07-18-08 Chilling out a little
Taking some time off to go camping out with the family ... my friend and I are probably 10 years older than your average web start-up dudes and the kids are always going to be first in line for quality time (I actually view this as a competitive advantage).
When we get back, other than the new Search feature, we also plan to release a useful upgrade for our other site,
InstantBull.com, which just turned 2 today! -Gal
07-08-08 New Feature: Added news images to our summary page
At the bottom of every page, there's a link to a concise summary of the
news images whose keywords are making headlines in each category -Gal
07-06-08 Nadal is the new King of Wimbledon
What an incredible match! It was the longest final in history and went on until after 9pm as conditions made it increasingly difficult to see the ball. Both players played at the top of their games, and in the end it was Nadal who managed to win his first Wimbledon grass court title and end Federer's Borg-like run of 5 consecutive titles -Gal
07-02-08 CNN editors -- what are you people smoking?
Take a look at which story CNN decided to lead with ... and what got relegated!
Now here's a follow up link
06-27-08 Working on the active search feature ... coming soon
Just in case our current site doesn't quench your thirst for the latest news updates then our active Search feature should - it's still in the testing phase but it should be ready a little later this summer. Search is the number one user requested feature and so we're making a big effort to make sure that the Search button will have real added-value when compared to the usual suspects -Gal
06-18-08 New Feature: Summary of all the hot topics at the bottom of every page
Take a quick glance at the summary - in 10 seconds you can figure out what's making news across all the major categories ... the summary refreshes every 15 mins -Gal
06-18-08 Big congrats to the Boston Celtics!
I recall those roaring 80s when Bird, Parish and McHale won the title. Red Sox, Patriots and now the Celtics! -Gal
06-12-08 LiveStock marathon video tomorrow
Our friend Tim Sykes just dropped us a line about his 8 hour special tomorrow. Tim's becoming a real star in the dangerous world of penny stocks and short selling and he currently ranks at #3 on our
business blogs page
What's really cool about the show is that Tim takes live questions from people who take part in the chat room (beware of any pumpers and dumpers there!) ...
click here to check out this special Friday the 13th video cast -Gal
06-11-08 Video explains why America knows less than ever about the world
...
this TED video demonstrates by means of a bloated graphic of americana.
Americans, on the whole, seem to know about the likes of Anne Nicole Smith much more than any natural disaster that's devastating any third world country!
Our very genuine hope is that our diversified
world news section helps improve on this. Thanks to CK for sending me the clip -Gal
06-02-08 Celtics vs. Lakers - what's up with Ticketmaster?
At 2pm today, the tickets for the first two NBA playoff games were *supposed* to go on sale ... but alas, either the scalpers bought them all up in a flash, or perhaps some server was knocked down.
Either way, I ain't go no tickets :( ... after all these years the Celtics are back in the playoff finals and the only way to get a seat is going to be by ways of some dubious reseller for some ridiculous amount!
Hmmmm, maybe I'll just stick to checking out our
sports section -Gal
05-29-08 Latest rankings update
Newsflashr was just updated with new feed rankings for the end of May - rankings determine the order of blog feeds displayed in "feeds view" (the topics/feeds switch button is at top right) -Gal
05-22-08 Fox News - missing in action?
"By simply looking at the headlines it becomes obvious that Fox Business news, the new business channel of media mogul Murdoch, skips the important issues of the day" --
Fox Business news - only soft headlines
05-19-08 Working on "page one" of newsflashr - now's a good time to send in suggestions
Here's a quick preview:
page one
The idea here is to provide a one-page overview of all the top keywords (topics) in the news headlines across
all the major categories. If you're a heavy newsflashr user, this is a good time to send in any requests on how to improve "page one" and any of our other pages -Gal
05-07-08 Crime really does pay?
Having previously raised the subject of guns and violence, I note that a single video game just sold over $500M in the space of one week:
Grand Theft Auto IV by the numbers. This extremely violent game plays out in a city that starkly resembles New York City. I just came back from NYC (where I enjoyed a somewhat flamboyant Cinco de Mayo party) and I curiously observed scar-faced, heavily tattooed east-european mafia characters taken from the video game plastered all over the Soho district. The game creators have executed a phenomenal marketing campaign that has resulted in a huge pay-off (so crime really does pay?), but I have to side with MADD, an organization that is furious at the flagrant promotion of drinking alcohol while driving, one of the depicted themes in the new game. Ok, it's just a game,
as Stephen King has pointed out, but these games seem to shape the attitudes of plenty of aimless teenagers hiding out in the land of instant gratification.
