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 |
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 |
Text Analytics Summit marketing panel update
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.
| Categories: Text Analytics Summit | Leave a Comment |
Inxight — value in the patents?
In a comment posted to this Andy Hayler blog entry, a former Inxight board member mentions Inxight’s broad patent portfolio. I don’t know what defensible value is or isn’t there, but I do know that patent positions are important to Business Objects. Read more
| Categories: BI integration, Business Objects and Inxight | Leave a Comment |
(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 |
Huge e-commerce gains claimed by everybody
The folks at Progress claim huge conversion rate benefits to EasyAsk, although unfortunately so far I’ve been unable to drill down and see what those numbers really mean. (Flagship customer = Land’s End.) Baynote makes more modest but still large claims. (Flagship customer = no big names that I’m aware of.) Endeca is clearly the market leader. (Flagship customers = Wal-Mart, Home Depot.) Mercado and Inquira are important players, at least in certain verticals.
I think it’s safe to say that e-commerce site navigation aids constitute a really important product category.
| Categories: Baynote, Endeca, InQuira, Mercado, Progress and EasyAsk, Search engines, Structured search | 1 Comment |
Wise Crowds of Long-Tailed Ants, or something like that
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. Read more