You have probably already heard of Thoora, if you payed any attention to the TechCrunch50. I was there, and I recall Thoora being quite impressive.
Memory serves, Thoora might change the way that you get and monitor news.
There are too many aggregators out there. Thoora is much more than an agglomeration tool; it uses machine learning to track what is popular, and what is being said about it, everywhere on the internet. It is by far the best news collection tool that I have ever used.
Let’s take a look at the 4G story, something that I found by digging into the technology section of Thoora. It does not just link out to the story, it does this:
Amazing, no? We have the story rank, a total overview, an overview from a blog or news perspective, total tweets per hour, total comments, aggregate number of news and blog posts, stats, recent tweets, and related stories. Anything and everything about the story is right there, no extra hunting needed.
As a news-fanatic, that is as close to news-porn that I have ever seen. Thoora takes the concept of getting the story right, to a whole new level, and drops any bit of curation bias. I asked Thoora for a quick overview, and they told me this:
“News junkies and general news consumers do not have a way of identifying the news coverage, blog commentary and real time reaction in twitter that is most popular in real time on one story, until now.
Thoora provides users the ability to quickly discover the news stories that people are talking about the most right now and also find the most interesting contributions on the Internet related to that story. We bring users the big picture by being the only service getting the whole story – tearing down the silos of traditional news, blog posts and tweets.
The daily volume of news articles, blog posts, tweets and comments is overwhelming. The Thoora technology platform is the first in the world to index all facets of news and cluster them through machine learning techniques to identify all the relevant sources and discussions about each individual news story. News is now a real-time experience and Thoora is able to deliver that real time view for each story all on one page as the news evolves.”
Thoora is a brilliant product, if you do not need to track breaking news to the second. The company was founded in 2008, and has 17 employees, according to Crunchbase. They have also received 4.1 million dollars in seed funding.
However, even with funding and a great product, Thoora has yet to find its audience. According to Compete, Thoora reached less than ten thousand unique users in the last month. The company left private beta some two months ago. That should change in time, Thoora has built something that we should all try, and most of us should use.
Alex,
Thanks for this write up. We all are working away on making Thoora something really useful (and special) and we appreciate you taking notice.
Saul Colt
Thoora Evangelist
Thoora.com
I had a chance to see Thoora present at StartupCamp in Montreal a few months ago. The service is incredibly impressive. The only problem I have is I’m so used to the news “coming” to me now through RSS, Twitter, etc. instead of going out to look for it. For that reason, I find myself checking their site much less than I should.
So let’s get this straight, Rogers funds Zoocasa.com which really does nothing useful other than make real estate searching somewhat prettier yet offers a fraction of the available listings (hence useless to consumer). As if Zoocasa.com wasn’t enough of a bust, they get sued by Century 21. Rogers fail, 0-1.
Now, Rogers funds Thoora, a competitor to, get this, Google News!! Yes, that’s right. Google News. Because typing ’4G’ into Google News is too difficult for most people, so we need a new news aggregator that looks a little prettier and gives you some robot-generated statistics that I have absolutely zero use or attention for? Ever heard of Daylife.com? It’s far better, far more useful than Thoora and they’ve been around a while. Guess what? Daylife’s traffic is down almost 40% from a year ago. Why? Because people don’t need Daylife, and they won’t need Thoora either.
Good luck Rogers. 0-2! What else ya got cookin?
hey Jeff,
The staff at Thoora are very proud of what we have accomplished and we think Thoora is different. if you ever want to chat about it feel free to drop me an email at saul@thoora.com
Saul Colt
Thoora Evangelist
Thoora.com
Jeff,, Thoora might end up failing, I agree. but those companies zoocasa and Thoora might also end up being successful and Rogers is simply giving chances to new start-ups and there is nothing wrong or stupid about helping start-ups
I kind of agreed with the panel at the TC50. It was overwhelming with the amount of data. For news junkies Thoora is great. I think their UI is cool and they do a lot of aggregating together.
I personally think that personalization is more important then aggregation. There is too much news out there and filtering is key. My company, BuzzBox.com, is targeting people who want that.
The key point all the companies are hitting on, is that users want more than the newspapers and Google News deliver. We want to be satisfied being informed and we don’t have a solution right now. We want a Google for News. Something you use and it just feels right.
Any comments are appreciated.
Anu
@Jeff
Regardless of success or failure Rogers should be applauded for experimenting and investing in innovative ideas & people. Your analysis is far too granular especially as it pertains to Rogers and thus misses the big picture entirely.
Thoora has great Middle Ware potential.
CNN would pay big bucks for access to their tech. All big news corps are afraid of missing big stories. These stories are more and more breaking on the internet first. Thoora-like products could help them in spotting trends.
Just curious, what did Jeff mean when he said “typing 4G”?
My word, that is impressive! Congratulations to the Thoora people. That is a really good combination of information about what is happening.