Silobreaker Blog

Silobreaker Premium - our new SaaS product

2010-10-12T12:41:00.003+01:00

We are announcing today the official release of Silobreaker Premium, our new subscription-based online service for corporate, financial, and government agency customers looking for more effective ways to monitor and analyze the news and social media.

Read the press release

Product information

View a demo

Silobreaker session speaker at Lucene Revolution 2010 7-9 October - Boston, USA

2010-10-01T12:03:00.000+01:00

Lucene Revolution 2010 is the first conference dedicated to open source search in North America. Apache Lucene, used by Silobreaker, is a high-performance, full-featured text search engine library. It is a technology suitable for nearly any application that requires full-text search, especially cross-platform.

Silobreaker's Director Mats Bjore will be a session speaker at Lucene Revolution 2010 7-9 October - Boston, USA. Mats will present the impact of open source search on the intelligence community.

Silobreaker session speakers at ISS World Americas

2010-08-10T09:37:00.000+01:00

ISS World Americas is the world's largest gathering of North American, Caribbean and Latin American law enforcement, intelligence, homeland security analysts and telecom operators responsible for lawful interception, electronic investigations and network intelligence.

Silobreakers CEO Kristofer Mansson and Director Mats Bjore are invited to be session speakers at the Special OSINT Sessions - Naked Intelligence track. This track combines hands-on access to intelligence support systems solution providers with valuable insight and know-how presented by experienced practitioners of intelligence.
The topics of Mr. Mansson presentation will be Media Monitoring & Analysis 3.0 and Mr. Bjore, The Naked Intelligence Agency.

ISS World Americas - Conference will take place October 11-13, 2010 in Washington D.C, USA.

Silobreaker Grand slam at Spotify programming challenge

2010-06-02T16:22:00.001+01:00

At the first ever Spotify programming challenge , Saturday May 29th in Stockholm, four Silobreaker and Silobreaker Alumni programmers were among the top seven winners (including the overall winner). The problem set were specifically created for this contest by experienced problem setters who have created problems for, and participated in, several high quality contests such as the ACM ICPC World Finals, and NWERC.

Yes, we are proud!

Silobreaker Hires Business Head for Scandinavia

2010-02-03T09:59:00.011Z

Today, we're announcing the arrival of Anders Kasberg to our Stockholm office. Anders has joined us as "Affärschef Norden / Sales Director" and will head up our business efforts in the Nordics.

Although most of the traffic to Silobreaker.com comes from the US, UK, Canada, Australia and other English-speaking nations, several companies and government agencies in Scandinavia are inquiring about our search tools and media-monitoring solutions too. As we announced last year, the Silobreaker Enterprise Software Suite was selected as the central engine for the Swedish Armed Forces’ new news intelligence system. With our Swedish heritage, this market will always feel like a local one, so making a business push here makes perfect sense.

Anders Kasberg joins us with a strong background in sales and marketing. He held several positions with Ericsson Enterprise Networks in Sweden and was the Area Sales Director North Latin America at Ericsson Enterprise Inc in the US. After a short stint as Vice President Marketing and Products at Celltribe AB during the first internet boom and bust, he became the Businss Area Manager at Teleadress AB, the provider of hitta.se, a directory search engine for Swedish telephone numbers and addresses. Most recently, Anders was the CEO of SWEDMA, the Swedish Direct Marketing Association. He has also worked as a consultant for start-ups grannar.se and hemq.se.

Silobreaker Energy Section

2009-12-08T06:34:00.012Z

With the world focusing in on COP15, the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, we are announcing today about our new energy section, giving users the depth of coverage, quality news, analysis, and rich graphics not available on other news search sites.

Silobreaker's energy section is a great resource for anyone seeking the latest news, blogs or video about this much talked about market and is split up into the following sub-sections:

Fossil Fuels: Oil, Natural Gas, Coal

Alternative Energy: Biofuel, Wind Power, Solar Power, Geothermal Energy, Ocean Power, Hydro Power and Nuclear Power.

Energy Storage: Batteries, Fuel Cells.

Click here to go to the energy section.

..and for those of you who want to follow all the latest from COP15: click here.

Silobreaker Enterprise Software Suite

2009-10-27T00:22:00.013Z

Today, we are announcing our new software suite for enterprise and government customers looking for more effective ways to search, monitor and analyze the news, tailored to there own internal specifications. Silobreaker’s software provides the deep analytical tools and graphical representation giving customers the ability to find what they are looking for, and also find things they didn’t even know existed.

This is what Sue Feldman, a top search and discovery analyst from IDC says about our announcement: "The problem for information workers today is making sense of the information that they are drowning in. Combining access to information with tools that allow users to explore and understand should create an appealing product for Silobreaker. The fact that they use multiple visual tools, and use linguistic analysis, as well as pattern recognition means that they will be able to surface concepts and names of people, places and things. This in turn should save workers time, and help them to discover trends and facts in the information that they didn't know were there.”

