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TOUCH ME: FirstRain is bringing touch-powered Customer Intelligence to the enterprise!

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As we saw last year, there’s been a massive wave of Fortune 500 companies adopting touch-based tablets and devices. One result of that has been the proliferation of a whole range of B2B iPad and smartphone apps from companies like us and salesforce.com to enable those mobile, touch-powered professionals with the intelligence and data they need to understand and engage their customers, as well as open up new opportunities.

However, there’s a second big enterprise trend that’s picking up momentum as well: that of large companies who are developing internal enterprise apps for touch-based tablets and devices, for use by their own enterprise sales and marketing teams.

And because it’s a need that more and more of our customers are requesting every day, we’re very excited to announce this morning the launch of FirstRain for Touch, a new, powerful and yet easy way to drop highly relevant customer intelligence for your sales and marketing teams into your enterprise iPad app—and the first enterprise customer intelligence solution built for the Salesforce Touch Platform.

Last fall, at their annual Dreamforce ‘12 conference, along with their high profile launch of Salesforce Touch, salesforce.com also announced the launch of the similarly named (but very different) “Salesforce Touch Platform.” And unlike Salesforce Touch—which is a downloadable app for iPad, iPhone and Android created for their users to easily access salesforce.com data and capabilities on their devices—the Salesforce Touch Platform is a Software Developer’s Kit that developers within a large enterprise can use to create their own, internal touch-device apps for their sales and marketing teams.

Our new FirstRain for Touch solution is an elegant and personalized set of components that have been optimized for use on touch-based devices, and can be easily dropped into enterprise apps created by companies, just like those developed using the Salesforce Touch Platform SDK. And the demand has been notable. For example, we have at least 3 large, current customers (all in the Fortune 500) who are each planning or have already created and deployed their own iPad apps for use by their own enterprise sales and marketing teams.

But perhaps one of the nicest aspects of this launch has been the opportunity to work with the great folks at salesforce.com. We have lots of clients in common and solutions that have always been highly symbiotic, and so this area is just one more place where we find common opportunity to help each other succeed. Our thanks to Clarence So, their Executive Vice President of Mobile Strategy, for his kind comments about our release: “It is exciting to see the rapid innovation that partners such as FirstRain are delivering on our trusted mobile platform, FirstRain for Touch will provide customers with the right intelligence to help them connect with their customers in entirely new ways and accelerate business success.”

If you’re interested in more information about FirstRain for Touch, let us know!

Can Google Lose its Labs Without Losing The Values That Helped them Succeed?

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I had hoped that my second blog post for FirstRain wouldn’t, once again, be about Google (you’d think that we’d all be sick of hearing about Google 24×7? And we may be, but sick in that ‘I-still-must-tune-in-and-see-what-is-happening-kind of way’ …). Still, I found myself captivated by their announcement this summer that they would phase out a major program called Google Labs by the end of September. And as we’re now approaching that shutdown date, it’s gotten me thinking again about this interesting decision.

For the most part, I’ve always been quite impressed by Google.  I am a long term Gmail user (Gmail has its own Labs, as does Google Maps) and I am still a firm advocate that Google+ will eventually be big (especially after seeing all the complaints of Facebook’s new design on my Facebook newsfeed the past two weeks). Google has launched so many winning products over the years that I was shocked to hear that such a successful and interesting part of Google was to be phased out.

For those unfamiliar with Google Labs, it was a playground for users who are interested in trying Google prototypes and providing feedback directly to Google Engineers. It allowed the public to freely experiment with pre-released Android apps, Google Maps experiments, Google Search betas and much more. Although, not all of these prototypes prove to be effective, it is still a nice way to get the public involved in ‘designing’ and evaluating some of Google’s most popular ideas.

So exactly why has Google decided to pull the plug on this program, when it seemed so many people (albeit, adventurous tech people) were benefiting from it? According to Bill Coughran, Google’s Senior VP for Research and Systems Infrastructure, Google is now beginning to prioritize their product efforts more strictly. And although some of their biggest products had started in Google Labs, they’re now focusing much more of their efforts into dominating the products already in progress, such as Google+. Google has decided that ultimately there are too many ‘small’ projects and they want to channel the company’s focus on the larger and, *cough*, more lucrative options.  By simplifying and focusing Google’s product line, Coughran said, more “extraordinary opportunities are ahead”.

