Alacra PulsePro gets a boost
Jinfo Blog

By Nancy Davis Kho

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Today Alacra Inc. (http://www.alacra.com) announced a major upgrade to its subscription a current awareness and idea generation tool for financial and professional services executives, Alacra PulsePro. The company has long touted the 'freemium' model with AlacraPulse, which filters both traditional media and blogs to extract actionable intelligence on business events, on either a free or subscription basis - see VIP Report: Product Review of AlacraPulse for more details. 

A year since AlacraPulse's release, the company is making sure that users of the free version have a reason to consider upgrading. The primary enhancements to PulsePro include:

o Additional event-specific filters:
- Chief Pulse: Remarks by 'C-level' corporate officers (CEOs, CFOs, etc.);
- Deal Pulse: News and commentary on rumored, announced and completed M&A transactions; and
- Weak Pulse: Corporate distress signals such as debt restructurings, reorganisations, layoffs, bankruptcies and 'seeking strategic alternatives.'

o User interface enhancements to facilitate searches and enable viewing of all events (Street, Chief, Deal and Weak Pulse) in a single screen

o Enhanced personalization features to enable users to set up 'profiles' and 'watch lists' tracking critical events impacting specific companies, industries or geographies

o Email alerts to allow users to choose what news is pushed to them on events like new M&A rumors and ideas, analyst price target changes, etc.

o Feeds and XML-based APIs to support easy integration within portals, CRM systems or other applications, including algorithmic trading models.

To kick off the launch, Alacra is offering one month of free, full access to the 'PulsePro' subscription-based service which otherwise starts at $995/yr for an individual license. VIP readers can take advantage of the offer by going to http://digbig.com/5bbfym - no special sign up necessary.

The new PulsePro interface represents an overall trend of search- and the innovative presentation of search results - becoming an integrated and powerful component of vendor solutions. The screen shot below, showing a search on the Eastman Kodak company, enables searchers to quickly navigate using the afore-mentioned filters like M&A or corporate distress signals.



Workflow integration of search results is hot, so Alacra's API integration and XML feeds are a key feature of the new release. Enterprises want to combine this sort of current awareness information with other enterprise data to make decision making faster and more accurate, so content vendors of all stripes are seeking to make it easier to do so.

If you do take advantage of Alacra's special offer, please share your observations and experiences with other VIP readers here in LiveWire!

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