We found that 'prosumers' of www.silobreaker.com quickly realize the value of the technology and want it tailored to meet their own needs by incorporating specific content and criteria. One example is the Swedish Armed Forces (Swedish: Försvarsmakten) who wanted a specific solution to meet their internal requirements. An overall contract was awarded to Swedish integration consultant LearningWell AB who teamed up with us and our Enterprise Software Suite became the central engine for the Swedish Armed Forces’ news intelligence system.

To see a video presentation of the software's main fetaures, click Play below.

Here's a link to the full press release. Thanks for visiting Silobreaker, and let us know how we can help you get ahead of the deluge of news out there today.

Follow DEMO Coverage In Silobreaker

2009-09-23T00:43:00.007+01:00

So DEMOfall 09 has just started and as a DEMO alumnus, Silobreaker wishes all the presenting companies best of luck. It'a great launch pad and having launched at DEMO 08,almost two years ago, we continue to improve our search solutions to offer Insight as a Service to people as they peruse the news. As you continue to weed through the immense amount of old-fashioned and new media coverage in the world today, Silobreaker will deliver killer search and graphics to share the news by providing more than just a list of headlines.

To follow DEMO coverage this week, visit Silobreaker to see the latest headlines, Network, Trends, InFocus, and more.

Or embed one of Silobreaker's widgets on your own webpage, blog, etc. Below are our Content and Story Widgets.

More Silobreaker Widgets

2009-09-14T10:33:00.012+01:00

We have now added two more widgets in addition to the Network and In Focus widgets we launched in early August. All these widgets are free to use, are updated dynamically and can be added by anyone to their web pages, blogs, forums, etc (just like we've done below).

Story Widget
The Story Widget shows the latest top stories for whatever person, company, organisation, entity, topic, search term etc you select (e.g. like iPhone below). Simply click on the "embed-button" at the top of any story list in Silobreaker and follow the simple steps to embed the feature on your own web page. Takes less than a minute.

Content Widget
The Content Widget shows the latest content headlines for your search term organised under separate tabs; one for news one for blogs, etc (e.g. like for Afghanistan below). You'll find the "embed-button" in the More Content section at the bottom of many pages in Silobreaker.

Have a go and try them out. Great to use as a "news-window" on your own site.

We've also updated the api with functions for the new widgets.

Silobreaker Widgets

2009-08-11T06:35:00.009+01:00

We'll be out with a press release this morning about our newly launched Widgets, allowing anyone to show Silobreaker features and graphics on their own web sites. The widgets can also be licensed by publishers and other content owners for use with their own content.

You can read the full press relase here.

Below is a video-demo of how to use/embed the widgets (we recommend to use YouTube's HD feature and to view in full screen for best quality):

Silobreaker New Release

2009-07-31T10:12:00.001+01:00

We're live with a new release of Silobreaker. More details to follow. Check it out on www.silobreaker.com.

Silobreaker Nominated for TechCrunch Europe Awards

2009-06-29T11:53:00.005+01:00

Silobreaker has been nominated in the category: Best Web Application or Service (EMEA).

Vote for us!

Many thanks,
The Silobreaker Team

Silobreaker Network of Obama's Speech in Cairo

2009-06-05T00:32:00.012+01:00

Use Silobreaker's Network tool to get a quick overview of the content in Barack Obama's recent speech in Cairo. By hovering over a term in the network a pop-up will appear explaining how the name fits in. The sliders enable you to change the composition of term-types in the Network. Go to live Network

Note: Network Search requires Flash.

Follow Silobreaker on Twitter

2009-06-03T08:26:00.004+01:00

Follow Silobreaker on Twitter

http://twitter.com/silobreaker

Silobreaker Named Red Herring 200 Global Finalist

2008-12-20T18:11:00.012Z

"Red Herring Global is the culmination of a year's work of scouring thousands of privately held companies from around the world. During this time we have meticulously selected 1200 of the top companies from Europe, North America, and Asia, of which 200 have made it as Finalists" - Red Herring (read more)

This is further recognition and confirmation that Silobreaker is making a real impact in the search arena. Unfortunately, we won't be able to attend the Red Herring conference in San Diego but wish the organizers and our fellow Finalists a great event.

Silobreaker Selected for 2008 Mediatech 100 Award

2008-11-07T09:11:00.018Z

The Mediatech 100 is a list of Europe’s hottest private media technology companies likely to have the biggest impact on the industry in the future.

Library House, the essential source on fast-growth, innovation-led private companies across Europe, has revealed its 2008 Mediatech 100 in association with Kemp Little and New Media Age.

