NewsTwits Delivers Tweets to the Enterprise

Newstex, a content-on-demand company, serves news and commentary to companies and industries that require real-time information. Some of their customers include CNNMoney, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, LexisNexis, and The New York Times. For the different types of markets they serve, they offer specialized newsfeeds that deliver information from a wide range of sources. For example, for the financial industry there is a newsfeed containing only finance news.

Just recently the company announced a new service called NewsTwits. Similar to how their Blogs on Demand service operates, Newstex will license full-text Twitter content directly from Twitter users and then use its proprietary NewsRouter technology to aggregate and deliver this content to distributors and enterprises in real time. This Twitter-based feed can then being easily integrated as a headline feed into the enterprise-grade applications their customers use.

“Blog content has become a ‘must-have’ for millions of researchers and enterprise professionals,” said Larry Schwartz, President of Newstex. “Now, we are thrilled to be first in licensing and distributing the best user-generated Twitter content via NewsTwits on an editorially-selected, full-text basis for enterprise use throughout the world.”

The company decided to make the jump into Twitter syndication and licensing after seeing an increase in the Twitter activity over the past four months by many of the bloggers they already syndicate. Plus, the 140-character limit of Twitter made for an excellent "breaking news" style headline, just like the old "newswires" of the past.

What’s remarkable about this story is that Newstex’s Twitter licensing and syndication may very well be the first time that Twitter has made its way into the enterprise space. Many have said that Twitter was not ready for enterprise use, but I imagine they were thinking of users sitting at their computers sending tweets back and forth. Instead, the Newstex model shows that there is great value in Twitter’s ability to break news fast, a trend seen recently when the China earthquake occurred, and prior to that, the UK earthquake and the quake in Mexico last year.

Despite the scalability and downtime issues that Twitter has been struggling with as of late, VCs are right to keep throwing money at the service. Hopefully Twitter will be able to overcome their problems because, clearly, the business world is ready for some tweets.