You may have seen that Parse.ly was featured in a TechCrunch article a couple of days ago. It was a great writeup by Sarah Perez, and we wanted to share it with you here.

Parse.ly Will Launch Its Pageview-Generating Machine Called “Dash” This Month:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/03/parse-ly-will-launch-its-pageview-generating-machine-called-dash-this-month/

The article actually includes a few screen shots of Dash that had not been seen before, so this is really the first public look at Dash. Now that it’s out in the open though, we encourage you to take a look!

Here’s a quick summary of the article as well: 

Parse.ly has been in stealth mode, but we’ll be launching Dash publicly this month. We have had an amazing group of early adopters that have helped us tweak Dash until we got it just right. Now, we have a fine tuned product that is designed specifically for large-scale content publishers…the biggest publishers in the world honestly. Dash is designed to help publishers maximize their pageviews by surfacing insightful trends and directly actionable opportunities. We’re taking predictive analytics into new territories. 

There’s much more to Dash, and you’ll be hearing more about it very soon. For now, definitely check out the TechCrunch article. Say hello and follow us on Twitter for more updates! 

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• TechCrunch
• Parse.ly
• Dash
• Predictive Analytics

Parse.ly Dash - Insights for the web’s best publishers…

Sounds great right? But who are some of these publishers and what type of insights can you expect from Parse.ly? Well, you’ll have to wait just a bit longer for a full answer, but here’s what we can tell you now….

Our semantic analytics have been breath of fresh air to editorial, audience development, analytics, and ad sales teams at some of the biggest content publishers on the web. We are finishing up what has proven to be a very successful pilot program and are really excited for the public launch of Dash (coming very soon!). 

We’ll have much more info to come, so make sure you check back with us, or drop us a line now. We’d love to hear from you.

 

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• Parse.ly
• Dash

In an excellent article discussing some software engineers’ transitions from working on Wall Street to working on startups, our very own Parse.ly CTO, Andrew Montalenti, is profiled.

You can imagine the surprise when we discovered the article as the top choice in our Parse.ly team account today (see above!).  How very meta.

A relevant quote:

[…] soon the work grew redundant, Mr. Montalenti said, and the problems he was asked to solve as part of his day-to-day responsibilities started to seem technically uninteresting. Like many other creatively inclined, intellectually ambitious programmers who took high-paying jobs on Wall Street after college, Mr. Montalenti found himself disillusioned and restless.

Then, in March of last year, he did something very few people in his predicament have the guts to do: He quit his job and founded a company of his own with one of his best friends.

“I’d just like to be able to point to at least one thing after 15 years of working as a software engineer and say, ‘I built that thing,’” said Mr. Montalenti, who, at 26, is now happily running Parse.ly, a Web-based recommendation service.

Click here to read more from Observer.com.

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• Parse.ly
• Andrew Montalenti
• Startups

Mike Singleton of FourSquare recently wrote a blog post entitled, “Algorithms as a Service”:

I think there’s a market opportunity to crease an AAS (algorithms as a service) company which provides simple APIs to implementations of common algorithms… Algorithms as a service would give you development efficiency, problem scalability (access to CPU farms), and confidence in the results.

Andrew chimed in with this:

I think what you’ve identified is that some APIs are about getting data into and out of an existing system that sort of lives on its own — e.g., Twitter’s, FourSquare’s, Flickr’s.

Then, other APIs are about abstracting certain problems and simplifying them to a simple API call. These are “algorithms as a service”.

So, in this category I put things like OpenCalais.com (entity extraction algorithms) and SimpleGeo.com (geolocation algorithms). I also put my own startup, Parse.ly, in this category; see http://parse.ly/p3 and http://parse.ly/api. For Parse.ly, what we’re doing is simplifying the following painful steps:

1) parsing and cleaning RSS/Atom feeds and other content sources in near-real-time
2) building personalized “resonance profiles” for different users that can be trained and queried
3) delivering personalized recommendations (Amazon/Netflix-style) of content to users, that can be listed, searched, and filtered

Our whole value proposition is that, yes, you could build algorithms to do personalized recommendations yourself and in-house, but it’s hard. There’s a lot of infrastructure that goes along with it. Your engineering team will spend months — not days — getting it right. So, why not just plug into our nice API instead?

I don’t think it needs a new name — it’s just an evolution of APIs and SaaS given the growing needs of developers to build more complex, dynamic applications and their increasing willingness to license best-of-breed 3rd-party platforms to do so.

