Company: Acquire Media, Roseland, NJ
Company Description: Acquire Media is a leader in news aggregation and real-time distribution for financial services firms, corporate enterprises, web portals and individual professionals. We specialize in delivering actionable news and multimedia through high-performance applications and customized solutions. Our flagship product, NewsEdge.com, was recently named 2012 CODiE Finalist for Best Online News Service.
Nomination Category: Products & Product Management Categories
Nomination Sub Category: New Product or Service of the Year - Media & Entertainment - Product

Nomination Title: NewsEdge.com

Tell the story about this nominated product or service (up to 500 words). Describe its function, features, benefits, and performance to date.

Background
Acquire Media purchased the assets of NewsEdge, a renowned information services industry brand, from the Thomson Corporation in 2007 with the goal of rebuilding its integrated real-time news management and delivery products.

Since its re-launch in July 2010, NewsEdge.com has offered a continually upgraded, online service for gathering relevant news more efficiently, analyzing its impact more precisely, and communicating its meaning more effectively.
Using the latest Web application development technologies, NewsEdge provides an intuitive, responsive interface for finding and redistributing important news items. Using patented real-time content processing technology, NewsEdge provides a high-performance solution suitable for the most demanding financial or operating requirements.

What’s New?
Several major enhancements to NewsEdge.com in 2011 underwrite its nomination for the American Business Awards. The enhancements affected the three core components of the service; news content, news search and analysis, and news redistribution.

News Content
Underscoring NewsEdge’s commitment to relevance, we added over 600 content titles to the NewsEdge collection, from both licensed and Web-harvested sources. Notable additions include Reuters Business Reports and Dow Jones Industry Alerts, two of the most requested brands for internal news distribution.

NewsEdge also added a unique federated search offering with industry leaders, EBSCO and ProQuest Dialog. The addition allows NewsEdge users research access to 20 years of news archive bringing past and present information together.

News Search
To make relevant results easily available, NewsEdge added extensive new search controls and options – offering the ability to utilize pre-built filters involving content sources, company, industry, subject, geo-location, and people. To facilitate the isolation of precise results, NewsEdge added a unique analytic tool for visualizing Boolean queries.

NewsEdge also implemented two components that enable an ‘event-driven’ news perspective – a comprehensive taxonomy of high-impact events and the ability to combine, or ‘nest’, searches using Boolean operators. The result is a better solution for performing corporate and market intelligence.

News Redistribution
The most far-reaching enhancements came in the variety and flexibility of tools for sharing the news. NewsEdge added support for licensed redistribution on major social networks, expanded newsletter-publishing options to include hosted Web publishing, and initiated mobile-device friendly Web alerting options.

NewsEdge also simplified the newsletter production process with the introduction of WYSIWYG editing of newsletter styles and support for duplicating successful templates for modified re-use.

Conclusion
NewsEdge offers thousands of sources in real-time from an easy-to-use, highly customizable interface. It now combines many search and viewing options and provides innovative ways to share information. With its user-driven enhancements, NewsEdge has become the functional standard for news management and redistribution - offering businesses the most timely, relevant notification of important news events.

With these enhancements, new business for NewsEdge.com increased by 100% over the 2010, validating its improvement. Major companies around the globe rely on NewsEdge to execute their information gathering and distribution strategies. Our clients are spread across various locations and industries and include global chemical companies, major financial institutions, leading insurance organizations, pharmaceuticals, international law firms and more.

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Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader(s) of the team that developed this nominated product or service:

Dan O’Connor joined Acquire Media in November 2007 as SVP, Software Engineering leading the team to re-engineer NewsEdge.com and has recently been named Product Managing Director. Prior to joining Acquire Media, Dan was VP of Engineering at a Boston-based start-up, Gotuit, specializing in web-based interactive video delivery. Previously, he was SVP of Partner Integration and Operations for TV Guide On Screen. During his 8-year tenure, his role expanded from pure engineering to include product design, business development, and partner management.

Dan holds an A.B. in Engineering Sciences from Dartmouth College and pursued doctoral research in interactive media at the Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College.