A Master of Headline Grabbing

As a former technology correspondent for the Financial Times and co-founder of the now-global First Tuesday club for dotcom entrepreneurs, Nick Denton, 35, understands a thing or two about intelligence gathering. So, when he and two friends launched Moreover, their news aggregation and business intelligence company, in London in 1998, they based it on the Internet, the most immediate publishing medium ever invented. And they exploited the paradox that the hottest news, discussions and market gossip on the Web are the most difficult to get to using basic search tools. "The average site is visited by the average search engine once every 15 days," says Denton. "And that's not good enough if you're trying to extract high-value, time-sensitive information."

Though its headquarters has since moved to San Francisco, Moreover has kept its technical team in London. Here they monitor and tweak the search codes that query their targeted sites as often as every 15 minutes. Personal visitors to www.moreover.com can search or browse news feeds harvested from 2,400 sources, channeled into 330 subject categories, for free. They can also have the results delivered as e-mail or, using some simple but slick tools, splice them onto their own Internet and intranet sites. Moreover's free headline feeds appear on an estimated 150,000 sites and news vendors like the Economist and the Financial Times are buying them for their own.

As evidence that the ground is shifting in search technology, Moreover recently licensed its dynamic database to AltaVista and Inktomi, established leaders in the field. So how come they can't do this for themselves? "Because it's a different kind of expertise," says Denton. "Indexing dynamic information isn't just a matter of having your crawler crawl more frequently. It's about being able to interpret the HTML [the standard language of the Web] and the structure of a page, and home in on the information that really matters."

Among Moreover's commercial clients are McGraw Hill, Wells Fargo, Ernst & Young and British Telecom — businesses where competitive intelligence is key. For example, the buzz picked up from discussion boards can alter market strategy or scupper deals; a change in tone on a central bank website can signal an interest-rate shift. Depending on their size, customers pay from $150,000 to $200,000 a year for Moreover's standard database of 3,000 sources, to which they can add 100 or so more

Research from information industry adviser Outsell showed that 79% of business users turn first to the Internet for information rather than inhouse or proprietary resources. That means they are each spending eight hours a week on average gathering, reviewing and analyzing information at an estimated cost to the employer of $10,000 a year. "They're finding things of value," says Denton, "but they spend far too much time looking for stuff and too little finding it.

Moreover recently signed deals with two major corporate portal providers, Autonomy and PeopleSoft. This combined customer base of more than 5,000 companies means Moreover data will be appearing on a lot more employee screens when they log in each morning. Looks like Denton won't be satisfied just distributing the headlines: he will be making them too