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ANDing topics and companies to understand a market trend

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
Penny Herscher

If you need to understand an unfolding market trend – because it affects your sales territory – or you are investing in the trend – it can be hard to get the right information on just that trend using traditional search tools. But there is a way to filter your web intelligence down to just what you need if you AND companies and topics.

Consider a hot topic right now – Mobile broadband.

The new smart phones are driving up mobile demand for bandwidth as they make it easier and easier to surf, watch video, etc and this will only get worse with devices like the Kindle and iPad. Google and Microsoft want to use the available “white space” in the spectrum but in the long run the only real solution will come from technology advances.

If you need to understand these developments – and get prompted when something interesting shows up – you’d want to track the related topics and the intersection of the interesting companies with the topics.

To do this you first pick your topics: in this case start typing Mobile and you’ll see a selection of topics to pick from – there are two that are interesting in this case — Mobile Broadband Industry and Mobile Bandwidth.

Now if you want to stay on top of Microsoft and Google against these topics you AND them together and save them in a folder.

1. Set up your folder by creating a new folder under the MyFolders drop down

2. Enter Google (wait for the drop down and select the company C:GoogleInc.) then keep typing and type AND mobile broadband (watch for the drop down and select the topic T:MobileBroadbandIndustry).

3. Run the search of the AND of the company and the topic – and then save it into your folder.

You can use this technique to build up a folder of searches on a market you care about and it is especially useful for large companies that get lots of web coverage – like Google does. When you have a “noisy” company you’ll want to AND it with the topics you care about so you just get the filtered search results.

You can achieve the same result in the research engine by searching on the topic and filtering for the company in the left hand side filters.


How to find FirstRain on Capital IQ

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
Penny Herscher

FirstRain is integrated into the Capital IQ platform. If you go to the news page of a company on Capital IQ (enter T=ticker -news) you will see a new FirstRain tab at the top of your page. From this tab you can get a snapshot of the company you are looking at (as you can see in this image here) or if you have a FirstRain login you can go straight into specialized pages like Company Brief, or Management Turnover for the company you are looking at.

There is now a Capital IQ page on our web site — for information about our Capital IQ partnership and you can see a short video demo there of how to get to FirstRain and the research you can do from within your Capital IQ platform.

A FirstRain snapshot window is linked for each company FirstRain has modeled – and we are working with Capital IQ to continuously increase the number of companies so don’t hesitate to contact feedback@firstrain.com of you want a company we have not yet added and we’ll get it in there for you.


Setting up sales triggers based on management changing company

Monday, March 1st, 2010
Penny Herscher

For many sales people, someone joining a company or leaving a company at a senior level can create an opportunity to call. FirstRain detects people moving around – for example a middle manager leaving – and often these changes have not been announced. Companies typically announce good news, but never announce bad news unless they have to because the person is a section 16(b) officer.

Here are two ways you can use FirstRain to pick up management changes i)  filtering by topic on your folder of prospects or ii) keyword search of the titles you care about.

First set up a folder of companies you care about — for example I have a major semiconductor folder set up like this (I have the top 20 semis configured into my folder).

Then you can filter that folder’s results by the topic Management and Board changes — to do this you click on the topic filter on the left hand side – it’s under Business Basics – and you’ll see your folder filtered by this topic (the ability to filter folders is a new feature in the March 1 release).

A limitation today is that you cannot then save this configuration so you can have it pushed to you in an RSS or Email – but this will be coming within 2 months. If you want a workaround for today you can set up a search for the topic Management and Board Changes and an Or-ed list of your companies – for example I have management changes ANDed with four companies here:

T:ManagementandBoardChanges C:NVIDIACorporation OR C:TexasInstrumentsIncorporated OR C:IntelCorporation OR C:QUALCOMMIncorporated

A second way to do this is to use key word search. Let’s use the example where your product is sold to sales people, or sales operations. In this case you can set up a search like:

“Sales operations executive” OR “Director of Sales Operations” OR “VP of Sales Operations” OR “Vice President of Sales Operations” OR “Sales Operations Vice President” OR “Sr. Vice President of Sales Operations” hires OR names OR joins

which will run a continuous search against these titles and the action words like “hires” or “joins”. Note – if you try to do this in a consumer engine like Google you will typically get old or junky results whereas in the research engine you’ll get pushed changes as they are detected – and they will be fresh. You can set up a search like this for any list of titles  you think are interesting. And we’ll be adding topics for different job types over the next few months to make this easier for you.

This is what the search looks like in the research engine and you can save this search and have it pushed to you in an email or RSS to alert you to management changes for the titles you care about.


How to use regions to find growth opportunities: Fast Food example

Monday, March 1st, 2010
Penny Herscher

FirstRain has concept of regions built into it which make it possible for you to research or monitor market developments just within a region, group of regions, or excluding a region.

