The internet may be helping to redefine the importance of geographical boundaries but it remains difficult for those of us in the West to discover reliable information on companies, politics, and people in places outside of the mainstream international press. Without local knowledge of a market such as Cuba or the Congo, it is difficult to know where to turn to find out information on a company from the region from which you’ve received a business proposal, or the political stability of the country to discover if would be worth opening a branch of your company in the region – and this is where Arachnys steps in.
Arachnys, a small start-up having just moved to the tech-cluster in East London, has spent the last year or so building a searchable database of local newspapers, magazines, company registers, and reliable local blogs. Subscribers to their service can search that database to find information on companies, organisations, and people that would otherwise be scarce without some local knowledge or understanding of the language. The service translates the search terms into the local language, and then searches the text of its database for those terms focusing on the country of your choosing, and then finally bringing back the results live-translated back into English through a combination of Google and Bing’s translation services. This isn’t a replacement for on the ground research and due diligence, but it offers an insight into local situations and companies that would otherwise be impossible from outside.
Beyond simply scraping and indexing information, Arachnys use individuals with local knowledge to rate, discuss, and add context to each source, so the searcher will know its political bias or whether the newspaper is under government control – information which makes weighing sources much more useful. They are also working on bringing visualisations to the search, making basic information on topics more approachable.
The web is full of information that can be useful for business intelligence or political analysis, but Arachnys brings down the language and geographical boundaries to that data and vastly improves the signal to noise ratio. If you are looking for information in the developed economies, there are well-known and well-regarded newspapers to explore for information, and company registers are easy to discover with Google – but outside of these countries it becomes a lot harder. With its continually expanding database of sources, subscribers have access to a blanket of reliable and contextualised information that would otherwise be hidden from view.
The world just got a little bit smaller.