"By coupling the new service with either Dialog NewsRoom or Dialog Profound, users can be instantly alerted to news as it is breaking and then immediately gather the analysis and perspective they need to react quickly and intelligently," said Murphy. "We've married the automated tools to proactively track news with the ability to put that news into its proper context all in a seamless, friendly, online environment."

Dialog Live News works as a push technology that prompts users whenever news matching their profiled interests occurs. Users can create up to 10 profiles, preferably using the SmartTerms thesaurus. SmartTerms is a proprietary indexing system Dialog uses to classify its business content and includes more than 855,000 terms. Murphy said, "This is the same syntax that works with Profound and NewsRoom. It is a tab within Dialog NewsEdge, but a cool stand-alone scrolling system on its own. We wanted to take the technology and make it available on our Web products without requiring special software and servers." Users can view the information while logged into Dialog Live News or detach it and run it as a desktop application simultaneously with other desktop activities.

In creating the Live News product, according to Murphy, Dialog gets its content direct from news feeds through relationships with providers. In contrast, the free, e-mailed, daily alerts from Google News (4,200 sources) and Yahoo! News (7,000 sources) rely on Web spidering. Currency in Live News is often faster than print publication or Web release, Murphy said. Users click on a scrolling headline to view the full text of a news story. According to Murphy, tests show that people tend to use Live News by detaching it. They get it in the morning and then have it sit resident, ready to expand and shrink in an open window. At present, the service also offers brief archives running back 7 days. (In contrast, the NewsRoom archives go back as far as 30 years and cover 10,000 sources.) Users can click on a "history" tab to reach the archives, choosing from a number of options, e.g., last hour, last day, etc.

Content coverage in Dialog Live News aims at business information, such as company announcements, shifting market conditions, crisis events, earning announcements, product launches, geopolitical developments, economic indicators and regulatory announcements, etc. It also includes such news-related sources as Securities and Exchange Commission EDGAR reports of public company financials.

The new Novus platform hosts other Dialog services as well as Live News. In March, Dialog introduced versions of Dialog Profound and Dialog NewsRoom on the new platform. In 2005, new versions of Dialog Intelliscope and Dialog NewsEdge are scheduled for launching on the same platform. The same user-friendly interface works now for all five services. The interface lets users move quickly between related arrays of content from each service. At present, the grouping of content sources is set by Dialog's packaging of sources, but Murphy said that we can expect to see user-specified groupings before the end of the year. At the same time, users will be offered a "My SmartTerms" service that allows them to save certain taxonomy terms as a group, e.g., sets of geographic or industry terms.

Subscription prices vary for Dialog Live News, generally based on the number of users, but pre-bundled for NewsEdge subscribers. Murphy indicated that a minimal stand-alone subscription for 1 to 10 users might cost $12,000 a year, while a 100-user configuration could run $50,000. I asked Murphy how the Dialog Live News service would compete with the free news alert services from Google or Yahoo!. She said, "It is good for crisis management. Trusting in Web sources is questionable. The origin of the services is financial services and people who monitor themselves or competitors, e.g., pharmaceutical or chemical firms keen to get a drug out or to find a licensing opportunity. At present we do no monitoring of Web sites. We have not decided on that yet. We must understand the value of our product and how to differentiate it."

Around the same time as the launch of Dialog Live News, Dialog also announced two partnership relationships targeted at delivering business news into enterprises. Elsag Solutions AG (http://www.elsag-solutions.com), a European leader in information chain management solutions, produces the Sentinel system used by corporations and government agencies, mostly in German-speaking regions. Under the new agreement, a range of Dialog business news, information, and research content will be released to Elsag's Sentinel subscribers. Elsag and Dialog executives expect business news to be the major content of interest.

Plumtree Software has added real-time news, stocks, and weather portlets powered by Dialog to its Plumtree Enterprise Web Suite. The News Portlets select articles from leading global news sources with a 30-day news archive. The Stock Portlet accesses more than 40 global market indices, plus price and volume charts, real-time company-specific news, and a 30-day company news archive. The Weather Portlet has 5-day weather forecasts for most U.S. cities and 500 international cities.