Create an innovative, always-on tool that makes news better, and makes you smarter.

In 2017, Bloomberg Media worked with Postlight to bring a new layer of financial insight to any news article, from any website. The resulting product was available in two forms: As a shiny, new Chrome extensions, and built into the core Bloomberg mobile app as a “share sheet” extension.

Connect to a dynamic network of information

Bloomberg is the premier global data company. They want to quickly and accurately deliver business and financial information to their readers—beyond visiting bloomberg.com.

Shipping as a strategy

In just a few months, Postlight and Bloomberg partnered to build the product strategy, design the tool, build it, get it through the Bloomberg approval process, and ship it—both as part of the core Bloomberg app, and to the Chrome web store. That’s fast for software, very fast for a partnership, and incredibly fast for a partnership between a small product studio and one of the largest media companies in the world.

Adding automated intelligence to any web page

One of the core functionalities of this product was Mercury, a toolkit developed by Postlight Labs. Mercury, at its essence, turns any web page into an easy-to-understand document, then makes it really easy to plug in external APIs — like Bloomberg’s news services, or Wikipedia data — to build new products. Working this way allowed us to focus on building a stable and maintenance-free application, without the pressure of writing new code from scratch. It made the product better, and the web smarter and more useful for more people.