Dump those expensive Bloomberg terminals in the trash, because there’s a brand new financial news product in town. And it’s free. SkyGrid will aggregate all the news about publicly traded companies in a single user interface, and give users a feel for the importance of each news story as well as the overall sentiment of the author.
In January we wrote about SkyGrid, the $6,000 per seat/year financial news product that gives users real time updates via a flash interface on the stocks and sectors they are interested in. Today the service completes its transition to a free service that anyone can use and launches into private beta. You can sign up for it here. Existing users are also given invitations to the service as well, so once you are in you can get your friends on the service, too.
Like TechMeme and Google News, SkyGrid clusters related news stories based on keyword analysis, what they’re linking to, etc. That lets users see a variety of coverage from major news sources and blogs. And SkyGrid also makes a serious attempt to determine the sentiment of each article – red for negative, green for positive.
The main page, shown above, shows major financial news affecting public companies. Users can create separate pages for stocks, a portfolio or sectors that they follow as well. You can also filter by news type (major news sites, blogs, edgar filings, press releases, etc.). Finally, users can look at real time news or filter historical news back up to two weeks prior (the company says they may increase the timeline further back if users want it).
My overall impression: slick and very useful. It’s trivial to find relevant news on just about any public company, grouped by whatever story is being discussed. The engine does an excellent job of picking and ranking stories. But by far the most useful tool is the sentiment engine, which can give stock buyers a very good indication of which way the news is trending without a careful read of the entire article. The sentiment engine isn’t 100% accurate, but it’s good. And users can change the sentiment if they think it’s incorrect.
What I want: more. SkyGrid currently only covers public companies. Large private companies like Facebook, or public company subsidiaries like MySpace, can’t currently be tracked even though there’s plenty of press on them. If they offered private company information as well this would be a serious competitor to services like TechMeme. For now, it’s only another tool in the arsenal for news junkies like me. Of course, serious stock traders will find this extremely valuable, and don’t care about private company news. SkyGrid is targeting those types of users first.
SkyGrid, located in Sunnyvale, California, has raised $13.3 million over two rounds of financing. They were founded in 2005.
Update: Here’s a demo video. Also see Robert Scoble’s interview from today.
I don’t see where can i sign up for the free service? The link you have in the article goes to their start page – but there is no registration there?
should be there shortly
Very slick.
Have you seen hookk? It maps citizen reactions to the news in a sidebar next to the news item.
The hookk can be no longer than 120 characters and is generally the subtext to an article.
The interesting thing is that it has been launched “sea worthy” as the founder puts it. So you can follow them on twitter to see the site being built as it is being used.
Worth checking out. http://hookk.com – http://twitter.com/hookk
Mike, I just did a 45 minute press conference with Kevin Pomplun, CEO and Founder of Skygrid, where he gives me a video demo and tour and explains tons of stuff about the company. That video is now up at http://www.kyte...-real-time-news
yeah, that when you broke the embargo.
Still not there :S
patience.
This is not directed at you Mike.
Why wouldn’t they make sure they have a proper sign up page that’s completely functional BEFORE they launched?
That’s an incredible oversight.
LOL, is finance really stuck in the dark ages to needs such an irrelevant product? The answer is yes, good product for broken industry
I am kind of skeptical about skygrid. I mean it really looks like another RSS reader with a slightly better filtering. One problem with these RSS readers is the rate that they refresh the stories (data) is kind of slower and if they don’t have a ton of sources, people naturally want to diverge out and look for more interesting articles that gets populated right from the writers/editors.
Mike, I love ya bud… Oh and it’s not there yet >_<
the whole site is going very slow. give it some time to deal with the press push.
and, i love you too. whoever you are.
Skynet must have killed the Skygrid sign up link.
by the way, demo video is coming. uploading to youtube now.
On a related note, social news site Tipd.com has a “real time social financial news aggregator” known as SocialTickers that they released earlier this month (4/7):
http://tipd.com/socialtickers
Sure, it’s not as real time as SkyGrid, but it certainly captures public sentiment on specific financial developments, and I think it’d be safe to say for the most part that it is also like Google News/Techmeme/Skygrid in that it “clusters related news stories based on keyword analysis” in the social sphere.