We’ve been noticing a number of announcements from McDonald’s, YUM Brands! and Burger King increasing their expansion outside the U.S. Here are a couple of ways to understand what they are doing and what’s driving their growth:

First – looking at specific regions – you can search on the Fast Food Industry and then OR together the regions you are interested in. In this example I show the topic on fast food and an OR-ing of China, India and Russia.

Which produces results like

It is interesting to see the level of investment. For example McDonald’s plans to open 45 restaurants in Russia in 2010, investing about $3M in each. But last week reports surfaced that they are also continuing to increase their investment in China – upping it by 25% which would mean anywhere from 150 to 165 new locations.

You can use FirstRain to research the approaches Burger King and Yum! Brands are also making – and especially in India with its exploding middle class population. For example McDonalds has only 174 outlets in India today, in contrast to the 1,200 they have already in China.

Alternatively, if you are just interested in a market outside of the U.S. you can exclude the region U.S. from your search. So, using fast food again, you can run the search this way and you will only see results form outside the U.S.


Release Notes: March 1, 2010

Sunday, February 28th, 2010
FirstRain Support

The main focus of the March 2010 release is an upgrade to the user interface to make it easier for you to find search results and analytics in the research engine. The basic principle is that now, for whatever search you run, you will see multiple views available to you in tabs across the top of your page – right below the search bar.

The best way to experience the new views of your content and analytics is to explore it yourself but we have highlighted a few of the things to look out for below.

And one note to be aware of – there is a chance this upgrade may make the research engine UI look misaligned in your browser. If it does clear your browser’s cache and it should then look OK.

As always – please do send us your ideas and feedback either in comments on this blog or by emailing feedback@firstrain.com.

From the FirstRain Support Team

– – –  Some things to look for in this release  – – –

First check out the new tabs of different views of your results. When you run a search, or you open one of your folders, you will see that you now have several different views of the content and analytics that FirstRain has found for you. Each is a live link to a page of analytics or collected search results.

Second you’ll notice that search results (down the middle of your page) are now dynamic. As you run your mouse over the search results you will see the highlights show dynamically to the right (for example mentioned companies, topics and extracted management quotes) for each search result.

There is a new way for you to look at the events that apply to your search result. FirstRain extracts events and now puts them on an “Event Timeline” for you – for either a set of search results or for your folder. The events that have the highest level of web coverage (the most web documents) are in bold so you can see them easily and you can also use the left hand side filters if you only want to see a subset of the events.

Finally, we have added the ability to show all the search results for your folder in one view. Your folder may be a list of companies, it may be a mix of companies and topics, or maybe it is a collection of saved searches. Either way, now when you go to your folder you can chose to see it the old way – a list of “index card” views of the most recent results  – or you can look at the combined search results of all the items in your folder and interact with them. This means that you can now filter your entire folder by the filters on the left hand side.


Healthcare example: Counterfeit drug trends

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010
FirstRain Support

This post shows you how you can take a topic, navigate through the research engine to understand the trends and dynamics around the topic and then set up a folder to monitor it for you.

We were doing some work on the pharma industry this week and noticed a lot of web activity around the prescription drug spending topic – specifically that the European markets are spending billions on “fake” medicines. Here is the first step we took – a search on the topic Prescription Drug Spending.

When you get interested in the thread of a story you can look on the left hand side of your research engine screen and see the ordered list of companies that have the most content – in this case Bristol-Meyers and Pfizer have the highest level of web content on this topic.

We started digging into these two companies using the combination of the company (model) and keywords. The search on Pfizer and “fake drugs”

turned up a great Wall Street Journal article.

Then one of the team remembered seeing something about Google and big pharma and wondered if there was a connection. Turns out the maybe Google is under pressure from the big pharma companies to squeeze out ads from smallers pharmacies like ProgressiveRX.com – which may, or may not, be the type of route through which counterfeit drugs are making it into the market.

Given this growing topic area an interested user might now want to set up a folder of searches on the companies and topics affected – like Pfizer, Bristol-Myers, ProgressiveRX et al – and the topics like “Counterfeit Drugs” and “Prescription Drug Trends” – and then set up an email or an RSS feed so they can get continuous, but highly filtered, updates on the subject.


How to set Content Type filters

Thursday, February 4th, 2010
FirstRain Support

FirstRain searches a wide variety of sources but you may find you just don’t want to see a certain type of content. To set your personal default to exclude sources just click on the change link under the search box.

Then you can select the content types you want – “only” or “exclude” – and set any configuration as your default.


Apple Backing VoIP will disrupt Tellcos

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010
Penny Herscher

FirstRain picked up a large spike around the story of Apple backing VoIP calls over 3G networks for the iPhone – you can see the spike on the right of the chart below.  Apple announced it is allowing iPhone owners to use Internet calling services over cellular networks. VoIP calling has been available on the iPhone, but only over Wi-Fi connections, which don’t have the range of 3G cellular networks.

