Martin De Saulles

Making money by selling digital information is becoming increasingly difficult as end users increasingly rely on free sources for their personal or business needs.  2 recent posts from the Alacra blog (links at bottom of this post) are fascinating and offer an insight into how the company has developed a commercial (based on a "freemium" model) information service that combines the knowledge of selected financial bloggers with their own proprietary databases of companies and M&A activity.  I was particularly interested in the comment by Steven Goldstein of Alacra regarding the need to use both automated systems to create a scalable system and human editors to compensate for inaccuracies in their semantic tagging system:

" Finally, we rely upon human review of the results. While technology is critical, in that it allows the product to scale, technology alone will only reach accuracy levels of 80-85%. That may be sufficient for some products, but when we’re pushing out alerts to users, we believe the bar is higher. So, we have a 24-hour team of editors who review the tagged events to ensure they are accurate."

http://www.alacrablog.com/alacrablog/2009/11/the-alacra-knowledge-base-a-rose-by-any-other-name.html

http://www.alacrablog.com/alacrablog/2009/11/tagging-the-heartbeat-of-alacra-pulse.html