on making your investment in the event a success, make sure your products or services will be relevant to the likely individuals that will be attending. Look into the specific sessions that are being held there to be sure the fit is good. Talk to some of your existing clients to see if they will be attending.

And if not, find out why…

My company InfoNgen is ramping up to participate at a series of conferences through the end of the year. The next one coming up is the Pharma CI Conference and Exhibition on September 15th.

It’s a perfect example of a highly focused event that is well aligned with the value we bring to the marketplace.

Beyond just having a booth at the conference, I will also be giving a keynote presentation on leveraging the web in the fight against Third World diseases. Looking for openings to actively participate at conferences is another way to engage with prospects and clients. Many conferences are looking for engaging panelists and speakers, and also have sponsorship opportunities that may offer the chance to network or present on a topic. The thing to remember here is that you should leave the hard-sell back at your show booth – that will be a turn off for most people. Instead, try to make a connection with your audience. Demonstrate that you understand the challenges they face, and explore new ways they can address them. Share their interest and passion, and be open to their comments and questions

If you do that successfully, they’ll show up at your booth when you’re done…

The Future Of Competitive Intelligence…

John — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:04:16 +0000

My company InfoNgen was invited to present at SLA 2008…

In a prior post, I wrote about some of the key points I made during a presentation to competitive intelligence professionals at this year’s Special Librarians Association Conference in Seattle.

As a followup, I’ve produced a video of that presentation that is now available over on our companion video blog The DIGITALedge.TV.

At just over 14 minutes long, it’s not the ideal ‘web video’ length. However, the presentation does cover a lot of ground, and provides a clear overview of the semantic based capabilities InfoNgen is currently bringing to the marketplace. Analyzing trends across information sets – covered in this video – is an especially interesting component of what we do, and it will continue to grow in importance over time.

This feels like a marketplace on the verge of taking off…

Back From SLA 2008…

John — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 12:56:32 +0000

I was fortunate to be able to speak at this year’s SLA conference…

The SLA – Special Librarians Association – is a professional organization representing the interests of information specialists around the world. These professionals, known as “Special Librarians”, are:

…information resource experts who collect, analyze, evaluate, package, and disseminate information to facilitate accurate decision-making in corporate, academic, and government settings.

I had the chance to share my views on what the future of competitive intelligence may look like, and the technology and tools that would be needed to support it. Competitive Intelligence (CI) is an fast growing component of corporate and academic research. When done well, it can offer an organization significant strategic advantages. When done poorly, an organization can find itself off balance in the marketplace, wasting resources, focus and time by being totally reactive.

My talk centered on the critical attributes of a modern CI workflow. I summarized them into four key trends:

Information lives in many places – the web; professional services; email; corporate file servers; your own desktop. You need to use a single tool to discover content across all of them. There is no way to effectively manage discrete content silos if you are forced to used a set of disconnected tools, profiles, filters, and taxonomies.

Information discovery needs to center around concepts and context. Once that is established, filtering by more traditional means becomes viable. The concepts and context I refer to here need to be personal. You need to be able to classify and discover content from your own perspective, and organize it into a structure that makes sense for you and your business. “One size fits all” taxonomies don’t cut it anymore – you simply end up seeing the world the same way as everyone else.

Discovery isn’t just about raw information – it’s also about trends. You need to be able to see changes to information over time, and explore the relationships various pieces of information have with each other. Finding trends provides focus and unique insight, and is a key component to maximizing the value of the information assets at your disposal. This is especially true when looking at trends around custom themes or topics that reflect your own interests and perspective.

Establishing a culture of collaboration and information sharing is critical for any modern organization. It needs to exist both internally and externally (with clients and partners). It needs to be more than just a slogan or ideal. It requires an investment in both tools and training. And it also demands a decentralized approach – people need to be able to “self organize” around the work they do and the materials they share to do it. Some of the most timely and insightful information an organization has sits in peoples heads. Giving them a better way than email to share it, discuss it, and preserve it as a discoverable information asset will have a considerable payback.

