Business

May 3 - May 9,2010 Btoomberg BusinessWeek

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rative Science, a fivemonthnaid company in Evanston, 111., that specializes in "machine-generated content." "There's no human author and no human editing," says Stuart Franke!, 44, the company's CEO and a former executive at DoubleClick. "But the stories sound really good." Narrative Science licenses the software fhim Northwestern University, where a team of computer science and journalism professors developed the technolc^. (The professors' name for the project: "Stats Monkey.") Frankel says his company has three customers. One is the Big Ten Network, a joint venture between the i:ollegiate athletic conference and Fox Cable, whicli began using the service for baseball and softball coverage on its Web site this spring. "It's considerably less expensive for us to go this route than for us to try to have our own beat reporters at each one of these games," says Michael Calderón, Big Ten's director of new media. "In fact, it would be logistically impossible for us to do that." After a game, scorekeep)ers e-mail game data to Narrative Science, which feeds it into a computer. A story can appear online in minutes. Frankel and the Big Ten Network won't say how much Narrative Science charges. The company says it is continually trying to make the system "a less bad writer," as Kristian Hammond, a Northwestern computer scientist and his partner in Narrative Science, puts it. Adds Frankel: "The 1,000th story of a subject is materially better than the first." Number of seconds needed for Frankel says his Narrative Science service can render software to convert stories about crime box scores into stats, medical a sports article study results, surveys, financial announcements, or any other data-intensive subject matter. Hammond says the company is starting with athletics because only about 1% of U.S. sporting events are covered by reporters. Next year it plans to approach Little League about using the service. It's "certainly...