EveryZing: Exclusive Interview with Tom Wilde, CEO
March 16, 2009
Tom Wilde, CEO of EveryZing, will be one of the speakers at the April 2009 Boston Search Engine Meeting. To meet innovators like Mr. Wilde, click here and reserve your space. Unlike “boat show” conferences that thrive on walk in gawkers, the Boston Search Engine Meeting is content muscle. Click here to reserve your spot.
EveryZing here is a “universal search and video SEO (vSEO) firm, and it recently launched MediaCloud, the Internet’s first cloud-based computing service for generating and managing metadata. Considered the “currency” of multimedia content, metadata includes the speech transcripts, time-stamped tags, categories/topics, named entities, geo-location and tagged thumbnails that comprise the backbone of the interactive web.
With MediaCloud, companies across the Web can post live or archived feeds of video, audio, image and text content to the cloud-based service and receive back a rich set of metadata. Prior to MediaCloud and the other solutions in EveryZing’s product suite — including ezSEARCH, ezSEO, MetaPlayer and RAMP — discovery and publishing of multimedia content had been restricted to the indexing of just titles and tags. Delivered in a software-as-a-service package, MediaCloud requires no software to purchase, install or maintain. Furthermore, customers only pay for the processing they need, while obtaining access to a service that has virtually unlimited scalability to handle even large content collections in near real-time. The company’s core intellectual property and capabilities include speech-to-text technology and natural language processing.
Harry Collier (Infonortics Ltd) and I spoke with Mr. Wilde on March 12, 2009. The full text of our interview with him appears below.
Will you describe briefly your company and its search / content processing technology?
EveryZing originally spun out of BBN technologies in Cambridge MA. BBN was truly one of the godfathers of the Internet, and developed the email @ protocol among other breakthroughs. Over the last 20 years, the US Government has spent approximately $100MM with BBN on speech-to-text and natural language processing technologies. These technologies were spun out in 2006 and EveryZing was formed. EveryZing has developed a unique Media Merchandising Engine which is able to connect audio and video content across the web with the search economy. By generating high quality metadata from audio and video clips, processing it with our NLP technology to automatically “tag” the content, and pushing it through our turnkey publishing system, we are able to make this content discoverable across the major search engines.
What are the three major challenges you see in search / content processing in 2009?
Indexing and discovery of audio and video content in search; 2) Deriving structured data from unstructured content; 3) Creating better user experiences for search & navigation.
What is your approach to problem solving in search and content processing?
Well, yes, meaning that all three are critical. However, the key is to start with the user expectation. Users expect to be able to find all relevant content for a given key term from a single search box. This is generally known as “universal search”. This requires then that all content formats can be easily indexed by the search engines, be they web search engines like Google or Yahoo, as well as site search engines. Further, users want to be able to alternately search and browse content at will. These user expectations drive how we have developed and deployed our products. First, we have the best audio and video content processing in the world. This enables us to richly markup these files and make them far more searchable. Second, our ability to auto-tag the content makes it eminently more browsable. Third, developing a video search result page that behaves just like a text result page (i.e. keyword in context, sortability, relevance tuning) means users can more easily navigate large video results. Finally, plumbing our meta data through the video player means users can search within videos and jump-to the precise points in these videos that are relevant to their interests. Combining all of the efforts together means we can deliver a great user experience, which in turn means more engagement and consumption for our publishing partners.
Search / content processing systems have been integrated into such diverse functions as business intelligence and customer support. Do you see search / content processing becoming increasingly integrated
into enterprise applications?
Yes, absolutely. Enterprises are facing a growing pile of structured and unstructured content, as well as an explosion in multimedia content with the advent of telepresence, Webex, videoconferencing, distance learning etc. At the same time, they face increasing requirements around discovery and compliance that requires them to be able to index all of this content. Search is rapidly gaining the same stature as databases and document management systems as core platforms.
Microsoft acquired Fast Search & Transfer. SAS acquired Teragram. Autonomy acquired Interwoven and Zantaz. In your opinion, will this consolidation create opportunities or shut doors?
Major companies are increasingly looking to vendors with deep pockets and bench strength around support and R&D. This has driven some rapid market consolidation. However, these firms are unlikely to be the innovators, and will continue to make acquisitions to broaden their offerings. There is also a requirement to more deeply integrate search into the broader enterprise IT footprint, and this is also driving acquisitions.
Multi core processors provide significant performance boosts. But search / content processing often faces bottlenecks and latency in indexing and query processing. What’s your view on the performance of
your system or systems with which you are familiar?
Yes, CPU power has directly benefited search applications. In the case of EveryZing, our cloud architecture takes advantage of quad-core computing so we can deliver triple threaded processing on each box. This enables us to create multiple quality of service tiers so we can optimize our system for latency or throughput, and do it on a customer by customer basis. This wouldn’t be possible without advances in computing power.
Graphical interfaces and portals (now called composite applications) are making a comeback. Semantic technology can make point and click interfaces more useful. What other uses of semantic technology do you see gaining significance in 2009?
Semantic analysis is core to our offering. Every clip we process is run through our NLP platform, which automatically extracts tags and key concepts. One of the great struggles publishers face today is having the resources to adequately tag and title all of their video assets. They are certainly aware of the importance of doing this, but are seeking more scalable approaches. Our system can use both a unsupervised and supervised approach to tagging content for customers.
Where can I find more information about your products, services, and research?
Our Web site is www.everyzing.com.
Comments
One Response to “EveryZing: Exclusive Interview with Tom Wilde, CEO”
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
[…] EveryZing: Exclusive Interview with Tom Wilde, CEO […]