  Unstructured data, such as news and blogs, can provide valuable insights into
the financial world. We present the NewsStream portal, an intuitive and
easy-to-use tool for news analytics, which supports interactive querying and
visualizations of the documents at different levels of detail. It relies on a
scalable architecture for real-time processing of a continuous stream of
textual data, which incorporates data acquisition, cleaning, natural-language
preprocessing and semantic annotation components. It has been running for over
two years and collected over 18 million news articles and blog posts. The
NewsStream portal can be used to answer the questions when, how often, in what
context, and with what sentiment was a financial entity or term mentioned in a
continuous stream of news and blogs, and therefore providing a complement to
news aggregators. We illustrate some features of our system in three use cases:
relations between the rating agencies and the PIIGS countries, reflection of
financial news on credit default swap (CDS) prices, the emergence of the
Bitcoin digital currency, and visualizing how the world is connected through
news.