No doubt Take-Two, the company behind Grand Theft Auto, is confident that it can deal with any lawsuits that come in, and the company appears equally confident that it is worth much more than the $2Billion that was
recently offered by industry giant Electronic Arts. Since Take-Two just made $0.5 Billion in one week, the company is obviously in no rush to sell out.
Speaking of huge buy-out offers, Steve Balmer says he's done bidding for Yahoo? Balmer was willing to do $33/share and Yang was looking for $37/share. Well, it ain't over 'til the fat lady sings:
Reports of the death of the Microsoft-Yahoo deal could be greatly exaggerated. And I'm tempted to say the same about the Obama-Clinton race, but after yesterday's results, it really looks like it's all over for Hillary ... check out our "elections 08" & "business" sections for full coverage -Gal
05-01-08 New category: "Stock Market Beat"
Check out our new section for news feeds submitted by expert finance blogger Bill Trent over at Stock Market Beat - Bill recently wrote a thorough
review of newsflashr.
I'm driving down to NYC later today for a meet-up at the
Crunch Network event. I guess this will involve more shameless self-promotion, but you know, the thing about self-promotion is that you've got to do the damn thing yourself! Anyways, sometimes I just need any excuse to drag myself away from the keyboard, and an excuse that's accompanied by a little alcohol is somewhat of a no-brainer.
And here's the latest on the
Microsoft vs. Yahoo showdown. That's an appropriate image they've taken from the epic western, "For a few dollars more" ... but I think Clint would have just riddled the Yahoo board a long time ago. Now this reminds me of a quote from Al Capone that I just read last week as I wandered around the Fisherman's Wharf (which is located opposite the infamous Alcatraz prison): "You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone" - there's a reason he was branded "Public Enemy Number 1" -Gal
04-29-08 Web 2.0 Wars - highlights from my week in San Francisco
Last week, I met up with a bunch of the Web's leading lights, people like Robert Scoble, John Battelle, Evan Hansen, Scott Rafer and Stowe Boyd to name a few. Wired Magazine hosted one of several after-event parties in the South Park area and by chance I happened to run into Techmeme's Gabe Rivera who I had emailed the day before about an online experiment that I had just launched. You may have noticed that newsflashr recently opened up a new section that makes good use of Techmeme's publicly available list of its top 100 news sources aka the "Techmeme Leaderboard". I told Gabe that newsflashr is a competing service (together with at least 10000 other news aggregators) and Gabe answered that he had checked out newsflashr and liked our new, keyword-centric way of displaying the news headlines. Cool. Of course, by showcasing the Techmeme Leaderboard in this way, we're also reinforcing its importance as the leading aggregator for technology related news.
So what new products were being promoted at the Expo? The overall emphasis was on the platforms that enable programmers and their applications to do new stuff. I got an interesting explanation at the big Microsoft booth about their just launched "Live Mesh" service that aims to allow users to access their data and applications from any computer at any time while keeping everything in sync. A very ambitious project for sure and word has it that it is being carried out by a team of over 100 programmers. Let's do the math, assuming Microsoft pays this team an average of $150k per programmer, that's $15M/year (just on salaries) which may seem to be a drop in the ocean for a company like Microsoft, but I think it does show some serious commitment to make this thing work. Now if you think about it, since Live Mesh also enables hooking up hardware devices and its aggregation cloud is fed by news feeds of all types, then in essence, this is really a bold attempt to create a new Web based operating system. For now, it appears that Microsoft doesn't want to call the beast by its name, maybe in fear of the service not living up to expectations. I asked the Microsoft rep how this compared to Google's new initiative (Google App engine) aimed at coaxing programmers to develop new stuff for them ... I didn't expect to get a straight answer and I didn't, but he did say that the scope of the Microsoft project was much wider. Interesting that Google all but snubbed the event, all they had there was a tiny booth in one of the isles. One of the other big players, Yahoo, did have a big display near the entrance to the show floor but many were still wondering if by this time next year they'll have been gobbled up by the Microsoft booth? At time of writing, it is still unclear if Microsoft is about to change strategy and launch a hostile takeover aimed at Yahoo's shareholders.
I also attended a number of the Web 2.0 Open sessions and I was the host of one of those sessions. This was well received and allowed for some enlightening discourse on the challenges facing journalists, bloggers and aggregators as more and more news content shifts to the Web.
