Many technology companies have managed to flood the market with their “magic” automatic solutions. They promise precision tools which are simple to use, have enticingly colorful dashboards and provide full coverage of “consumers sentiment” with minimal effort. Many of their web sites state that once top executives are equipped with their magic tool, the task of reading and interpreting the extracted data can be easily delegated to their subordinates.

As I am directly involved with this aspect with my company, I can’t seem to figure out if this claim is just an aggressive marketing campaign or if it is just a way to tell customers what they want to hear. Either way, it has created a situation where the only dialogue with the potential customers is based on looking at the data contained these reports and trying to find the errors in the extraction, thus casting doubts on whether the technology is actually ready for the market.

This vicious cycle needs to be stopped. It could be useful to remember the following guidelines to create a more productive climate and provide value both to businesses and to technology companies:

1) Online sentiment analysis is just another element of competitive intelligence and should be handled accordingly
2) Even the more established technologies (ERP, BI, CRM) are not perfect and do have a margin of acceptable error
3) A group of analysts should be employed to examine the data, extract the knowledge and scan the sources
4) Set priorities and be conservative: avoid incidents first
5) Learn how messages propagate

The current economic crisis is creating new possibilities for semantic technology. Businesses need to cut costs (which is usually done by downsizing personnel) without making any cutbacks in the quality of their services. No one can afford to let quality go downhill, because once it does, the competition is more than ready to pounce on the opportunity.

The fact that there is growing interest in semantic solutions (like automatic categorization and text mining) is obviously a positive factor (for us, at least :-), but the crisis has also complicated the situation. Companies express interest in implementing innovative solutions, however their present-day budgets are quite limited, especially when it comes to purchasing software licenses. This creates a kind of catch-22 situation because investing in innovative technology is often the key to improving efficiency within a company (when correctly implemented.)

It is very important to thoroughly weigh the pros and cons of this situation. Cost may seem to be a problem at first (because it may exceed the allotted budget funds), but in reality it is actually quickly absorbed thanks to the level quality which is gained (quality which was not compromised by the need to reduce costs). This type of approach often makes it possible to find a solution which benefits both sides (customer and supplier) and guarantees an outcome which lives up to expectations. Of course, flexibility is required on both ends and supplier experience is essential to minimize implementation risks.

If a budget is truly minimal, it is usually best not to play around with money. Money should never be wasted, especially if it’s scarce. Although sometimes it is actually possible to reduce the final objectives and focus only on the fundamental aspects and still be able to obtain positive results.

Sooner or later this crisis is bound to end! Those who invested wisely during these hard times will have an advantage over those who chose not to take any risks.

Do you remember the song, “Change the World”? It was recorded by Eric Clapton and won a Grammy Award for “Song of the Year”. There’s no doubt that we can change the world, but sometimes we just can’t accept the idea that world can change us as well. This is especially true in the business world; we trust the notion that change is needed in order to grow and progress, yet we aren’t usually very fond of it (some say this is a sort of unconscious, unresolved conflict between our intelligence and our emotions.)

In the last year, the concept of monitoring consumer opinions expressed online in forums, blogs, and social networks became a very popular topic, not only for management and industry press, but also for mainstream media. Several incidents have caused the reputations of companies and government organizations to take a beating. Some have even had their image completely destroyed by videos posted on YouTube (Domino’s Pizza), online rumors or email campaigns. On the positive side however, the companies which implemented focused and innovative viral marketing campaigns were able to profit considerably by using these same mechanisms proactively. What this tells us is that having access to online opinions about products, brands and people is more than just a passing phase. It is a strategic variable for all organizations (have you read this report about Toyota’s crisis?)

While executives seem to be increasingly aware of this aspect, the majority of them do not seem to place the same value on this issue as they would for other strategic business variables. Activities involving business intelligence are dealt with using a mix of technologies, databases and analysts (internal and external to the organization), yet this new variable of competitive intelligence is treated superficially, without engaging sufficient resources. It certainly can’t be easy to face these sorts of challenges, but I believe it all boils down to what I said in the beginning: it’s not easy to change the way you work. Furthermore, as intellectual and emotional factors continue to build up, the situation tends to become even more complicated then it actually is.

There is a bright side to all of this, however. First, we can allow the world change us and let things happen by themselves. Change doesn’t have to be “the thing to do” because it is driven by outside forces (because markets change or because consumers needs change, etc…); it can be something natural and simple. There are lots of people out there willing to change, sometimes with the help of other people. Thankfully, for a company like Expert System, there are a lot of people that embrace the idea of changing their lives - or maybe just their companies - by exploring new technology.