Silobreaker was awarded a place on the list!

The list was dominated by UK companies (60) followed by France (11), Germany (11), Finland (3), Iceland (2), Sweden (2), Ireland (2), Luxembourg (2), The Netherlands (2), Switzerland (2), Belgium (1), Denmark (1), and the Isle of Man (1). For the full list, click here.

Silobreaker "Truthiness" - Who Needs Opinion Polls?

2008-11-03T09:09:00.015Z

It’s the eve of the US Presidential Election and pollsters are working around the clock to predict the result. Each new poll, though, seems to have a shelf-life of no more than a few hours and is met with either suspicion or disbelief (or is forgotten in the deluge of other polls being released).

The problems with polls, of course, are that (a) they can only cover a very small sample of the actual electorate because of the time and effort involved in carrying out the surveys; and (b) they rely on the people being asked to actually vote the way they say they will when being polled. We know from the past, however, that many voters may say one thing and vote another.

So, if polls offer no more than “qualified guesses”, aren’t there faster and cheaper ways to come up with an alternative gauge of the election outcome?

Take a look at the chart below.

The chart shows the relative share of mentions in the news between Obama, McCain, Biden and Palin. To go to the chart click here.

Since the campaigns begun, Silobreaker has aggregated hundreds of thousands of articles related to the US election and anyone can use its Trends Search to see the relative media attention that the presidential and vice-presidential candidates receive over time. Essentially, it enables users to measure trends from what the aggregate press corps is writing about. In our blog from 14th September,“Silobreaker Truthiness – The Sarah Palin Effect”, we showed how Sarah Palin dominated news coverage following her surprise appearance as John McCain’s running mate. The chart above shows that it didn’t last and that Barack Obama has raced away from John McCain in the last week or so in terms of media coverage.

This is not the time to go deeper into the correlation between media attention and opinion polls, let's just observe that the Silobreaker chart suggests what almost every poll indicates right now as well.

It may not be more reliable, but the "Silobreaker poll" takes a few seconds to conduct and can be re-run at any time for updated results.

Kristofer Mansson, CEO

The trend charts that Silobreaker extracts and visualizes are not pre-determined or manually edited in any way. All Silobreaker’s search results are deduced by algorithms performing semantic and statistical analyses of tens of thousands of articles every day. Sounds complicated? Well, the equivalent manual research effort would be more or less impossible. Silobreaker's search results offer users "auto-generated" insight, which is updated dynamically as new articles are being published and the search is re-run.

Silobreaker "Truthiness" - Effects From Financial Meltdown

2008-09-16T13:57:00.040+01:00

As much as we would like to (and probably should), we rarely find the time to blog about Silobreaker. So there is normally quite some time between our posts. However, considering the unprecedented turn of events in the financial markets, here are a few "algorithmic" insights into the situation.

Silobreaker Trends Search provides media attention trends based on mentions in the news. Essentially, it enables users to gauge trends from what the aggregate press corps is writing about. We are also about to introduce "Tracks" in Silobreaker. Tracks will enable enterprise users to define what they are tracking from a media monitoring perspective.

Here are few general tracks that we have already set up for everyone's use:

Rate Hike
Rate Cut
Oil Price Higher
Oil Price Lower
Dollar Weaker
Dollar Stronger

Each Track has been defined through a variety of rules and terms to enable a much broader approach than just single keyword-based alert-systems. By using these Tracks in Trends Search we can gauge what media are focusing on and how it changes over time.

So by looking at the relative share between Rate Hike and Rate Cut based on media's attention to the respective scenarios, we get the following picture:

Click here to go to the chart.

We have also filtered the press coverage for the chart above to only include news about the Federal Reserve to provide a more specific and multi-dimensional search result. So again, the chart shows the relative focus between Rate Hike and Rate Cut in Fed-related news. The chart seems to suggest a strong anticipation of an actual rate cut by the Fed later today. Is it an accurate forecast by media or are they just trying to "talk up" the market? We'll soon know.

Here's the same but filtered on Bank of England related news:

Click here to go to the chart.

What about in European Central Bank related news?

Click here to go to the chart.

Now, let's switch to media's reporting on oil prices and the relative focus between "Oil Prices Higher" and "Oil Prices Lower":

Click here to go to the chart.

..and finally the US dollar and the relative media attention between "Dollar Stronger" and "Dollar Weaker":

Click here to go to the chart.

I'll leave the interpretation to the reader, but as always with this blog, the purpose is to promote the easy use and benefits of Silobreaker. The above analysis took no more than a couple of minutes to complete.

