From my weekly Newslink from www.infotoday.com came a story about Reuters Labs following in the footsteps of Google and Yahoo Labs. Reuters is one of the parent companies of the company i work for and i am pretty sure that i have seen this site before? but found it interesting because of the ways that they are experimenting with delivering information. The Reuters NewsBeats are pretty funny, the one from today with a plong-plong piano in the back and the yesterday's massage music-maybe i am just not a fan of the music and perhaps they need to work on the blending of the voice over.
What was interesting was the dashboard. It is a Yahoo Widget so i guess it becomes a widgetdashboard (see Greg's Widget rant) and it took me about 10minutes to get setup because i didn't have the Yahoo Widget App installed. It provides headlines on your favorite news subjects including oddly enough news segments. There doesn't seem to be any personalization, but i am sure it is coming if it goes into production.
The interesting thing is that 7 years ago when the merger between Dow Jones and Reuters business divisions produced Factiva, i used to work with a Reuters product that was a client side application with alerting, that went the way of the browser based destination product quickly-IT groups didn't want enterprise users downloading client apps on local desktops and even recent attempts to provide client side news delivery applications haven't been very successful in the enterprise. Now we are seeing a resurfacing of news applications that are 'client' based and need to be downloaded to the users desktop. Last week i mentioned Touchtone (thank you Chris for the invite-i promise to get to it) -they aren't widgets but go beyond general alerting to personalize views based on definable trigger events.
I have been talking to some of my customers about how Web 2.0/Ajax functionality- widgets or whatever you want to call them -will become important information delivery tools to enterprise users who want to get away from email or website specific delivery of news, Reuters Labs is just one example of what the marketplace is working on.
1 comment :
Hi again Daniela :)
I'd love to get in contact to talk more about our little attention engine - drop me a line at chris@exigent.com.au if you're interested.
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