Flare’s year in review
Before we get fully into the swing of a new year, we thought it worth taking stock of what Flare Data (Flare) achieved in the last 12 months. Although Flare formally came to life in 2023, January of 2024 was really when everything started motoring.
Born out of a desire to discover material insight buried within ever growing piles of data, the founders at Flare – all with extensive publishing backgrounds – set about to play our part in fighting fake news and supporting publishers in their efforts to create richer, more unique data-led stories.
On the fake news front, we have a way to go! With platforms such as X riddled with bots, bias, and bile, and while Facebook waves goodbye to professional fact-checking services, the need for accurate and incisive content to counter the damaging effects of social media-generated guff is never more acute. We see this as an opportunity for professional publishers to disentangle themselves from “free” platforms and push readers back to their own.
In terms of supporting publishers, Flare had success. Since Easter, we brought on more than 10 brands as our clients and have been busy since supporting them in generating richer, more reliable insights for their audiences.
To celebrate, we thought we’d select five Flare highlights from the year, focusing on both our commercial successes and technological breakthroughs. Here they are:
1. Flare’s first flare
What is a flare, you ask? It’s an automated data-led insight and the building block of Flare’s business. Containing a headline, a small synopsis and a chart, a Flare is an easily digestible piece of information discovered from a dataset – just one of potentially millions.
The premise is that journalists, analysts, and researchers lack the time and resources to crunch important data and discover an insight both powerful and unique enough to be of real value. By automating this element of the research process, we unlock the true value buried within data.
We built Flare to be able to handle this task. And while we were testing our rather clunky V1 machine by rummaging through Gov.UK gender pay gap data, this gem fell into our lap:
It was then we knew we had something to tell the world about. Thank you, JD Wetherspoon!
2. Flare’s first client
But an insight isn’t worth much if no one is prepared to pay you to obtain it. In the case of the Financial Times (FT) – specifically its specialist B2B division – they were.
Long considered a leader in professional business publishing, we discussed how we could support one of its market leading brands to speed up and increase output generated from a unique database covering the activities of some of the world’s most influential asset owners.
By feeding the database through Flare, useful insights into the buying and selling behaviour of funds across the globe no longer needed to be manually handled by the journalists, freeing up considerable time to dig up new observations.
We are proud to call the FT a client and, more so, we are now working with more brands inside the business on similar use cases.
3. The “Interpretation Model”
Our ambition is to make the analysis of data easy, immediate, and cheap. The development of our Interpretation Model (IM) got us one large step closer to this goal.
In short, IM can organise any dataset into a simple unified structure – allowing our analytical tool (that generate the flares) to easily run through the cleaned data. We believe this addresses the “90% time” burden problem; the foundational blocker to extracting value from data is the ability to structure and normalise datasets.
In automating this process, we relieve our clients from this barrier to entry. However, we leave the user in control – we do not want a black box operating on its own terms.
4. Our clients’ rapid commercial success
Watching our clients benefit from our services has been a huge highlight in our year. Saving time, reducing costs, increasing output are all consequences of working with Flare’s platform and intrinsically valuable.
With one UK publishing client they went a step further and opted to use Flare’s platform to launch a new product, hoping to open a new revenue stream from it. In compiling both public and proprietary market critical data into a simple-to-navigate dashboard, the publisher was able to upsell subscriptions for market intelligence that would have otherwise been difficult to obtain.
Not only was the dashboard easy and quick to create, but within only one month subscription upsell revenues rose by 46%. Within 3 months, it generate a return on investment of nearly 500%.
On the back of this, we are working with the publisher on similar projects for other brands within the division.
“Within 3 months, the dashboard generated a return on investment of nearly 500%.”
5. AskFlare
Described as “potentially game changing” by one of our clients who got a sneaky preview of this service late last year, you will be a lot from us about AskFlare over the next few months.
With Flare’s ability to generate almost limitless mathematically sound data insights, we believe the future of insight discovery will soon become as easy as asking a simple question. And that’s what AskFlare does, just by asking a question, you will soon be able to discover whatever insight data has to offer.
Adopting LLM technology to support AskFlare, we are working on a service that will surface the most relevant insights Flare create while also providing an invaluable synopsis of what the insights mean and prompt the user with ideas on what to do with the results.
Still in beta-testing mode, we are looking to partner with any interested individuals or teams to use and provide feedback on AskFlare. If you are keen to try it out, please email us at hello@flaredata.ai
