The Internet has been busy revolutionizing how we communicate, disseminate information, and more. This has meant big changes in almost every industry. The biggest changes are happening in the traditional news media, however, where yesterday’s business model is no longer relevant.
TeamStream.com is a project by the people behind WotNews (formerly Plugger) who’ve been working with semantic technology for search. The plan behind TeamStream is to take what they’ve learned with WotNews (and its sister sites like CelebrityHunted) and make a sustainable business model for news.
Aimed at the corporate market, TeamStream is a collaborative news reading platform. Using semantic search and social technologies, the service collects news from the around the Web, which is indexed and searched in near-real-time by the user.
Daily feeds based on subject, source, etc. can be built by each user, who receives them and can read and share within their collaborative team.
So an organization can then use and disseminate news inside itself as needed, skipping the fluff of irrelevant news and keeping shared news private within the company (no Facebook or Twitter here). The sharing includes annotation and alert statuses to mark importance and ad commentary.
Basically, where WotNews is a single-user news source, TeamStream is a collaborative one. Founder and Lead Programmer Stephen Phillips of TeamStream says that they noticed several people from the same organizations (by IP or email address) using WotNews and its sister sites simultaneously.
Phillips guessed that they were collaborating through other networks and probably not very effectively. He saw the opportunity to provide tools to do that within the WotNews system and the idea for TeamStream grew from there.
For organizations that need instant news that they can collaborate on (say blog networks), TeamStream seems to fit the bill perfectly. It is currently in beta until December 1, when it will move to a paid service.