Kristofer Mansson, CEO

The trend charts that Silobreaker extracts and visualizes are not pre-determined or manually edited in any way. All Silobreaker’s search results are deduced by algorithms performing semantic and statistical analyses of tens of thousands of articles every day. Sounds complicated? Well, the equivalent manual research effort would be more or less impossible. Silobreaker's search results offer auto-generated insight “live” and the graphical results are updated dynamically as new articles are being published and the search is re-run.

Silobreaker "Truthiness" - The Sarah Palin Effect

2008-09-14T10:54:00.043+01:00

Whether your loyalties lie with the Democrats or the Republicans in the US Presidential race, very few of us can pretend to have been unaffected by the media frenzy following Sarah Palin’s surprise appearance as John McCain’s running-mate.

There has been much discussion about the “Palin-effect” in media and Silobreaker is the perfect news search service to use for examining it a bit closer.

In the weeks and months leading up to the Republicans' surprise announcement, Silobreaker averaged around five articles per day about Sarah Palin (hardly noticeable on the graph below). Ever since the announcement, the equivalent number of articles is about 1,000 per day (with peaks over 2,000). That is a 200 times increase.

So how has this increase in absolute terms affected Palin’s relative share of press coverage compared to the other candidates? Silobreaker’s Trends Search provides media attention trends based on mentions in the news. Essentially, it enables users to gauge trends from what the aggregate press corps is writing about. The chart below suggests clear evidence of the “Palin-effect”. Quite sensationally actually, for the first time since the campaigns begun, Barack Obama is not the obvious leader in terms of press coverage. And in terms of the vice-presidential media attention race, there is simply no match at the moment. Joe Biden gets around 6-7% of the overall coverage of the four candidates compared to Palin’s 30%.

The chart shows the relative share of mentions in the news between Palin, McCain, Obama and Biden. Click here to go to the chart.

So is it all good news for the Republicans?

Well, for believers in “all PR is good PR” the answer might be yes. The networks below, however, analyze the media attention through another lens and show the 10 keyphrases that have been found in the overall press coverage to have the strongest association with Barack Obama and Sarah Palin respectively (filtered out in both networks are obvious terms like White House, US Election, etc).

The networks show what keyphrases in the news flow that have the strongest association to Obama and Palin respectively. Such keyphrases, and their connections to the candidates, are extracted from the overall reporting about Obama and Palin, which during the last few weeks amount to some 40,000 articles in Silobreaker (blogs are not included in this analysis).

These pictures seem to support those who believe that a large part of the press coverage around Palin is based primarily on sensationalism and controversy rather than policy. Can this ultimately hurt the Republicans, and might it be difficult for the McCain camp to maintain media’s interest to the same degree or for the right reasons as their campaign races on towards the November election date?

So is Barack Obama's apparent silence about Sarah Palin evidence of grave concern over the "Palin-effect", or is he just silently confident that the controversial topics surrounding Palin will eventually be the sword on to which the Republicans will fall themselves?

By using Silobreaker regularly, it will be easy for anyone to follow these twists and turns - up to the election and beyond.

Finally, the purpose of this blog is not to provide political commentary, for which I am clearly not qualified, but to promote the easy use and benefits of Silobreaker. The above analysis took no more than a few minutes to complete.

Kristofer Mansson, CEO

The connections and trends that Silobreaker extracts and visualizes are not pre-determined or manually edited in any way. All Silobreaker’s search results are deduced by algorithms performing semantic and statistical analyses of tens of thousands of articles every day. Sounds complicated? Well, the equivalent manual research effort would be more or less impossible. Silobreaker's search results offer auto-generated insight “live” and the graphical results are updated dynamically as new articles are being published and the search is re-run.

Go get them Jimmy!

2008-05-14T08:34:00.002+01:00

Our chief architect Jimmy is once again in the TopCoder finals.

We'll all be watching it live on Thursday, May 15 at 10:00 AM, Vegas time. Go get them!

Silobreaker goes beyond the news headlines to uncover the latest trends

2008-03-28T12:22:00.014Z

Here's a podcast from Network World that was released a couple of days ago (although the interview took place mid-Feb).

"A new search engine upstart making waves is Silobreaker, which has created a search system for users wanting more than just the latest news headlines and looking for deeper analysis and trends. Silobreaker CEO Kristofer Mansson talks about how the site works, what data it can deliver and how it differs from that other big search engine dominating the news."

Click here to listen to the podcast

Search market in focus

2008-02-10T01:02:00.000Z

As we reported last week, we had fantastic feedback following our official launch of Silobreaker at the DEMO 08 conference in California at the end of January. The need for “smarter” search engines seems to touch a raw nerve amongst many web users and positive reactions keep coming in from press and bloggers alike as the word about Silobreaker is spreading. I am sure Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo has helped as well because of the renewed focus on the search space as a whole.