Mike – it would be interesting to hear about their strategy and why they abandoned the B2B pay model and went to free. Seems bizarre if they were getting good traction with enterprise clients…
I have been a beta tester and this is really an excellent way to sort and segment news and information. The clustering feature helps duplication tremendously
Hmmm, Bloomberg is more than just news, its real-time & historicaldata for just about every traded asset classes there is (plus OTC instruments as well), its a messaging hub, its a charting tool… and it has massive scale and mindshare in the capital markets profession. I don’t think traders and fund managers will be ditching Bloomberg/Reuters (despite the cost) for this anytime soon. For daytraders however, something like this + StockTwits is compelling
james, agreed. bberg = bond yields, price data, stochastic analysis, etc…not same as skygrid = web news, sentimnt, no price data, and web app. no one’s ditching bberg, and agree again that it’s easy to use both
Hmm, is not there yet Mike..
Hey, Mike,
Good article and hopefully I’ll come back to check out SkyGrid shortly. One little criticism: please don’t post any links until they’re actually fully functional. I went to sign up and followed the link — no sign-up. Sometimes a company’s PR gets ahead of the company and we depend on people like you to filter out the vapor from the ware. All too often, TechCrunch articles are more like ads — it’d be nice if the articles aligned more closely with the (current) reality warts and all.
In fact, many of SkyGrid’s links were clicks to nowhere — not a promising start if the PR department is rushing this into print.
Other than that (very) mild criticism, thanks for all the good work you and your colleagues do.
Thanks!
How do you think this compares to Newssift, the service that the FT just launched?
Hey Michael,
I think Skygrid will keep its focus on providing meaningful data to stock traders who will be their target demographic it seems. You really believe that they could compete with Techmeme if they offered private company info? I guess it all depends on how powerful and user friendly their system is.
Constantine from dotMusic/Music.us
I have developed an API to be used in an application that will do the same thing as SkyGrid using dimensional reduction & latent semantic. That’s probably what they’re using, but there are tons of dimensional reduction algorithms available today and they only vary in their error rate, so I don’t know what exactly they’re using. I have gone further to incorporate the retrieved sentiment into the evaluation of the stock price (provided the user wants to). There has been a number of researches in this domain (but they’re still primitive), ie, the inclusion of the subjective market sentiment into the model to evaluate stock price.
Anyway, it looks like SkyGrid is a good app, but instead of a binary system classification they’re using (ie, flagging red for negative or green for positive), they could make it multi-class by using more flags rather than just 2.
To the developers of SkyGrid (or the CTO), look at the following paper from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (Robotics Institute) which they had developed a system called Warren (Buffet), which does the same thing as you do, but their system is multi-class and not binary like yours. Binary is fine, however multi-class is more informative to the user. Here is an example of the multi-class sentiment classification that Warren uses. The 5 classes are: GOOD, GOOD-UNCERTAIN, NEUTRAL, BAD-UNCERTAIN, BAD.
GOOD News articles which explicitly show evidence of the company’s healthy financial status.
e.g.) … Shares of ABC Company rose 1=2 or 2 percent on the Nasdaq to $24-
15/16. …
GOOD, UNCERTAIN News articles which refer to predictions of future profitability, and forecasts.
e.g.) … ABC Company predicts fourth-quarter earnings will be high. …
NEUTRAL News articles which mention financial facts but do not provide good or bad aspects. e.g.) … ABC contributes $ 700 million in stock to its pension plan …
BAD, UNCERTAIN News articles which refer to predictions of future losses, or no profitability.
e.g.) … ABC (Nasdaq: ABC) warned on Tuesday that Fourth-quarter results
could fall short of expectations. …
BAD News articles which explicitly show evidence of the company’s bad financial status.
e.g.) … Shares of ABC (ABC: down $0.54 to $49.37) fell in early New York trading. …
The paper is downloadable from the link below:
Financial News Analysis for Intelligent Portfolio Management
If you want to chat about text-mining algorithms (its one of my specialist area), then I can have an informal chat (exchaning) with you guys if you’re interested.
I developed my sentiment API as an add-on to something larger that I am working on, so I see sentiment capability of what I am developing is not something major to me.
You haven’t posted any on your contact info. How are we supposed to chat with you?
Nice. My dad’s company uses those six grand bloomberg terminals, and a LOT of them.
While on the subject of financial news aggregators, I suggest paying The Daily Crux a visit.
It provides readers with a hand-selected digest of the most important financial news, insight and research.
(http://www.thedailycrux.com)
it screams extreme right wing fanaticism
maybe it’s the font
yea it looks like a hate site with the colors and font and such. it’s missing the swastikas and buring crosses
The swastikas and burning crosses were removed in private beta.
