Silobreaker Premium - our new SaaS product

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow Silobreaker on Twitter

http://twitter.com/silobreaker

Silobreaker Named Red Herring 200 Global Finalist

"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

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?

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

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

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!

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!