In my view, Microsoft's bid for Yahoo and Google's subsequent involvement is a clash of giants that will likely have implications for everyone involved in or using the Internet. However, in the wake of this deal and regardless of its outcome, information overload will still be a problem and users will continue to ask for quicker and better ways of finding more relevant search results than what traditional search engines have been offering so far. Silobreaker was developed to meet exactly such growing user demand and the service brings meaning to news content through sense-making analytics and graphical search results.

Ultimately, it’s the value and relevance of the search result that matter and our goal is very simple; to deliver insight as a service.

Thanks for using Silobreaker.
Best regards,
Kristofer Mansson, CEO

New Feature: We have added a zoom-feature to Network Search. You can zoom in or out either by using the scroll wheel on your mouse or the zoom-slider in the upper left corner of the network area. See what you think.

Recent press clippings:

"Search tools made clever" - Financial Times, 8 February, 2008

"Silobreaker can also chart article volumes by media type, identify geographic news hotspots and, impressively, map relationships between topics in the form of an interactive network. Users can navigate spiders- web graphics by dragging and dropping the elements in it. I found the graphic often suggested relationships I had not immediately thought of."

"Silobreaker Brings a Graphical View to News Research" - Information Today, 7 February, 2008

"The smart context extraction and relational analysis of Silobreaker is by far the best I have seen in the semantic search space. Silobreaker quickly becomes indispensable; it is an invaluable research tool with a sophisticated algorithm that I’d like to see proliferate in the search market."[Says Chris Shipley, executive producer of DEMO]"

"The Search Market Fallout Of Microsoft-Yahoo" - InformationWeek, 9 February, 2008

"When tigers battle, mice get fat. That pseudo-Chinese proverb well describes one likely outcome of Microsoft's $44 billion bid for Yahoo... The clash of the titans atop the search pyramid is opening up new opportunities for smaller players while helping to enable a broad flourishing of innovation in information-access technology... Take Silobreaker, which debuted its contextual search engine at last month's Demo conference..."

"And here are blogs about Silobreaker found on Google Blog Search"

DEMO 08 (Part II)

2008-02-01T19:00:00.000Z

We're back from the DEMO 08 conference that was held in Palm Desert, CA, 28-30 January. It was great! Truly a unique mix of demonstrators, media, VCs and industry experts coming together in an event that is informal and relaxed, yet incredibly professionally produced by Chris Shipley and her team. Anyone looking to launch anything in tech or media, this is the event!

We had a great time and judging by the attention and media coverage so far, Silobreaker's message of providing "insight as a service" struck a chord with many of the attendees. Thanks to all who came by our booth and saw the presentation. You can find Silobreaker's presentation in DEMO's video center.

And here's some feedback that's come in so far:

"The Coolest Thing I Saw At DEMO" - InformationWeek, 31 Jan 2008

"Every year at Demo there's one presenter that captures my imagination and actually seems to be providing something that I will find useful. This year, while Skyfire showed off the beta of an intriguing new mobile browser and BitGravity displayed its power new network platform for high-definition video, the choice was easy: Silobreaker."

"Picking the winners at the DEMO conference" - San Jose Mercury News, 31 Jan 2008

"It's rare that a Web site offers a genuinely new way of looking at information. But that's what you get with Silobreaker"

"The Best of DEMO 08" - Seattle Post Intelligencer, 30 Jan 2008

"BEST PITCH: I didn't have the chance to watch every company, but one that really hooked me was London's Silobreaker."

"Silobreaker advances social-network visualization" - Intelligent Enterprise, 30 Jan 2008

"Silobreaker's visualizations add huge value to the company’s underlying news-aggregation service."

"Silobreaker pitches ‘insight as a service’" - ZDNet, 30 Jan 2008

"Silobreaker offers a new twist on news aggregation and search navigation."

"SiloBreaker: More than just the latest headline news" - Microsoft Startup Zone, 31 Jan 2008

"SiloBreaker was one of my favorites at DEMO this year. Based on statistical relationships, they are the first company I’ve come across that is able to perform sophisticated visualization and text analytic-like functionality on large unstructured data sets like news articles."

"Silobreaker: Information, Context and Correlation" - White African, 31 Jan 2008

"Of all the products that I saw at DEMO 2008, none impressed me more than Silobreaker."

"DEMO 08: My Favorites" - Somewhat Frank, 31 Jan 2008

"Silobreaker - An innovative trend analysis site with lots of visual goodies to dig deeper."

"Blogs about Silobreaker found on Google"

DEMO 08

2008-01-25T16:08:00.000Z

So, we've just come up for air after a couple of months of some serious new development. We will launch this major release (and Silobreaker officially) at the prestigious DEMO 08 conference in California next week (28-30 Jan). Due to DEMO-rules, we can't tell you about any features, tools and designs, but be sure to check it out next week at http://www.silobreaker.com/.

