New York/Silicon Valley based SkyGrid offers users who are willing to pay a per seat license of $500/month a browser based premium real time news service that competes with super-profitable Bloomberg terminals and other services. The service first launched publicly in February 2008, and as of November 2008 the company said they had 100 paying customers.
The paid Skygrid service lets users personalize and filter the real time news stream from blogs and traditional new sites, and it also tries to detect “sentiment” via an algorithm that guesses what the tone of the article is. That’s a big plus for traders trying to make quick decisions on which way the market is going. Publications and authors are also ranked by authority.
But now, we’ve learned, the company is preparing to offer a free version of the service that anyone can use.
The paid version is really only attractive to private equity funds and individual traders that need a jump on the news to get better returns on stock trades. Few others are going to pay $500/month for a premium news service.
The free version, though, may be the future of news aggregation. Our understanding is that there is little attempt to cluster news items as Google News and TechMeme do to try and rank stories. Rather, it presents a personalized, filtered stream based on company, sector, topic and industry settings you make.
In the future you may go to sites like Google News and TechMeme to see what the important stories of the day are. But you’ll go to sites like SkyGrid to monitor all the important news around topics you care deeply about. As a blogger, I really look forward to the new service.
Off-topic
Hey Michael, what’s with the new arrangement and “design”?
Tweak the typography because it looks out of the design, especially the featured section. Cheers and good luck!
I also wonder why adsense is located on prime spots even above major sponsors.
Is adsense more profitable than those sponsors?
I want a photo version of this service.
Wow 100 customers after only 9 months…thats pathetic, it took me 4 months to get 800…gotta love how techies stink at actual business
100 customers, but maybe it’s more than one seat per customer, average. We really don’t know.
Do those 800 customers generate you $6000/year each in revenue? That’s what SkyGrid is doing. It took them 9 months to book $600,000 in revenue… not bad!
Also, what’s with your products anyways? SInce when is DVD considered “high definition” like you advertise? What a scam. Also, your 30 day money-back guarantee has a 20% restocking fee. For your $497 product (I take it you’re an Internet Marketing Center fanboy?) that’s a restocking fee of almost $100. Given that each DVD costs about $5 to make, you can sell and accept for return all day long and make $100 profit on each (given that you profit from shipping too).
What a great business. Whore yourself out on sites like this by posting the first comment, hopefully some suckers buy your overpriced non-high definition DVDs that you deceptively market as high definition, and gladly accept them back, laughing all the way to the bank.
Wow Michael your readers are dumb, they cant even research me enough to see i’m one of the most transparent traders out there…enjoy Digg-like businesses geeks
They’re not in the business of selling bullshit. Anyone can do that. They just have to actually fool themselves first.
100 after 9 months, that’s a good joke.
Thank you Ireneusz, glad to see I’m not the only sane one here…and thats on $11 million raised! Investors no doubt are panicking forcing the company to go the free route….the Digg route…look how that turned out LOL
Are you guys above reading the same article as me?
They have 100 customers paying $500 a month. That’s nothing to be sneezed at. Do you gentlemen want to guess how much they would be worth if they can grow to 1000 customers @ $500 a month? Clue: considerably more than the amount they raised.
Kudos to them for having an actual business model. The new free service is obviously meant to be vessel for upselling to the paid service, but they aimed for profit before growth by launching a pay-only version first.
There’s nothing to laugh at or make snide comments at here. In fact there’s a lot the average Techcrunch reader could learn by their example.
We have to presume they are not counting on making any real money from running ads against the free version, but rather in generating more buzz / awareness about the paid version. If this is not the case, this may be a sign of desperation.
Remember SkyGrid’s client base in the financial services industry has been absolutely hammered, and their main competitor, Monitor110.com, just went belly up a few months ago.
Let’s hope their expenses are low so they can ride this thing out.
Wow, this sounds like a great service. They will have to also compete with DOW JONES NEWS WIRES. Many brokerages offer it free like td ameritrade. Others like reuters have platforms too.
I am a contributor on http://www.thec...gwealthblog.com
I’m a one man shop with 800 customers paying me $30/month…if I raised $11 million….I’d be be embarrassed at anything less than 10,000 paying customers
we’re all happy you’ve done well for yourself, Tim.
Congrats! That comment has just spawned future competitors who now have some real numbers to build into projections!
DOA
We have RSS, Ajax, and Google.
100 is a start, and when they will have 10.000? that’s a start.
I love this Facebook connect log in. I’m glad you guys have added this feature.
This sounds like the kind of service a lot of industries could be interested in. I work in the advertising industry in business development and strategy and this is exactly what we’re looking for.