The Google Labs decision is more than just phasing out a neat program, however. The last few years were spent testing potential golden projects. And they did this successfully. Google beat out competitors like AOL and Yahoo in numerous departments such as search, smartphones and Email (does anyone use AOL for email anymore?). And Google Labs has significantly helped develop some of these platforms. But the need is no longer necessary as the trial period is officially over.  What’s interesting is what a signpost this is for where Google is in their lifecycle as a company. Instead of the fun, pioneering tech startup playing in many sandboxes, looking for ideas and doing no evil, they’ve now evolved into a focused and mature company that—for the most part—knows its market, where the money is, and is coalescing around key products like Search, Gmail and Google+.

Now that the deadline is upon us, I was curious to check out the status of Google Labs, especially since I haven’t come across much recent news about the Google Labs termination. If you go to GoogeLabs.com, they inform users directly (no sugarcoating) that the Google Lab’s program is being phased out.  Also, it is obvious that many of the experiments have been visibly shut down.

Not all of Google Labs’ programs will completely disappear. Google claims that they will be integrating some of their better prototypes into many of their already existing experiments but the actual “Labs” name will be retired. The real question for Google now, is how they can retain the spirit of Google labs—that open sense of valued community feedback in a beat environment, now that their flagship vehicle for those values has been lost.

Misreading the seismic shift HuffPo represents

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There is a seismic shift going on that is continuing to shake the foundations of journalism. The intellectual view was well captured in an editorial by NYT executive editor Bill Keller – while the commercial reality is impossible to avoid as you can see in this chart from Business Insider on the drop in ad revenue over the last 10 years.

Keller’s piece, which is at once thought provoking and snarky, expresses annoyance at the hyper-inflated public and market valuations of aggregators like The Huffington Post, arguing that AOL’s purchase of HuffPo no more moves it into the content game than a company “announcing plans to improve its cash position by hiring a counterfeiter.”

Clearly he has an issue not only with the HuffPo team making out like bandits – but more so because they are doing so, in his mind, through aggregation. Earlier in the piece, Keller describes the news aggregation business model as “taking words written by other people, packaging them on your own Web site and harvesting revenue that might otherwise be directed to the originators of the material,” a practice he then likens to Somalian piracy. Methinks he also finds Arianna’s ability to capture a thought and repackage it in a warmer, more convincing way, very annoying.

Keller’s irritation is somewhat understandable, after all, he presides over one of the world’s great newsgathering organizations, one maintained at great expense and passion, and he’s watching the public perception of the monetary value of that content sink precipitously. But while aggregation in some form is here to stay, the quality of journalism is a pendulum that will swing back. His bemoaning of the fate of journalism is not unlike to bemoaning of the smut being circulated in England in Victorian times. Yes, there were great writers publishing in periodicals at the time (Dickens for example) but at the same time the Illustrated London News was a bestseller with stories of scandal and mayhem like Jack the Ripper.

I think Keller substantially misinterprets the value and appeal of HuffPo. Not only does HuffPo attract readers with pop culture – it also hosts a tremendous amount of valued, original opinion content authored by high-profile bloggers from politicians to religious leaders, mixed with aggregated news, yes I admit all from a decidedly left-wing perspective. I am often surprised to find out who is reading HuffPo. Not only rabid liberals in the mid West, but also academics and captains of industry. I find out because they tell me their reaction to some of the provocative pieces I have myself written for HuffPo.

More importantly, however, I think Keller misses the overall shift in content dynamics to which The NYT is also subject – the growing ability to analyze new and aggregated content and derive relationships between them making the stream both relevant and unexpected. Something we provide to our  business users.