"DEMO is the premier launch venue for new products, technologies and companies and has established a reputation for identifying and presenting to an elite audience the products most likely to have a significant impact on the marketplace and market trends in the coming year. Each product is carefully screened and selected by DEMO's Executive Producer, Chris Shipley, one of the top trend spotters in the personal technology product industry."
- Source: www.demo.com

Silobreaker was one of only four European companies selected for DEMO 08, so it's a great opportunity to demonstrate Silobreaker to an audience of US media, VCs and industry experts.

Wish us luck.

Select your favorite content sources

2007-10-05T13:20:00.000+01:00

Sure, it's great with thousands upon thousands of content sources aggregated into one service. But sometimes you may want to check out a single source, or a limited number, or want to compare one set of sources with another. Well, in Silobreaker you can do exactly that by setting up your own publication filters and then by bookmarking the pages enable the source-customizations to be used more than once.

Here is how you do it:

Click on "Advanced Search Options" under the search box to expand the column. In the field under "Select Publications" start typing the name of the source you would like to use (see picture below). Once you have found the source, select it and click on the "add" button.

------------------------------
Repeat the steps as explained above for each source you want to add to your list.

------------------------------
When you have completed your selections, click on the "search" button.

----------------------------
You're done! Any search on the page you've just created is now limited to the sources that you selected.

Now bookmark the page for future use.

Click here to go to the page in this example.

If you can't find a source, please let us know about it. Simply request a source by emailing us at feedback@silobreaker.com

Silobreaker - Insight as a service

Help us spread the word - tell friends and colleagues about Silobreaker!

The “new” open source intelligence and Silobreaker

2007-10-01T08:01:00.000+01:00

The Tsunami that struck South East Asia on December 26th 2004 was a wakeup call for the world in many aspects. Hurricane Katrina that struck New Orleans 8 months later was another. The crisis in Darfur is here and now.

The heartbreaking stories about human loss and torn-apart families will eventually fade. The insights about what was really working in information matters will live on in the ways how we need to interact with information, knowledge and intelligence. Governments’ slow decision cycles, below-par information management and in some cases extremely hierarchical fears makes them slow to respond. Media are a little bit faster but the proliferation of information and the global scope make the validation of what people need to find, know and understand extremely complex.

But this is the world we all live in. Instabilities such as war, terrorism, environment, crime, disease, human rights issues, political upheaval, and natural disasters are global and affect us all. There is a lot we do not know and cannot foresee, but many times the writing is on the wall somewhere in the world, if we just know how and where to look for it....

Click here to read the full article from Mats Bjore, Director of Silobreaker and former Founder and Head of the Open Source Intelligence Section at the Swedish Headquarters Military Intelligence & Security Service.

Silobreaker - Insight as a service

Help us spread the word - tell friends and colleagues about Silobreaker!

Silobreaker "Truthiness" - Business as usual in Burma

2007-09-28T17:29:00.000+01:00

As anti-government protestors continue to face off against riot policemen in Burma, many international oil companies seem to conduct their business as usual depsite mounting political pressure for a boycott against the Burmese regime.

The view 360 page for Myanmar/Burma in Silobreaker shows that most of the related companies to the country are oil companies. A closer look through Silobreaker's relationship network gives the following picture.

Just to explain. In the example above, Silobreaker auto-extracts, in real-time from thousands of articles about Burma, the most related companies in the energy sector - and displays them in the relationship network. By hovering over over the midpoint of any relationship the user can easily see the articles that explain the association.

Sounds complicated? Well, the equivalent manual research effort would be more or less impossible. Silobreaker offers this insight by a couple of clicks.

Click here to try it out

Kristofer Mansson - CEO

Silobreaker - Insight as a service

Help us spread the word - tell friends and colleagues about Silobreaker.

Issue by issue - what was said during Ahmadinejad's visit to Columbia University.

2007-09-27T12:14:00.000+01:00

Get more from the news by using Silobreaker's relationship networks.

The screenshot below shows the 20 most related keyphrases from the news around Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to Columbia University.

The user can simply hover with the mouse over the midpoint of any relationship to see the articles that explain the association and get an issue-by-issue breakdown of the news.

Click here to try it out

Silobreaker - Insight as a service

Help us spread the word - tell friends and colleagues about Silobreaker

The relationships or associations that Silobreaker extracts and visualizes are not pre-determined or manually configured in any way. Silobreaker deduces relationships between terms or entities statistically by computing several measurements, such as co-occurrences, text-proximity, spelling variations etc in the information flow. This enables Silobreaker to offer more insightful search results than just traditional lists of headlines (often too many) by showing people, companies, places, keyphrases, etc that are related or associated with the search results. This in turn enables the user to move away from linear analysis to multi-dimensional exploration and discovery.

