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.
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