But the real highlight of the week ... the weekend :) It was gorgeous weather for hanging loose at Carmel-By-The-Sea and then heading up north to taste glass after glass of fine wine at the Napa Valley. Yes, San Francisco is where ideas, technology and money mesh together and it also has so much more to offer on the weekend. The only downside, gas is already topping four dollars a gallon on the West coast! And this is way before Memorial Day weekend when everybody hits the roads and the Big Oil companies inevitably jack up their prices even further -Gal
04-17-08 If you're going to San Francisco ...
be sure to drop me a line and I'll be happy to meet up!
Email: info[at]newsflashr[dot]com
See you at the big show, should be an interesting week -Gal
04-16-08 Alexa just updated their ranking methodology
Note that the new stats will kick in at the end of this month (as they do every month).
Our system does not use Alexa traffic stats as part of its keyword analysis algorithm, however, the Alexa stats do serve as an independent way to rank the authority of the news sources as follows:
In feeds view: the
display order of all news sources on the page is determined by the Alexa stats
In topics view: there is
an option to display results by rank instead of by time (which is the default method)
So watch out for the big rankings shake up at the end of the month! -Gal
04-13-08 Stumbled upon
We got some good attention last week when a user voted for us on the popular "StumbledUpon" service. If you enjoy using our new service, the easiest way to support us is by sending an email to your friends with a link to your favorite page. Putting together this site was no trivial task ... any help mentioning us to your friends is much appreciated! -Gal
04-08-08 "The great Google News conspiracy?" - from The Guardian (UK)
Olympic torch protests are relegated to the back pages of Google News
Ok, blowing our own horn here, but this is the exact problem that we've set out to fix with our new, far more
transparent text-processing algorithm at newsflashr.
And to be fair, I think this case is probably a simple algorithmic slip on Google's part, however, it does highlight the biggest problem with fully automated news services such as Google News ... they purposely hide their inner workings in a "black-box" that leaves visitors in the dark as to
why certain stories get pushed up to, or in this case relegated from the top of the news page.
Our new service is also "fully automated", but our new emphasis is placed on an analysis of all the keywords in the news headlines. The premise is that news editors always place the important keywords in the headlines and so by focusing our attention on all the headlines from the most credible news sources, we can
transparently display a near real-time news cloud of popular topics currently in the news -- the "collective intelligence" of the top news editors in each category -Gal
04-04-08 New mods: increased number of topics per page, tweaked newsflashr's color schemes
Every one of our topics pages now displays the "hottest" (most popular) 8 topics in the shortcut links (that appear just above the headlines). Determination of "Hottest" topics is based purely on an analysis of all the keywords in all the headlines across all the top news sources. Choose one of 3 color schemes from the top row (click on a box next to the word "background"). Drop me a line if you think something else needs tweaking! -Gal
03-31-08 Interviewed at The Disciplined Investor Podcast
This weekend has been a busy one thanks to the rave review at Barron's (see previous post) and the interview that I just did with Andrew Horowitz. Andrew is one of my newly found friends that I've been fortunate to meet via my endeavors with
InstantBull.com - he hosts an
excellent blog and podcast about the latest investing news and Andrew has a real knack for simplifying complicated financial topics. Every week, he manages to pull some terrific guests out of his magic hat ... I was humbled that he invited me to make a guest appearance this week (yes, that's me with the oddball accent at minute 43) -Gal
03-30-08 Barron's Electronic Investor calls newsflashr a "must-have tool"!
Getting a tremendous response from people in the investor community who are telling us that they really benefit from our new approach to emphasizing popular news topics. Barron's is comparing newsflashr to the likes of Google News and Yahoo! News. Also check out some of the excellent responses from the trading bloggers who have become early adopters of our new service (see bottom right) -Gal
3-27-08 New category: "business blogs"
Just added a nice selection of some of the best blogs in the business ... check out the new
feeds view for the business/investing blogs category -Gal
3-23-08 New feature: news archives
If you want to step back in time and research popular news headlines, you can now check out our
archives which contain a huge and evolving collection of time-sorted news headlines for days gone by. Every day, newly archived pages get created for each of our news categories -Gal
3-17-08 New feature: "sort hot headlines by time" (river view)
For our feeds pages, at top right there's a new button that lets you quickly view a
chronological list of all the latest headlines that are considered "hot" (whenever headlines match popular keywords from our default "topics view"). This new view of time sorted news is yet another way to stay on top of the latest breaking headlines of the day (it's commonly referred to as "river view").
Soon, we'll be adding an archived view of all the daily headlines as they accumulate on our site. This will enable you to go back in time and research news headlines that were once considered "hot" and that you may still have an interest in -Gal
3-14-08 Anatomy of a breaking news story ... the big picture:
What happens when a major news event hits the wires? Every news editor has to quickly assess the story's impact and, based on their own experience, make a snap decision whether or not to place the story's headline ahead of all the other news headlines.
