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Market Gossip As Enterprise Search

Google's enterprise search just isn't enough anymore for companies in certain sectors. What about investment companies that want to keep their pulse on Web chatter about the companies they've invested in? Monitor110 is a platform being deployed by today's hedge funds that can trawl more than 40 million Internet sources--everything from blogs to regulatory filings--for company information. Founded by a former Deutsche Bank exec and backed by the same venture-capital firm that backed Skype before it was sold to eBay for $4.1 billion last year, Monitor110 is being tried out by about 10 hedge funds before a full-scale launch early next year. The service it offers is a bit like Endeca: Monitor110 is supposed to aggregate and filter information for hedge-fund analysts, but it searches the Internet. "There may be more information value in online trends in the aggregate," says Scott Lessing, COO for investment research at Citigroup. "5,000 more Web mentions of a product than the week before could be an important signal for an analyst covering the product's manufacturer." Roger Ehrenberg, the former head of Deutsche Bank's hedge fund, who is now president and COO at Monitor110, adds: "The platform is similar to the data portals that investors are used to, but the difference is that it tickers the unstructured universe"--by which he means blogs. One wonders whether that also includes social networks.

Read the whole story at Financial Times »

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