Get a 360 degree view of today's stories

2007-09-25T12:36:00.000+01:00

Silobreaker offers more insight faster by aggregating news, blogs, research, audio, video and other digital media content from proprietary, shared, user generated and open access sources around the world.

Take a look at our 360-degree search results for some of today's news events.

US

How is Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad doing in New York? Click here

What's the latest in the race for the White House? Click here

Strike is in the air - UAW and GM talks break down Click here

UK
Latest development in the Madeleine McCann disappearance Click here

Gordon Brown at the Labour Party conference Click here

Bluetongue Disease - another disaster for British farmers Click here

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Silobreaker "Truthiness" - Iran/Military Action

2007-09-23T21:20:00.000+01:00

The arrival of Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in New York and the controversy (amongst other things) surrounding his wish to visit Ground Zero and give a speech at Columbia University are covered intensely by media and political commentators around the world. And although it feels like Iran and the US have been at each other's throats for as long as anyone can remember, a simple look in Silobreaker reveals that the topic of a potential military attack of Iran is currently getting more press coverage than possibly ever before.

Putting his New York visit in that context, one interpretation might be that while the US is stepping up its preparations for a possible invasion, Ahmadinejad goes behind enemy lines to launch a PR "blitzkrieg" in order to gain a first mover's advantage. Fascinating tactics if the whole situation wasn't so scary!

The chart shows the number of daily articles about Iran in the last four months filtered on the topic of "Military Action". Source: Silobreaker

Click here to see the full page in Silobreaker. You need to log in to be able to go back four months (only the last 30 days if you don't log in). Registration is free - click on Login/Register button at the top of a page.

Kristofer Mansson - CEO

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Silobreaker in Sky News show

2007-09-23T20:42:00.000+01:00

We know it's been quiet from us on the blog-front lately but watch this space as we will be providing "truthiness" reports and announcing a bunch of new features in the coming weeks and months.

Btw, followers of Silobreaker might have seen that we popped up in a press release from Sky News, who announced last week that Silobreaker will be one of two aggregators that the award-winning UK news channel will be using in a new show looking at the most popular stories, videos and debates on the web. The show, to be hosted by Martin Stanford, will air on Sky News TV channel on Tuesdays to Fridays at 7:30pm (UK time) as well as being streamed on the Sky News website.

Click here for Sky News press release

Check us out at http://beta.silobreaker.com/

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Silobreaker "Truthiness" – Middle East

2007-06-14T16:24:00.000+01:00

We’ve had a lot of positive response on the “truthiness” report that was posted last week about the upcoming US Presidential Election 2008. So much that we will try to make these reports regular features on our blog.

Silobreaker provides more insightful results than traditional search engines by returning not just lists of headlines, but a fuller picture of people, places, companies, organizations, keyphrases, etc that are related or associated with each search result. This is a simple way of providing quick glances of instant “truthiness” that otherwise may require days if not weeks of manual research to work out.

Last week I took a look at what keywords each presidential candidate in the US was associated with and the differences between Democrats and Republicans.

Here is another way that Silobreaker can slice up the news flow. Let’s take a look at one of the most talked-about organizations in the Middle East right now – Hamas.

Q: Are there differences in the tonality of the reporting about Hamas between news sources from different countries?

I looked at sources from 5 different origins; US, Jewish, Arabic/Muslim, UK, and Chinese; their reporting around Hamas and especially what keyphrases and organizations that were associated to Hamas in such reporting (top of a list means the strongest association).

As I pointed out last week, this is not scientific research and may come with some obvious flaws (after all it took me all of 10 minutes). Real political commentators or media analysts may have very different views, but I guess one of the beauties with these truthiness reports is that they don’t take any views. They find what they find without any bias and leave the interpretation to others. Users may also find that these search results trigger questions and ideas, otherwise not thought of, leading to more comprehensive research through Silobreaker’s many other tools and features (or elsewhere).

At a first glance at the lists below, many keywords seem to be the same regardless of the origin of the source (possibly because the keywords represent the issues -but to which there are often two sides). At a closer look, however, the lists suggest more than subtle differences both in terms of tonality and the order in which certain keywords are placed on the lists. The result also suggests that sources from origins not immediately involved have a more emotionally detached and diplomatic tone in their reporting.

For instance, “Terrorist Group” and “Terrorist” are the most strongly associated keywords to Hamas amongst US and Jewish sources, while such terms come much further down the list for Arabic/Muslim sources (16th place) and hardly at all for Chinese sources (29th place).

In some more detail
Roughly 3,000 unique news articles were found in Silobreaker from the sources above in which Hamas was mentioned. All articles were in English. Blogs were not included in the analysis above.

