AlphaSense
Jack Kokko and Raj Neervannan launched AlphaSense, out of New York, in 2011 and now more than 1000 corporate and financial clients are using the platform. They have taken the major challenges and frustrations of search and incorporated features to alleviate the pain: tapping into a wide span of sources at once, confirming results relevance in the correct context, ranking of results by relevance, discovering the best search terms to use and eliminating unwanted results right off the bat.
For the purpose of speeding up research so you can find information that you need quickly, AlphaSense’s platform allows you to search across a vast amount of content at the same time. This content spans SEC and global filings, IR (investor relations) presentations, event transcripts, private companies, press releases, broker research (from more that 1000 sell-side research providers), and news and industry journals, in addition to your uploaded content. You can search a particular company/supplier and using the exploratory tool search for any keywords across all companies. To help you quickly determine the best results, which is the most time-consuming part of researching, you can click any sentence to see keywords in context and this is all happening on the same screen. Another feature that helps in determining result relevance is AlphaSense’s proprietary Relevance Score that ranks search results to “improve the signal-to-noise ratio.” The most challenging part of searching large amounts of data is determining and discovering the correct keywords to use. Using the wrong search terms is the number one reason searches fail. AlpfaSense automatically expands your search to include synonyms in your results to help you recognize terms you might have missed. Reducing the number or results right off the bat is a key strategy for searchers. Similar to putting a minus sign directly before a term in Google, AlphaSense uses a negative ticker search to see what is being said by sources other than the company itself, which is important when performing due diligence research for company/supplier evaluation.
IPlytics
As I have written earlier, innovation intelligence will play an important role in how we research startups and disruptive market events. This German startup was founded in 2014. Using machine-created algorithms, the IPlytics platform collects and integrates public data like patents and company data and standards, which is processed to create connections between the data and bring hidden patterns to light.
IPlytics helps companies with their IP (intellectual property) strategy, competitive analysis, R&D investments, market strategy, company valuation and risk management by understanding new/future market challenges, next trends, future and current competitors, and make or buy challenges.
Data you can access through the IPlytics platform:
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- 90 million worldwide filed patents, (fell text, English translation of all patents, legal status, transfer deals, litigation cases) updated daily but guaranteed every week
- 3 million worldwide company profiles, (corporate tree, financial data, news) public data from Bloomberg and private data is from a collection of sources
- 60 million scientific publications, (articles, conference papers, books) title, abstract, and bib info links to full text if interested
- 280,000 declared standard essential patents (license commitments, standard document links)
- 4 million standard documents (national/international, formal/informal committees)
Procurement professionals will find the platform useful for risk management to avoid and identify possible IP legal problems and for identifying suppliers that are developing possible disruptive new technologies and products.