January was an exciting month for Parse.ly. At the end of 2009, we were heads-down, polishing our own “algorithms-as-a-service” offering. We aligned our development around a public launch of it at the SIIA Information Industry Summit in NYC, where we were invited to present. Sachin gave a great presentation; here’s what one blogger had to say about it:

Parse.ly, a semantic tool that recommends content, steers users towards content towards personalization and recommendation through their licensed content. When and how [do] personalization really happen? […] Parse.ly collects a little personal interest information from users, “listens” to their content habits and provides recommendations that can be embedded in any number of content applications. Market segmentation data and other demographics fall out of this information naturally. Parse.ly is available to publishers now for integration via their new P3 platform.

At the same time as launching the Parse.ly Publisher Platform (P3), we also put online our API docs and made it possible for you get an API key. Then, we started conversations with some great brands in online / digital publishing (household names, even) about using our platform. These conversations have been going really well — almost too well! These companies know how much more valuable their online properties would be if they were built around engaging, personalized recommendations in the Amazon/Netflix style. And they have a lot of ideas about how to use the data and recommendations P3 will give them. We’ve already started to mock up new user interfaces for our API to make the integration with publishers as smooth as possible.

We’re excited for this new direction for Parse.ly. We agree with Mike that there are opportunities all around us to simplify algorithmically-tough problems to simple and highly-usable APIs. This will not only make web developers more productive, but it will also make the websites we use daily more useful and powerful!

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Sorry for the lack of posts recently, but we’ve been busy changing and improving Parse.ly for the better!

We did, though, get picked up by a couple popular blogs in the past few weeks. Here a few snippets from both ReadWriteWeb and ZDNet.

Bloggers, muckrakers and news fanatics, lend me your ears. It’s entirely possible that we’ve discovered one of the best approaches to media monitoring since RSS itself. My mother always said, “You’ll never get what you want unless you ask.” But with adaptive feed application Parse.ly, that simply isn’t true. Rather than forcing us to abandon our overflowing feed readers, Parse.ly records our preferences and learns to work with us.

ReadWriteWeb 11/11/09

I haven’t figured out a way to manage Google Reader. I tried using Fever, but it doesn’t find news that matters to me… and it cost $30.  Techmeme is my home page, but I think it needs an upgrade.  I would like a feed reader that saves favorite feeds for me, and finds other content that is similar and interesting.

A new product called Parse.ly caught my eye that makes content discovery a painless process.

ZDNet - The Web Life 11/24/09

Check out our press page for more articles written about Parse.ly.  We’ll update you soon about what we have in store for the future!

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• zdnet
• Press
• readwriteweb
• Parse.ly
• fever
• Cog Tree

Hi Parse.ly fans.  Andrew here.  I just wanted to let you know that I presented Parse.ly at the NYC Search & Discovery Meetup on Thurs, Oct. 29.  The meetup is organized by Otis Gospodnetic (blog), who is one of the authors of Lucene in Action and the author of the forthcoming Solr in Action book.  It was graciously hosted at kgbweb (thanks for making that happen, Joe West!).

We make heavy use of Lucene and Solr on Parse.ly, so it was exciting to get an opportunity to present to a community of fellow technologists building systems with these excellent technologies.

Here is the abstract from the talk:

Parse.ly: Inside a modern RIA built with Solr
Andrew Montalenti
—-
Parse.ly is a rich, adaptive web application that discovers your unique interests to filter and prioritize content from countless news and blog sources on the web. This talk will introduce Parse.ly with a quick demo and then delve right into how the Parse.ly engineering team makes use of the Solr open source search engine. This will include discussion of initial design mistakes that were later revised and “real world issues” that were overcome in scaling a system that currently processes millions of articles per week. Finally, we will discuss the existing Solr and Python landscape, and how we at Parse.ly aim to help the Solr community with the open source release of high-quality, Pythonic components for doing common Solr tasks.

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• Cog Tree

Sorry Parse.ly users, but one of our servers unexpectedly failed on us. As a result, we took Parse.ly down.  We’re working hard now roll our backups over to our failsafe and get Parse.ly back up and running.  We should back to normal in a few hours.  We’ll update this post when we’re all good to go.