While this talk was targeted at Competitive Intelligence librarians, the core points I made really apply to any organization that depends on information flow to conduct their business. And these days, that probably covers most of them.

It was clear from the feedback I got after the talk that this conceptual approach resonated.

The need is there for a new set of tools…

I hope to be putting a video of this presentation up on the site a little later. (Now available at The DIGITALedge.TV) Semantic analysis and automated understanding are at the heart of what we do at InfoNgen, and are areas I am passionate about.

They represent the future of the information search and discovery world…

InfoNgen Quick Tips…

John — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 19:24:33 +0000

Short form video is a great training tool…

Over at InfoNgen, we just started producing a series of very brief tutorials for our service. Each video tutorial will focus on a single concept, and cover it in about 90 seconds. They will be built from a combination of studio material and screen captured shots.

Though these tutorials won’t be up on the InfoNgen corporate site until later next month, I wanted to give readers of this blog an early look:

The production value of these segments should improve as we optimize the workflow (especially around audio!), but I’m really pleased with the visual simplicity of the production overall.

And this isn’t the only video related news I have…

I am going to be using a format similar to this on a new video series we’ll be launching here at The Digital Edge called “re:SEARCH“. It will focus on various tools and strategies for more effective web searching, and with some luck, the first episode will be up sometime in February.

I’ll post more information on this new series once production begins next month…

PRACTICAL RSS Show #4 – Exploring InfoNgen…

John — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 12:25:24 +0000

I have just uploaded a new episode of Practical RSS. This show, the fourth in the series, introduces a sophisticated feed reader/web discovery tool made by my company called InfoNgen. The latest version of InfoNgen, which we have just launched today, has many features that set it apart – deep custom tagging, similar story clustering, and story language translation just to name a few. Though we sell a professional version of this product, we also have a free version that everyone can access. I explore the free version in this episode.

PRACTICAL RSS [Show #4]: Exploring InfoNgen…

SHOW NOTES:
In this show, I demonstrate the free version of InfoNgen, a high-end feed reader/web discovery tool targeted at financial professionals and corporations. InfoNgen automatically tags and classifies every story from inbound RSS feeds or other textual sources IN REAL TIME, providing a manageable way for professionals to discover content across tens of thousands of unique sources.

Topics Include:

- the limitations of current RSS feed readers
- the advantages of a core tagging engine
- Signing up for a free InfoNgen account
- configuring content widgets on the InfoNgen Home page
- navigating the InfoNgen Feeds page for more detailed discovery

Sites Referenced:

http://www.infongen.com

Run Time: 11:33

Usage: Feel free to embed and share.

Thanks for watching, and for all the great feedback!…

RSS, The Limits Of Scale, And InfoNgen…

John — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 17:02:19 +0000

I am a big believer in the power of RSS. So much so that I started an RSS video series on this blog. It is one of the cornerstones of the current generation of Web technologies, and it’s now easy to find RSS feeds on a wide range of sites and services.

To work with these feeds, most people use readers like Google Reader or portal sites Netvibes or Pageflakes. Google Reader lets people browse through the feeds they subscribe to as either individual sources or as commingled headlines. Pageflakes and Netvibes present the feeds in widget based frameworks, with each source appearing as an individual widget that can be positioned anywhere on user configurable pages.

These are all great tools except for one thing.

None of them are designed to scale up…

Each of these tools will do a good job managing less than 100 feeds, and could probably work reasonably well with twice that number. The most aggressive feed user I know, blogger Robert Scobble, manages to have over 600 feeds in his Google Reader. He ends up doing a quick scan through the 1300 headlines a day he gets to pluck out those few he thinks he should actually read. And while I know he does an incredible finding little tech nuggets to write about, I’m sure there are a lot of things he ends up missing – people just can’t effectively screen through that many sources and that many discrete pieces of information manually.

