Text mining
Analysis of text mining companies, technology, and trends. Related subjects include:
Job posting — TEMIS is hiring consultants
TEMIS is a French company, with US headquarters in the US, as befits a company whose strongest vertical market is pharmaceuticals. I offered to put up a couple of job postings for them. (Nice of me — TEMIS isn’t even a client yet!) Here goes. Read more
| Categories: Jobs and careers, TEMIS, Text mining | Comments Off on Job posting — TEMIS is hiring consultants |
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: Read more
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: nStein, Text Analytics Summit, Text mining | 4 Comments |
(A little) more on Business Objects/Inxight
After missing what seems to have been an uninformative press conference anyway, I hooked up later with the Business Objects folks on the phone. I say that it was probably uninformative because in the short call, it was pointed out to me that they really weren’t at liberty to say much anyway. Here are a couple of tidbits I picked up even so.
- Business Objects’ text mining partnerships have been more demo/sales-cycle than actual sales up until now. That said, they have a few deals each with Attensity and Inxight (but not with ClearForest, which pulled in its horns prior to being acquired by Reuters). I still think they’re the leading BI vendor in integrating with text mining, SAS perhaps aside (who if nothing else have a lot of fun using text mining for data cleaning). The working Inxight partnership, by the way, was all about the specific app of email compliance, with the demo being based on the publicly available Enron corpus.
- Inxight’s visualization technology is in the form of an SDK anyway. So integrating it into BOBJ’s product line should be straightforward. Note: Through the Excelsius acquisition, BOBJ has been trying to gain competitive advantage in the cool-visualization area.
- Inxight’s “federation” capability for search is pretty primitive (my term and opinion of course, not theirs). It takes in search result sets from various sources, then clusters and/or refilters them. What it does NOT do is the much harder task of taking actual relevancy rankings from various engines and somehow arbitrating between them. Nor, I’m guessing, does it even assign higher or lower weights to various corpuses or anything like that. Thus, it does not sound terribly competitive with the distributed search capabilities built into any state-of-the-art enterprise search engine.
| Categories: Attensity, Business Objects and Inxight, ClearForest/Reuters, Enterprise search, SAS, Search engines, Text mining | 5 Comments |
Business Objects is acquiring Inxight!
The press conference is a little ways off, but the news has come across the wire that Business Objects is acquiring text analytics/text mining vendor Inxight.
Quick context on Business Objects: BOBJ is a pioneer — perhaps THE pioneer — of modern business intelligence. Recently it has gone on an acquisition-heavy bulking-up strategy. There is no assumption that ALL its pieces will fit into one seamless whole. For large enterprises, it is increasing its professional services emphasis (as a complement to new license sales, not a replacement for them).
Quick context on Inxight: Inxight spun off from Xerox PARC with all sorts of cool text-related technologies. But while it’s somewhat of a competitor in generic text mining, visualization, and so on, the one market where it has really succeeded is in OEM software for filtering and tokenization, serving search and text mining vendors alike. Read more
| Categories: BI integration, Business Objects and Inxight, Companies and products, Text mining | 1 Comment |
Interesting comment thread on reputation tracking
Techcrunch blogged skeptically about Umbria’s* service, specifically its partnership with PR Newswire. The comment thread had a fair amount of pushback, largely from vendors with skin in the game.
*Note: Umbria has a non-obvious URL.
I haven’t actually spoken with Umbria — uh, guys, why not? — but they seem to have a reputation tracking service. Their niche is apparently to quantify/measure by a variety of metrics, and that’s supposedly what makes their service (and their competitors’) worthwhile. Read more
| Categories: Blogosphere, Competitive intelligence, Sentiment analysis, Social software and online media, Text mining, Text mining SaaS | Leave a Comment |
ClearForest, Reuters, Factiva, Dow Jones, and possible futures
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. Read more
| Categories: ClearForest/Reuters, Factiva/Dow Jones, Text mining | Leave a Comment |
TEMIS, part 2 – application areas
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. Read more
| Categories: TEMIS, Text mining | 2 Comments |
TEMIS, part 1 – overview
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). Read more
| Categories: Business Objects and Inxight, IBM and UIMA, TEMIS, Text mining | 2 Comments |