NewsScape presently exists in two forms –
NewsScape Version 1 – a vanilla html presentation at www.newscape.com that
delivers to just about any html browser and device.
NewsScape 2 – a development project – lives at
dev.newscape.com, and this parades a number of advanced ideas and features but
requires IE version 6
NewsScape is the most effective way of
summarising and categorising the vast journalistic output of the internet
NewsScape is more than this: it is a way of presenting,
in a readable format, a summary of any published material on the Internet, or
an intranet. It can be selective too, selecting just the type of information
that the user requires.
In its simplest form, NewsScape cycles through
a list of sources and detects any new additional material on those sources. It
formats the material into a title, summary and text. It then indexes, analyses
and displays this material. With News Sites, it can list the various categories
of news in a number of ways, and do complex searches for news items. It can
sort stories into categories according to simple or complex criteria, or alert
users to the presence of newly published material from a particular source, or
with particular content.
NewsScape can automate a great deal of the
drudgery of checking news sources, whether for journalists doing research,
company intelligence, checking brand integrity, or just simply for routine
reports on what is being said about particular organisations
A strength of NewsScape is its powerful
searches. It can search through 4.5 million news stories for particular words,
or strings in under a second. Even complex searches take around four seconds on
a small twin-pentium machine. NewsScape is able to do fairly complex processing
on its stored materials. It can, for example spot major stories published by
several sources from the underlying 'noise' by spotting changes in the use of
words and phrases (e.g. Soham or Bali), and categorise them as 'featured'
stories.
NewsScape has been used to monitor stories on a
particular subject (e.g. Commerzbank), or to research the history of particular
ongoing news stories. Unlike other news stories it has a three-year archive
which allows in-depth historical research
NewsScape is able to be catholic in the areas
of the web that it inspects. It can get behind bland press-releases. NewsScape,
for example, scans product recall sites, notices of creditors meetings, court
reports, trading-standards judgements, newsgroups, and various government
sites. Because it is so economic to use, it can be set to inspect primary
sources of news, press releases, occasional magazines or political material.
NewsScape is an information aggregator.
Although it has been developed primarily to index and categorise news stories,
it is of use of anyone who must make sense of a huge mass of information, most
of which is irrelevant, and who must be able to browse and search through it.
NewsScape has evolved to be more and more efficient, as its database becomes
more and more enormous. Its searching algorithm is complex but startlingly
fast. It is therefore an excellent way of presenting the information contrained
in intranets.
·
Anyone who has blown a business opportunity because of
missing that morning's industry announcement
·
anyone who finds it impossible to keep track of what
your competitors are doing, throughout the day, every day
·
anyone who wants to know what's being said about their
company, competitors, clients and partners - in time to act on it?
The sheer volume of online information doubles
every year. But it's the right information that continually eludes
professionals: 79% turn to the Internet first for information, and spend more
than 20% of their time locating the information they need. (source: Outsell)
Today, success is almost impossible without
access to information that is:
·
Targeted to the users' unique business needs
·
From the most influential online sources
·
Fast enough to impact decisions
Professionals are continuously missing vital
information they need simply because they don’t know how or where to find it in
a world of endless information. Then, if they do manage to find what they need,
it’s rarely in time to put it to good use.
By turning overwhelming amounts of information
into actionable knowledge, NewsScape aims to enhance global intelligence and
competitiveness by managing real-time data streams and delivering them
immediately and intelligently.
NewsScape’s technology locates, filters and
consolidates a breadth of real-time information from countless content sources
– such as Internet News-sites, broadcast television and radio, news wires, web
pages, message boards and more – and delivers only what is relevant.
By discovering the most useful information in
real-time, NewsScape gives you the entire universe of information transformed
into useful knowledge. NewsScape is the perfect tool for anyone who needs to
receive relevant information as it is generated. It is especially useful in
such industries as financial services, public relations, news and government
organizations or any other knowledge-driven industries. With NewsScape, not
only do you have all the breaking news, but you also have it organized
according to your personal preferences in one centralized location.