And compared to the vastness of the web, 600 sources seems like a pretty small number…

In my interview with Wallstrip, I talked a little about my company’s product, infoNgen. InfoNgen was designed specifically to handle these types of scale issues with RSS.

Our free version of InfoNgen is a new type of web based feed reader. It offers a hybrid widget/headline interface combined with a powerful semantic tagging engine in the backend to let us ‘understand’ what each individual story is about. The basic service comes with a directory of over 15,000 handpicked and organized feeds (and growing). You can turn any of them off that you don’t think are useful to you, and also add any additionals ones you’d like to have. You can also screen feeds by language – the feeds in our directory represent multiple languages and come from sources authored around the globe.

Continuously throughout the day, each individual feed is crawled, and the full text of each story in it is analyzed and classified using a broad yet detailed financial taxonomy. Because we provide these traditionally unstructured sources with rich tagging, you’re able to do a lot more with InfoNgen than just browse through feed headlines or perform basic text searches.

InfoNgen gives you the ability to read across all of your sources in aggregate using very detailed filtering. You can see what’s happening with individual companies, specific industries, or even regions. You can filter what you see further using topic based screens like ‘Management Changes’ or ‘Unusual Dividends’. You can also choose to look only at stories based on the type of source – blogs, technical publications, or local new papers for instance.

You get to focus on just the things you care about without all the noise…

I’ll be covering this version InfoNgen in more detail in the next episode of Practical RSS, so I’d encourage you to head over to www.infongen.com and check out the service in advance.

It’s completely free, and I believe you’ll find it to be a valuable tool…

QUICK COMMERCIAL NOTE: A professional version of InfoNgen with customized topics and enhanced searching and alerting features is available on a subscription basis. Contact me through email if you have any questions.

My Chat On Wallstrip…

John — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 13:35:51 +0000

I got to pay a visit to Wallstrip recently and sit down for a one on one chat with Lindsay Campbell.

It was a great conversation focusing mostly on what we are doing at InfoNgen (The company Isaak Karaev and I founded), but also diving in to a lot of related topics in the digital space. You can watch it here:

I’ve been a big believer in Wallstrip from the day my friend Howard Lindzon described it to me, and I have tremendous respect for the whole team that makes the show work – Lindsay, Adam, Mark and crew. They are all consumate professionals and genuinely great people.

If you’re not subscribed to Wallstrip, you’re really missing out on something special.

Thank you guys – it was a lot of fun!

Instant Information's New Website…

John — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 14:02:51 +0000

I am co-founder of a company called Instant Information…

We offer a product called InfoNGEN that lets financial professionals and corporations monitor the world of unstructured information for high value news items that they can leverage in their investments or business decisions. This is a brief introduction about we do that I have taken off our newly launched corporate site:

As a young company, our business is evolving rapidly. We are continually adding new features and approaching new market opportunities. When we looked at our corporate web site – which was less then a year old -it seemed to be talking about a different company. It was a time capsule that did no justice to our current organization, products, or focus. We needed a new corporate site that could really reflect the dynamic nature of our business.

We decided to build it as a blog…

It was an easy choice. Building our corporate site around a blog is clearly the best way to not only keep our clients up to date with where we are as a business, but to create a dialog with them that can keep us better connected with their businesses as well. Some of the best ideas we get for features come from our clients. Each one of them provides a unique – and highly valuable – perspective on both our products and the markets we serve. While providing visibility into what we do as a company is important, it’s even more important to offer visitors a view of how we can make a difference to them and to their specific businesses.

The on-going discussion format offered by a blog lets us do that…

The other key driver for making our new site a blog was that it could become personal. People like to do business with other people – not faceless companies. We are now able to expose that in our site. Every post comes from an individual at the company. We have faces there for people to recognize. We incorporate embedded video (like the clip in this post). The people that make up Instant Information are visible and real. Many times the site will be our first point of contact with someone. It’s important for them to see who we are as well as what we do. We want to build a relationship with our clients – not just sell them a service.

And blogging (done right) is a great relationship builder…