TechCrunch notes more money going into Monitor110:
Monitior110, the pre-launch web monitoring service for hedge fund traders we wrote about in September, will announce on Monday that it has closed a Series C round of financing with $11 million from new and existing investors. The company, which will begin offering its product for general subscription early next year after three years of development, has now raised a total of $20 million.
Of course this product hasn’t come to market yet and it could be an abysmal failure. I don’t think it will be, however, because the opportunity to leverage new technologies (RSS most importantly) and the energy behind this startup in particular are too big to miss completely. Some one, if not a number of people, is going to nail the new real-time research of emerging social media.
I'd love for this category of useful intel aggregation to break out and be successful, but I have to wonder if it ever will.
It's not a question of demand: as long as there are organizations, like institutional investors, or hedge funds, that can make a buck on the slightest bit of information asymmetry, there will be a need for this type of service. I think the problem may simply be in the nature of information.
If you look at the company's view of where information advantage remains to be exploited, you'd have to infer that the most valuable information is being created early on, where few readers see it (at least compared to the mainstream media):
Almost by definition, those high-value sources are the hardest to qualify; either semantically as being relevant, or structurally as being authoritative. If you could, they would be known, and far further along the timeline, tending towards the "Historic Point of Investor Visibility."
So, Monitor110 has picked up a tough nut to crack. I have no doubt these are smart guys, and perhaps they have the relevance and ranking algorithms required to infer high value very quickly, and from very few data points, but it feels like believing that is asking me to believe they've out-thought, among others, Google. That makes me think twice.
Then again, I'm blogging here and toiling away at a salaried job, not making billions in a hedge fund, or even millions selling to them.
Tags: Monitor110, hedge funds, aggregator, RSS, intelligence