Nice posting
Real-time search all over. In financial news gathering, general news, sports etc — everywhere we can see an obvious need for a real-time search feature. Someone mentioned in some earlier posts about a cool real-time search engine called http://www.boilingpage.com. I played with it for a while and I gotta tell you, I just love it. It shows the recent popular for any search query and it’s a great tool to discover many interesting webpages which it’s impossible to find using traditional search engines. Here’s a query on “Oracle” and the results are quite useful:
http://www.boil...p?search=oracle
This company could be worth $3 billion dollars. mint.com is alreayd worth $2 billion. This is financial web 2.0 http://iamned.com/blog/ no recession here
sorry to say but this site is terrible. add them to the deadpool!
Checking out FB connect.
what’s the business model?
paid to free change screams disaster for investors
This is absurd. Almost 3 hrs after launch and still no sign up page.
yes it is. http://www.skyg...com/account.php
Yes, there it is. A full 24 hrs later.
And btw, that’s a ‘leave-your-email’ page where you hope they contact you in the future.
It’s not a sign up page.
This is what I use for “hot business topics”, simple and effective:
http://www.news...s/business.html
added demo video.
Bought SkyGrid a year ago…great for equity news flow and seeing change trends compared to whisper numbers…great job guys, keep going.
Uhm, as has been mentioned, a Bloomberg Terminal runs Bloomberg Professional, which is far more than just a financial news aggregator.
You don’t believe that the guys turning over millions of dollars a day in the trading pits are simply trading based on the latest articles posted to Marketwatch, do you Michael?
Humorous.
Their backend real time technology seems very impressive. I agree that adding private company data would be valuable.
It seems like they may need to expand their scope beyond “financial news” to reach a much broader audience.
I’m sure they’re looking into this (or looking to license their tech to the big news companies)
So how does it work? Does a company pay guys like you and Scoble a fixed amount or a part of the company or a seat in the director board or something to promote their junk companies through your social network tools?
Hey, at least choose something that adds value when you choose to promote. Or your name goes down along with the products you promote. In this economy I don’t blame you – even you are having a hard time finding quality companies. Right?
Jim Jim I was not paid or compensated in any way by Sky Grid. I use SkyGrid a lot as you will see if you watch the video I did with Kevin today.
This company has been out there for 2+ year trying to sell their product. They started at $1000/month/seat and went down to free. There is no competition for Bloomberg here.
I have been swindled by these guys. This product does not work.
This is all magic of looks and hollow underneath. I don’t see any real software backing here. It looks like bunch of people hacked up something by hand.
And, Scoble is an investor at SkyGrid… so he doesn’t count. He is lying if he says he uses it a lot because SkyGrid is unusable. It is more errors than information.
Yuriy: I am NOT an investor in SkyGrid and I have no financial interests at all in them.
Hi there,
would somebody be so kind and send me over an invite (to.michaeljung-/at-/gmail.com)?!
I am a student and have my major in Economics. Would really appreciate it.
Or hit me up @michaeljung on twitter.
Cheers.
So…where is it?
It could be interesting if it were available to the public. Its too bad that the creators of programs like this and the project that Falafulu Fisi referenced suffer from a complete misunderstanding of what financial analysts do. As a portfolio manager, it is pretty obvious to me what market sentiment is which means that I would never pay for an algo that doesn’t add value. The value add opportunity is in sorting and classifying information based not on positive or negative but on the magnatude of the effect it would likely have on a stock. In this case, articles covering daily price movements have nearly no value whereas articles covering industry forecasts and management strategy should carry more weight.
FirstRain has been doing this for a while.
After entering email from http://www.skyg...com/account.php, I got email from them.
In that mail they guide their blog site to me, but their blog (blog.skygrid.com) is password protected.
I have signed up and just waiting for acceptance now
No sign up. No access to the blog (as inetgate mentioned). I’m not impressed!
I wrote it off to chance when SkyGrid went offline right after announcing their Series B funding:
http://www.inqu...s-goes-offline/
There’s no excuse this time.
Way to go. Keep the momentum skygrid team.
Why did they drop their nice looking website from a couple of months ago and switch to this mess?
Also, on their “In the News” page why do they have this TechCrunch article and one from January, but not the other one from January? Does their news algorithm only find 2/3 of news?
skygrid is a major waste of time. its just the web2 version of hitting the refresh button every second. the news is an unending stream that will be 99% uninteresting, which means you will likely tune out of the other 1% as well. the “sentiment ranking” is trivial phrase analysis.
there is no trade secret here, skygrid just continuously polls news sites…i’m amazed these sites haven’t blocked their crawlers by now
every idiot who learns twenty minutes of python coding will whip up a crawler that gets web data from somewhere and spits it out. wrap that in flash and you have skygrid