The neat thing about newsflashr is that it gives you the overall
big picture of everything that's going on and it does this by automatically analyzing what
all the top news editors consider news-worthy. Our "hot topic news cloud" provides a constantly updating snapshot of what all the top editors collectively consider to be important. The system is focused solely on analyzing the keywords in the headlines. This is based on the premise that journalists always want to get attention to their articles by phrasing a good balance of critical keywords in the titles.
For example, in our "technology blogs" category, if all the news editors are suddenly obsessed with "Facebook" (enough already!), then they will almost always put the word "Facebook" in the title. Our technology page naturally brings attention to this topic and our interface allows you to quickly check out what everyone has to say about this and other hot topics. Fresh topics are highlighted in bright colors and you can use the slider bar to tell our system: "color keywords in pink if there exist at least two headlines that are no more than X hours old, where X is between 1 and 7 hours", sorry 'bout the algebra but I couldn't figure out an easier way to explain this :( By the way, we're using psychedelic pink (or green) to make sure that fresh topics stand out from the crowd (for background color options, click on the little squares in the top line menu).
Alternatively, you can easily view all the headlines at each source on one big page. The switch for this "feeds view" is at the top right of the page -Gal
3-10-08 Boston Globe - Business front page!! ... and a snippet from the Shanghai Daily:
This morning was a little crazy ... The Boston Globe featured newsflashr on the front of their Business page and in the space of less than an hour I got about 10 different real estate agents call to see if I needed any extra office space (no!). To this, add another 3 calls from furniture suppliers and a couple of dead-enders. Must have been one of my least productive hours ever.
You'll see on the right that newsflashr also got mentioned in far away Shanghai - sorry, no chinese version for now :(
Thanks for the emails (yep, in general, this is a much more efficient way of communicating) and to people like Al who read the Globe today and quickly got hooked:
"newsflashr - News the way it should be. In a glance, in depth ... it's effectiveness is a direct result of it's simplicity."
3-3-08 My thoughts on the two key advantages of newsflashr:
newsflashr's beginning to get attention ...
the "Plugged In" story at the Sacramento Bee (California) was just
syndicated in Business Week!
So what are the key advantages of newsflashr over all the other automated news services?
1.
interactivity / speed: pages are "pre-loaded" with hot news topics for
instant access to 100's of news headlines. Only the
most credible news sources (per category) are monitored every 15 minutes, all day long.
2.
transparency: no more "black-box algorithm" that leaves users guessing
why one story makes it to the top of the news page above all the others - newsflashr makes it obvious by matching topics (keywords) to
all the fresh news headlines that include them:
- the
size of the hot news topics corresponds to the
number of news headlines
- the
color of the hot news topics corresponds to their
freshness (use the slider bar above it to customize this)
- be sure to also check out the one-page "
feeds view" (the button to switch between views is located at top right)
... stay tuned as I continue to update "what's new" on this page! -Gal
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Gal Arav, founder & creator of newsflashr. Gal's developing faster ways to monitor huge amounts of news data. Following a successful run of investing in the stock markets, in 2006, Gal invested in his own startup company to create InstantBull.com, a time-saving stock research and message board aggregator. This came after several years of R&D at an MIT spin-off that develops eye-tracking devices where Gal was Product Manager. In 2008, Gal is once again striving to turbo-charge the Web with his latest news aggregator, newsflashr. Gal holds an Engineering degree from The Technion, Israel and a Master's degree in Operations Research and Decision Theory from Tel Aviv University, Israel.
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Bedford, MA - Feb 26, 2008 -- newsflashr.com launches next-generation news aggregator:
- hot topics are extracted from all the most credible news sources in order to display the "collective intelligence" of all the top news editors
- results are displayed within a "hot topic news cloud" in order to transparently link matching news headlines at unprecedented client-side speed (competing services are slower due to their use of standard server-side retrieval operations)
- mainstream news and blog categories can be easily compared while viewing each news source's independent traffic rankings (provided by Alexa, an Amazon, Inc. company)
- customize the "freshness" of highlighted topics and corresponding headlines
- access all headlines on one concise page in either "feeds view" or "topics view", including photos and images in the news that match selected topics
The freely accessible new service provides a time-saving news interface for journalists, bloggers and news-lovers alike.
newsflashr.com is not affiliated with aggregated sites. Trademarks & Logos belong to originating sites. The same Terms of Use and Privacy pages posted at our other aggregation site apply here:
InstantBull.com InstantBull, Inc. Patents Pending ©2008
