DomainWhiz Identifies Potential Domain Names
April 17, 2010
Need a nifty domain name? You can try DomainWhiz.net’s new search utility. I learned about the system in “DomainWhiz Introduces Doman Name Search Tool.” The idea is that the system makes it easier to locate potential domain names. The write up said:
DomainWhiz’ domain name search technology is supported by Natural Language Processing technology that has the ability to generate alternative names that are either synonymous with or highly relevant to keywords entered by an end user. The technology goes one step further by checking the availability of each alternative name, and notes its availability, expiration date or whether it is up for sale. The service is available now in English and the alternative names that come up are SEO friendly.
You can give the system a test drive at http://domainwhiz.net/. When you locate a suitable name, a click on the “pricing” links sends you to GoDaddy.com.
DomainWhiz says:
DomainWhiz combines the power of machine learning techniques, large natural language databases, and manually crafted linguistic rules to search the vast space of Semantic Network and extract only those domains that the end user intends to search.
Applied Semantics (formerly Oingo) offered similar capabilities to licensees prior to the firm’s acquisition by Google. Other domain registrars offer similar functions; for example, Register.com. If my memory serves me, Oingo / Applied Semantics offered a similar service via its licensees before the company was gobbled by Google and lashed to advertising tasks.
Stephen E Arnold, April 17, 2010
An unsponsored post.
A-Life NLP Renew Medical Automation Deal
April 17, 2010
A-Life Medical, Inc., a leading provider of computer-assisted coding (CAC) products and services to the healthcare industry, announced today the renewal of an extensive contract with Associated Billing Services, Inc. “Associated Billing Services Renews Extensive Agreement with A-Life Medical” The computerized coding and workflow management product that leverages A-Life’s proprietary and patented technology, LifeCode ® appears to be the source of reaping the cost-savings benefits and efficiencies key to a successful business.
According to Associated Billing Services’ vice president, Matthew Frick:
“We have built a long-standing relationship with A-Life based on the benefits of the company’s patented NLP technology. Its accuracy rate and ability to appropriately code quickly, seamlessly and efficiently, has helped us to significantly reduce turnaround time, labor costs and accounts receivable days of services outstanding.”
Using NLP technology, A-Life deciphers electronic transcribed patient encounters via the Internet through its data center, which are then appropriately coded for reimbursement purposes.
Melody K. Smith, April 17, 2010
Note: Post was not sponsored.
Wither Nervana?
April 16, 2010
I received a call about a company in the Seattle area. The firm is Nervana, founded in 2001, and if you are one of the lucky folks attending the Gilbane conference in San Francisco, you can hear a talk by Nervana’s founder, Nosa Omoigui. Nervana focused on semantics and natural language processing. My Overflight files has a meaty collection of information about this company’s technology. The firm received funding and ramped up its marketing in 2006. The firm pushed into the processing of health and medical content. Then the firm refocused its efforts on the processing of résumés. The firm’s Web site is online at www.nervana.com, but the news section has not been updated since November 2006. I continue to track the firm because Mr. Omoigui is involved with Youth for Technology Foundation which has a presence in Louisville, Kentucky.
What’s important about Nervana is that the company’s trajectory shows how a very bright entrepreneur in the field of content processing has positioned what is, in my opinion, a quite interesting technical system. The firm’s technology is anchored in “a unique technology that allows knowledge workers to ask questions naturally within the context of their meanings.” A LinkedIn description adds:
“Nervana, Inc. provides knowledge discovery solutions for companies. Its solutions enable knowledge based workers to find, correlate, and retrieve the information from repositories both inside and outside their enterprise. The company’s products include Drug Discovery that provides Medline, life sciences news, and life sciences Web content for research and development teams; Business Discovery, which offers Medline, life sciences news, general news, patents, and life sciences Web; IP Discovery that enables users to discover and retrieve information from the United States, European, Japanese, and other worldwide patents; and Premium Discovery for enterprise customers to manage their in-house information. It also offers project management, logistics, pre-configuration, onsite installation, informatics consulting, and documentation services. Nervana was founded in 2001 and is headquartered in Seattle, Washington.”
My notes show that one of the sources of funding is now involved in a company that seems to use the original Nervana logo. This firm is Dipiti. SeattlePI in February 2008 ran a story “Dipiti, a Search Engine for Message Boards.” Dipiti seems to have gone off line and now redirects to Hot Shopper.
