Competitive intelligence
Discussion of how text analytics technologies are used for competitive intelligence or “Voice of the Market” applications – i.e., to analyze (usually web-based) information and comments about competitors. Related subjects include:
Attensity update
I chatted recently with David Bean, Attensity’s CTO, and then with marketing exec Phil Talsky. Highlights included: Read more
| Categories: Application areas, Attensity, Clarabridge, Competitive intelligence, Software as a Service (SaaS), Text mining, Text mining SaaS, Voice of the Customer | 6 Comments |
The biggest text analytics company you probably never heard of
I caught up with Expert System S.p.A. last week. They turn out to be doing $10 million in text technology annual revenue. That alone is surprising (sadly), but what’s really remarkable is that they did it almost entirely in the Italian market. As you might guess, that figure includes a little bit of everything, from search engines to Italian language filters for Microsoft Office to text mining. But only $3 ½ million of Expert System’s revenue is from the government (and I think that includes civilian agencies), and under 30% is professional services, so on the whole it seems like a pretty real accomplishment. Oh yes – Expert Systems says it’s entirely self-funded.
As of last year, Expert System also has English-language products, and a couple of minor OEM sales in the US (for mobile search and semantic web applications). German- and Arabic-language products are in beta test. The company says that its market focus going forward is national security – surely the reason for the Arabic – and competitive intelligence. It envisions selling through partners such as system integrators, although I think that makes more sense for the government market than it does vis-a-vis civilian companies. In February the company is introducing a market intelligence product focused on sentiment analysis.
Expert System is a bit of a throwback, in that it talks lovingly of the semantic network that informs its products. Read more
| Categories: Application areas, Competitive intelligence, Enterprise search, Expert System S.p.A., Ontologies, Search engines, Text mining | Leave a Comment |
A claim that Google is doing pretty detailed extraction
In a blog post focusing on SEOing for local search, some interesting claims are argued, including:
- Google knows what a review is. (This seems to be “everybody knows it” conventional wisdom.)
- Google knows how many stars a review got. (Ditto.)
- Google tracks who the reviewer is and how many other reviews s/he wrote (that’s the big insight of the post and related conversation).
Pretty interesting. Text mining companies are paying a lot of attention to Voice-of-the-Market these days; even so, I question whether then can do the same things out of the box.
| Categories: Competitive intelligence, Google, Search engines | 1 Comment |
Scout Labs – yet more public-facing sentiment analysis
Scout Labs sounds like even more of what I was thinking of than Summize. It’s a shame that the “traditional” text mining vendors didn’t get there first.
| Categories: Competitive intelligence, Text mining | 2 Comments |
QL2 – web text extraction and more
Here are some highlights of the QL2 story, per exec Mike McDermott.
- QL2’s main business is scraping price and other product offering data from the web for high-speed competitive analysis. For example, of their 250ish customers overall, over 90 are airlines. Online retailers are another big chunk of their customer base.
- QL2 also commonly partners with text mining companies in applications such as Voice of the Market or competitive intelligence. E.g., QL2 has been brought into a few deals each by Attensity, Clarabridge, and especially Temis.
- QL2 goes well beyond basic crawling. Notably, the system fills in forms with parameters. And of course it monitors pages for changes.
- QL2’s scripting language is, Mike tells me, very SQL-like. Hence the “QL” in the name.
- QL2 rolls its own filters, rather than using INSO or whoever. (Actually, what are the main file-reading filter choices these days? I’ve lost track.) Indeed, Mike fondly believes QL2 does a better job with PDFs than Adobe does.
- QL2 doesn’t want to be thought of as web-only. Rather, Mike likes my formulation of “text data ETL, web or otherwise.” That said, he freely admits QL2’s strength is in Extract rather than in Transform or Load.
| Categories: Application areas, Competitive intelligence, QL2, Text mining | Leave a Comment |
What TEMIS is seeing in the marketplace
CEO Eric Bregand of Temis recently checked in by email with an update on text mining market activity. Highlights of Eric’s views include:
- Yep, Voice Of The Customer is hot, in “many markets”; Eric specifically mentioned banking, car, energy, food, and retail. He further sees IBM backing VotC as text’s “killer app.” (Note: Temis has a history of partnering with IBM, most notably via its unusually strong commitment to UIMA.)
- Specifically, THE hot topics in the European market these days are competitive intelligence and sentiment analysis. (Note: I’ve always thought Temis got serious about competitive analysis a little earlier than most other text mining vendors did.)
- Life sciences is an ever growing focus for Temis.
- I confused him a bit with how I phrased my question about custom publishing and Temis’ Mark Logic partnership. But he did express favorable views of the market, specifically in the area of integrating text mining and native XML database management, and even volunteered that nStein appears to be doing well.
| Categories: Application areas, Competitive intelligence, Custom publishing, IBM and UIMA, Investment research and trading, Mark Logic, nStein, TEMIS, Text mining, Voice of the Customer | 1 Comment |
Text mining applications as per Attensity and Clarabridge
Besides asking them technical questions, I surveyed Attensity and Clarabridge last week about text mining application trends, getting generously detailed answers from Michelle De Haaff of Attensity and Justin Langseth of Clarabridge. Perhaps the most important point to emerge was that it’s not just about particular apps. Enterprises are doing text mining POCs (Proofs of Concept) around specific apps, commonly in the CRM area, but immediately structuring the buying process in anticipation of a rollout across multiple departments in the enterprise.
Other highlights of what they said included: Read more
| Categories: Application areas, Attensity, Clarabridge, ClearForest/Reuters, Competitive intelligence, Factiva/Dow Jones, Investment research and trading, Text mining, Voice of the Customer | 3 Comments |
Nice new phrase — Voice of the Market
Michelle DeHaaff, Attensity’s VP of Marketing, just introduced me to a nice phrase — Voice of the Market, obviously related to Voice of the Customer. As Michelle put it:
We’ve also expanded into what we call Voice of the Market data – providing a combination of analysis on external and internal data
– this is how we’ve heard our customers put it:
*Customer feedback comes in many forms……when customers don’t know you are listening (blogs, public web forums) it is important to hear what they say.
*When customers purposely tell you something (via emails, in surveys, captured in customer service notes) it is not only important, but expected….
The first of those would be Voice of the Market, while the second would be Voice of the Customer.
| Categories: Application areas, Attensity, Competitive intelligence, Text mining, Voice of the Customer | 2 Comments |
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