Europresse.com - an aggregator to watch
Jinfo Blog

By Penny Crossland

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When it comes to information industry exhibitions and conferences, we tend to focus on the big events like Online in London and the upcoming SLA conference in the US. However, there are other industry conferences, which are less publicised – at least in the English-speaking press – but are just as interesting for us observers of new content, packaging and methods of delivery.

One of these events is the annual i-Expo in Paris, organised by the French information industry association, GFII. All the usual suspects exhibit at i-Expo, showcasing their French-language capabilities: Factiva, LexisNexis, Questel and Emerald, along with hundreds of other vendors.

At this year’s i-Expo, held a couple of weeks ago, the innovation award went to Canadian company CEDROM SNi for its Europresse.com product. Europresse, a news aggregation service, and the European counterpart to Eureka.cc – reviewed by Anne Jordan for VIP Magazine last year – was praised for its “diversity of sources” and its ability to “create custom reports”. Read the press release here.

Europresse.com is not just your common or garden aggregator: apart from the obvious news sources, it monitors websites, social media sites, including Twitter, as well as TV and radio transcripts. Company profiles and biographical information on high profile individuals from North America and Europe are also included, and users are able to set up alerts on topics of interest. All content is fully customisable, allowing the publishing of newsletters.

The innovation that won Europresse the i-Expo prize this year was its introduction of media analysis tools, which represent information in graphic format, as well as providing access to the original article. However, to my mind one of most interesting aspects of Europresse is that it acts as a workflow tool.

Subscription to the service includes a copyright clearance function. When purchasing content, users pay reproduction rights and obtain a certificate allowing them to publish online or share via email. That strikes me as the way forward for news aggregators, avoiding all the aggravation that competitors such as Meltwater has had to contend with, in its battle with the Newspaper Licensing Agency. Read Tim Buckley Owen’s LiveWire postings on the subject here.

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