The company reported on its 2nd quarter progress as follows:

"As of June 30, 1998, more than 1,100,000 paid, registered or authorized users were signed up to NewsEdge services, an increase of more than 40% in new user growth in the last twelve months. The Company counted approximately 1,200 enterprise customers, up 17% over the previous year total, with approximately 350,000 users. In addition, there were over 750,000 Internet and other single worker users of the NewsEdge NewsPage, Netscape Business Journal by NewsEdge and other single worker business news services."

Company Information from Hoovers

The company recently announced that its newly released version of NewsEdge Insight gives users access to Company Capsules from Hoover's Online. Uses can link from a news story to a Hoover's Company Capsule that includes a company description, address, fax and phone numbers, the names of key officers and top competitors, direct links to each company's Web site, current and historical financial information, and more. The capsules are updated daily by Hoover's editorial staff of more than 100 researchers, writers, and editors. Insight users can also access more than 40 Hoover's Industry Snapshots. Each snapshot includes a detailed industry overview, names of major players, spending and sales estimates, definitions of industry jargon, and more.

Actually, Hoover's is a busy company too. With its reputation for high quality information, it has proven to be an attractive content provider for many information services. Hoover's Company Information is also available through more than 30 Internet and online services, including America Online, Infoseek, Microsoft, and Reuters.

Product Enhancements

NewsEdge Insight Web 4.1 is available for Internet, intranet, and workgroup-based configurations. It has been enhanced with personalized e-mail alerts and e-mail news delivery, as well as adding the grab-and-go capability to download a set of stories for reading offline. Version 4.1 also incorporates an upgrade of NewsEdge's Internal Publisher, which allows NewsEdge customers to publish their own internal corporate news or research from multiple in-house sources. In addition, the new version of Insight doubles the news-feed delivery and archiving capabilities of the earlier version.

NewsEdge Insight is actually a family of products that includes Individual's First! For Intranet, Notes, fax, and e-mail, and Desktop Data's NewsEdge Notes and NewsEdge/Web products. A company representative noted that with the merger there were some complementary products and some that were "somewhat redundant." The company has worked to streamline them into four distinct product lines. Information can be found on the company Web site (http://www.newsedge.com).

Earlier in August, NewsEdge announced the release of personalized news alerting and other upgrades in NewsObjects 2.0, a new version of its ActiveX-based news toolkit. NewsObjects now includes a component that issues an instant alert when specific news breaks. NewsObjects is part of the NewsEdge NewsTools family of products that allow corporate and commercial third-party programmers to embed news content into enterprise-level applications as well as public Web sites.

Web Outlets

NewsEdge also announced that it would deliver daily, targeted news to Yahoo! Small Business (http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com), a new Web resource designed to meet the needs of the growing small business community. The news service covers a range of small business categories, including communications, human resources, legal, sales and marketing, finance, tax, and other areas. In the spring, NewsEdge had announced an agreement to provide business research for the Netscape Netcenter online service, specifically, Business Journal by NewsEdge (http://www.netscape.com/netcenter/businessjournal).

The NewsEdge for Extranets program was also recently introduced. Targeted at existing NewsEdge customers building extranet sites, the program is designed to enhance corporate extranets with highly targeted news stories of daily interest to a company's clients, partners, resellers, or other constituencies. In a partnership recently forged with Inso Corp., the NewsEdge Review Topics1,400 industry-specific subjects culled from over 500 worldwide news sourcescan now be displayed on intranet and extranet sites created with Inso Corp.'s new DynaBase 3.0 release. The resulting XML-based syndication system and publishing platform debuted at the Seybold San Francisco Publishing 98 trade show the first week in September.

NewsEdge is working hard to tailor its product lines to meet a diverse range of corporate and individual needs with a variety of features and delivery modes. It even offers the free NewsPage service, which provides personalized business news delivered over the Web. While it's not clear on the site while registering for NewsPage, there are actually three levels of service. After a 30-day free trial, users can opt for a premium subscription for $6.95 a month, or revert to free basic service that lacks some news sources. There is also additional content (beyond the premium content) available on a pay per view basis.