Google News really doesn’t cut it.
You guys, this service really is very cool. My uncle invested in it when it first came in to private beta, and he gave me a little tour of how it worked. I was highly impressed.
One of the best features of this service it sends a robot to as many blogging / news sites it can find, and using an algorithm the bot determines if that pages post is helpful or hurting a specific company.
To test, I searched AAPL and instantly I got a slew of iPhone related posts (I tested it a few weeks after the 3G came out) as well as posts about other apple products, and posts about competitors’ products. For example, a positive review of the iPhone 3G was flagged by the robot as “good” and colored in green, but two articles down in the list was an article colored red for “bad”. This article was describing the promising new features of the next blackberry, a competitor to the iPhone. Thus, positive news about competitors = bad news for apple, so the robot flags it red.
The algorithm is highly accurate, and based off the titles of the 50+ current posts it showed me (there might have been more pages; I didn’t check), the robot had colored every single one of them correctly: red of bad or green for good (there is also a “gray” color for neutral posts, where most of the time it was simply a website announcing that Apple has a new product, and not necessarily giving it a review).
And people, 100 members at $500/mo isn’t that bad for a fresh company. That’s $50,000/mo for the company just from a nine month old member base. And the service will continually expand.
Good news is what makes democracies work. Google is not a plausible interface or model for news agg and presentation. This moves things in a positive direction. But the other real issue is how to assure that we get real news, well-presented when the people doing that – professional reporters and editors – are being laid off and the model is crumbling.
yeah, my mom wants this thing instead of google news. get real. this is for junkies/ power users. not a big market, but it doesn’t have to be. if good reporters get laid off, they can easily start publishing their own stuff on their own site.
In the DeadPool on 3, 2, 1
Sounds a bit like UK’s NewsNow. Both paid and free versions. Topic pages on the free site autorefresh every five minutes. Over 30,000 sources both blogs and mainstream news are tracked.
The fee-based services is much more robust. Finally, the offer a mobile version of the free service.
http://www.newsnow.co.uk
http://nnmob.com/
Congrats Keven and team,
This is a great way to increase your leads for the premium service as well.
@Jose Enrique Modecir, it isn’t my place to speak to the success of SkyGrid or defend them but I share some of the same investors and they are doing well. Not sure how launching a free version to complement their premium version means they are deadpool bound.
Alex Castro
CEO
Delve Networks
Very interesting product. Regarding their 100 members – to echo voices above, that is nothing to sneeze at. Most companies who would benefit from a service like this are most likely locked into year long contracts with existing vendors and to get mgmt to allow extra cash during a year of cost cutting. Not bad.
When does the free service start? The ability to aggregate corporate news in real time could be a major factor in the new SEC ruling of Notice and Access.
Look forward to testing the free version.
Serena/docstoc.com
Isn’t this just a knock off of stockmood.com, one of the TC50 finalists?
How does this year old service become a knock off of a company that launched in Sept (a few months ago) ?
So let me get this straight, this company wants to subscribe people at $500 for gethering news from sources like google, yahoo and such? Oh brother, what a rip off
Can you ban this Timothy Sykes person? It’s getting very annoying, and he just won’t quit spamming. Michael agrees that he is very spammy, don’t you Mr. Arrington?
okay, if you want to see something that is already better and already offers both a free and premium offering for news consolidation and dynamic exploration and filtering, take a look at silobreaker.com, much mo’ bettah…
Another market for this is bookies and sports bettors – big time…. nice opportunity for a competitor actually – hmmm.
The free version of the service sounds interesting, and I look forward to checking it out. I agree that specialized aggregation services may be best place to find in-depth content on particular topics and will likely become more prevalent in the near future.
One such site, focusing on sports (NFL, NBA, MLB, and NCAA), is buzztap.com. I’ve been involved in the development of buzztap and similar personalization capabilities will be added soon.
Great stuff… I will be rooting for these guys to succeed!
Keep up the good work SkyGrid team.
I love Frienfeed real-time. It’s my presente.
@500$ a month, only rich peolple in the business will register that software I guess. For the average Joe, 500$ is way too expensive.
I will continue to use my google reader, it’s free and I get the news fast enough for me.
I like my free news tools, too, but a lot of comments are missing the point. SkyGrid is one of a dozen or so companies who are mining online content for investment purposes (some also support corporate finance roles). Their business addresses a market that *can* justify spending money on specialized news services, based on ROI in securities markets. In return, what they get is a bit faster, better filtered, and enhanced with quantitative and qualitative analytics that mass market aggregators don’t offer.
http://net-savv...t-insights.html
Bloomberg called… they want their visual identity back.