Control Center

Control Center is a local-first, settings-driven business intelligence dashboard for monitoring industry updates, exact brand mentions, newsletters, public audience totals, reminders, and tasks. It starts with an empty workspace that users configure with websites, RSS or Atom feeds, topic phrases, brand identities, public profiles, and optional Gmail access.

Collectors run at startup, on demand, and at intervals while the app is open. Industry collection combines feeds and sitemap discovery, then applies URL and title deduplication, source priority, recency, topic and exclusion rules, change signals, event similarity, and source diversity to produce a bounded reading queue. Mention collection searches news sources and can use optional cloud AI for broader web discovery, but verifies identity on the canonical page using configured domains, handles, anchors, and negative contexts before storing a mention. Audience collection checks configured public profiles on YouTube, X, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Threads, and TikTok, retaining verified readings and historical comparison samples.

Optional AI curation supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Grok, LM Studio, and Ollama for bounded reranking, verified-page summaries, mention prioritization, and newsletter extraction. Newsletter monitoring uses a read-only Gmail OAuth connection; the selected model extracts substantive stories from matching issues, consolidates repeated coverage, and stores metadata and deduplicated topic state locally rather than retaining raw email bodies. The application can also use loopback-connected local models and an optional connector bridge for read-only summaries from services such as Gmail, Slack, Granola, Google Calendar, and Apple Messages.

The dashboard runs as a Node.js application with SQLite-backed local storage and binds to 127.0.0.1. It provides launch, diagnostics, backup, development, and smoke-test commands; the documented runtime requires Node.js 24.19 or newer, npm, and a modern desktop browser. Saved settings, tokens, and provider keys remain on the local machine and are not encrypted at rest.