A 35,000 feet view of the crisis

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Guest author: Dave Frankel, VP Business Development

I am writing this post from my American Airlines flight over Rapid City, South Dakota right now – connected to the internet via GoGo wifi . While I am generally a creature of habit when I get on my flights to and from CA (which almost always includes catching up on sleep), this time I figured I would try something new to see if it would improve the experience. I must say – I am hooked. I’ve already updated my Facebook status, participated in an email thread pertaining to a partner meeting I have tomorrow, got up to date on football news, checked in with my family via instant messaging (interrupting homework time), AND learned everything I needed to know about the our in-flight movie “Son of Rambow”. Who knew life could be this good?

It is a nice respite from what has been going on in the industry over the past week and half. As I was explaining to our Silicon Valley colleagues (who agreed with Penny’s post last week about how the financial meltdown hasn’t quite registered yet in sunny CA), there has been a dark cloud hanging over NYC since Lehman went down. The market swings, the daily debates about the proposed bailout, the questions about how the institutional investment industry is going to rebound, and the opportunities opening up to research providers are all regular topics of conversation for us in FirstRain’s NY office and in the field.

The truth is, no one REALLY knows what is going to happen next to this industry. As one of our Board members pointed out yesterday, there is not a person alive on the buyside that has ever traded through a phenomenon remotely close to this. Brokerage relationships are quickly being shifted, the availability of broker produced research is now in question, and consolidation and increased regulation appears to be on the horizon for investment managers, especially hedge funds. What this means is anyone’s guess – pundits, hedge fund managers, and common folk alike. One point on which we all can agree however: the art of institutional investing is going to be IRREVOCABLY CHANGED when the dust settles.

Despite reports of surging ratings for CNBC, I am personally finding the most thought provoking insights and opinions coming from the following: 1) sources I have already previously vetted from the web, like the daily updates from my friend Keith McCullough at Research Edge, the Integrity Research blog, Paul Kedrosky or John Mauldin’s Outside the Box, 2) sources published on the web that are forwarded to me from people that I respect and trust like colleagues or friends, or 3) of course, stories from the deep web that I might not regularly follow but that I uncover throughout the day from FirstRain. As I sit here at 35,000 feet reflecting on this, I realize that I have not felt the need to pick up the WSJ once in the past few weeks, and I certainly cannot remember seeing anything new and provocative on broadcast news about the financial industry meltdown. And, dare I ask, has anyone come across any market moving sell side research on the topic in the past two weeks?

Back to my decision to connect to the web via in-flight wifi. I must say, having tried it, I can’t see myself going back to transcontinental flights without being connected. Sure, I had to alter a routine that was working for me (and I definitely didn’t catch any zzz’s), and I am not quite sure about how much the option will allow me to accomplish in the future, but I see that the change is coming whether or not I embrace it. It’s probably better to be figuring out how to make the technology work for me (maybe download Skype before the next trip) than to think it’s just going to be a passing fad.

Next time, however, someone remind me to pack another laptop battery – my computer died before I was able to finish this post. With new opportunities come new challenges I guess.

FirstRain selected by Newssift of the Financial Times Group

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Last month’s announcement by Newssift (part of the Financial Times Group) of its meaning-based vertical search engine was an important new way to look at search for business professionals – you can quickly see how it’s different if you try it at www.newssift.com.

This morning, Newssift and FirstRain announced that FirstRain’s technology provides the business-relevant content: news, blogs, and other original, authoritative pieces of web content that Newssift consumes. We drive business content into the Newssift search application – here is the press release.

Why does this matter to Newssift? Well at the heart is the quest for quality of search results. If you’ve ever tried to use Google for business research you know how nearly impossible it is. You just get too many old and junky results back so you can’t sort the good from the bad – and so you can’t solve your research problem. In contrast, FirstRain has built its name providing highly relevant finance and market research information, extracted and analyzed from the web, to professional investors and corporate users. This matters because some of the smartest people in the world manage money. They run hedge funds, they manage billions of dollars of assets in mutual funds and pension funds – and they have a lower tolerance for junk or irrelevant data than any other group of users in the world. They have driven us to produce only the highest level of quality of research from the web.

As a result of our user’s demands, we’ve built considerable expertise in the quality of the content coming in which we are now making available to Newssift. The quality and classification of the sources, sorting out useful and authoritative blogs from junky promotional ones. Sorting out the highest quality journalism sources from countries all over the world. And now that content is flowing into Newssift so if you use Newssift you’re getting access to the first stage of the FirstRain advantage.

