Get Noise-free Updates on Companies with News API

API or "application programming interface" enables different computer software, mobile apps, or websites, to securely exchange information with each other. A News API connects software applications with online sources of information such as news websites, company websites, government and regulatory portals, product review sites, discussion forums, individual blogs, and more.

News API systems work by scraping text from websites and parsing it to extract the headline, date, author, body text, etc. Advanced News API providers also remove duplicates and enrich the information by tagging contextual meta-data such as companies mentioned, business events, locations, etc. They utilize AI technologies such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML), and text analytics to tag this contextual meta-data.

News APIs provide programmatic access to this aggregated and enriched data in a standardized format that can be ingested into other applications.

News APIs allow organizations to fetch relevant information and ingest it into their internal applications, intranet portals, ERP, CRM, and KMS. Organizations use this information to monitor, analyze, and interpret recent developments in their market and competitive landscape. This helps them to identify new opportunities, potential threats, and hidden risks, providing insights to help them strategize for the future.

Advanced News APIs providers offer news feeds that are customized to specific use cases. For example, organizations can choose to customize the information by:

• Industry segment, business events, topics of interest, etc.
• Type of information (news, press releases, blogs, social media, etc), sources, etc.
• Geographies and languages that are relevant to their business

Manually visiting thousands of websites and selecting only the relevant information on specific topics, industries, or companies is not a viable option. It takes up too much time, and doing it consistently on a daily basis without error is extremely challenging. Also, RSS aggregators cannot be used for comprehensive coverage because not all websites offer RSS feeds. In addition, manually filtering out information that is duplicate, similar, or irrelevant from a near-infinite volume of online information is impossible. News APIs are a technology solution that make it possible.

Organizations across industries and geographies are leveraging News APIs in many creative ways. Some common use cases are:

• News aggregation app or website for a specific domain or target audience: Organizations use News APIs to launch specialized apps or websites by aggregating valuable content around a topic that they deeply understand. They combine information that is fetched from multiple sources and curate it for their audience. (More information on how news feed APIs have helped Targeted News Service (TNS) build a reliable open-source intelligence solution).
• Market and competitive intelligence program: Organizations drive fully-tailored market and competitive intelligence programs by integrating News APIs with their intranet portals, ERP, CRM, and KMS. The continuous stream of relevant news updates from News APIs benefits all the stakeholders and facilitates informed decision-making.
• Sales triggers and account intelligence: Organizations enable their salespeople by sharing updates, also known as sales triggers, that create new opportunities with their prospects and existing customers. Custom News APIs can help in setting up sales triggers that are uniquely configured to an organization’s sales function, e.g., business expansion, partnerships & alliances, new offerings, funding rounds, etc.
• Identify trends using advanced data analytics: Organizations build sophisticated data models using high-quality datasets from News APIs. They extract insights from the data using NLP and use the data to train machine learning models to surface industry trends that may impact their business goals.
• Add new features and/or enhance existing functionality: Organizations add new features to their customer-facing products, applications and/or launch new products that leverage custom News APIs to provide additional value to their users.
• Supply chain risk intelligence and supplier monitoring: Global organizations track their suppliers to spot any potential risk to their supply chain. They need to continuously assess various risks associated with their suppliers in different geographies. A custom News API that is configured to track specific risk signals for a given list of suppliers helps in developing early warning systems with unmatched accuracy.

Choosing the right news API depends on an organization’s requirements. A few things that an organization should keep in mind when choosing a News API should be:

• Sources / Coverage: How many, and what kind of sources are covered by the News API provider? Big media outlets like New York Times or BBC News may not be relevant for an organization’s business use case. Organizations need updates from company websites, product review sites, or regulatory bodies from a specific country. They should ask for detailed information from their API provider on the sources and coverage offered.
• Quality of information: The quality or relevancy of information for an organization’s use case is an important evaluation criteria. It is wise to always ask for a free trial of the News APIs and check the relevancy of the real-time updates for a specific use case.
• Ease of integration: Organizations should ensure that they choose a News API that allows easy integration of information with their application. The endpoints of the APIs should be flexible enough to provide different ways to ingest the information. It is important to check its documentation beforehand, and then share it with developers.

Contify was founded in 2009 as a News APIs provider. Since then it has been providing custom industry news feeds to some of the most respected information providers such as Dow Jones (Factiva), Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, LexisNexis, and more. Over the years, Contify has developed one of the largest known business information crawling infrastructures, in addition to a highly-accurate meta-data tagging system. It has managed to do that by training AI algorithms using large datasets.

The information in Contify is aggregated from over 500,000 sources including online news, company websites, trade publications, social media, regulatory portals, review websites, job boards, etc.

Contify’s News APIs offer some stand-out features to its users including:

• Flexible End-Points: Users can fetch the information that is precise and relevant to their use case with the help of pre-configured metadata that is added by Contify to the aggregated information. Contify offers options to build a custom news feed using a combination of parameters such as companies, business events, industries, country, or the type of content, e.g., news articles, social media updates, marketing resources, job postings, regulatory filings.
• Integrate Own Sources: Contify allows users to easily integrate their preferred sources for fetching relevant data from any publicly available source across the internet.
• Multi-Language Support with SmartTranslate: Multi-language support enables users to source, categorize and structure updates in a manner consistent with their specific business requirements. Contify also provides multi-language support through SmartTranslate so that users can translate information from any foreign language to their local language.
• Contextual Noise-Filtering Algorithms: Contify’s proprietary NER, NLP, deduplication and disambiguation algorithms ensure that users get clean updates that are relevant, structured, and machine-readable.
• Customized Taxonomy and API Endpoints: Contify lets users create their own taxonomy, which can be used to tag information based on their specific business objectives. Contify combines AI and machine-learning technologies with human intelligence to add subjective business context and delivers updates that are tagged with the user’s taxonomy. In Contify, these tags or a combination of them can be used as endpoints.
• Webhooks: Contify also offers Webhooks so that updates are pushed to the user’s application servers in real-time, and removes any delays in receiving the information. Webhooks are ideal when the information delivery is time sensitive, such as in stock trading applications.