A Web 2.0 Dashboard for Buzz

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To help fuel growth, StrategyEye has rounded up $4 million in funding in three rounds of investing, including $1 million from London-based NewMedia Spark Ventures (SPK.L). "StrategyEye is using the techniques of Web 2.0 to create a new publishing model. It's easily scalable so can be used in a variety of sectors," says Jay Patel, executive director of NewMedia Spark, which earlier backed a mergers and acquisitions news wire called Mergermarket that was sold for $202 million in August, 2006 to Pearson (PSO).

Over the next 18 months, StrategyEye aims to expand into other vertical markets beyond digital media, including the software industry, clean technology, health care, and aviation/defense. The existing Web 2.0 technology will be fleshed out though deals with news and content providers in each of these as-yet untested markets.

News Partnership

The startup also is in negotiation with an undisclosed but "high-profile" news Web site to provide its market information directly to end users. And CEO Gregg says StrategyEye is in early-stage talks with a major news wire to combine the startup's aggregated content with existing news and analysis.

Such deals come as no surprise to industry analysts, who have long been championing the rise of blogs, social networks, and wikis as business tools. "Web 2.0 has rapidly switched from a technical curiosity to a center-stage idea among larger company IT leaders in Europe," says Gartner (IT) analyst Mark Raskino in Britain.

Not that StrategyEye will be the only one looking to cash in on companies' desire to filter out important market information from the ever-increasing chaff found on the Internet. Reuters' (RTRSY) Chief Operating Officer Devin Wenig, for example, has already proposed combining many Web 2.0 elements into the company's future market terminals. Similarly, free-to-use news and blog aggregator Web sites, such as digg.com and technorati.com, could make subscription-based services obsolete by providing many of the same tools without charging fees.

No matter who hits on the right business model, the need for specific company research tools will only increase as managers battle to stay ahead of the barrage of information now available on the Internet. By combining search engine technology with Web 2.0 applications, StrategyEye is hoping to fill a growing need from firms looking to see where they stand in digital media—and beyond.

Scott is a reporter in BusinessWeek's London bureau .