Please note that the advanced search functionality that I used in Silobreaker to obtain the results above is not yet deployed in the beta version. Advanced search is only available in our subscription service so far, but is due to be released in the beta soon.

The relationships or associations that Silobreaker extracts and visualizes are not pre-determined or manually configured in any way. Silobreaker deduces relationships between terms or entities statistically by computing several measurements, such as co-occurrences, text-proximity, spelling variations etc in the information flow. This enables Silobreaker to offer more insightful search results than just traditional lists of headlines (often too many) by showing people, companies, places, keyphrases, etc that are related or associated with the search results. This in turn enables the user to move away from linear analysis to multi-dimensional exploration and discovery.

Check it out at http://beta.silobreaker.com/

Kristofer Mansson, CEO

Silobreaker "Truthiness"

2007-06-04T10:58:00.000+01:00

At Silobreaker we talk a lot about “intelligent search” and providing more insightful results than traditional search engines. But what do we really mean by that and how does it translate into practical use?

Let me show you a simple example of how Silobreaker can be used for analytical purposes. This is not groundbreaking scientific research and may come with some obvious flaws, but it provides a quick glance of instant “truthiness” that otherwise may require days if not weeks of manual research (it took me about 20 minutes).

Let’s take look at what’s going in the upcoming presidential election in the US (covered quite extensively in Silobreaker here).

Q: Can Silobreaker analytically process the huge volumes of news around this topic to work out what issues are debated, which issues each candidate is associated with and what differences there are between the Democrats and the Republicans?

A: The simple answer is; yes it can!

By searching all news articles in Silobreaker for each of the candidates during the month of May and especially what keyphrases each candidate is associated with in such news flow, a picture starts to appear. I also searched on Al Gore and George W Bush to get similar perspectives for one Democrat and one Republican who are not in the race for the White House.

Real political commentators may interpret the news for the month of May very differently, but the Silobreaker analytics suggest that:

While “Health Care” is the most commonly associated keyphrase with the Democratic candidates, “Abortion” is the equivalent keyword associated with Republican Candidates (in fact it is the top keyword for every single Republican candidate).

“Global Warming/Climate Change” and references to “War on Terror” or “War in Iraq” make the top 10 list for most Democratic candidates, but such keyphrases are noticeable only by their absence for most of the Republicans candidates.

“Immigration” is another keyword primarily associated with most Republicans, while “Tax” has similar associations in both camps.

While some observers seem to think that Al Gore may still announce his candidacy, the Silobreaker analysis suggest that he has some catching up to do in terms of policies – except for environmental issues, of course, which almost entirely populate his top 10 list.

The day-to-day issues for the current President, George W Bush, seems to have little in common with the policy-platform on which most of his fellow Republicans think they will replace him.

Judging by the percentage share each Democratic candidate received of the total news coverage for all Democratic candidates, John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama are way ahead of the rest of their Democratic peers.

The equivalent percentages for the Republicans, i.e. each candidate’s share of all Republican candidates’ news coverage, suggest that John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney have taken a lead in the Republican camp (in terms of news coverage – good and bad) .

In some more detail
Roughly 8,000 unique news articles were found in Silobreaker for the month of May in which one or several candidates were mentioned by name. All articles were in English from some 1,000 sources around the world. Blogs were not included in the analysis above.

The relationships or associations that Silobreaker extracts and visualizes are not pre-determined or manually configured in any way. Silobreaker deduces relationships between terms or entities statistically by computing several measurements, such as co-occurrences, text-proximity, spelling variations etc in the information flow. This enables Silobreaker to offer more insightful search results than just traditional lists of headlines (often too many) by showing people, companies, places, keyphrases, etc that are related or associated with the search results. This in turn enables the user to move away from linear analysis to multi-dimensional exploration and discovery.

Check it out at http://beta.silobreaker.com

Kristofer Mansson, CEO

Beta update #1

2007-05-31T11:23:00.000+01:00

The Silobreaker Beta has been updated. Changes include:

A rewamped first-page, showing both blogs and updated fact sheets. You can now also see all incoming content. We hope that this better reflects the wide variety of content available in Silobreaker.
Improved personalization experience. All you need to do now is to Log in and click Personalize This Page!
Faster image downloads
Improved behind-the-scenes filters to give you even more relevant results.

Try it out and tell us what you think.

Welcome to Silobreaker Blog

2007-05-31T10:22:00.001+01:00

Hi there!

This is Silobreaker Beta Blog. We'll give you the latest news and inform you about the changes happening to Silobreaker Beta. As you might know, Silobreaker is beta-testing its new service at http://beta.silobreaker.com and the site evolves on a daily basis based on your feedback.

Don't hesitate to tell us what you think, either by commenting our posts or by sending us feedback through the feedback button on the beta site.