What’s interesting is that the trajectory of Nervana shows that next generation content processing has huge potential. Management and investors tried a number of different markets. The other thought that struck me is the words and phrases used to describe the firm’s technology are as fresh today as they were in the firm’s marketing push in 2006. Next generation content processing evokes considerable market interest. Nervana, shortly before it repositioned, was named a “Hot 100” company and touted some major clients, including Procter & Gamble. (Lists of “hot” companies may not be valid indicators of a firm’s health in my opinion.)
This is an interesting case example of the challenges facing some types of technologies.
Stephen E Arnold, April 16, 2010
A freebie.
Big Bucks to NetBase for Semantic Search
April 13, 2010
Semantic search continues to fire probes into the information sector. The most recent laser flash was the $9 million that charged the batteries of NetBase. I read “Semantic Search Startup NetBase Gets $9 Million” and learned:
With the new cash, NetBase will have now raised $18 million since its start in 2005. The funding comes from Altos Ventures and Thomvest Ventures. Cash will be used to “aggressively develop and serve new markets.” NetBase says it will build out its sales, marketing, business development and product management functions.
Interest in semantic search continues to percolate. The idea is that indexing words is often not enough. In order to go beyond key word indexing, semantic search innovators employs a broad range of techniques. These methods can degrade into marketing buzz. Casual observers of search hear “natural language processing” and “entity extraction” and leap to the conclusion that smart software can understand text.
Well, sort of. But the point is that most people who have used search engines for information know that a key word can generate information wide of the mar. One example is the use of the word “terminal” in a query. If you are looking for a bus station and get hits to an untreatable cancer, you realize that the word “terminal” has insufficient specificity to get you what you want. On the other hand, if you enter five or six key words, you may get a handful of hits but these may be too specific.
The fix is to assemble a number of methods to make fuzzy boundaries sharper and make too sharp boundaries fuzzier. The idea is to create a recipe that yields results that are just right. Google has some formidable intellects working on the semantic challenges. A Paul Allen start up Evri, bought the high profile Radar Networks, to beef up its semantic offerings. Most search vendors assert that their systems use semantic technology.
NetBase describes its approach as delivering the “next generation of search.” The company says:
We are the insight discovery company. Founded by innovators Jonathan Spier and Michael Osofsky, NetBase develops and markets a next-generation semantic technology that reads and understands the English language. This technology is the basis for solutions that help our users answer complex questions faster, more accurately, and with greater confidence. And we do this at scale. NetBase finds and extracts the most relevant information from billions of public and private sources of online information. Our advanced technology combines with patent-pending lenses to provide context for search results and intelligently guide users to highly relevant answers.
The company’s technology “focus searches by organizing the patterns detected by our next-generation semantic technology in the context of a specific set of questions relevant to a specific discipline or audience of researchers.”
Hakia, another semantic player, has been successful in attracting investment as well. The challenge for any semantic vendor is to find a way to generate sufficient revenue to keep the investors in vacation homes and new BMWs. There is a race underway among a number of interesting companies with semantic solutions. Looming over the entire sector are giants like Google and Microsoft which are keen to use semantics and any other context generating technology to give their services an advantage.
Which semantic vendor will break out and deliver a solution that delivers a hockey stick growth curve. Azure chip consultants praise most semantic technologies. But the proof is not PR. The proof is a sustainable base of revenue, sufficient revenue to continue technology investment, and the agility to dance around the very big players in the semantic game.
NetBase may be focusing on a vertical strategy and it will be interesting to watch the story unfold.
Stephen E Arnold, April 13, 2010
No one paid me to write this.
Akibot: Enterprise Microblogging with NLP
April 7, 2010
We received a question about Akibot, a stealth start up in private beta. We have not been able to use the system, but I wanted to snag what information I have in our Overflight system before I head to the airport. Fact is, we don’t know too much about this Twitter-influenced service.
Akibot is a company using smart software to generate business intelligence. The company’s Web site does not contain much information. Here’s the splash screen:
One phrase in “Collaboration with Akibot” provides a good summary of the company’s focus:
Akibot is the first semantic actionable micro-blogging platform for the enterprise. Akibot not only allows real-time group collaboration and awareness through short, instant messages (like a Twitter for the company), but it also understands those messages and, if applicable, takes action.
A July 2009 story in ReadWriteWeb, “Akibot: An Enterprise Twitter Clone Infused with AI” reported:
At first glance, Akibot may look very much like your typical Twitter clone, but it does something very different: it combines the collective intelligence provided by microblogging with an artificial intelligence engine that lets the service take action on the messages posted.
