P1100458 Ray Renteria presents WorkStreamer

Workstreamer lets people keep track of companies. Marketing departments are interested in what's going on with their competition, vendors in their customers. Historically people did that through Google. But, as Ray Renteria demonstrated in his presentation, if you search for, e.g. Target, you'll get lots of irrelevant results. A savvy person might create a Google Alert. But you don't want to keep track of things "at an atomic level", he says, because you probably follow more than one company.

Workstreamer pulls in tens of thousands of streams of information. It determines what is business and non-business related, and delivers those results to you. So you get filtered, relevant news, as well as what people are saying about a particular company on social networks, like Facebook and Twitter.

Workstreamer has a web application, and an AIR desktop application. It's free, but as a premium feature it's planning to offer technology that will "plug into other contexts", such as email, and into other platforms as well. As another paid feature, it is also planning to offer a structured data repository about companies. It will let you find out, for example, which companies bought other companies, or which ones recently went bankrupt.