Acquire Media
Facilitates News Categorization to Fine-Tune Business Strategies

Rafsky,an international financial analyst at Chase Manhattan was critical of the mountain of country risk reports that lay on his table for analysis. The risks shouldered during those days were based on research conclusions on governments, products, companies and markets—however breaking news always added a different perspective. “The hard stuff to quantify is textual, and in 2001,we created the kind of news Analysis Company that I would have wanted to have back when I was analyzing reports,” says Dr.Lawrence C. Rafsky, CEO, Acquire Media.

Acquire Media, headquartered in Roseland, NJ, is into acquiring real time business and financial news and other time-sensitive content from publishers and distributing it to corporate servers,websites and end users with near-zero latency and pinpoint filtering. The core team’s expertise over 15 years has resulted in the latest version of NewsEdge.com, a revolutionary product to collect news from newspapers, newswires, trade journals, web sites, blogs, and social media. It then aggregates, normalizes and filters this news in context for each client’s specified topic and industry interests, and finally delivers alerts regarding any change in news related to the client,in any needed format.NewsEdge.com combines business-relevant content categorization with text filtering to find and communicate the news and events impacting business.

How does the content categorization work? The Acquire Media Metadata Enhancer (ACME) taxonomy, the categorization product from Acquire Media, has 3 main components: Industry, Subject and Location.

Every story processed is categorized with relevant, meaningful tags selected from over 1300 industry sectors, 1250 subjects and 68,000 geographic locations. As a first step, the company’s engineers work with the publisher’s publishing system to ensure that the news transfer happens very quickly without error and with all publisher metadata intact. The editorial team reviews all provided metadata and maps all proprietary publisher codes to the ACME codes to ensure all users get access to the news they request in real time. They also authenticate the content with the content creators. Acquire Media’s semantic algorithms team has created Metabot which works side-by-side with content categorization. Metabot fine-tunes entity extraction of company names, person names, locations, products, dates and times, and money amounts, plus does story summarization and indexing of semantic entities all in under a few milliseconds. The infrastructure processes more than 500,000 news stories per day and filters according to relevant words and phrases with no human intervention. The news feed sent to users is further filtered for spam elimination and de-duping.
The company’s client roster for news distribution includes some of the most respected publishers in the world like Advanced Newspapers, Business Wire, The Financial Times, Market News International, McClatchy, PR Newswire, Tribune Content Agency, and The Washington Post News Service.

“We are a syndication, filtering, and distribution system, and we bubble up to the top key content, always in context of what is already known about the various topics covered and customer interests expressed. Our uniqueness is in our proactive approach to monitoring whether the news has been delivered reliably, in formats that make content instantly usable and searchable to the more than 6000 end points that we serve,” sums up Rafsky.