Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/50188
A Comparison of News Aggregators: A Product Review by Zena Applebaum Product Name: 1. Manzama 2. InfoNgen 3. Attensa StreamServer Company That Owns Product: 1. Manzama 2. EPAM Systems 3. Attensa News aggregators are designed to address information overload related to news and business intelligence — a problem that has taken on a whole new meaning with the growing number of paid and free news sources, including traditional media, email messages, websites and social media streams. News aggregators provide a series of filters for organizing and understanding the news, thereby increasing one's ability to read, digest and act upon relevant news. This turns news into intelligence. Information overload is both an old business problem — too much information — and a new business problem, with increased access to information and the frequency with which it is delivered growing exponentially in the last several years. The introduction of more social media sites, blogs and online magazines ensures that information overload will continue to be on the rise. How well do these products deliver on solving the described business problem? 1. Manzama truly does deliver on the promise of being able to wade through content with ease. The product is built for the legal community, with at least one former "big law" attorney at the helm. The product is extremely customizable — lawyers can choose topics to which they subscribe and topics to eliminate. This product's administration tool is perhaps its best feature. It is simple to navigate and easy to sort through data. The company already has several Am 12 Tech Potpourri ILTA White Paper Law 100 clients as a result of its ability to provide savvy information dashboards, a high level of customer support and the ability to push or pull content to users. The platform also accommodates SharePoint integration through RSS. 2. InfoNgen positions itself as a Discovery Engine, making information from various platforms available in one place. Moderately priced, InfoNgen is fully customizable with custom tagging, semantic Web applications and trend extraction. The system can also incorporate free sites and external paid content.