Alacra Store, an online provider of company financials and credit/investment research, just announced the addition of RSS feeds to its “company snapshot” services.

Here’s what you get. Say you’re interested in watching a company to see how it performs, probably because you’re thinking about (or already) investing in it. Say, Apple Computer. Alacra has a free company snapshot of Apple Computer on their site. Handy, but you always had to keep visiting it to see how the market is changing.

Now you can subscribe to an RSS feed about Apple, and have Alacra’s market updates about the company sent right to your reader. The feed as of the time of this writing has various items of interest, from stock price alerts to news about the so-called ‘iTunes Law’.

You know the saying, “it takes money to make money?” The corporate snapshot is free, and so is the RSS feed. The content of all of the RSS items (research, news clippings) comes with a price. Every item I checked in the Apple feed, for instance, cost $10.

Offering RSS of your content is nearly always a good idea, but it looks like Alacra’s offer is targeted primarily at existing customers. It is too bad the market snapshot itself isn’t included in the feed… that might keep people subscribed to it even if they don’t pay for the research items at first. Since everything in the feed costs money, I suspect the turnover rate of feed subscriptions will be pretty high.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 7th, 2006 at 01:10 and is filed under syndication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.