Thomson Reuters Focuses on Search in Latest Eikon

Key to Thomson Reuters' plan are enhancements to Eikon’s search box, which acts as a focal point for the terminal’s content and allows users to search using instrument symbols and function shortcut codes, or simply to type natural-language queries into the search bar, which not only returns results in the form of relevant data tables and charts, but also suggests these as a drop-down list of potential search results. For example, if a user types “IBM VWAP” and starts typing a timeframe, Eikon will suggest the most commonly-used timeframes for viewing VWAP for IBM. Or if a user types “IBM Yahoo,” Eikon will suggest a chart displaying IBM and Yahoo side-by-side as a potential search answer.

Users can equally ask natural-language searches such as “What did Obama say about the budget?” to generate a list of recent, relevant quotes—which the vendor will ultimately link to the original news stories or transcripts available in its Reuters Insider news portal.

The platform also analyzes individuals’ usage patterns to understand what they typically search for, to provide more targeted search results. Officials say this “cleans up” search results, while also providing more information.

“You get the benefit of a full, rich application’s worth of content, without having to worry about how you get to it,” says Albert Lojko, global head of platform product at Thomson Reuters. “A lot of these enhancements are coming from customers wanting to know how to navigate our content better and find data… and we found that we could answer the questions they are trying to ask. Instead of going through steps A, B, C, D, E and F, we can take them directly from A to F.”

The search box also becomes a navigation tool from which users can access individual applications within Eikon, or pick from a library of applications, including new tools such as the vendor’s Social Media Sentiment Monitor and News Sentiment Monitor, Macro Explorer and Signals.

The social media monitor analyzes feeds from Twitter and StockTwits to measure positive or negative sentiment about a company, allowing users to spot trends and potentially market-moving events. The news monitor applies a proprietary scoring methodology to the vendor’s News Analytics product to generate a rolling average score across 30,000 listed companies, overlaid by share prices to demonstrate how sentiment affects prices over time. Macro Explorer visually presents content from the vendor’s Datastream macroeconomic database of more than 80 economic indicators—as well as indicators from Fathom Consulting, Oxford Economics and the World Bank—on global and regional maps, alongside other charts and tables, for users to compare macroeconomic factors between countries and regions.

Lastly, Signals allows users to monitor a list of securities that conform to technical criteria that they can set themselves or select from a library of popular criteria for stock selection or for timing decisions to buy or sell securities.

‘Always-On’
To promote the idea of “always-on Eikon,” Thomson Reuters has created a floating toolbar that sits unobtrusively on a user’s desktop and allows them to quickly access all the applications and workspaces within Eikon. Within these workspaces, users can now add and arrange unlimited numbers of panes that snap together “magnetically” and can be grouped or stacked, and can link the content and analytics in different panes without performing any programming. Since these workspaces are saved centrally in the managed compute cloud that supports Eikon, users can access the same displays wherever they log in.

In addition, users can now access Eikon’s search and content even when they don’t have the application open, via a plug-in developed for Google’s Chrome browser that allows users to leverage Eikon’s data and analysis against any online source of information. For example, if a user is reading a news story on a website, they can select a function called “Analyze This” from a drop-down menu of Eikon functions on their Chrome toolbar. This function scans the story for entities and individuals, then returns a list of those mentioned, accompanied by links to data on each in the online version of Eikon. “This is about having ubiquitous access to Eikon,” Lojko says.

Similarly, the vendor has also introduced a feature for mobile users called Snap-to-Search, which allows them to take a photograph of a news story with their mobile device’s camera and submit that to Thomson Reuters, which will supply relevant data—such as revenue figures or earnings estimates—for companies mentioned.

The new version also includes an add-in for Microsoft Office that allows users to import live data into PowerPoint slides or Excel spreadsheets, to run calculations on streaming data in Excel, and to perform searches directly from spreadsheets. If a user types “TR” followed by a free-text query—rather than needing to know command shortcuts—in a field in the Excel add-in, the spreadsheet recognizes this as an Eikon command, and treats the field like the Eikon search box, returning a list of results and potential answers.

“For analysts or bankers, this is powerful stuff because they spend all their time in spreadsheets,” Lojko says, adding that this means anyone unfamiliar with Eikon—for example, someone migrating from another data product, or someone entering finance for the first time will not need to learn or re-learn complex shortcuts in order to navigate data in Excel.

Eikon users can also easily share screens or windows via a function that sends them to other Eikon users, who can open and interact with the same display, and even allows clients to share information with non-Eikon users, who would receive a static image of the Eikon user’s screen.

In addition, once users have downloaded this version, they will never need to physically download another upgrade, Lojko says, as the new version allows the vendor to automatically roll out updates more frequently, without users needing to manually download them.

Another time-saving feature introduced as part of Version 4 is a “briefcase” function that allows users to save longer news items—perhaps from the more than 100 newspaper sources added to the platform over the past couple of months, in addition to the more than 250 fully-searchable sources of news and research already on Eikon—or other documents such as transcripts of earnings calls to read later, annotate and send to colleagues.