Newssift has led the way, and other media leaders now have a template. We read daily of publishers of every stripe struggling to build and retain their online audience. Whether it’s a technology trade journal, a leading voice of the blogosphere, an investing website, or a major metro newspaper, new tools are coming up to make the web useful for business research in the new generation of publishing that’s emerging. And Newssift won’t be the last.

Exciting times ahead.

Technology, not War, is the solution to publishing

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The global publishing giants have declared war on the new technology generation of content distributors – but they have lost sight of what consumers value and how they want to get to the value. It’s time to separate content creators from distributors. It’s time for a new business model which requires technology understanding and leadership to develop – and one that new generation search applications like Google News and Digg for the consumer, or FirstRain for the professional investor, can sign up for to get the right news to the right people at the right price for them.

Local publications like The Boston Globe are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, others such as The Seattle Post-Intelligencer are moving exclusively online after 146 years in print and global giants like the Associated Press and Wall Street Journal are trying to fight back. But the reality is this is too little, too late and effectively going to war with your customers is a fatal strategy as Arianna Huffington posted a few days ago.

Face it – the consumers of news have changed – dramatically. We no longer read multiple news sources on the hope that we’ll find something interesting, most of the younger of us don’t take a daily physical newspaper and as services like Facebook, Digg and Twitter have shown, we expect the most interesting news to find us. It’s not that we believe news should be free – clearly there is discovery, research and production cost, but it should be allowed to roam freely across the many channels the web enables and still maintain proper attribution.

Our customers at FirstRain have shown us over the past three years that the authoritative news is no longer only found in the WSJ, FT et al. Instead it’s media like the DailyKos, Gizmodo, Consumerist, and In the Pipeline that are increasing the size of the news market pie and creating a huge demand for such obscure, on-the-edge news. In addition, the value of each piece of news varies by who’s reading it and what they plan to do with it. What a college student reads about Apple, Inc. on an obscure blog may be informative and help him plan on his next iPhone purchase, but to a portfolio manager at a Hedge Fund, that same information may be the bit of news he’s been looking for to insert into his model and make a multimillion-dollar trading decision. In both cases the news has value but the value, the search technology to find and rank the news and the delivery model is different in each case.

The critical issue still stands though – original investigative reporting is a public service that we, as a society, cannot do without. Journalists are our educators and our whistleblowers , our eyes and ears on the ground.

The news industry needs to find a recovery path through innovation and collaboration. As Scott Karp points out in his article in Publishing 2.0, this is a technology issue that is outside the comfort zone of traditional publishers. Here are three steps the AP and its 1,500 U.S. daily newspaper members and the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) need to consider in creating a viable business model for themselves and their customers:

* Protect the original content creators: Grant original content producers the opportunity to file as nonprofits under the same laws and protections offered to the Public broadcasting companies as supported by Senator Benjamin Cardin, of MD.

* Track the content: Work with aggregators like Google News, Yahoo, MSN, as well as NYT, WSJ, and the like on developing a new HTML standard that can be inserted into the original news articles to enable the tracking of news throughout its lifecycle.

* Develop a fee-sharing business model: Work with content distributors on an appropriate fee-sharing model to enable the distribution of originally published news through the various niche channels as diverse as Google News, Bloomberg, FirstRain, and even a locally-published community paper.

These options would give content producers multiple channels to sell through, and the ability to charge a real market price based on each distributor’s reach and depth, while at the same time providing an opportunity for smaller players writing original content to distribute their content through major channels for added revenue, outside of Google Adwords.

Then the AP and NAA would create a competitive environment and a generation of startups through which news is distributed to consumers and business professionals. And better yet, this would drive the separation of content creation from distribution – and set up a long term sustainable business model which is what the publishing industry so badly needs.

Steve Jobs’ health – blogs and rumors lead the AAPL stock price by a week

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Here’s an interesting chart on the relationship between rumor, blogs, news and the stock price for Apple around Steve Job’s health . The period is Dec 22 thru Jan 5. The red line is blog volume on his ill health, the blue line is formal reported news on his health and the black curve is AAPL stock price.

