April 30th, 2007 Curt Monash
Baynote sells a recommendation engine whose motto appears to be “popularity implies accuracy.” While that leads to some interesting technological ideas (below), Baynote carries that principle to an unfortunate extreme in its marketing, which is jam-packed with inaccurate buzzspeak. While most of that is focused on a few trendy meme-oriented books, the low point of my briefing today was the probably the insistence against pushback that “95%” of Google’s results depend on “PageRank.” (I think what Baynote really meant is “all off-page factors combined,” but anyhow I sure didn’t get the sense that accuracy was an important metric for them in setting their briefing strategy. And by the way, one reason I repeat the company’s name rather than referring to Baynote by a pronoun is that on-page factors DO matter in search engine rankings.)
That said, here’s the essence of Baynote’s story, as best I could figure it out.
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Posted in Baynote, Google, Ontologies and context identification, Search and text storage, Search engine optimization (SEO), Social software and media, Specialized search engines | 3 Comments »
April 30th, 2007 Curt Monash
ClearForest is being acquired by Reuters. That ClearForest is being bought is unsurprising. The company recently pulled in its marketing horns dramatically, a common sign of putting oneself up for sale. The Reuters move, meanwhile, can be seen as a sequel to the divestiture of its half of Factiva to former 50-50 partner Dow Jones.
If the two main parts of the text mining market are custom publishing and finding warning signs, then both could actually be a good fit with Reuters. The custom publishing part is obvious. As for early warning – well, maybe ClearForest will lose its competitive edge in consumer product warranty analysis or something, but a significant fraction of the early warning market is tied to news articles, web postings, and other things that are a good fit for Reuters.
But the really interesting (at least to me) possibilities arise in the core Reuters and Dow Jones business of supporting investment decisions.
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Posted in ClearForest and Reuters, Factiva and Dow Jones, Text mining | No Comments »
April 17th, 2007 Curt Monash
In a recent post on the Monash Report, I drew a distinction between two aspects of the Internet: Jeffersonet and Edisonet. Jeffersonet deals in thoughts and ideas and research and scholarship and news and politics, and in commerce too. It’s what makes people so passionate about the Internet’s democracy-enhancing nature. It’s what needs to be protected by extreme network neutrality. And it’s modest enough in its bandwidth requirements that net neutrality is completely workable. (Edisonet, by way of contrast, comprises advanced applications in entertainment, teleconferencing, etc. that probably do require new capital investment and tiered pricing schemes.)
And if there’s one application that’s at the core of Jeffersonet, it’s search. No matter how much scary posturing telecom CEOs do – and no matter how profitable or monopolistic Google becomes – telecom carriers must never be allowed to show any preference among search engines! At least, that’s the case for text-centric search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft run today. The reason is simple: The democratic part of the Internet only works so long as things can be found. And search will long be a huge part of how to find them. So search engine vendors must never be able to succeed based on a combination of good-enough results plus superior marketing and business development. They always have to be kept afraid of competition from engines that provide better actual search engine results.
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Posted in Censorship, Google, Search and text storage, Social software and media | No Comments »
April 16th, 2007 Curt Monash
Comments are working again, and I’m easier to reach by email too.
Posted in About this blog | 1 Comment »
April 13th, 2007 Curt Monash
As with DBMS2, I am moving Text Technologies to another hosting provider this weekend. Until the name server change has propagated, there’s no guarantee a comment will really land in the right place. By Monday this should be a non-issue.
Posted in About this blog | No Comments »
April 4th, 2007 Curt Monash
CEO Eric Bregand clearly described TEMIS as being in three markets – life sciences, publishing, and “industrial.” However, based on his descriptions, I’d characterize industrial as itself having three components – competitive intelligence, adverse impact detection, and customer satisfaction. Legal is somewhere in the mix too.
The common theme among these markets seems to be an emphasis on applications where complex semantic analysis is important. Actually, I think it would be expedient for TEMIS to use the marketing hook of saying the subjects it does analysis about are complex. Nobody likes to be told their software is complex, but they don’t mind being told they’re experts in a complex discipline themselves.
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Posted in TEMIS, Text mining | 1 Comment »
April 4th, 2007 Curt Monash
Due to various transatlantic communication glitches, I’d never had a serious briefing with text mining vendor TEMIS until yesterday, when I finally connected with CEO Eric Bregand. So here’s a quick TEMIS overview; I’ll discuss what they actually do in a separate post.
- TEMIS has 50 people; 3 main businesses and a couple of secondary ones; two larger offices in France; and smaller offices in Germany and the US. As would be expected, TEMIS’ customer base is concentrated in Continental Europe. The US exceptions seem concentrated in the life sciences vertical (not coincidentally, the US office is outside Philadelphia).
- Like Inxight, TEMIS is at least partly a spin-off from Xerox’s text analytics efforts. Indeed, its Grenoble office was acquired from Xerox. Unlike Inxight, TEMIS doesn’t serious pursue OEM business, but a couple of exceptions have occurred (Eric mentioned Convera and Documentum).
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Posted in Business Objects and Inxight, IBM and UIMA, TEMIS, Text mining | 2 Comments »