Porsches to Pizza – Hack 6,000,000 automotive news articles #NewsReader

The global automotive industry has a value of the order of $1 trillion annually.

The industry comprises a massive network of suppliers, manufacturers, advertisers, marketeers and journalists.  Attracting and supporting the industry is a significant goal of industrial policy.

On January 21st we’re running an event which should be of interest if :-

  • You’re a data journalist on an automotive desk;
  • You’re an analyst sifting daily news looking for information on your company or on competitors;
  • You’re a data analyst looking to understand how your customers operate their supply chain
  • You’re an analyst trying to find secondary events that could influence an investment decision;

We’ve developed a powerful new tool called ‘NewsReader’ which utilises natural language understanding and semantic web technology. This helps you to better understand the interactions between companies and key individuals, derived from news articles.

We’re processing 6 million news articles from sources around the world both general and specialist media to obtain a searchable database of the news on the automotive sector and you can play with at our Hack event.

Over summer we ran a Hack Day on news surrounding the World Cup. NewsReader enabled the attendees to pull out networks of interactions between politicians, football players and people in FIFA. Not only who they were interacting with but what they were doing.

Early analysis of the automotive data is giving us some interesting insights. For example, news stories between 2005 and 2009 reported that Porsche was buying an ever larger stake in Volkswagen, prompting speculations that Porsche would take over Volkswagen. However, in 2009 the tables turned and Volkswagen took a majority stake and eventually took over Porsche. Our system is able to discriminate between articles mentioning that Volkswagen was taking over Porsche and vice versa rather than simple co-occurrences that are generally found in aggregated news analysis systems. In the slipstream of this take-over, Wendelin Wiedeking, longtime Porsche senior executive, was fired from Porsche. In 2013 he opened the first of a chain of Italian restaurants. As we have a structured database in which similar events can easily be retrieved, it is a small effort to find out that Jürgen Schrempp, former CEO of DaimlerChrysler, also opened a restaurant after retiring from the car industry.

We are running an event in London on January 30th and if you cannot make the
21st in Amsterdam you may want to join us there.

NewsReader helps you find a needle in a haystack.

REGISTER FOR HACKATHON AMSTERDAM:  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/porsches-to-pizza-hack-6000000-automotive-news-articles-newsreader-tickets-14504369961

REGISTER FOR HACKATHON LONDON:  http://www.eventbrite.com/e/porsches-to-pizza-hack-6000000-automotive-news-articles-newsreader-tickets-14458478699?aff=efbnen