Here’s some food for thought: we start to change only when we start to think differently. (BTW, did you know “Change the World” was also chosen as one of the Songs of the Century? Ranked #270.)

Today I reached out to my old Friend Dennis Tran. Dennis and I met around 1990 when we both worked for a company called Excalibur and we were selling fuzzy search.

Excalibur should have been Google, but like so many companies with great technology we lacked the vision and marketing to have taken the fore front of the search market. Excalibur shelved it’s cool technology, became a me-too product, changed it’s name to Convera, was disected by Fast and eventually consumed by Microsoft. Dennis and I parted ways and I lost track of my friend.

My next adventure was Autonomy. Better product and marketing, but like the overweight sun bather, roasting on the beach and slowly losing sight of thier toes; they will not see the tide change and miss the opportunity to move.

Well… back to my original point. A few days ago Microsoft announced that it is dropping support for FAST on all Unix platforms. This made me think of Dennis and the conversations we used to have about handling objections concerning the size of our company. It never occured to me to point out that we would never just drop support of our product, and that in perspective, every customer made a big difference and was extremely important to keep and care for. Maybe Dennis and I can help some of our original believers move from keyword to advanced semantics.

It’s funny how the smaller tech companies have become the safer bet in our ever changing market and economy. And how very interesting that dissapointing decisions made by industry giants cause us to re-connect with some truly wonderful people.

It hasn’t been long since the wireless industry decided to expand it’s high-speed wireless services, promising easy access to corporate data from a mobile phone (so called wireless data extensibility). The industry-wide goal is a potential factor of improvement for workforce effectiveness and efficiency in enterprises worldwide.

Progress can already be seen as handset manufacturers launch smaller and faster mobile devices with touch screens, keyboards and new operating systems for on-the-go access to content. With the infrastructure in place, one can expect end users to be easily connected to relevant content, thus fulfilling the wireless data promise. Unfortunately, the unique characteristics of mobile phones and their intelligent counterparts (smartphones) still pose a challenge when it comes to offering the ideal end user experience. For one thing, the latest evolutions in graphical user interfaces (GUI), such as those provided by Apple’s iPhone,  provide decent access to menus, content lists and cursory internet search, but they really just mimic the same experience users have when accessing applications from a regular computer. Secondly, due to the small screens, people who use the text messaging features to access data from a mobile phone require a user interface that’s simple, with a built-in Q&A mechanism providing just the minimal amount (possibly the only) information requested by the user. That would be smart.

This is why I believe that well-developed, high-performance, natural language interfaces are the ideal solution to enable users to access the information required. And from our personal experience alongside a leading company in the mobile communications market, we can safely say that users seem to agree. Just in the last few months, the service we developed for this company has been flooded with more than 100K questions daily. Real semantic technology in addition to a well-designed knowledge base is a recipe for success which can reach level of performance (90% of correct single answers) that is no match for any version of a generic keyword-based system.

We’ll be releasing a more official announcement shortly, but we wanted to let our readers know firsthand that we have released the new version of COGITO Focus.

Focus is our semantic search engine for enterprises. Searching is really just the beginning with this engine because it also supports analysts and knowledge workers in the activities of strategic data analysis. It breaks through the barriers created by the majority of traditional search engines (e.g.: NO flexible faceted search; NO graphical representation of the semantic relations between words, concepts, entities; NO intelligent agents; NO semantic crawling… just few of the features that traditional enterprise search tools do not offer).

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank those of you who worked with Marco Varone on this new release of Focus. Great job, everyone!

Toyota is in hot water. The company recently announced recalls on seven U.S. and European models, due to faulty gas pedals and braking systems. Not only is this a tremendous blow for the world’s largest automaker’s image, but it could also have a serious impact on it’s sales.

A drop in sales has already been registered: in the US, sales have declined by 8.7%, due in part to the removal of some defective models from the market, in Jan 2010. For the first time in 10 years, Toyota’s sales sank below 100,000 units; and in the first few days of February, the stock was down 5.69% on the Tokyo Exchange.

Toyota is now focusing on winning back it’s customers and reassuring them of the quality and the safety of it’s vehicles. And what about the Voice of the Customers? Could Toyota have foreseen the imminent crisis just by analyzing the opinions expressed online? Could they have had a notion of which aspects were being discussed and criticized by users?

We used Cogito Monitor (our semantic software which automatically processes content in detail) to find out what users have said about Toyota. We examined the comments posted on the most popular U.S. automobile blogs and forums such as: caranddriver.com, carforum.com, autoblog.com etc.

And this is what we have found out.