This group of TechCrunch50 companies is focused on news and meme tracking. The companies include; Dotspots, Angstro, LiveHit, and StockMood. The TechCrunch expert panel is once again Marisa Mayer, Dan Farber, Ron Conway, and Chad Hurley.
DotSpots Brings the wisdom of crowds -- to every topic meme on the web. DotSpots will focus on improving online news (mainstream media, blogosphere and citizen journalists), by identifying and indexing semantically similar content across millions of news sites and blogs, while empowering bloggers and individuals to annotate text on their local favorite sites with comments, videos and photos. Each local contribution is then instantly distributed globally and filtered by a user voting system that ensures everyone benefits from the best thoughts. DotSpots puts a sidebar on your browser where their content and advertisements can be seen together with the source site.
Problem/Solution - News and blog aggregation
Business Model - Advertising
Possible Competitors - TechMeme, Digg, Reddit, Scoopler
CrunchBase Info -
Ångströ Delivers critical business news about people and companies across professional networks. By leveraging existing services such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, Ångströ helps users to easily discover and share news about colleagues and clients. Unlike clipping services that confuse different people with the same name, Ångströ both disambiguates names and analyzes social graphs to prioritize those relationships that matter most.
Problem/Solution - A clipper service for business news and business people
Business Model - Advertising
Possible Competitors - ZoomInfo, LinkedIn, PlaxoPulse, Google Alerts
CrunchBase Info -
LiveHit A social discovery service showcasing who and what’s hot in the moment across the social web. It’s your live personalized social navigation engine to discover contextually relevant media content and people.They have categories such as Community, Entertainment, Sports, and Shopping. LiveHit’s social discovery platform provides a new extension to social search and discovery by using user-powered navigation paths to surface what’s being viewed live in the moment it’s happening. The platform collects valuable cross-network data and uses velocity-based tracking and dynamic-predictive modeling to gauge the propensity of something to become hot. Very visual presentation of content by category. They have lots of partners to syndicate their content.
Problem/Solution - Finding who or what is hot
Business Model - Advertising
Possible Competitors - Me.dium, MatchMine
CrunchBase Info -
Quant the News (StockMood) was formed to develop advanced textual sentiment analysis applications that leverage its unique, AI-based natural language processing and data mining technology. QTN's first product offering is "StockMood.com," a website that analyzes news stories about stocks, identifying their sentiment, and then measuring their potential impact on a stock's price direction. StockMood measures a stock's moving sentiment as news flows, and also assesses the "mood" of a stock, a gauge of how a stock's price responds to news. Graphical representation of news sentiment and stock price charts. Includes a dashboard to track stocks and news in real time, green for good, red for bad, up and down arrows. very easy to track lots of stocks.
Problem/Solution - Make better stock picks based on news and investor sentiment
Business Model - Subscription
Possible Competitors - Reuters, Dow Jones, Reddit, Digg
CrunchBase Info -
TechCrunch Panel of Experts - Marisa Mayer (Google), Dan Farber (CNet), Ron Conway (Angel Investor), and Chad Hurley (YouTube).
The panel had some interesting questions and observations;
- Marissa Mayer loved DotSpots, but what about the business model? Angstro looks useful...like Google Alerts. LiveHit needs to focus on design and usability. StockMood looks clever and insightful, but building a big audience will be tough.
- Dan Farber liked the annotations and distribution of DotSpots. StockMood - great feature, but not the basis of a company. LiveHit great for targeting advertising. Angstro is an interesting feature for LinkedIn. Again a feature, not a company.
- Ron Conway asked about monetization models for all the companies. Consumers like like the service, but where is the revenue? Will consumers accept and value StockMoods indications?
- Chad Hurley echoed many of the same thoughts. LiveHit colors aren't that interesting. It is all about the quality of the service, but thinks LiveHit will be important in the future.