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• error
• Sorry
• Parse.ly

Andrew’s a lifetime New Yorker. He grew up in the city and Long Island (and now lives in Astoria, Queens), and has always been a fan of the New York. I’ve been in NYC for the past eight years bouncing between Mnhattan and Brooklyn (I just moved to Ft. Greene this past weekend), and have grown to love the city

Well, this past week we had the opportunity — the privilege — to present Parse.ly (our baby) at NYC Demo Day, an event focused exclusively on New York City, early-stage startups.  You can check out some photos of Andrew and I presenting here.

The event was a blast, as evidenced by Andrew’s inexplicably happy face after it was over (see the photos to see what I mean).  Good luck to all the companies: Renthop, Trendsta, SECWatch, LegalRiver, Sensobi, Localytics, Seatgeek, Postling … and, of course, Parse.ly!

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• Parse.ly
• Cog Tree

If you were trying to log into Parse.ly between 11pm-1am this Sunday, you may have noticed that it was intermittently down for maintenance.  Over the last several weeks, we’ve been working hard to roll out some new features, polish some rough edges, and improve our infrastructure after our launch last month.  Our first beta users have been amazing in providing us with detailed and specific feedback on what works and doesn’t work well within Parse.ly.  We’ve diligently addressed many of the issues raised by these users and rolled out a new version of Parse.ly this weekend.

So, what’s new in Parse.ly?

• Faster archiving and deleting: many users have complained that archiving and deleting items in Parse.ly was extremely slow.  This was a shortcoming of the beta release we pushed out in August, and we have now rectified this issue.  Archiving and deleting should be very speedy, and bulk archives/deletes are just as fast as single ones now.


• Keyboard shortcuts: we bill Parse.ly as the most productive way to read the news, but our initial beta users noticed that one productivity feature we are sorely lacking is keyboard shortcuts.  We have implemented an experimental cut of keyboard shortcuts in the latest release.  Simply click inside the article grid (under “Current Items”) and press the question mark key (?).  This will bring up a message box with a list of our keyboard shortcuts.  They are very similar to GMail’s; for example, e archives an item, and shift+i marks an item as read.


• Username casing problems: we had a silly bug where your username was case-sensitive, even though we use e-mail addresses for usernames.  This has been addressed and so now you can use any case you like for your username.


• Better De-duplication: we did include a deduplicator in our initial beta release, and we thought it was working pretty well: nearly 50% of the articles processed by our crawler were being deduped.  However, many users reported duplicates in their accounts, and when we investigated, we saw that there were many scenarios that fooled our deduper and resulted in an unpleasant reading experience.  In particular, resyndicated articles (e.g., those republished after a press release) often had similar titles/summaries but were not exactly the same.  So we have included a more aggressive deduper that makes use of fuzzy string matching and seems to work better in the testing we have done so far.


• Better sources: we are continuing to improve the breadth and depth of Parse.ly’s sources.  We have restructured our crawler so that it gets access to sources that weren’t available before, and also better delivers content based upon your interests.


• More frequent crawls: many users were reporting that crawls wouldn’t happen often enough for them, so they wouldn’t see articles published e.g. in their twitter feed right away in Parse.ly.  We have re-engineered our crawl infrastructure to be much more performant, which will mean fresher content inside Parse.ly for you.


• You can kill the Parse.ly share bar: when you click a link inside Parse.ly, we top-frame it to allow you to share it easily with your friends.  However, users rightfully complained that they wanted the ability to easily remove this bar from any page.  You spoke, we listened! :-)


• Password recovery: some users forgot their passwords and we simply forgot to implement a password recovery feature in our initial release.  It’s there now.


• User profile editing: users can now change their password from inside the UI.  This was an obvious feature just plain missing from the initial release.

• Better performance when adding new interests: before, there was a bit of a lag when you entered in interests.  This should be fixed now.


• E-mail is sent to user upon initial setup: some of our users were rightfully confused when they entered in their interests and … nothing happened.  We aren’t activating accounts right away, but at the very least, we should send you an e-mail to let you know that your interest entry actually worked!  This is fixed now.

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• release
• DreamItVentures
• Parse.ly
• Cog Tree

We’re rolling out a new version of Parse.ly this weekend, so the service may be up and down intermittently while that happens.  We’ll update our blog once the new version is rolled out to let everyone know what has changed.  Stay tuned!

Update (9/16/2009): after some additional testing, we’ve decided to delay the production rollout of the new version of Parse.ly until later this week.  As promised, we’ll write up a full blog post about it once it’s online.

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• Parse.ly