Seer News Analytics wins Thomson Reuters’ FinTech Innovation Challenge!

Background
Thomson Reuters along with Zone Startups India designed a FinTech Innovation Challenge to connect startups and companies in BFSI space. We decided to participate to showcase our Seer News Analytics product which is still in development. The judges and the mostly financial industry audience seemed to agree with our premise and proposed solution.
Why Seer?
Professional news as produced and distributed by players in the financial information industry has not changed much in few decades. Barring some enhancements like better metadata, a simple sentiment indicator and visual embellishments the financial news industry is yet to see the innovations that more retail focussed players have managed to bring out.
We see three general trends that are impacting the news industry:
- Rise of unstructured data
- Half-life of content
- Diminishing marginal utility
Which in turn leads to:
- Filter failure
- Stale data
- Lack of contextual relevance
Each of the above points should be empirically evident to those who depend on news for their business decision making. We will share more details on how Seer envisions to tackle these problems using a combination of Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and a perspective on how human cognition works in upcoming posts. For now though, we wish to be in a celebration mode.

All credit to our team, a subset in the pic, that is building Seer one feature at a time. Special thanks goes to the panel of judges who could see where this could lead and the entire team at Thomson Reuters.
You can go here to register for a preview of Seer when its ready.