This is going to disrupt the business models of the major carriers as cellphone traffic moves to VoIP – so how can you stay on top of this in FirstRain?

To understand as this story unfolds, whether you are an investor or a sales person calling on the VoIP industry, you’ll want to set up a folder of the relevant topic and companies and then have the daily results of that folder pushed to you in email or RSS.

You can now build your folder by performing a set of refined searches and saving each one to the folder. For the first one – click on the save icon (see the green icon on the upper right of this picture) at the top of the search results and select “save to a new folder”. This will prompt you to name your folder – then from then on you can save your searches to that folder.

Here are some example searches that you can save to track this story as it unfolds on the web.

1. Follow the topic T:VoiceoverInternetProtocolVOIPIndustryTrends

Find this by typing VOIP industry into the search box, pause and select the topic. Run the search and save it to your folder.

2. Follow a division of AT&T that is affected.

Find this by typing in AT&T, and drag your cursor slightly to the right to select the blue company brief> link next to the company name. Then in the company brief select the business line (on the right hand side) that is the division you want. If you select the Wireless Communications business line from the right hand side of the company brief you’ll just get results about that division.

In the same way you can go to the AT&T company brief, click on the 3G Networks line of business and you’ll get a search just about that business which you can then add to your folder.

3. You can combine two topics to get very focused content. For example AND the VOIP Industry Trend topic with the Wireless Communications topic together.

4. Or mix up topics and keywords for example the VOIP Industry Trends topic and the keyword “3G” – note if you want FirstRain to do a keyword search you put the keywords in “”, otherwise it will try to match a company or topic to the words first and only resort to keywords if it can’t find a match.

5. If you think the iPad is going to have a huge load on the AT&T network you can track AT&T AND  iPad topic.

6. Finally, you can follow very small 3G VOIP companies that have iPhone apps and will probably benefit from the announcement by searching on their names using keyword search for example on “fring” and “iCall”.

Your folder then has the following searches in it (the searches are shown collapsed – you can click on the + icon to expand them).

Your final step is to set up RSS or email for the folder – you can set this at the top of the folder.


Tracking Google, China and Cyberattacks to find new opportunities

Friday, January 29th, 2010
Penny Herscher

Do you know how you can monitor a new event with potential short and long term investment opportunities – in seconds per day? Here’s an example — based on a current hot topic:

Following the NY Times Jan-12 article “Google, Citing Attack, Threatens to Exit China” the news heated up about Google’s report that “highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China.” and the company added that it is “no longer willing to continue censoring our results” on its Chinese search engine, as the government requires. Google says the decision could force it to shut down its Chinese site and its offices in the country.

By setting up a FirstRain folder to track this emerging area – using topics like “internet censorship” and security software companies (e.g., McAfee) to see if there were other similar attacks reported your client would notice this article : McAfee Offers Guidance and Protection as China-Linked Google Cyberattack Continues to Unfold. “This is the largest and most sophisticated cyberattack we have seen in years targeted at specific corporations,” said McAfee Worldwide Chief Technology Officer George Kurtz. “It is a watershed moment in cybersecurity because of the targeted and coordinated nature of the attack. As a result, the world has changed; organizations globally will have to change their threat models to account for this new class of highly sophisticated attack that goes after high value intellectual property.” And “Over 30 organizations have reportedly been targeted by the same attack that hit Google and the list of victims continues to grow”

Now add keywords into the folder to track the key concepts – like “cyberattack” and “Aurora” (McAfee named the attack Operation Aurora) and the result is a market monitor pushed from FirstRain to you through RSS (into your RSS reader or FactSet) or in an email.

Obviously, this event has long term implications on a huge search market for Google and its advertising. Additionally, this has positive implications for Baidu, which is the leading search engine in China. This event also increases the negative publicity for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) browser, which in turn bolsters the market for competitive browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari.

You can now use FirstRain to follow this new event as it unfolds — and to spot investing opportunities as it rapidly changes and reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the key players strategies . As you can see below, the chatter (web content volume) has picked up dramatically around FirstRain’s “internet censorship” topic.


How to track a company’s line of business

Monday, January 25th, 2010
FirstRain Support

If you keep track of McAfee, you may want to just track a particular line of business from them or any other company.  If you look within our research engine, you will see we have companies broken down by lines of business.

For this example, you can select Web Security (check box on the left) and only view content about McAfee and their Web Security line of business.  Then, if you choose, you can save this into a folder (see the green “save” icon just below the blue bar in the middle) and have an email sent to you on this one specific item.

By setting up this configured search, FirstRain will track just stories about McAfee along this business line and deliver it to you via email or RSS as you choose.


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