More Newsdesk features

Our development team is hard at work and every couple of weeks we release updates to Newsdesk. Here’s what we added most recently, based on your feedback:

1. Expanded search box

For complex or long queries, the previous search box just wasn’t cutting it. Meet our new expandable box that easily handles long search strings.

2. Customizable chart colors

When charting data from your saved searches, you can manually set the colors if you do not like the defaults.

3. More data to download

We have TRIPLED the amount of data you can download via our Analytics tab, so you can run more extensive analyses on your own.

Expect more updates next week!

Leave a Comment August 23, 2011

3 Levels of Newsdesk to Meet Your Needs!

Moreover Technologies has begun offering our award-winning Newsdesk in 3 different flavors:

• Alert
• Corporate
• Enterprise

Each takes advantage of our powerful search technology, but scales according to your needs.

Read our official press release here.

Leave a Comment August 17, 2011

Moreover to start regular online training sessions for Newsdesk users

Attention Newsdesk users! Moreover is starting a new, regular online training program for Newsdesk due to increased demand. We have 5 topics, and each one is covered at least once a week. No matter what your time zone, you should be able to find a session that is convenient for you.

Check out the full schedule and register for a session.

To get you started, here are the topics and times they will be presented:

Newsdesk Overview & Basic Instruction (30-60 minutes)

Summarizing the overall layout and functionality of Newsdesk, including basic searching. Reviewing the main tabs to provide a good general grounding in all the tools in the application.

Creating Searches and Saving as Feeds (30 minutes)

Demonstrating how to build basic searches: covering Boolean commands, advanced search filters, the refine panel and a run-through on saving, editing and sharing feeds.

Analytics (30 minutes)

Analyzing feeds and the various analytical models available to measure searches, identify trends and highlight hot spots.

Redistribution: Exporting Feeds to a Website, Email Alerts and Electronic Newsletters (30-45 minutes)

Covering the use and function of exporting feeds to websites, plus creating, editing and sending Alerts and Newsletters. Includes branding and styling of custom Newsletters.

Advanced Searching & the Refine Panel (45-60 minutes)

After users master basic searching in Newsdesk, this session will dig deeper into Boolean search, Advanced Search and the power of the Newsdesk Refinery’s faceted searching.

Leave a Comment August 2, 2011

Moreover Featured in Social Media Monitoring Tools and Services Report

Ideya Ltd. has published a sweeping 487 page report on available Social Media Monitoring tools, of which Moreover Technologies’ Award winning Newsdesk 4 has a review.

Check it out!

Leave a Comment June 30, 2011

Newsdesk 4 adds another award to the trophy case

Congratulations to the Moreover team on yet another Newsdesk 4 award! At the annual American Business Awards^SM ceremony last night in New York, Newsdesk 4 won a Stevie® award in the category of New Product or Service of the Year-Media & Entertainment-Up to 100 Employees.

A finalist from more than 2,800 nominations in 40-plus categories, Newsdesk 4 won out over five other category contenders.

The Stevie Awards were created to honor and generate public recognition of the achievements and positive contributions of organizations and business people worldwide. The American Business Awards are governed by a Board of Distinguished Judges & Advisors that features many of the leading figures in American business.

New Product or Service of the Year – Media & Entertainment – Up to 100 Employees
STEVIE AWARD WINNER:
Moreover Technologies, Reston, VA: Moreover Technologies’ Newsdesk 4
FINALISTS:
Brand Affinity Technologies (BAT), Irvine, CA: Brand Affinity Technologies’ Fantapper
Central Desktop, Pasadena, CA: Central Desktop’s SocialBridge™
HipLogic, Fremont, CA: HipLogic *Spark
RightsFlow Inc., New York, NY: RightsFlow’s Limelight Online Clearance Tool
Weather Trends International, Bethelehem, PA: Weather Trend’s Free Year-Ahead Weather Forecasting Site

2 Comments June 21, 2011

If you don’t make your payments, they can take your bank

A story about a Florida bank being foreclosed on by a homeowner has recently gone viral. Noah Seidenberg of The Evanstonian has a good summary of this crazy turn of events:

So here’s what happened. A couple in Naples, Florida bought a home with cash (no mortgage) in 2009. In 2010, Bank of America began foreclosure proceedings against them. This was Bank of America’s mistake, of course. This couple, the Nyerges, hired an attorney to help defend them against this foreclosure, and then Bank of America realized their mistake and dropped it. Well, it’s great that it’s been dropped, but the Nyerges are out $2,534 in legal fees. So they’ve requested that Bank of America cover the cost multiple times over the phone and in writing. They finally get a judge to order that Bank of America pay the fees. When they still haven’t gotten their check after five months of more calls and letters, they obtained an order of foreclosure against the bank.

Read the whole thing here.

While this has been reported in the news, Social Media has really run wild with the story. Using Newsdesk 4, I plotted out the mention of Bank of America and foreclosures (in their various permutations). You can see the huge spike of blog posts vs traditional news coverage.