Initially Apple announced that this would be the last MacWorld and that Steve would not be speaking. The stock dropped. Then Dec 30 the rumors start that Steve’s health is deteriorating. The blogs are ahead of the news and in higher volume than news, and the stock again dips. Then, when the news is official from Apple that Steve has a “hormone imbalance” (sadly no longer the whole story) the official news sites spike up, and blogs have a lower spike.

This is an example of the type of thing we see in FirstRain all the time. Blogs are ahead that something is up. They are often written by specialists with inside visibility into what’s changing – in this case people close to Apple. News follows and the stock moves on news, but that’s the same time everyone else gets the information. Most investors don’t yet have access to tools to help them sort out the junk in the blogosphere and filter for reliable sources. Queue FirstRain.

You could be missing a quarter of what you should see

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My team were prepping me for a talk I am giving at NYSSA next week, and gave me some great statistics on why it is now so important to incorporate the web into your research process. For anyone who needs to get up-to-date, relevant information on business topics, if you don’t have an application to make the web practical you’re missing significant information. In fact, based on our analysis of the web results database we run, 12% of the content is on alternative sources like blogs, trade journals, transcripts etc. but then, when you focus it on business topics and companies, clean it up, de-dupe it, age it (only look at new content) and remove irrelevant documents an astonishing 27% is from alternative sources.

That means if you don’t have an application like FirstRain, you are probably missing more than a quarter of the content that impacts your business. Wow.

12% of total web content is alternative

27% of relevant content is alternative

Why blogs REALLY matter now

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Per Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere Day 1 report – some fascinating statistics on who is blogging. It’s not the teenage unemployed geeks or housewives writing about their kids that the press sometimes imagines. It’s a business relevant, earning group, which is why blogs are rising so rapidly in importance as a source of news and the new wave of publishing – citizen journalism.

Did you know:

There are now a million blog posts a day – This is a huge source set of information

80% of bloggers write about brands and products – This is business relevant information

58% of bloggers are over 35 years old – The writers are mature, not kids

56% employed full time – And they are professional

51% make more than $75K/yr – And they are relatively wealthy!

And this is why the majority of our customers want us to bring blogs to the front of their FirstRain data.

The Free Content movement continues

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I was struck by the juxtaposition of two articles in the last 24 hours
- Thomson Reuters plan to take share from Bloomberg and
- NYSE releasing real time quotes to the public.

Seemingly unrelated right?

Underlying both is a theme of how the ongoing trend to free content is shaping their competitive strategies and responses.

Thomson Reuters believes it can use price to take Bloomberg market share – Bloomberg being notorious for having fixed pricing and not discounting – and being expensive as a result. And the impact of free web content impacts how users view the terminals:

Neither company has sorted out a strategy for competing with online services. Michael F. Holland, the chairman of Holland & Company and the former chief executive of First Boston’s asset management division, said he can no longer justify a Bloomberg terminal for his current role and often turns to the Web for data. He first used a terminal in the 1980s and remains a fan: “There really is nothing else that’s quite like the Bloomberg,” he said. “From the beginning, it has provided incredible information. But at a very high price.”

And when asked what Google Finance and Yahoo Finance might mean for Bloomberg’s future over time, Mr. Grauer paused. “I don’t know how to answer that,” he said. “I really don’t know how to answer that.”

And John Blossom’s comment in his summary of NYSE’s move is right on:

It is, unfortunately, a familiar refrain in the content industry: major institution covets proprietary content revenues, squeezes them out for as long as possible while the markets move to find both acceptable substitutes and better ways of doing business. Publishing is in essence a very conservative business, so it’s not surprising that NYSE would try to keep this formula going for so long. But in an era when the buyers of securities have and demand information at least as good as most selling institutions failing to serve the buy side in financial markets effectively is to ignore the fundamental shift in the content industry that empowers people with independent access to content from around the world. Your content may seem safe as a proprietary asset, but if it’s not driving your clients’ profits in its most valuable user-defined contexts it is far from a safe bet in today’s content markets.