A few years ago, when InfoSquire was in its infancy, I received a phone call from a gentleman in New York named Jeff Stewart. He was curious if our technology was capable of 1) crawling multiple domains and discovering the presence of certain file formats, RSS/ATOM feeds and 2) capable of processing high volumes of web pages on demand.
At the time, InfoSquire was composed of no more than yours truly, and those of you who have run a tech sole-proprietorship know that when a potential client calls you asking if you have a feature that you know you could code up in a day or two, the answer is always yes. In this case yes and yes (this was early stage mind you).
Little did I know that I’d still be working with Jeff a few years later (and a couple of nice trips to Manhattan) and that I’d have built a whole system dedicated to managing, monitoring and saving the contents of (at one point) hundreds of thousands of RSS/ATOM feeds! The company that was using this custom feed “ping service”? You guessed it, Monitor110, a NY start-up specializing in real-time web-content monitoring/analysis and intelligence delivery to (primarily) the financial sector. Their goal was to provide a platform that gave knowledge workers a head-start on information that could impact their investments. This was accomplished at InfoSquire by “pinging” thousands of valuable resources to see when their contents had changed. Notification of changed resources was then passed onto Monitor110 who would then process the new contents of the resource.
At it’s height, our system was capable of pulling down well over a billion feeds per month, though the number of individual targeted feeds were eventually refined from hundreds of thousands to around 80,000 hand-picked premium feeds that contained the best information they were looking for. In turn, we provided a service to add/remove and update feed information in our system, as well as specify the interval at which a feed would be checked.
Last week Monitor110 announced that it was closing it doors. This is obviously sad to me for two reasons: 1) They had a great idea and had developed an awesome system, but unfortunately made some important direction changes too late in the game (see Roger Ehrenberg’s Monitor110: A Post Mortem) and 2) They were one of our best clients, and we loved working with that very talented and innovative group of individuals.
Subscribe