For the last 30 days, Social Media and News coverage have been trending together rather evenly. For this story, however, blogs blew the news sites out of the water.

A lot of people are chasing after the nature of what makes a story viral. In this case it seems rather clear that the populist angle in this story is appealing. It is human nature to celebrate the little guy winning over the big guy.

Do you agree? Let us know in the comments.

Leave a Comment June 8, 2011

The Microsoft-Skype deal: Why and What For in a picture

We ran a quick search on the Microsoft Skype deal through our Newsdesk 4 analytics engine, to produce the following theme cloud. The search is over approximately 10,000 news articles from the last 4 days, from about 25,000 English language sources, any country.

The analysis picks up on products mentioned across these articles. The graph simultaneously highlights why Microsoft purchased Skype -witness the iPhone and all the Google related services- and how it plugs into its own line of products: Windows Phone, Xbox, Kinect, etc.

1 Comment May 12, 2011

The Rise and Fall of Osama Coverage

Posted by Chad

There has been a lot of buzz about the reaction in Social Media to the news of Osama bin Laden’s death. The story broke late Sunday and people plugged into the Social Media pipeline learned about it a full hour before President Obama made the announcement on television.

In comparison, let’s look at how online News sites reacted:

On Saturday, April 30th, the biggest story involving Osama bin Laden was a story about a bombing in Morocco, possibly connected to al-Qaida. There were few than 100 mentions of his name.

On Sunday, May 1st, that number jumped to nearly 3000, up 3135% from the day before.

By Monday, news mentions exploded to nearly 40,000. That’s roughly a 1400% increase from Sunday.

From Saturday to Monday, there was a 44,475% increase in news coverage about Osama bin Laden.

Monday, May 2nd, was the day with the most mentions of Osama bin Laden. Nearly 15% of all news worldwide mentioned his name.

Here we can see how US vs. Middle Eastern coverage of Osama bin Laden has been for the last 30 days. This chart includes searches for Osama’s name in Arabic (أسامة بن محمد بن عوض بن لادن), so it is likely that there is some noise in the red bars below.

We can see that news and social media both react strongly to trends. At its peak, a single story can dominate the world’s headlines. It also shows that coverage tends to fall off quickly, even in the affected area, like the US in the chart above.

Also, when we look at products that are mentioned most in connection to Osama bin Laden, there is one clear – and extraordinarily pervasive – winner.

1 Comment May 10, 2011

Spring Cleaning for Your Website

Image courtesy of The Shopping Sherpa

Posted by Chad Bolender

Spring is here! Time for renewal, rebirth, and that cleaning you’ve been putting off all winter. High on your list of items to get in order should be your company’s website. Nothing turns off a visitor and undermines your credibility like a dusty and neglected site.

Items to double-check:

• Copyright date
• “Updates” section
• Old Content
• Blog
• Headlines

Copyright Date

Is the date at the bottom of your company’s website current? This is easy to notice and easy to fix. Make sure your copyright date  is for the current year.

Company Updates

Do you post recent company updates on your site? Was the last update from 2009? Post something exciting your company has done in 2011. If there hasn’t been anything worth mentioning, consider axing the updates section from your site.

Old Content

Read through all the copy on your website. Does it mention people or products that are no longer with your company? Is the information up to date? We see these pages every day and it is easy to stop really looking at them. Meticulously read through About pages and product descriptions. You can be held liable for advertising false information on your site, even if it was correct when you posted it.

Blog

Most blogs start out with high hopes and good intentions, but after a while, the chore of weekly updates becomes too much. First one week is skipped, and then two, and then it dies. Consider breathing new life into your blog with a post or two. If that is too much work, consider removing the link to it from your site menus until it can get the attention it deserves.

News Headlines

Nothing says fresh like up-to-the-minute news headlines. Using our award-winning Newsdesk 4 application, you can post links to niche-specific stories that can give your site that extra bit of freshness. It gives visitors a reason to come back to your site, even if you can’t manually update it every day yourself. Check out a live example on the right side of this page, see a preview of the custom RSS feeds you can use, and try out the even more powerful Newsdesk 4 yourself!

We’d love to hear other areas to watch out for in the comments.

Leave a Comment March 24, 2011

(CODiE award winning) Newsdesk 4 update

We’ve been a bit quiet on the blog front recently, so it’s time to rectify that by keeping you all up-to-date with the latest product features and enhancements to Newsdesk.

• Added US State and UK County options in the source location filter
• Option to exclude regions/countries/states in the source location filter
• Option to exclude subscription and registration sources from a feed
• A new template search option that is automatically applied to new searches so as a user you don’t have to configure the same preferred settings each time
• New facets for Source Category, Source Section, and Publisher
• New HTML feed export option and simplified the UI a little for Feed Export
• Made the ‘expand search text area’ feature a little more subtle and neater

So far the feedback from customers and our peers has been overwhelming, we appreciate all your comments and help us to make Newsdesk the fantastic product it is!  Any questions or should you like a free trial just drop us a note below.

Leave a Comment March 1, 2011