The Beating Heart of Coverage: Alacra Pulse
Jinfo Blog

17th February 2009

By Gary Price

Item

Alacra has announced a new platform, Alacra Pulse (http://pulse.alacra.com/), with the first service being named Street Pulse. Street Pulse aims to spot business trends, rumours, etc. by mining and applying semantic technology to more than 2000 -- and this is important -- hand-selected (by Alacra editors) feeds from both mainstream news and alternative sources such as weblogs. The company says that the service allows people to quickly determine, 'what key opinion leaders have to say about Company X today?' The Street Pulse home page consists of the latest analyst comments (you choose mainstream or alternative press) dynamically - streamed - on the left-side of the page. The right-side of the page consists of a 'scoreboard' with the most 'talked' about companies of the day listed by total number of comments. These numbers change as content enters the database. When you search or browse by company name or ticker symbol a results page appears consisting of the latest comments taking up most of the page. A box on the lower-right side of the page includes a section with the latest analyst comments for that company gleaned from the database. These comments also include various color-coded letters that help the user quickly determine what they’re reading. They are: * B for Blog * S for Sell Side * C for Credit Analyst * I for Industry Analyst The basic Street Pulse service (what we just talked about) is free for all to use. Nice! All pages (except the home page and category browse pages) include one advertisement from Google AdSense. Alacra is selling a premium version of the service to customers. Subscribers will be able to create watch lists, set alerts, etc. We said at the outset that Alacra Pulse was a new platform for the company. They plan to unveil new services in the future including Deal Pulse (M&A events) and Weak Pulse (distressed companies). Finally, if you know of a news or commentary site that’s not included in Street Pulse, the company has set-up mydata@alacra.com to handle suggestions. Alacra Pulse reminded me of what Techmeme (http://www.techmeme.com/) and memeorandum (http://www.memeorandum.com/) have been doing for some time by aggregating and ORGANIZING (automatically) what people are talking about in the tech news and political news blogosphere. Overall, it's a welcomed service--the price is right-- that info pros should know about, use and share with others. It can help save time and effort in helping make sense of a non-stop stream of business and investment news and commentary.

« Blog