I came across an early stage company that I really liked yesterday called my6sense. They’re an Israeli based company that help you filter information so that you can find the really relevant stuff that you most want to read. They do this using your observed reading habits and currently they filter RSS feeds, Facebook and Twitter. You can imagine subscribing to 20 blogs and news sites via RSS feeds and every morning waking up to just the gems of stories that really interest you. I have to say that personally I find this very appealing.
What’s more interesting to me though is the potential for this in the future. As news moves increasingly online, aggregators are inevitably going to end up playing a more important role in our consumption of media. The points of differentiation between different aggregators will be limited. It could be no more than the current differences between search engines (which are minimal despite the thousands of articles that have been written about it since the launch of Bing). Where there is minimal differentiation a company that can help aggregators filter more effectively than their competitors will have a compelling proposition.

Further down the line they should also be able to develop the IP that can help throw any given reader articles on random topics that they wouldn’t otherwise search for but that they find interesting, effectively allowing the reader to browse in the same way they do a newspaper today.
The issue that will decide whether my6sense ends up a poorly monetised but valuable web utility or a large, highly profitable company is whether online news manages to monetise effectively. I believe that it will over the next couple of years and that makes my6sense very interesting indeed.

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