Competitive intelligence, software robots and the Internet: the NewsAlert prototype

The Internet offers managers and executives a vast array of untapped data that can be applied to issues of competitive intelligence. The exponential growth in the Internet has made it virtually impossible for managers and executives to track these data with even the best Windows-based Internet tools. What is required is a proactive system that automatically and routinely monitors Internet data for patterns of interest and only notifies the end user when these patterns appear. At the core of these systems are &ware robots. In this paper we explore a robot-based “detect and alert” system called NewsAlert that delivers Internet alerts to the desktops of managers and executives in the form of a personalized electronic newspaper.