As news and information break, they immediately
“find” the appropriate recipients automatically. Users determine the flow of
information to them by creating a network of queries (in the form of keywords
and Boolean expressions) that encompass the subjects that are valuable to them
in their daily operations. These queries put them on the edge of real-time
information as it emerges across all global information sources. They do this
by alerting the user to their search results in real-time, thus keeping them on
the edge of information that’s relevant to them. The aggregation of the query
results becomes a snapshot of the most up-to-date information available. Alerts
are created and categorized into folders by subject, company name, etc.
NewsScape cuts through information overload to provide users with only the
information they need, when they need it most. Managing countless data streams
and personal criteria, it gives users the ability to monitor only the
information that pertains to their individual needs, and set alerts to notify
them of real-time information like breaking news and financial updates.
NewsScape delivers the breadth of external
information coming from such sources as television broadcasts, news articles,
website updates, and more. NewsScape offers several choices as to the types of
content packages available so that you receive the most relevant information
delivered to you instantly in an organized, personalized interface.
With the exponential growth of live content
streaming through the ether and growing demand for personally relevant
information, individuals in all walks of life need new solutions enabling smart
and active information navigation and retrieval. NewsScape can coordinate and
deliver the best of these solutions, enabling significant penetration and
expansion of several major markets.
Initial applications for this type of product
are traditionally aimed at the $21.5 billion financial services segment of this
market. However, that market is way oversubscribed and the incumbents are
suffering. But those who once had a $1000/month Reuters terminal on their
desktop might not be suffering from information withdrawal, and find that
newsscape actually fulfils most of their real requirements.
NewsScape’s solutions are ideally suited for
this industry, where real-time access to information is critical.
NewsScape is a combination of database,
DataGatherers and Website. The current production NewsScape database is on an
NT machine with SQL Server. It is a twin pentium machine with three Gigabytes
of memory, which is little more than an averge desktop specification, these
days. The DataGrabbers host a process that runs on rack Pentium 3 NT boxes with
access to the Internet. DataGrabbers trawl through a list of sites, at
scheduled times according to the volatility and importance of the site.
NewsScape presently gathers over 12000 stories a day from over 3000 sources.
There is no practical limit.
The entire logic of categorising, indexing and
analysing data is written in Transact SQL, and is highly optimised. It has been
tested at a sustained rate of 2000 stories per hour. The only requirement for
remote maintenance is to maintain a table of sources. NewsScape has run
unattended for several months
NewsScape collects the content of a block of
information ('story') and indexes it. It is able to scan it over to check for
key phrases, search for proximity of words and alert individuals. It can 'sniff
out' the subject matter of a story from the presence of 'diagnostic words', and
it can display information or news on a particular subject from a large number
of sites as it comes in.
NewsScape was originally designed as a
news-aggregator with a historical dimension, optimised for reliability and low
production overhead. It uses a number of table-driven 'DataGrabbers' that trawl
through the sources at scheduled times, and presents them in a browser-based
summary or 'news-Ticker'.
NewsScape has been running for three years as a
system for providing an overview of ephemeral public information, . It has been
gathering an archive of news items, and allows this archive to be searched for
items of interest. Although it is a public site, it has never been exploited as
a revenue source. It has been primarily serving as a feed for news stories
through a multicast feed to the EnfoCast application.
Unlike the Internet-based news services,
NewsScape is not restricted to the primary news services. It also gives a
historical dimension over the past three years. Currently NewsScape gathers
news, stock-quotes and broadcast-media listings. It is now starting to collect
product-recalls, reviews and other trader-based information. NewsScape also
contains Court reports, including details of employees who take employers to
industrial tribunals and all libel, deformation and slander cases.
NewsScape consists of a database, a collection
of newsgathering processes, a website, a queuing system, a back-end reporting
system and a messaging system
NewsScape is best seen as a number of
inter-relating processes. Currently, many of these are co-hosted on the one
server, but this need not be the case. As the system grows, it can be
increasingly distributed. Already, there is a customized replication system in
place. This can be extended so that more complex tasks can be offloaded from
the main servers.
