Silobreaker pitches 'insight as a service'

Silobreaker offers a new twist on news aggregation and search navigation. The free service, which was introduced at Demo 08, offers several views of news, with more than 20,000 data sources (including news sites,blogs, and research institutions) poured into the index.

The company claims that it provides more context and relevance than existing news services such as Factiva and Nexis-Lexis. Silobreaker clearly offers some useful visualization tools and a rich set of structured and unstructured data sources.

Silobreaker is targeting its tool at research communities such as journalists (like me), law enforcement, government agencies, corporations and universities. Calling its search engine, "insight as a service," Silobreaker offers what it describes as 360-degree view of the contextual data related to the query. Content is clustered by topic, similar to a meme tracker.

Trends compares the media attention given to people, companies or products.

Silobreaker also tracks article volume and content types for search queries.

A Hot Spots map shows geographical connections of the search query.

Silobreaker also extracts entities, such as people, companies, topics and places, as another path for drilling down semantically on the information. Users can personalize the service to receive custom search results.

Network search displays real-time connections and relationships between entities as a way to navigate the through the data.

The 10 person company came out of Sweden and is based in London. Silobreaker is privately funded and seeking outside investors this year (a good reason to go to Demo). The business model is ad-based today, but the company plans to offer versions for prosumers and enterprises. Corporations, for example, could upload their own content to Silobreaker and use the engine to get better insights, according to the company.