WHILE THE TV, CABLE and telecom industries are bogged down once again in regulatory minutiae, Mike Lee has many other things on his plate.
The chief strategy officer at Rogers Communications, both the biggest wireless and cable company in Canada, is not thinking much about wireless phones or cable these days. Instead, he’s up to his neck in the real time web as the CEO of Rogers-funded start-up Thoora.
“I’m spending 100% of my time on new growth,” said Lee in an interview with Cartt.ca. “I’m actually not that tied into cable or wireless.”
Being Canadian regulated industries, the growth yet available in cable, telecom and wireless is limited to Canada and has matured in some ways, so Lee is concentrating on what can be built and grown outside the Canadian playpen.
“Online is a high-growth area, but the challenge for Canadian companies is that there’s no such thing as the Canadian Internet… If you go at the Internet market and try to just be a Canadian version of something else that is online – it doesn’t make any sense,” said Lee. “So we’ve been focused on early-stage investment activity for technology start-ups. And our interest has been the plethora of opportunities that create revenue growth.”
Thoora is one of those web services which is hard to understand until you use it a little (and Lee has created and allowed us to publish an invite code for any interested Cartt.ca readers. Just go to Thoora.com, enter thoora4cartt as the invite code and you can get into the limited private beta for a look around), but the CEO describes it as “the best way to discover the news that the world is talking about, right now, in real time.”
Thoora’s proprietary algorithms index about 4,500 news sites and 80 million blogs as well as the whole Twitter stream – to identify what people are talking about on the web, rightthisverysecond. Put another way, Thoora reads the entire web and presents the most talked about stories from the best sources to users in an easy-to-digest way.
It quiets the noise – and in real time.
“Originally, it started as a group of Ph.D. students who had done some work in the industry, in search, who came to me and said: ‘We think that news, as a category, is really changing in the sense that it’s not about traditional news sources exclusively anymore. News, in the way it’s reported, in the way it evolves, is totally different just because the number of sources… and as a result of all that magnification it’s getting very complicated for people to get the story,’” recalls Lee.
So Thoora has since pulled together a multinational team, a “best-of-breed research team,” said Lee. “They actually have the of science behind what is on screen and in this platform.”
And there isn’t an editor in the bunch. Nobody here decides what the top stories are going to be. That comes from the data. Thoora indexes “in real-time every English news source on the Internet – all news sources worldwide… every blog in the world, and the entire Twitter stream,” explains Lee.
Then all that information is clustered together based on the stories involved. “So the story is the product.”
For example, if you do a search on Google News for Obama + health care, you’ll get keyword news from just about anywhere. “Sometimes it’s a document, sometimes it’s a blog post, sometimes it’s a news article, sometimes it’s an unrelated thing that just happens to have captured the picture,” said Lee.
Thoora, however, “can cluster the blog posts and the news and all the tweets based on the content of what the original reported story was. So it can get quite refined where that healthcare story is maybe many different stories, all with separate reactions. So ‘death panel’ is a different story than Joe Wilson’s comment on the Obama healthcare and him being a liar,” Lee said.
But if there are no editors deciding what’s important, what are the parameters built into the technology to dig out the value for the users?
“Everything from language analysis to the composition of a page to the types of stories that were written in the past by that (news writer, blogger or other author). It’s just about a hundred different factors they work into determining: a) whether or not it’s part of that story cluster; and then b) whether or not it’s a high-quality source.”
Thoora does not spit back thousands of blog posts or news sites that simply mention whatever the buzzing topic might be. “It boots to the top the most relevant and high-quality voices as determined by how everybody else is mostly reacting to the writing,” says Lee.
So, using an example from Lee, if Apple releases a new product, Thoora will know instantly when the web starts buzzing about it, but it will kick to the top of the story list articles by The New York Times technology columnist David Pogue, for example – or perhaps a more relevant perspective by a lone blogger who has something relevant to say.
It all depends on who or what Internet users are reacting to strongest. Thoora’s algorithms know that most of the sources are just reacting to the original piece or pieces and the technology automatically highlights the strongest, most relevant stories on any given topic.
So that means, unlike the traditional news competition, it’s not most important to be first – but to be the most talked about.
“We are not so much focused on who was the original source of the story. We’re focused on which piece generated the greatest amount of reaction. It’s quality as determined by how everybody’s responding to what you’re writing. In that sense, you can actually get at who reported the original story, yet you have to do searches and sorting in our structure. But our priority is not necessarily the original source of the story… What we’re trying to do is use the behavior of the greater audience of news – consumers, and contributors – to effectively create automated curation.”
While Thoora is nearly ready for launch, there are some bits to be sorted out. For example, because of time zones, if you look at Thoora’s sports feed through to the middle of the day, what’s risen to the top are international sports such as soccer, rugby and F1 auto racing, simply because while North America is still asleep or on its way to work, Europe and other regions are busily blogging and tweeting, dominating the buzz and causing their stories of interest to rise up the Thoora indices.
“We’re a beta right now and there are some very unique behaviors that exist online. Sports is one of those categories that we start to notice regionalism and so we’re trying to figure out how to put more tuning in it… how to tune this thing in the same way news is interpreted by region, as opposed to just being just global,” added Lee.
One aspect not yet turned on in the beta site is the sharing, or social media aspect, where people can talk on Thoora about what they see through Thoora. “This is inherently about sharing,” he added. And that is coming very soon.
So the big question surrounding Thoora (and any other web venture) is how will this make money? What’s the business plan?
“Two prongs. The first one is advertising. But news and advertising is not a great combo – Afghanistan war stories don’t sell well on the Internet. And so we think that there are certain categories within science and technology and other areas where there will be interesting advertising opportunities. There’s a search component that we still continue to work on right now, which will be a part of that because you’ll be able to do searches on any type of news based on which topics or areas of interest that you have.
“But then we’ve shown the product in various stages – and what you see right now is actually built on an underlying platform that has a lot more capability to analyze the news. And we’ve shown it to a lot of professional news organizations – mainly in the U.S. And everybody walks away with: ‘I really want to follow up and figure out how you can do this for me and… how to package something with a product… and there may be an interesting business-to-business subscription product there.
At the very least, it can show news organizations what stories have traction and which ones don’t.
“So it’s interesting we – the platform – will be able to catch certain news stories before traditional news get to them because we’re crawling in real-time, so we actually pick up spikes on stories and catch breaking stuff before electronic media gets to it,” said Lee.
“I think we can, in an automated way, deliver a lot of value which organizations are trying to figure how to bring to their subscribers… They are becoming more open to not just being traditional news reporters, but also reflecting how people are talking about stories as a valid part of the news community for their company. I think that we can bring value to that.”