These are processes written in a scripting
language (Perl). The are programmed to gather stories from a specified source.
Datagrabbers can be sited anywhere on the network. When one of them finds a
story, it is checked for a match with existing stories. If it is new, it is
indexed and saved, along with its' keywords. The user of NewsScape can then see
the news, reports, or commentary as it is found. There is currently only one
DataGrabber box, but this can be expanded up to any number. DataGrabbers are
processes written in a scripting language (PERL) that are programmed to gather
stories or information from a specified source.
Information on how to retrieve the stories from
the source are contained in a source table on the database, editable by the
NewsScape editorial team. The DataGrabber determines all the parameters for the
source via an ODBC link. It writes its' progress to a table
(www.newscape.com) has now been running in its
present form for three years, and was preceded with a prototype design. It has
not been fundamentally altered since. It currently displays lists of stories
including the title, summary, URL, and the time it was added. These lists are
prepared according to the category (e.g. World, business, Technology). There
are also lists, in time order, for the breaking news (i.e. the latest stories
that have been added) and there is a list of 'featured stories' originally intended
to be selected 'by hand', but now selected automatically.
NewsScape harnesses the world’s editorial
content – from broadcast television to newswires to webchat – as it is being
published, enabling subscribers to tap into the totality of public perception
immediately and extract personally-relevant information. NewsScape’s solution
is based upon three core elements:
·
Real-time access to the world’s most compelling
content, including TV, radio, newsfeed, streaming media, web, bulletin
board/chat, and intra-company content,
·
A proprietary real-time filtering platform capable of
filtering tens of thousands of these feeds and intelligently extracting
relevant content based on user profiles, and
·
A globally distributed publish-and-subscribe network
infrastructure capable of securely connecting users with relevant content via
multiple devices, all with end-to- end latencies of a few seconds.
The result is a new era in communications, an
era where content immediately and intelligently finds interested individuals
anywhere in the world. NewsScape’s revolutionary solution embodies the
evolution to the next-generation Internet – from archival search and retrieve
to real-time publish-and-subscribe, from computing to communications, from
PC-dependence to device-independence.
Users can be alerted by email or SMS (or any
other practical means) when certain key words occur at a good relevancy score.
NewsScape can issue a daily/weekly email newsletter. NewsScape is configurable
as a corporate Intranet site, with the identity and style of the intranet.
Customisation options for users allowing them to change graphics, backgrounds,
customise News-feeds and ticker etc
NewsScape has rudimentary tools to facilitate
workgroups, allowing them to create their own new channels, pass comment on
news stories and rate them with the top rated stories going into their own
column. NewsScape will soon be able to utilise its user information database to
match users with similar profiles - and suggest further content that they might
have an interest in.
There will soon be a mechanism for allowing
users to apply comments to news stories that are visible only to other group
members.
Outsell Inc., a research firm specializing in
information services, once sized the B2B Information Content (IC) market at
over $50 billion. This market includes publishers, aggregators and distributors
of information content.
·
Financial Services. Management plans to focus its
initial applications on the $21.5 billion financial services segment of this
market. NewsScape’s solutions are ideally suited for this industry, where
real-time access to relevant information is critical.
·
Market Research. NewsScape’s real-time platform
and infrastructure will enable a new genre of media metrics measurement for
this $15 billion market. The two-way nature of NewsScape’s solution will enable
detailed usage measurement and the development of a new class of “Nielsen-type”
metrics.
·
Reference & Aggregation. This $8.3
billion segment is currently dominated by purveyors of text-based archival
information such as Lexis-Nexis. NewsScape’s ability to deliver rich media in
real-time promises to add significant value to this market segment.
·
Public Relations/Crisis Management. NewsScape’s
ability to comprehensively capture the world’s perception of a given topic will
add considerable value to firms engaged in public/investor relations and crisis
management, and will lead to considerable penetration of this $3 billion
market.
