AlacraPulse reviewed in VIP
Jinfo Blog

22nd July 2009

By Nancy Davis Kho

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The new issue of VIP Magazine 68 contains a review by Anne Jordan of Alacra Pulse, a recent addition to the Alacra suite of products and a great example of a 'freemium' product - a topic of much interest lately on the LiveWire (http://digbig.com/5bacas). The Pulse platform covers around 2,600 RSS feeds, hand-selected by the Alacra editors. The sources represent a mixture of online traditional media (from newspapers, journals and trade publications) as well as alternative blog sources, chosen where they have a strong following or are influential in their given field. Applications sit on top of this platform, and the first, Street Pulse (http://pulse.alacra.com), which focuses on analyst commentary, was launched as a free product in February 2009. A subscription version, Pulse Professional went live in mid May. This provides more functionality than the free version, and also includes Deal Pulse (covering M&A deals). Two more applications are currently under development: Weak Pulse (distressed companies and restructurings) and Legal Pulse (mentions of law firms). Alacra Pulse is primarily targeted at business and investment end-users as a current awareness tool, however, the content will be of interest to end-users and information professionals alike. For Street Pulse, the same content is available to both free and Professional users, although Professional provides more functionality. It is an excellent tool for finding out what key opinion leaders – analysts from investment companies, credit agencies and market research firms, and industry bloggers – are saying about specific companies or industries. Alacra Pulse does not store full text content. The system mines and applies semantic technology to feeds, making snippets of information available. These short extracts show company names and events in context; users can chose to click through to the original source for the full text. Extracts will be kept on the system for a rolling 12 months. Some of the older links may no longer exist and this is likely to be an irritation for researchers. Anne's review revealed examples of false drops, caused by problems with the automated semantic indexing. However, they do not detract from the overall usefulness of Pulse for homing in on online information about specific companies and events, as covered in a range of quality online sources.

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