Overflight snared the Akibot Web log at http://akibot.blogspot.com/. The activity on the blog is modest with the most recent post appearing on February 11, 2010. The story “Yet Another New Version” pointed to an article about Akibot by Martin Bohringer, “Ubiquitous Microblogging”. He wrote:
The approach of ubiquitous microblogging has much to do with the search for enterprise use cases of microblogging and a rising number of researchers is thinking about this topic. Michael Rosemann from Queensland University of Technology described how microblogging could be used for business process management. Alexander Dreiling from SAP shows a prototype for collaborative modelling with Google Wave (is Wave microblogging? I am going to discuss this question in a future posting). But the other way round is also possible, as the guys from Akibot show with their microblogging bot using NLP (Natural Language Processing). And finally, our research group is currently involved in several microblogging projects including ‘microblogging for logistics’ (think of tweeting RFID chips). To implement a full ubiquitous microblogging scenario, still lots of work has to be done.
The question asked by Smarter Technology in July 2009 is difficult to answer: “Is there a business purpose for microblogging?” We won’t go beyond, “Stay tuned.”
Stephen E Arnold, April 7, 2010
A freebie.
Cognition Technologies Added to Overflight
April 6, 2010
We received a clipping about Cognition Technologies’ beefing up its management team.
Stephen J. Lief will assume responsibility for Cognition’s legal eDiscovery business. According the the Cognition announcement of dBusinessNews, “His role is to expand the company’s growth by developing partnerships with eDiscovery vendors, law firms and enterprise legal departments.” One interesting aspect of his background is that he has served as the founding editor of a number of publications, including the Legal Tech Newsletter.
Cognition develops semantic / natural language processing technology. The company describes itself this way:
Cognition’s Semantic NLP, the Company’s patented linguistic meaning-based text processing technology, is able to simultaneously deliver significantly higher levels of precision and recall than is possible with currently used NLP and Search technologies….Unlike all of the popular text reading and search in use today which utilize mathematically-based pattern-matching technology (i.e. they search for a particular word pattern based upon the user query), Cognition’s Semantic NLP understands the meaning within the context of the text it is processing. Therefore, the end benefit delivered to Cognition’s clients is simultaneously more precise and relevant understanding of their customers’ actions and intent.
Here at the goose pond, there has been an uptick in questions about semantic search. We have added Cognition to our Overflight service.
Stephen E Arnold, April 6, 2010
This is a freebie.
TextDigger and Open Web Service
April 5, 2010
The flurry of semantic activity reminded me that I had not updated my files on TextDigger, a semantic player based in San Jose, California. In February 2009, the company received an infusion of $4.3 million from “True Ventures (San Francisco, CA) with a follow on investment from Intel Capital (Santa Clara, CA), CBS Interactive, and some private investors. The company says:
TextDigger was founded by a group of former CNET employees and executives who developed patented linguistic technologies that, today, are used to auto-generate thousands of natural language texts posted on CNET’s award winning websites. Several members of TextDigger also founded SmartShop, which was acquired by CNET Networks in 2002. SmartShop developed a feature-rich comparison shopping engine distinguished by its ability to merge catalog data (product specs and features) from different sources, normalizing their divergent syntax and semantics, and presenting a unified catalog.
The has an interesting Open Web Service angle. In effect, the firm’s automated semantic tagging tool can be used by anyone who wants to tap the company’s technology to add to the Community Semantics term list. TextDigger’s technology is the top rated service in this project, which carries more weight for me than the comments from azure chip consultants, poobahs, and carpetbagger. TextDigger offers a version of its system for search engine optimization. You can sign up for a demo of the service on the TextDigger Web site here.
I read a paper by Tim Musgrove and Robin Walsh a couple of years ago. My recollection is that TextDigger’s technology had an interesting “more like this” function. My memory is hazy, but these types of functions can be computationally hungry. As Intel’s chips get more horsepower, semantic operations become less expensive. Intel has shown interest in other text-related investments, including Endeca. The commoditization of search and spare CPU cycles may open the door to some content related processes turning up in silicon. I am tracking the use of “open” as a differentiator, and like the word “search”, “open” has many shades of meaning.
Stephen E Arnold, April 5, 2010
A freebie.
Oracle Text Visualization
March 30, 2010
Short honk: A happy quack to the reader and obvious Oracle aficionado for this tip. You can download the Java library for Oracle Text visualization directly from Oracle and at no charge. The information on the Oracle Web site is sparse:
This Java library for Oracle Text visualization is incorporated in the Oracle Text sample code application to visualize clusters, categories, and themes.
