Connotate Brings High Value Mashups to Wall Street with New 2.0 Features    

New release enables a new class of financial research

NEW BRUNSWICK , NJ – October 30, 2007 - Connotate Technologies, Inc., the leading provider of solutions which transform information from the Web and enterprise into standardized, reliable information and applications, today announced the release of The New ResearchPlatform powered by Agent Community GEN2 V1.  The V1 release introduces a number of new Enterprise and Web 2.0 features, and furthers the platform’s capabilities as a research tool for idea generation, mashups and the detection of trading signals. 

“Connotate's solution provides me with information on product pricing, inventory levels, advertising spend, website conversion rates, unit orders, and other valuable unstructured data that is difficult to collect but highly valuable to analyze,” says Jason Jones, a hedge fund portfolio manager.  “These data points are inputs into my fundamental research process and help to enhance my conviction level when making investment decisions.”

Examples of The New Research Platform in Action

• Predicting a Revenue Surprise – In the second quarter of 2007, an Internet company announced a revenue shortfall resulting in a significant drop in their stock.  Connotate analysts were not surprised.  By “mashing up” product uptake data with pricing and other information a revenue shortfall was indicated.
  
  
• Analysis of Clinical Trials Predicative of Next Blockbuster Drug – The New Research Platform is used to provide detailed information about drug pipelines. While much detailed information is available on the Web, a holistic, analytic view is difficult without the Connotate solution.
  
  
• Generation of Ethanol Investment Thesis – Using primary data related to a combination of raw materials, producer and retail data, surprising price inversions were detected. Such inversions were seen both numerically and graphically using the Connotate solution.

The New Research

The world of Financial Research is changing. Recent regulations and legal settlements have dramatically changed the research landscape. Sell-side and buy-side now have access to the same information at the same time.  Market data is widely distributed and there is an overabundance of information on companies, industry sectors, government entities and regulations available on websites, blogs and chatrooms.  Increasingly, industry sources of information make it difficult to obtain original research.

The Web is the most comprehensive source of information ever created and the world’s largest database.  There are billions of websites and an estimated 600 billion+ Web pages. Despite the Web’s size and importance, access to it is severely limited.  Search engines like Google and Yahoo only index approximately 2 to 5% of the Web, and are unable to penetrate pages that require inputting information, links, passwords, etc.  Even the largest search engines spider the Web only once every two to four weeks, so dynamically-changing information cannot be easily identified.  Until now, no other capability has allowed access to the entire deep, changing and dynamic Web.

Highlights of The New Offering

The New Research Platform powered by Agent Community GEN2 V1 offers significant new functionality including:

Agent Portal  – A personalized, financial portal, the Agent Portal empowers business users to create applications “on-demand” by dragging and dropping Agent results. A variety of view types are available including graph, table and news. Mashups and views can be shared with the community or held privately.



Additional Agent Types – In addition to HTML, RSS, database and XML Agent types, new Agent types have been added. These include email, ftp, Excel and an intelligent spidering Agent type. Taken together, these Agent types provide rich access to information both on the Web and inside the enterprise.
  

Connotate Alerter and Toolbar – As Agents detect changes, signals, and important events, alerts are provided on the desktop with links to both the Agent Portal and to the source of the alert. Personalization limits unwanted noise. Significantly the Alerter in conjunction with the entire Connotate solution eliminates manual monitoring and most importantly causes the essential important information to “come to you.”

“According to The Intertek Group, the average analyst or fund manager spends 25-35% of their time searching for information,” says Bruce Molloy, CEO of Connotate. “Connotate’s intelligent software Agents change that. Now more time can be spent generating value and less time collecting information.”