FirstRain: A Game Changer?
May 11, 2010
Navigate to www.firstrain.com and you will see this headline: “When was the last time search made you money?” Interesting angle. Search is fast becoming a component within other enterprise applications.
You can read the Reuters’ story “FirstRain Announces Game-Changing Intelligent Business Search” and get a sense of the company’s approach to the crowded search and content processing sector. For me the key point was this statement by Penny Herscher, president and CEO of the company:
FirstRain has solved a critical problem for today’s business professionals…For decision-makers, the web represents the most dynamic and current view of companies, markets and management and yet until now, it was not a practical source of useful business intelligence. FirstRain now delivers relevant intelligence like today`s hot trends, emerging market events and unannounced, but visible management moves into the user’s information workflow.
I have been hearing about FirstRain for months. The company obtained an additional $7.3 million earlier this year. The item I saw appeared in Deals & More and stated:
FirstRain, a service that scrapes the Web to deliver relevant research to investors, has brought in $7.3 million of an anticipated $8.8 million round of equity, according to a filing with the SEC. Based in San Mateo, Calif., the company has raised $20.9 million to date and is backed by Oak Investment Partners, DiamondHead Ventures and Ampersand Ventures.
The phrase “scrapes the Web” suggested to me that FirstRain is one of the participants in the business intelligence or competitive intelligence sector.
What I also found interesting is that the Reuters’ story detailed the drawbacks of “traditi0onal search and business information providers”. The weaknesses are quite interesting. Included were these comments which I have extracted or summarized from the news story:
- There’s been a “breakdown of traditional media”, even Web indexes have drawbacks
- Key word systems “are not designed to deliver dynamic intelligence”
- Existing aggregators like Dow Jones or LexisNexis provide access to information “limited in scope and quickly become out of date”
- “Business intelligence applications are usually limited to the documents and databases
related to a company`s own operations, business and resources.”
The FirstRain system, by inference and explicit statement, address these problems. One example is:
Finance professionals can use FirstRain to research and track their vendors and customers directly or through FirstRain integrated into the Dun and Bradstreet DnBI platform. And investor-relations professionals can stay current on market forces impacting their company and its ecosystem as well as events and changes impacting their lead investors.
The value of near real time content processing is recognized by a number of business sectors. However, there are a number of firms nosing into this potentially lucrative market. One can argue that Fetch Technologies and Kapow Technologies are pushing the edge of the open intelligence envelope. Established companies like Alacra have been enhancing their open intelligence content coverage as well.
You can check out the FirstRain Facebook page or you can snag John Blossom’s Content Nation book. The company is profiled in Chapter 4. Among the firm’s customers are Capital IQ. FirstRain mentions other customers on its Web site.
FirstRain is blending some interesting functions and making some strong assertions about its technologies and services. Worth monitoring.
Stephen E Arnold, May 11, 2010
Freebie!
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One Response to “FirstRain: A Game Changer?”
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Stephen,
Thank you for writing about FirstRain. You raise some excellent issues and we are definitely in a rapidly develop technology area. FirstRain combines both search and analytics technology. And while there maybe many firms “nosing into the near real-time content market,” our emphasis is providing business insight for sales and marketing that occurs in scattered pockets across the web and that would be missed by both traditional search and business intelligence. It is, to quote you, “Beyond Search”.
I have a proposition for you. Let me run you through our software. It will take only 10 minutes training and then you can let me know what you think. Cheers, Penny