What if someone could read through all the newspapers, magazines, newsletters, press releases, blogs, and other news sources available on the Internet each morning and hand you the 10 to 40 items that mostly closely match your business interests?That's what a service introduced today, called FirstRain Financial, aims to do. For $10,000 to $50,000 per user per year, the service searches through the 30,000 sources the Foster City, Calif., company has determined to be most relevant to the financial industry and sends customers early-morning (either 5:00 or 8:00 a.m.) email alerts with the articles that match their profile. Customers are typically buy-side investors and analysts.

"We help customers find interesting information that would affect the way they think about their investments, that allows them to ask and answer better questions about their investments, to generate ideas and to identify trends," says Penny Herscher, president and CEO of FirstRain. "In addition to classic news feeds and blogs, we look at all kinds of obscure sources of information, like international local newspapers, industry specific periodicals, government filings and company web sites."

In addition to the daily pre-market emails, subscribers to FirstRain Financial gain access to a portal on which they can select a company and see a cluster of themes and trends affecting that company, as well as news articles about the company, its competitors, its suppliers and customers.

FirstRain's search technology is a mostly home-grown combination of Web crawling, categorization, extraction, clustering and matching tools. A staff of 100 people in New Delhi configure the search engine for customers.