Daily Intelligence Discovery for Wireless Applications

News Patterns has become one of the most powerful tools I have access to, and I am always amazed at how accurate it is in predicting movement in our fast-paced world of wireless.

For several years, we have been working with a company that has a unique way of capturing news about specific subjects and listing the articles of importance in a daily email, but more importantly, it captures all of the news in folders that are placed on a radar screen so the relationships between categories and companies can be observed and tracked.

This service is provided by News Patterns, which will soon be launching a version to track the wireless applications marketplace on a subscription basis and will include my analysis of important changes. We will also be launching another version that will focus on the Public Safety Communications industry and will be free through our website. I have been interacting with these services for a few months now and once you understand the technology behind the product, you soon come to appreciate the power of this system.

Reviewing today’s radar screen, the first thing you will notice is that the system captured more than 10,000 articles about wireless applications and added them to the running totals for the various categories. Those shown in the center of the radar screen are the ones with the most articles, blogs, and other posts. As you can see from the screen shot below, and to no one’s surprise, these articles deal with Google Wireless, Android applications, Apple applications, and the iPhone. But simply seeing what is listed in the center of the radar screen is not the true value of this tool. If you watched this over time, you would have noticed that the email category has been moving away from RIM and more toward the center, meaning that email delivery on devices is a mainstream application and no longer the sole purview of RIM, which built its company on providing the first, and best, email service to wireless devices.

You would also have noticed that the BlackBerry apps and LBS (location-based services) folders are moving toward RIM. The BlackBerry apps movement is based on recent improvements to the app store while the movement of LBS toward RIM means it is taking a leadership role in that category of applications. Nokia and Nokia applications are further out on the screen, which can be interpreted to mean that their ability to remain a strong competitor in the United States has not yet been re-established.

If you had this radar screen up on your computer and clicked on one of the tools on the right-hand side, you would see lines that indicate relationships between the folders. The stronger the line appears, the more of a relationship there is. For example, when I invoke this feature, it becomes clear that Nokia is tied to games but not to music or other entertainment applications, and that there is a strong tie between location-based applications and Apple applications. Another button brings up a list of the top BUZZ articles for today and yesterday and shows in graphic form what people are writing and blogging about.

There are a number of other tools, including ones that put the radar screen in motion so you can watch how the various categories interact over the past few days, a week, a month, six months, or a year. There is a visual representation on the screen and the catagories move around the radar screens. New categories are born and others move toward the outside of the screen and at some point, unless the company figures out how in increase its relevance, the category simply falls off the radar, so to speak.

The logic behind this system, which has been developed over the years, works for many other categories as well. News Patterns is being used to track elections in various states and has been very successful in predicting winners. It has been used by a number of government agencies for various types of information analysis, and Netro City, the company behind the News Intelligence service, has developed some special applications that can be used to track blog and other social site traffic that can operate as an early warning system for unlawful gatherings and other events that might otherwise have caught public officials off-guard.

As you can see, this is a very powerful system, and we are pleased to be able to offer this service, along with my take on the results shown by the Daily News Intelligence, on a subscription basis. We are in the process of organizing a beta test and if you think you might be interested in taking part, we will be happy to set up a webinar session to explain the power of this service to you in more detail. You can send me an email or use the Contact Us feature on this site to request more information.

News Patterns has become one of the most powerful tools I have access to, and I am always amazed at how accurate it is in predicting movement in our fast-paced world of wireless.

Andrew M. Seybold