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AOL: What about Relegence

I am now longer surprised with the deep cloud of unknowing that reduces visibility in pundits’ reports. Someone (who shall remain nameless) sent me a report from a well known search “expert” (who shall also remain nameless) reporting on the changes at America Online.

AOL fumbled some of their opportunities in the last three years. Now the company is the darling of the analysts’ eye because the company is dumping services. I have a partner who is a former Naval officer. He remarked, “When you jettison stuff, you want to try and stay afloat.” Not much more deep thinking is required to understand why AOL Pictures, BlueString, and an online back up service called Xdrive are history. None has much traction compared to Flickr, YouTube.com, and literally dozens of cloud-based back up services. Here’s a link to a reasonably good summary of the received wisdom about AOL’s actions.

The report I mentioned earlier talked about solid AOL services; namely, email, instant messaging, and chat rooms. The consultant generated a laundry list of other AOL services, which you can find here without paying a consultant to prepare a custom study for you.

One interesting service, which is named “Money”, is reasonably useful. In fact, for some types of company research, one can argue that it is as good as either Yahoo Finance or Google’s Yahoo Finance clone aptly named Google Finance. I heard that one of the female engineers who worked on Yahoo Finance, jumped to Google to work on Google Finance, but that may be Silicon Valley chatter. There are some similarities.

AOL has muffed the bunny on its promotion of its service. First, navigate to http://money.aol.com. There are a number of point and click options. These range from changing the page layout to scanning through categories of information, blogs, headlines, and videos.

In November 2006, AOL acquired Relegence Corporation, originally started in Israel. This company–essentially unknown and untracked in the search and content processing world of New York punditry–developed technology that monitors, formats, and displays real time content streams. The company’s approach presaged the Connotate system (now the object of much love from Goldman Sachs) and Exegy (in deep mind meld with the financial and military intelligence sectors) in 1999.

This is the Relegence tool bar. Users have one click access to news and other features.

In 2006, I thought that The Relegence Corporation was a very solid real-time financial services news engine, providing market and business intelligence to global buy-side and sell-side institutions. The company had an R&D center in Israel. In 2004, Relegence hooked up with search vendor X1, but that tie up has dropped off my radar. Relegence’s automated infrastructure aggregated relevant structured and unstructured information from internal resources and external research, including blogs, Web sites, email and over thousands of third-party sources in English and other languages. Relegence’s could deliver customized news in real-time to any communications device. When I looked at Relegence at the time of the AOL deal, I thought that Relegence was in a position to give InfoDesk, founded by a former Bell Labs wizard Sterling Stites, a run for the money.

When I learned about AOL’s buying Relegence, I was not sure if AOL could get its act together and make use of Relegence’s technology. It did and you can see some of Relegence’s functionality in action at the AOL finance site here.

I looked at the company (then called eNow) in late 1999, maybe 2000, and pinged them about three months ago. Relegence is alive and well, and it may well be an undervalued asset for AOL. Founder Edo Segal (an expert on artificial intelligence technology) still has a role at Relegence, but it is not the highest profile content processing company in world at this time. In my opinion, AOL has not leveraged Relegence’s technology effectively nor has the AOL management team included Relegence technology in other services to the extent that I think possible. Relegence sells to both the buy side and sell side on Wall Street. A financial services customer can use the Relegence version of AOL’s instant messaging (AIM) with a Relegence “trusted federation”. This service is called FinAIM, and the company is working to position it as a real time messaging network for financial services firms.

What’s a Relegence to AOL? AOL’s description is flabby:

Using its proprietary FirstTrack technology, Relegence simultaneously monitors, indexes, and filters more than 20,000 unique, global sources of live content streams – such as local and international newswires, print media, television and cable networks, regulatory feeds, corporate and information web sites, Internet bulletin boards – and deliver to a user’s desktop only the information which is relevant to his or her individual search criteria. Additionally, Relegence can comprehensively integrate internal content streams and programming with external content and create a powerful tool for users to manage and utilize mission-critical information in their day-to-day activities and enable them to make more timely and accurate choices and decisions.

Information in my files sheds some light on how the system works. FirstTrack can accept information via spidering or push mechanisms. The content is normalized, indexed, and filtered against profiles of users. In operation, the company is not that different from the older and now largely forgotten NewsEdge service. Relegence generates a “KnowledgeBase”. This feature is a database that organizes user queries according to personal and corporate needs. Users can also define a sensitivity threshold to control the amount of results they wish to receive. Users stay on the edge of information that is relevant to them by being alerted to their search results in real-time. Like Connotate, Relegence can integrate all of a corporation’s internal content streams, such as research, with external content.

AOL has some nuggets in the mine tailings of the company. In fact, AOL could be acquired by a savvy firm, parsed, piece ranked, and the useful bits kept and the underutilized bits sold off. But as long as “experts” look at what AOL was, the potential of the property may be misperceived.

Stephen Arnold, July 27, 2008

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