NewsScape’s familial relationship with EnfoCast
provides access to the world’s news organisations, and we have to properly
leverage this opportunity. We realise that a formal business proposition is a
precursor to meaningful discussions – but our ability to instantly deliver
relevant content to news desks around the world promises to give NewsScape a
foothold in this $30 billion market.
NewsScape will deliver crucial applications for
emerging markets spawned by convergence.
·
Wireless. Goldman Sachs recently quantified significant
opportunities created by the high-bandwidth Mobile Internet, forecasting U.S.
2005 revenues of $4.4 billion for mobile commerce and $3.0 billion for
advertising. We believe that NewsScape, with its ability to deliver
highly-relevant rich media content in real-time, will be a killer app driving
adoption of video-enabled mobile devices. Thus, NewsScape stands to capture a
significant share of these new revenue streams.
·
Smart TV. Forecasts for the global Smart TV market to reach $45 billion by 2005, with
electronic program guides in >100 million households and personal video
recorders in 70 million households by then. By analysing metadata (e.g.,
subtitles) of television content as opposed to merely scanning program
information like existing solutions, NewsScape's proprietary technology
represents the evolution of electronic program guides to electronic content
guides, and the company stands to realize considerable licensing fees from
existing providers (similar to Gemstar's approach).
·
Enterprise Solutions NewsScape’s solutions can empower
organizations of any size and scope with a critical knowledge management tool
that leverages internal assets, from employee communications (e.g., e-mail) to
company publications to customer information.
·
eCRM. According to IDC, the “collaborative service and
support technologies” segment of the eCRM market is projected to grow from $4.3
billion in 1998 to nearly $12.0 billion by 2003.
·
Corporate Portals. The Aberdeen group anticipates
revenues from corporate portal products to top $1.3 billion by 2003.
Additionally, knowledge management services are forecast by IDC to top $4
billion by 2003.
·
Other Markets. NewsScape has identified and will continue to
explore several other potentially attractive markets, including sports, gaming,
government, legal, education, and research.
NewsScape will build upon its first-mover
advantage by partnering with the most highly relevant and respected content
sources from around the globe. Users can simultaneously access tens of thousand
of content streams across all forms of media in real-time. The result: users
can tap into the totality of perception of any given topic at any given point
in time.
·
TV/Video. NewsScape is currently pursuing licensing agreements
with CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg, BBC, JAGfn, WebFN, On24, and others.
·
Radio/Audio. NewsScape is currently working with broadcast
partners as a result of our relationship with EnfoCast.
·
Web Page Updates. NewsScape is constantly scanning
over 4,000 premier websites for breaking news and updates through an agreement
with Moreover.
·
Internet Community. NewsScape is currently
monitoring IRC chat rooms and Usenet newsgroups, and is pursuing licensing
agreements with Raging Bull, Silicon Investor and others.
·
Newsfeeds. NewsScape currently access over 15,000 articles a
day over 50 wires through an agreement with Comtex, including AP, Business
Wire, UPI, Knight Ridder, and others.
·
Data Feeds. NewsScape is evaluating licensing of real-time market
data and other real-time feeds from the usual suspects. It plans to develop
it’s own index technology specific target markets.
·
Instant Access. Users will be able to view the
live video of their latest alert, or view the live broadcast of any content
stream they choose. Additionally, the most current piece of relevant content
from across a given user’s profile is constantly displayed.
·
On-demand Access. NewsScape is intuitive.
·
Archive: 3 years of news stories (4 million items) from around
the world are already available (text only)
An experienced and respected team of technology
and media veterans drives NewsScape development.
NewsScape’s business operations are based in
Chelmsford UK, and its R & D operations are based in Suffolk. There is an
experienced Editorial team that monitors new News-sources on the internet for
inclusion in the source-list
NewsScape has grown alongside other
products in the enformatica stable. It has continued to thrive and evolve as
one of the development teams favourite in-house research tools.
The time is now right to separate
NewsScape as commercial opportunity in its own right, since its users agree
that it is superior in all respects to the competiton from the likes of
MoreOver and NewsNow.