Vigil Launches Web-Monitoring Information Service

Vigil yesterday launched a service designed to help companies better understand their markets, who their competitors are, and what they're doing.

The service, called e-Sense, "focuses on providing professional decision makers with a service for monitoring their business landscapes from open Internet sources," says Gidi Cohen, president and CEO of Vigil.

Cohen says the service is more than just a search engine that looks for relevant information based on key words. The service employs a proprietary information-retrieval mechanism that continuously scans anywhere from 500 to 1000 sources -- such as company Web sites, news groups, online newsletters, and mailing lists -- and then pulls new and pertinent data that is packaged into reports and automatically E-mailed to customers.

To get started, all a company needs to do is provide Vigil with some basic information, such as its company name, its industry, any trademarks it has, its product offerings, and any known competitors. From there, the Vigil servers will begin searches and continuously update the information as new data is discovered.

The service includes a researcher application that lets users search and analyze archives of previously retrieved information. Available now, the service ranges from $75 to $500 per month per user, depending the level of service and whether or not it includes the researcher application.