Inform Technologies has launched a beta of its Web-based platform that combines news reading, aggregation and search from thousands of sources.A startup is banking on starved news junkies—sports fanatics, politicos, journalists, consultants and public relations and finance jockeys—to scarf down its new blog and news search platform.
"The problem is, people want to absorb a lot of news online, but it's cumbersome to do so," said Neal Goldman, CEO and founder of Inform Technologies LLC, which last week launched a beta of the Web-based platform at www.inform.com.
"If you wanted to read the entire New York Times online as you do offline, it's frustrating navigation, using the back and forward buttons a lot," Goldman said.
"To the extent you want to use the benefits of technology while you're reading, you have to open a new browser, at Google.com, enter the keyword, get 55,000 results, move through them, use the back button, go back to the search result site, [etc.]"
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Inform.com combines news reading, aggregation and search by distilling Internet news content into common semantic elements. Using an algorithmic processing engine, it analyzes entire text blocks from thousands of sources.
As it does so, it systematically tags and scores components of the article, identifying topics, industries, organizations, people, places and products mentioned in articles—a process called "meta-tagging."
Search results from blogs, publications, RSS feeds and other Web content are then served up with one-click navigation and search capabilities.
Greg Sterling, an analyst with The Kelsey Group, said he found the product "pretty impressive."
He agreed with critics who have said it's got more bells and whistles and complexity than consumers want, such as personalization capabilities and an impressive contextual search feature.
But that power-user approach gives it more functionality than most other news aggregators out there, he said, which should help Inform to stand out from the pack.
"Every time you read the story, there's dynamic navigation generated based on content of the page," he said.
"A story on breast cancer has different navigation than a story on Eric Schmidt at Google, for example. If you want related news searches, it's easy to do that with lots of precision that's not generally available on regular search engines."
Inform allows users to add their own feeds, to save particular stories and to create personalized news searches from selected sources, giving users what Sterling called a very personalized news experience.
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The question, Sterling said, is how broadly and widely will users adopt it. "They may be quite happy and satisfied with their current news readers or other aggregators out there," he said.
As it is, Inform is targeting publishers seeking to increase page views and adapt to the changing habits of online news consumers.
"Inform's vision reflects bigger online news reading trends—topic-driven, personalized news consumption," said Michael Rogers, author of the MSNBC column The Practical Futurist and former vice president of The Washington Post Co.'s new media division, in a statement.
"Consumers and content providers are still trying to evolve the traditional newspaper model and figure out an easy way to read and present information on the Internet," Rogers said. "Inform offers an interesting new option for both."
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