A look inside the Monitor110 research suite
Marshall Kirkpatrick
34 comments »
I know what I want for Christmas. It’s going to be expensive, but Monitor110 is already making beta testers money. It’s a real time research suite tracking RSS, deep web, static web changes and many other sources with multiform alerts, semantic analysis, extensive domain knowledge concerning financial markets and high profile VC backing.
The company was profiled in the Financial Times last night, but we have exclusive details and the first public screenshot of the service.
Almost three years in development, with funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson amongst others, Monitor110 is set to launch in early 2007. It looks a lot like big parts of my research system (which I take great pride in) rolled into one very smart, automated system. High level knowledge workers in the future are likely to combine Monitor110 for what we call feed reading today with something like SystemOne for a CMS and Touchstone for alerts. Just as Root Markets is taking attention to financial markets first, Monitor110 is focused at launch on hedge funds. People who deal in pure money are probably the only market that is ready for these kinds of technologies on a large scale today, though individuals in any field could well use them to gain a competitive advantage.
Monitor110 gathers information from 40 million sources of various types (100 million by the end of next year they say), ranked by financial market knowledge through a proprietary algorithm that takes 50 factors into account - inbound links being just one reputation metric. Users can chose between top sources preselected for their market sector and subscribe to sources of their own. Static sites can be monitored for changes with good granularity. Premium subscription and other deep web sources, blogs, forums, news and regulatory filings are among the sources included. The end results will be delivered through the company’s RSS reader with email, IM and SMS alerts as appropriate.
Rather than keyword search, the company’s technology is based on conceptual or semantic search. Those conceptual search results are prioritized relative to key events in industry news.
If you’re familiar with the consumer online research space, think Technorati plus Pubsub plus Sphere plus WatchThatPage plus NexisLexis plus Newsgator white label plus Rasasa - with vertical search domain knowledge overlaid that targets people who’s bread is buttered by getting key information first.
I know that I struggle with piecing together a research infrastructure similar to Monitor110’s with quite a few different services. To have all of the above functions rolled into one service is a very exciting prospect.
Monitor110 will be a hosted service subscribed to per user per year. The company wouldn’t tell me what that price will be but said that it’s a high-end product. I asked whether RSS and web based real-time research were better appreciated today than they were when the company was formed. Monitor110 President and COO Roger Ehrenberg told me this is definitely the case, but that RSS in particular is still almost unknown in the hedge fund milieu. None the less, Ehrenberg told me that the service has been very well received among exclusive beta testers, a number of whom have already clearly identified ways the service has made them money.
Monitor110 does not incorporate Attention data as Ehrenberg says the sector is very siloed and not set up to share knowledge. I am surprised that in the three years since the company was conceived and has incorporated so many trends in cutting-edge online research that they haven’t incorporated Attention on an individual level. I also asked whether the service would be available preinstalled on a server to place onsite and it will not.
Will Monitor110 be able to scale in performance to its ambitious goals and convince customers that it is sufficiently secure as a hosted service? Only time will tell, but the company certainly has the resources to work towards those goals.
The company’s primary strength is their domain knowledge around financial markets. If the same infrastructure could be built into other verticals, I don’t know how much demand there would be today, but I’m willing to bet there will be a whole lot in the future. In fact, now that research suites like Monitor110 are coming to market, those of us who have been piecing together several different services to gain a competitive advantage in our fields are going to have to move to the next level. Services like this will give many more people the tools to get high-quality information at very early stages after it emerges.
The following is the first screenshot that has been released by the company. You can see that it’s tailored to the financial crowd, but you can also see how the different features and topics are integrated. I expect that Monitor110 will see substantial adoption in it’s target market and is a harbinger of the kinds of knowledge tool suites that many industries will rely on in the near future.
Beta users will be accessing the fully functioning service in October and the service will be ready for subscription in early 2007. You can click on the screen shot below to view a larger size and get a look at what the systems multifeature company and concept search subscription dashboard looks like.
I’ve seen this and so far, it’s not living up to what it says. The concept is cool, but it’ll be a long time before they get it right
interesting stuff; we’re doing work in this area but from a rather more pragmatic perspective …
Looks and sounds great! I need a service like this (and know many others who would use it to). Great for competitive intelligence and knowledge management!
Steve, you and your friends don’t have to wait long
I see a new baseline of content aggregation tools forming. With new sources and communtiies rising up every day, however, I think there will always be a need for supporting tools to gain a competitive advantage. Thta’s only natural. no panacea, as usual.
Looks promising. But the graphics and layout make me feel like I’m on a website built in 1995. I hope they do something about it.
