The View from Congoo, a personal note from co-founder Rafael Cosentino
Continuing our tour of Congoo’s corporate headquarters, here’s a personal message directly from Congoo’s co-founder Rafael Cosentino:
What’s great about Congoo? Congoo is the only technology that allows users to get access to subscription content without a subscription. Congoo’s patented Netpass code runs in the content management systems of subscription partner websites like eContent, Zacks, the Wall Street Journal, Morningstar, Harvard Health and many others. Because other search engines cannot provide access to these subscription links, they don’t display them in search results or news channels…can you believe hat? So there are literally thousands of sources of the highest quality content that go unnoticed at the point users search or browse news channels.
How to access Premium Content?
Publishers are faced with a daunting question in a hot ad market too. “How can I let non-subscribers into my content so that I make more ad revenue without cannibalizing existing subscription revenue?” By limiting the amount of free articles that we allow users to access, Congoo creates a solution for publishers and users. The vast majority of users don’t want unlimited access to subscription content; they only want to read occasional personally relevant articles so the solution works well for everyone. Best of all the process is patented so you won’t find other portals providing that service. Congoo’s search strategy is to provide the same information you would find on a typical search result and then to add a layer of premium content plus the free access piece. Congoo is capitalizing on the fact that search results are a commodity and that no other portal can duplicate the unique access component.
CONGOO’S News Channel is also very unique.
Dare I say “Congoo is the most comprehensive source for news on the Web”- and its not just because we provide headlines from more sources than any other provider. Let’s address the current problem with consuming news first. Lots of people think RSS is great but actually it’s not so great for a few reasons when you think about it. The first is that less than 5% of Web users utilize RSS so its not mainstream at all. The second reason is that if I know what to do with RSS, it’s a one dimensional solution that does not suit my multi-dimensional news needs. If I am a person interested in news about newspaper publishing then why would I subscribe to a RSS feed from Editor & Publisher when that feed only contains Editor and Publisher’s news? Subscribing to anything less then every single RSS feed available on the Web means that you want to limit the news that you are exposed to. Lots of other sources write news about newspaper publishing. OK, once you realise that I want to see all stories related to a subject, and not just from a few niche sources you get past the RSS thing real fast. So let’s talk about keyword news searchers and their ineffectiveness. If you work in the agriculture industry, you will want to view news stories that directly affect the agricultural industry. Performing a keyword search for the word “agriculture” however is basically useless because many of the most important stories that impact agriculture don’t contain the keyword “agriculture.” Conversely, many articles that have little to do with agriculture do contain the keyword. So again, staying current in an industry is nearly impossible using single sources like RSS or subject focused keyword searches. This is precisely why we designed Congoo’s new platform the way we did.
How Congoo works
Everyday Congoo indexes around 200,000 news articles from over 25,000 news sources. We do not limit the sources that we pull from. Congoo then clusters all of those articles by subject into nearly 500 subject focused channels like agriculture, robotics, nanotechnology and genetics. Once the articles are tagged for subjects, Congoo’s technology clusters articles into stories. Today (when Rafael wrote this) you’ll see that there are 34 articles about the White House calling former president Jimmy Carter irrelevant. Even though there are 34 articles, they are all the same story, so Congoo clusters them together.
The Last Word
We believe the nuances are what make commodity services extraordinary. We are working hard on launching a new feature very shortly which will again prove to be a step above what the others are doing by providing technology that simplifies and provides access.
Thanks!
Rafael Cosentino
Co-founder Congoo & VP of Business Development
