Well Informed?

Neal Goldman, founder and former CEO of CapitalIQ (acquired by Standard & Poors last year for circa $225 million), this week launched his latest venture, Inform Technologies.

Inform, currently in beta, is a news service designed to enable users to more easily piece together the background to a current story of interest using a variety of related web news sources and blogs - the content available spans 4 days.

The service automatically extracts and tags content from news stories related to things such as  companies, people, places, industries, topics etc.  This enables a user to navigate the web of related news by clicking one of these tags. 

As the service is currently in beta it is obviously a little rough around the edges.  But I did find the interface a little clunky.  Existing subscription-based news aggregation services such as Factiva and LexisNexis do offer some of this capability today although their coverage majors on news wires and print publications rather than web-based sources.  But they're not free services.

So has Inform the potential to succeed?  Following the write-up in the New York Times, Inform has attracted a lot of comment in the blogging community, not all complimentary - one example here.

My view is that it clearly is work in progress but there seems much to do to make it more user friendly to the casual user - I suspect professional researchers will continue to demand the breadth and depth of traditional media sources available in services such as Factiva.  I'll be keeping a watching brief.

What do you think - go check out the website for yourselves.