Microsoft Backs News-Crunching StartupMicrosoft Backs News-Crunching Startup

Silobreaker has joined Microsoft's Startup Accelerator Program. A news aggregation portal similar to Google News, Silobreaker goes a step further by displaying the relationships between subjects in the news, global news hotspots, and the amount of media attention devoted to a topic.Founded in 2005, Silobreaker describes itself as an online search service for news and current events. Its algorithms scan 10,000 sources for the names of people, companies, topics, places, and keywords, with results presented in a familiar format of headlines organized by category. What's different are graphics that display topics in added dimension. For example, type in "Fidel Castro" on today's news of his resignation, and Silobreaker shows a sharp spike in news stories and blogs, along with Castro-related quotes pulled from the media.

Silobreaker demonstrated its technology last month at Demo 08. My colleague Richard Martin was so impressed the he picked Silobreaker's technology as the coolest thing he saw at Demo. Obviously, Microsoft was impressed, too. As I noted a few weeks ago, Microsoft sponsored Demo specifically to cozy up to companies like Silobreaker. Microsoft has now signed about 50 companies since launching its Startup Accelerator Program last October.