Forecast: Our enterprise tools for searching, synthesizing, manipulating and transforming data into knowledge and skills will soon move beyond short keyword text searches into an era of more interactive, personalized and software-guided experiences. The next wave of enterprise search, collaboration and learning tools will be built around: voice (natural language/conversation), video, location, social relationships, real-time activities and sentiments, agent-based applications, decision-making support, workflow support, and meaning applied to unstructured data.
A Disruptive Innovation Opportunity: ‘Searching/Sharing to Learning’
The web and web user experience seems ripe for disruptive innovation. We have reached a point of diminishing returns of our search paradigm as we drown in too much information, and not enough context. The tools for more effective searching, knowledge discovery and creation are absent from most consumer and enterprise web experiences.
Today, our expectations for building our search skills are shockingly low as most people just type in a keyword and click the first search result without any critical thought. Today’s web is an easy target for critics who believe easy searching has created a disincentive for building more challenging critical thinking skills. (I agree, but am optimistic that new tools and expectations are on the horizon!)
The mainstreaming of the social web has obvious upsides for ease of sharing ideas, but what about tools and platforms for more robust learning and evolution of our skill sets?
The disruptive opportunity of taking us from an Era of Searching to Learning is enormous, and it is exciting to see real movement among incumbents, startups and research institutions in evolving our tools and expectations for learning in a world where information is abundant, but the skills to build knowledge are lacking.
Terms like ‘semantic web’, ‘natural language processing’, and ‘mash up’ have become stale to geek web culture, but they are just now finding an audience in mainstream enterprise and consumer markets. The following lists includes [Updated: January 12, 2010] companies and projects to monitor as we prepare for the disruption of web learning…
Learn more below with a list of Incumbents, Startups and Projects to Watch…
Start ups Companies to Watch
[Updated: January 12, 2010]
- Altus – enterprise video search and learning platform
- Alitora – search, navigation and collaboration solutions
- Brainware
- Clarabridge – text mining
- Cognition – semantic solutions
- Collibra – enterprise data and business integration solutions
- Coveo – enterprise search and knowledge
- Exalead – enterprise search-based application (SBA) developer
- eVri – search and context engine
- Feedmil – ‘long tail’ search engine
- hunch –
- iGlue – web search and context platform
- Linguistic Agents – agent based interface platforms
- OpenAmplify – search and knowledge
- Pingar
- Rippol – a personalized, social video discovery engine
- SnapLogic – ‘ a new kind of data integration company’
- Synaptica – standardizing business vocabulary and language
- Temis – text mining and knowledge discovery
- TenForce– project ‘knowledge from data’
- Triviox – personalized job search
- Viewdle – video search
- VizSearch – supply chain and manufacturing exchange platform *
- Location based search – Google Near Me Now, Aloqua,
- Financial / Markets data – SkyGrid,
- Real-time search – OneRiot, – more coming
- Video search – Viewdle, VideoSurf
Enterprise Solution Incumbents to Watch:
[Updated: January 12, 2010]\
- Microsoft Live Labs is pushing Pivot a new way to interact with data
[Also see ‘EntityCube‘ project; Bing Map Integration] – more to come… - Google has released its beta version of Fusion (Fusion Tables); Living Stories; … more to come
- Oracle –project list coming soon
- IBM – Blue Pages, Bee Hive, project list coming soon
- Cisco – Cisco Pulse (Thanks, Anurag) – full project list coming soon
Projects to Watch:
- AnalogySpace (MIT)
- Paraview – is an open source
- Common Sense – open sourced project gathering common sense knowledge
- Common Sense Computing Group (MIT)
- Divisi (MIT) – a library for reasoning and semantic web applications
- *InfoChimps – open source knowledge and data marketplace platform *
- FedThread – search and interact with data from Federal Registry
- MESH – future of news and learning project
- Quora – collecting questions and answers
- Software Agents Group (MIT)
- YAGO – Max Planc Institute semantic web knowledge base project
- 2Wit (MIT) –
- List of ‘deep web’ search tools
*I’m refining my semantic web list to the most current and active projects**
Just to have on your radar
- DataDesigner – build a data platform
- GiniPic – simultaneous visual search
- GizaPage – learn more about your social graph
- Rank Em – crowdsourcing music discovery engine
- PearlTrees – visualization knowledge organization platform
- Mikojo – ‘the intelligent search engine’
- Oamos – meta search engine
- Public Database – gov 2.0 project
- Principle Global Indicators – global data
- Similar Page – discovery with searching
- SensesBot
- Spezify – search platform
Leave comments with any notable companies, projects that I miss… and I will update with credits!!
[Follow lists via my del.icio.us tags on search]
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I would add Cisco Pulse to this list. This product analyzes and indexes documents as they move through the network. It uses NLP technologies to extract terms of interest from the documents to establish a vocabulary for the enterprise. It appears Cisco passes this vocabulary to the Nexidia product to “tag” audio and video files. In addition to search of text and rich media, Pulse is a corporate directory and expert finder within the enterprise. The experts are identified based on the NLP of documents they read and publish, including email.