ReadWriteWeb

FirstRain is a web research tool-suite that markets itself to buy-side professionals in hedge funds. It costs $10k per year per user and is today announcing a distribution deal with CapitalIQ, an upstart Bloomberg competitor. That price is less than a Bloomberg box, but it's still a substantial chunk of change. What kind of emerging research tools are available for financial players at that kind of price-point?

FirstRain offers features that many of us who do business on the web would love to have, wether we buy and sell financial abstractions or not. What's offered is qualitative analysis of search results through more intelligent filtering than is available in any other tool I know of. The feature set feels oddly within reach, too, if only we had a small army of algorithm developers at our disposal. Check out the screenshots below.