Research and analysis is still and will always be profitable. This is a smart product and I hope that everyone benefits form it.
I’m sure it’s the product of the future working presently! Great idea! I believe it could be very perspective project.
But what about spam and other attempts to game the system? Here’s where their approach to reputation will be key. False stock tips is a common spam genre that is known to work. The success of systems like Monitor110 might lead to their own demise as spammers quickly adapt to it, creating and populating blogs that provide false signals and information. Detecting these bad sources, and doing it quickly, will be difficult.
Kris, hows about a free trial then
Good timing this appearing at this time as I only posted yesterday on my blog about the lack of decent knowledge management tools.
Sounds interesting…I can think of a number of uses of such a system…One could be more measurable returns on marketing $$ another could be better identification of the main influencers in a certain market segment. Very much depends on the flexibility of the platform though.
MA, how does one get on the beta testers list?
and more importantly, will tech crunch follow the information dissemination curve? Am I to expect a fresh off the presses copy of the daily techcrunch delivered to my door every morning? or a new Mornings with Digital Mike on MSNBC ??
Very interesting, we have a similar and possibly dumbed down version [and probably much lower cost] and are about to commence beta testing. Our system is designed to work in any market area as per the requirement of the user and will most likely be launched on a pay as you go approach.
Feel free to get in touch if you are interested in becoming a beta tester.
Carl
Or, just list keywords relevant to you and use pubsub for blogs and Google news alerts for news sources.
Cheaper and available today.
Services like this can make some of our work easier.
Hundreds of contacts and feeds are frequently hard to manage. It could be nice to cut back on feeds and increase our contact base.
Looks interesting!
I’m wondering whether the beta account still has an open position
Are you aware we are live in the market with a service that does all that Monitor110 does and more? After two years in development, we launched at the beginning of August and the hedge funds we have been talking to are loving it. Here is one excerpt from a senior analyst:
“…The whole “news source feed” from absolutely everywhere and for as many filters as you want, is the key. George has been asking for that since i started last year…..Thanks again for thinking of me and for not wasting my time with “the same old stuff”. This is definitely something i have been looking for. ”
We are juiced to be ahead of the game, ahead of the competition, and helping our new customers to get ahead of the market!
Apologies. My colleague has just informed me that espousing the virtues of your own services on public blogs in poor blog-etiquette.
I had better leave it for our clients to spread the word….!
To the folks worried about false sites, stock spamming, and other finint psyops:
I don’t know the Monitor 6 (oops, “110″ in binary;-p ) team. I just found this site today. However, it’s pretty clear from their tech PR that their use of page-ranking (inbound link count, eg) alone would have the effect of decimating spam site influence. That, plus a ’semantic’ rollup and weighted balancing of blog input will go a long way to washing out most all effects of a single user doing stock psyops. These guys have been at it for three years. I betcha they have some good ideas in play.
What would be harder to detect, track, and disambiguate would be…well…exactly what’s hard to detect in the economy at large: irrational
crowd behavior (think Shiller, Taleb, et al.) not related to real and stable underlying factors.
One prima facie word of warning: There is a time granularity to all this. While I would enjoy a Monitor110 live evaluation, I suspect that their product has a “time sweetspot”: in the analysis cycle, if you wait long enough, all the information they’re likely to scoop up and present has already been aggregated and chewed up by the weeklies and monthlies and any additional Monitor110 value would be in the ‘diminishing returns’ ballpark (strict cost v. benefit analysis here) . At the other analysis cycle extreme of, say, a day trader, Monitor110′ll be pulling from solely indie blogs and ‘chatter’ (to borrow the Echelon term) which have much lower semantic credibility, much higher volatility, and low page-ranking street cred. Therefore…somewhere in the “longer than a couple days, shorter than a month” is probably this service’s sweetspot.
A hope for the future: I hope they allow this offering to take flight from its financial moorings: I’d like to be able to use it to track any kind of information (ie scientific, academic, public sector, etcetera). They’ll be able to do this exactly to the extent that their proprietary algorithms are semantically robust, and can be adapted to a larger sematic space. We’ll see how well they do at this going forward. Sound like a great project to me!
As a high-end database guy, this stuff is absolutely fascinating to me, and I can think of half-a-dozen neat tweaks to do on such a service. I wish the Monitor Team the very best possible luck!
- Ross
seems cool but at least for the next few years I think what RGEMonitor.com is doing is the better (best) way to get good smart aggregation till the AI gets smarter. They have a team of economists who pick the best news of the day and highlight it in their aggregator …. Natural Intelligence vs Artificial Intelligence — at least for the next few years, is bound to deliver qualitatively better results. http://www.rgemonitor.com
great idea