How Sqoop helps business journalists find news

Steven Goldsmith of the Puget Sound Business Journal interviewed Bill Hankes, the CEO of Seattle-based Sqoop, the service that helps business reporters find stories in public documents.

Here is an excerpt:

How will you scale?

Our demand has been pretty brisk, with our base of reporters growing 40 percent month over month. Very soon, one in five business journalists in the country will be using Sqoop; we’re at 17 percent today. Additionally, our database of SEC, patent and federal court filings has been growing exponentially. We’ve been scaling through a combination of smart architecture as well as scaling hardware through Amazon Web Services. I spoke at the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in June in Philly.

How do you plan to make money?

Over time, Sqoop will make money by allowing companies to advertise their messages to reporters. How will we match sponsored messages to the right journalists? We’re building a matching system that is sensitive to location and areas of interest. It will note, for example, that a particular reporter is based in Philadelphia, and that he or she covers social networking, or health care. If one of our advertisers is a real estate app serving only the Seattle market, we’ll try to show that content only to Seattle-area reporters, and not to journalists from Atlanta or Philly. We also plan to use the same system for public data, offering a means of news discovery so we can, over time, suggest data that may be of interest, an idea that one of our Seattle reporters calls “ambient discovery.”

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