Delve Curates News to Deliver Better, More Relevant Information

We live in a fast paced world where information is a major key to success.  But the thing that some people forget is that it’s not just about having the most information, it’s about having the best information.  I recently sat down with co-founder and CTO of Delve, Tom Weingarten to learn more about his company is helping organizations get better information faster and more efficiently.

The company was recently one of three companies selected to join the TimeSpace, an incubator space hosted at the New York Times building in New York City.  Companies who are selected to work in the TimeSpace get to meet with relevant Times staff, demo their product and teach/learn alongside entrepreneurs and employees who make their livings in digital media, technology and journalism. After learning more about Delve it made perfect sense as to why the company took advantage of this opportunity.

Keeping Companies Informed

Delve is tackling the difficult task of keeping companies informed with the latest news in their particular industry (or related industries of interest to them).  The company launched the first version of the product in November with 10 pilot organizations, however, also allows organizations or individuals interested in the product to sign-up as well through its website.  Delve is currently free for individuals or any organization who wants to use it with under 10 people.  Companies larger than 10 people who are interested in rolling out Delve within the organization will need to pay a monthly fee.

Currently, Delve is working with companies in all different verticals including media, consulting, and law.  As you can see these are verticals with a heavy emphasis on information and news, I’m sure the finance and tech industry will not be far behind to sign-up.  In fact, as someone who is building a technology focused media company, I saw the benefit in using Delve right away.  Not only do you receive the latest news fairly quickly on Delve (typically within a few minutes), you can ensure your entire team has seen it as well.  Plus, Delve offers users the ability to receive daily or weekly email roundups with the top stories and editor’s picks.

Delve also offers a forum area for users to share and discuss articles (including from outside sources) with the rest of their team.  The forum section will also showcase articles that team members have recommended through Delve.  Additionally, Delve has a Yammer app which will pull in shared articles on Yammer into the forum section, making it super easy to keep track of all the content being shared in your organizations network.

Some may point out the lack of being able to find new content “socially” as you might on Twitter or Facebook.  While Mr. Weingarten did acknowledge that to be true, he did say, “You lose the social aspect but get the expert curation.”  A tradeoff I believe many companies will be willing to make.

The Real Brains

Once you setup an account, you can configure the types of topics and sources that show up in your organizations Delve news feed.  The topics range across every industry you can think of and sources have been hand-picked by Delve editors in an effort to only bring you the best news and information. However, when dealing so much content and thousands of sources, it is tough to scale with just humans.  This is why the Delve team developed advanced algorithms that use natural language technology to read the content and sort it appropriately.

While in my experience the algorithms seem to work very well, I did get a few stories here and there that really weren’t of interest to me, the Delve team doesn’t rest on its laurels.  Mr. Weingarten told me, “The real brains are the editors, which train the algorithms to help them scale.” In fact, the editorial team is constantly training the algorithms as to what it should be looking for in order to improve it, because at the end of the day, the better the algorithm is the more successful Delve will be.  In addition to the algorithms and editors, Delve also watches for new content from people it has identified as experts in a particular field.

Going Forward

Right now, the company is actually working on a completely new design of the product and is also working on developing mobile apps for both iOS and Android (currently you can access a mobile version of Delve via the web on your smartphone).  According to Mr. Weingarten, all of that will launch early this summer, hopefully in July.