Text analytics buzzphrase of the year – “Voice of the Customer”
If there was one theme to this year’s Text Analytics Summit, it’s “Voice of the Customer.” Attensity’s pre-conference press release was about a Voice of the Customer offering. Clarabridge’s sponsored user talk was about a Voice of the Customer app. SPSS’s marketing materials emphasized Voice of the Customer. Sentiment analysis and Web/blog scraping were frequently mentioned, in contexts such as “customer care,” “reputation management,” and/or “competitive intelligence.”
But above all, it was “Voice of the Customer.” I know it’s till June, but I think we have our text analytics industry buzzphrase of the year.
| Categories: Attensity, Clarabridge, SPSS, Text Analytics Summit, Text mining, Voice of the Customer | 3 Comments |
Insight into Inxight
Based on a few conversations at the Text Analytics Summit this week, I’ve gotten a richer picture of what’s been going on at Inxight. Here are some highlights:
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Inxight has around 120 employees. (And while I haven’t doublechecked this, apparently Inxight has been disclosed to have $26 million revenue.)
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At least half of Inxight’s business is OEM. Only 10% or so is enterprise, with the balance being government.
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Until recently, Inxight OEMed only basic tokenization (e.g., stemming), reserving higher-level tokenization (e.g., entity extraction) for direct sales (primarily to government). Recently, however, most or all of Inxight’s tokenization has been opened up to the OEM channel.
Is nStein ‘n trouble?
nStein canceled out of the Text Analytics Summit, with some bizarre behavior. For example, to the last moment they insisted they were showing up. But then they didn’t, leaving me holding the bag on the Marketing Panel. (Fortunately, Olivier Jouve of SPSS pinch-hit expertly on very short notice.)
This kind of odd reclusiveness is usually a sign of an impending corporate transaction, or at least a desire for one (cf. ClearForest). But for the premier potential buyers there are several stronger and more attractive alternatives to mate with.
And as I pointed out to several folks today, being located in Montreal is unlikely to give nStein a leg up in being acquired by Cognos. That’s not how Cognos evaluates acquisitions.
| Categories: Text Analytics Summit, Text mining, nStein | 4 Comments |
I’ve decided to trust Akismet/Bad Behavior
Akismet recently upgraded so that you can see all the spam it’s holding, not just the last 150 messages. This made me a lot happier — but ironically I quickly gave up, and decided to trust Akismet without checking. Why? Well, Akismet sequesters 15 days of spam, and I currently have the following numbers of messages stashed away in it:
- 2246 here on Text Technologies.
- 4427 on DBMS2.
- 816 on Software Memories.
- 5156 on the Monash Report.
That’s over 800 spam per day across four blogs. And when I did check, I almost never found a false positive, except occasionally a trackback of my own.
More problematic is my e-mail. Eudora flags pretty much everything that isn’t from an established sender as spam. So along with my 300+ true spam, I get a number of false positives per day, some of which have turned into paying customer relationships. So THAT spam directory I do check carefully …
| Categories: Blogosphere, Spam and antispam | Leave a Comment |