Ironically coming right after a Google indexing problem, I am putting up my first sponsored blog post ever. It’s in connection with the forthcoming Text Analytics Summit, at which I will be speaking (in Boston) on June 16. The post itself offers a free white paper by the estimable Seth Grimes.
The First Conferences Ltd. folks who bring you the disappointing Text Analytics Summit are now also launching a “Video Search Summit”. It’s the “first annual” such, and is “inaugural.” On the other hand, their site has a page saying: Check out who has attended in the past - it’s an A - Z list of anyone who is anyone in Video Search! And it gives a list of same.
That’s pretty typical for First Conferences marketing. (And I hope they’ll edit that page after they read this …)
If the Video Search Summit is anything like the four Text Analytics Summits First Conferences has organized to date, it will be a great venue for technology vendor executives to chat with each other, untroubled by interruptions from customers* or prospects.
*Except for any they bring along themselves to participate in their talks.
It was tough to judge user demand at the recent Text Analytics Summit because, well, very few users showed up. And frankly, I wasn’t as aggressive at pumping vendors for trends as I am some other times. That said, I have talked with most text analytics vendors recently,* and here are my impressions of what’s going on. Any contrary – or confirming! — opinions would be most welcome.
*Factiva is the most significant exception. Hint, hint.
If you think about it, text analytics is a “secret ingredient” in search, antispam, and data cleaning,* and this dominates all other uses of the technology. A significant minority of the research effort at companies that do any kind of text filtering is – duh — text analytics. Cold comfort for specialist text analytics vendors, to be sure, but that’s the way it is.
*I.e., part of the “T” in “ETL” (Extract/Transform/Load).
Text-analytics-enhanced custom publishing will surely at some point become a must-have for business and technical publishers. However, it appears that we’re not quite there yet, as large publishers make do with simple-minded search and the like. In what I suspect is a telling market commentary, there’s no headlong rush among vendors to dump text mining for custom publishing, notwithstanding the examples of nStein and (sort of) ClearForest. I don’t want to be overly negative – either my friends at Mark Logic are doing just fine or else they’re putting up a mighty brave front – but I don’t think the nonspecialist publishing market is there yet.
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.
Technorati Tags: text mining, customer care, voice of the customer
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:
Inxight has around 120 employees. (And while I haven’t doublechecked this, apparently Inxight has been disclosed to have $26 million revenue.)
At least half of Inxight’s business is OEM. Only 10% or so is enterprise, with the balance being government.
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.
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.
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Technorati Tags: nStein
When I previously announced the marketing panel for the Text Analytics Summit, I mentioned four outstanding panelists. We’re down to three now, as Dave Kellogg belatedly noticed a conflict which mandated that he never should have accepted in the first place. I’m comfortable going with just three; we’ll have more time for audience participation, including I hope from some of the usual-suspect folks who will also be speaking at other points during the two days. (Hi, Olivier and Ramana!) In the unlikely case that there are any further defections, and I’ll try to rope one or two of them onto the panel on an emergency basis.
As for subject matter, I encourage everything to think about and comment on the issue groups I previously raised. I also think it might be interesting to talk about tactical issues such as lead generation, brand awareness advertising, and the like. It will be particularly interesting to see if evidence and decisions in those areas match up with people’s gut feels about more strategic market issues.
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If you go to one text analytics conference, the choice should probably be the US Text Analytics Summit in June. For one thing, it should have a great marketing panel. 
But if Boston is a little far away for you, there’s also a European Text Analytics Summit in Amsterdam, April 26-27, 2007, by the same organizers. And if you register with the discount code MONASH07EU, you’ll save 100 Euros.
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We’ve now solidified the membership of the Text Analytics Summit marketing panel. It is:
Michelle, Michel, and Mary are all obvious choices, responsible for marketing at leading text mining vendors. In addition, Mary has excelled on the same panel in the past, Michel sent me e-mail with some brilliant thoughts on the panel subject, and Attensity has one of the most interesting strategies in the text analytics market.
As for Dave — he’s simply one of the most astute marketing theorists working in software today. And he runs a very interesting text technology company. And he used to be most senior marketing guy in all of business intelligence, when he was SVP at Business Objects. In his copious free time, he writes a really cool blog.
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If you plan to attend the Text Analytics Summit, there are two things you can do to minimize your registration fee:
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