ICE system

Conceived, developed and maintained by Influence, the ICE system is a one-stop information aggregation solution. It is a Web platform that is fed information automatically by some 30 firms, 24 hours a day, every day.

With the ICE system, you can:

• manage multiple suppliers
• manage multiple sources of information
• manage multiple media and formats
• monitor streaming media
• manage your media impact
• archive data

Features

The ICE system allows users to access their data from any location without having to worry about the point of origin or presentation format of the information.

Although ICE is a stand-alone system that enables clients to manage a wealth of information with just a few clicks of the mouse, it does feature a system-independent page so that data is fully exportable to any other application. As a result, clients can quickly and easily transfer content to their intranet, extranet or any other Web-based system.

Speed

The frequency at which clients receive updates can be adjusted to suit their needs. Because a great deal of the information-gathering process is automated, we can generally pass along most news items within close to 60 minutes of their release. It is therefore possible for clients to receive streaming news 24 hours a day. However, to avoid a glut of information, many clients opt to limit delivery of updates to a few specified times throughout the day.

Reliability

In the past four years, our total downtime has been less than two hours. In order to ensure optimum continuity of service, the ICE system boasts a high-performance redundancy infrastructure with a second server, extra hard disks and an emergency power system in case of a power failure.

Scope

The other key feature of the ICE system lies in its automated monitoring of information Web sites. ICE scans more than 7,000 sites worldwide (including 500 in Canada, 114 of which are based in Québec) between four and six times a day. The system is so powerful that it can analyse, sort and compile all of the news from a site such as canada.com in 1.1 seconds. It combs through 54 sites every minute. And new sites are being added every week. Indeed, clients can add up to 12 sites per year to their monitoring protocol at no extra charge.

Coverage can include the Web sites for each of Canada's main political parties, for example. Furthermore, some of our clients ask us to keep tabs on the sites of their competitors and partners.