Competitor surveillance and selective customer addressing system FirmWatch.com

Project homepage:   www.FirmWatch.com (identical to these pages)
German test version (Deutsche Testversion):   www.FirmWatch.de

Objectives: The only system for comprehensive automatic competitor and market observation. Best price performance ratio in the area of the competitor and market observation.

So far it has been very time consuming to address customers in a focussed way and to observe competitors thoroughly. It is only with the advent of the internet that comprehensive information on these subjects can be retrieved quickly, easily, and anonymously. Compris Intelligence GmbH puts its intelligent text understanding and information extraction technology into action to identify automatically for each user potential customers and competitors. The services offered range from semi automatically created market overviews focussed on customers or competitors over regular e-mails with a summary of modifications in the monitored areas to the automatic generation of personalized messages to potential customers for automatic transmission by e-mail, fax, or letter.

Insight into the target group: Overview of customers and competitors

You as FirmWatch user initially need to tell the system how to identify your customer groups or your competitors: Directly through web addresses, link lists / bookmark files, through keywords that identify your target groups or competitors or simply through documents describing your product spectrum. FirmWatch.com uses that information as input to the relevant search engines and starts with its main work where those stop: The list of the web addresses will be searched by an "intelligent" web crawler aiming at the understanding of textual meaning. In particular it identifies different wordings of the same concept. The web crawler does almost completely automatically extract company addresses, legal form, web domains, contact persons, reference customers, co-operation partners, major shareholders, trade marks, patents, publications, technologies employed, composition of the (online) marketing mix, products with features & prices, customer opinions in news groups, known technical problems, announced products, product reviews by the technical press, for which departments people are being hired, information for/from the stock market, how well their web domain is known/frequented, marketing priorities, strategies and positioning, unique selling propositions, degree of professionalism. Dotting the i’s, especially completing and rearranging the mass of information into a clear shape is then done manually. With such information it is possible to address customers in a targeted and personalized way. Examples for wordings are: "In your product announcement for X you mention that you would like to improve aspect Y. We have a proven solution to that ...", "Since you’re marketing X, you certainly have to deal with problem Y ..", "For the industry segment X we offer ..", "For your activity in field X .."

Permanent surveillance and notification

As soon as all relevant information for identifying customers or competitor are stored, the web crawler won’t overlook even the smallest change: New products, adjusted features, prices, discounts, distribution conditions, new reference customers, dependencies, co-operations, business models and even new competitors. Furthermore, FirmWatch monitors new web domains, news groups, and news tickers to identify new developments and trends. The system reports fully automatically on all its findings and thus saves you plenty of time and vast manual research. As a result you can react early: with cooperation talks, better technology, lower prices or a marketing campaign.

Monitoring and tracking technological developments

Which are the patent applications and the research papers of a company and which products might result from it? Because this data is publicly accessible and searchable, it is easy to monitor them automatically and you can drastically reduce development risks this way: FirmWatch searches recent patent applications with the keywords from your development projects, databases with technical publications, and technical product descriptions. The advantages:

Concepts and how they are expressed: Similarities & relations are considered

The web crawler behind FirmWatch is equipped with a rich lexicon, which knows synonyms, generic terms and in other ways related concepts. For example the system knows the parts a car contains. Table structures, the way in which information is presented on web pages – all this is represented precisely on a very high level of abstraction. As a result, information can be extracted in a very robust and flexible manner. Even the greatest challenge – changes in design or arrangement of information – is thus no longer a problem.


 
 

Address

Compris Intelligence GmbH
Rheingönheimer Str. 79
67065 Ludwigshafen am Rhein
Germany
phone: (+49)(0)700-COMPRISTel (0700-26677478)
fax: (+49)(0)700-COMPRISFax (0700-26677473)

Internet: www.FirmWatch.com
E-Mail:products@compris.com



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