Is Q-Go a Yugo?
August 9, 2010
Last week, I received a call from a fancy pants MBA about NLP or natural language processing. NLP seems to be a new opportunity. NLP has been around a while, and like the formerly hot notion “taxonomy” and “semantics”, NLP is in vogue. The question concerned a company I knew about, Q-Go. I dipped into my Overflight service and realized that the company had gone quiet. In some cases, “going quiet” is a prelude to either a massive investment like Palantir’s $90 million or closing up shop like Convera did earlier this year.
Q-Go provides an application aimed at redefining customers’ web searching experiences. Research indicates that a growing number of customers are sick of turning to search engines for answers because they get responses with millions of unrelated websites.
According to their website, “31 percent of users are unhappy with their online interaction with web sites and 70% are unable to find what they are looking for.” And Q-Go asserts that it has the answer for the airline, financial services, and telecommunication industries. Q-Go reduces customer service issues by providing a search application that can more successfully interpret the meaning behind user questions—in all major Western languages. The approach sounds like InQuira’s.
The result? Fewer customer service calls, lowered costs, and higher conversion rates. It almost sounds too good to be true. With a guaranteed six-month return on investment, the only downside I see is that there are still some languages Q-Go can’t work with. But I’m guessing that will eventually change if the company avoids the “quiet” state.
Stephen E Arnold, August 12, 2010
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