Act now.
Stephen E Arnold, March 30, 2010
No one paid me to pass along this link.
Evri and Radar Networks
March 29, 2010
The Semantic Web, as those of you who have read my study Google Version 2.0, may become Google’s wading pool. The company continues to provide easy-to-use services whilst keeping the complications of semantic technology under the bonnet.
Evri, a start up founded by Paul Allen (one of the Microsoft founders), focused on semantic technology. The company’s focus is on the context around a conversation. The company’s said:
Evri is a technology company developing products that change the way consumers discover and engage with content on the Web. Publishers large and small have leveraged Evri’s semantic platform on their websites, including some of the world’s most prestigious news organizations like the Washington Post, Hearst Publishing (www.lmk.com), Ziff Davis, Yahoo! and the Times of London. With over 2 million profile pages across over 500 categories, several content recommendation applications and a feature-rich API platform, Evri is rapidly improving consumers’ access to information on the topics they value most.
In March 2010, Evri acquired Radar Networks, another player in the semantic sector but one with more marketing moxie in my opinion. Radar Network’s service is called Twine, and you can give it a test drive on the Twine Web site. Evri noted:
Twine is an online service for intelligently finding, organizing and sharing information with the people you trust. With the acquisition of Twine, Evri gains an incredibly talented team with proven momentum in semantic search and content discovery to complement our own. By combining the best of social and semantic filtering, we are greatly accelerating our ability to help people cut through the clutter and discover relevant news and information from across the real time web.
Evri offers contextual and topic based widgets. One of the widgets that I found useful is the Popover button. Once installed, an icon appears below a blog post. A click displays related content. Useful.
Evri offers an iPhone app called EvriVerse:
The EvriVerse app from Evri.com let’s you browse through popular people, places and things on demand. Watching a TV show and want to know who the actor is being compared to or curious to find out who your favorite celebrity is feuding with this week? Simply enter the name of the person, place or thing and find out who is connected to your topic. Learn more about them through related news stories and find additional pictures, videos, connections and news on their Evri.com topic pages.
EvriVerse from http://itunes.apple.com/app/evriverse/id312716560?mt=8#
Are semantic companies about to catch fire? The UK’s decision to set up a semantic institute and the number of emails I get about semantic technology suggest that interest is increasing. The challenge, in my opinion, will be to outsmart Google, which has the likes of Ramanathan Guha and Tim Bray drinking Odwalla in the Google cafeteria. Google has traction, lots of customers, and lots of distractions. An upstart could snag the semantic sector, leaving Google looking at another firm’s tail lights as Google is watching Facebook’s tail lights now.
Stephen E Arnold, March 29, 2010
No one paid me to write this article. Because I reference semantics, I will report no pay to the USGS which once had an interest in semantic technologies.
Institute for Web Science Funded
March 28, 2010
The UK may have a lorry stuffed full of bad debts, but it is going to support the Semantic Web. I learned from XML Journal that “Berners-Lee Gets a New Institute.” Now an “institute” in the UK is a bit different from the US non-profit. “Institutes” can certify. To become a materials scientist with alphabetical letters behind one’s name and a permit to do stuff like find new methods to deposit scratch resistant films on aircraft cockpits, you have to pass a test. “Institutes” can be big business and their impact is global. I heard that Japan monitors some UK institutes closely to make certain that the requirements set down in the UK for engineers are considered for Japanese engineers. Maybe? Maybe not, but the rumor underscores a type of influence that extends beyond something like the Institute for Creation Research.
According to XML Journal:
[The Institute for Web Science is] supposed to develop, maybe even commercialize, Berners-Lee’s quixotic next-generation notions of a Semantic Web and put the UK on the cutting edge of emerging Internet technologies, according to Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who also wants every home in the UK to have super-fast broadband by 2020. The institute will be jointly based at the Universities of Oxford and Southampton, the latter a hot bed of Semantic Web research where Berners-Lee has had a part-time post since 2004.
My view is that this will be an important outfit in less than a year. The Institute may be one way to help ensure that the Semantic Web remains an open environment, not the province of a single company. How big a role will outfits like Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle play? We will know when the first organization details begin to emerge.
Stephen E Arnold, March 28, 2010
Free as a bird. No one paid me to write this. I will report non payment to the Administration for Native Americans. I should work at a casino in Wisconsin. Bet I get paid there.
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