Blogs @ Northern Light

It has been just about a week since Apple’s newest iPhone went on sale. The new phone, dubbed iPhone 3G, boasts download speeds substantially faster than the earlier model (at least in areas supporting 3G). But that is not all that has changed. Apple has also opened up the iPhone API allowing third parties to create applications for its App Store, available through iTunes in the Apple Apps Store. The iPhone now also supports Microsoft Exchange, making the phone more acceptable for use by the business community.

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Last Thursday the News Corp. company MySpace released the application programming interface (API) for its Data Availability project. Releasing the API, which follows the project’s initial release a month ago, will make it easier for MySpace users to do more with the data they have entered into (and which tethered them to) their MySpace account. Users will no longer need to enter their entire profile at each network they join or site they visit: default profiles, photos, and friends lists will be able to travel with the user out of the walled garden of the social networking site.

If that seems like a giant leap forward – it is. If it seems too good to be true – ditto.

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The title of an IDC white paper released in May and sponsored by Nortel, A Global Look at the Exploding ‘Culture of Connectivity’ and Its Impact on the Enterprise, makes the content of the study apparent.

For the study IDC surveyed, “2,367 men and women across 17 countries in various industries, company size classes, and age segments.” All respondents were fully employed, over 17 years old, used a PC at work, and owned or used a PDA or mobile phone for either business or personal activities, and had access to the Internet.

From the survey results IDC distilled four distinct clusters of users. Barebones Users, Passive Online, Increasingly Connected, and Hyperconnected. Barebones Users, at the low-end of the connectivity scale are defined as: “Those who are online but pretty much stick to email, desktop access to the Internet, and cell phone use for voice calls.” The other end of the connectivity spectrum is reserved for the Hyperconnected: “Those who have fully embraced the brave new world, with more devices per capita than the other clusters and more intense use of new communications applications. They liberally use technology devices and applications for both personal and business use.”

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Even before it won its first SXSW award in March of 2007 Twitter has been making waves. Since then the messaging service has achieved a valuation, “pegged at way north of $70 million,” according to leading tech blogger Om Malik who also notes that its most recent round of funding raised the company another $15 million.

Originated as a browser-based microblogging tool allowing users to post updates of up to 140 characters to groups of followers (rather than just to individuals), Twitter has spawned a plethora of tools now piggybacking on its success; from desktop clients which free users from Twitter’s browser-based origin to those that allow searching of the stream of Twitter messages known as ‘tweets’.

Once the playground of ‘tech elite’ early adopters Twitter is now being utilized by businesses to monitor their status and brand among not only those early adopters, but among the rapidly growing number of more mainstream users now using the service.

Twitter is now on the way to rearing its head in full and in doing so has also become the center of one of Web 2.0’s greatest love-hate relationships.

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Northern Light announced SinglePoint Connects on May 20th, during the Enterprise Search Summit in NYC.  SinglePoint Connects includes user collaboration and “social computing” capabilities that make it easier to find, annotate and share market intelligence documents and organizational knowledge in the context of a SinglePoint Market Research Portal.

SinglePoint Connects enables users to gauge the popularity of documents and search terms; identify internal experts on particular research topics; and identify potential collaborators and reports likely to be relevant to a specific research project. In addition, SinglePoint Connects offers social computing features including bookmarking reports with user defined tags which other users can then search on and review and wikis with links to relevant reports.  Because Connects is part of the SinglePoint portal environment, the collaboration features are restricted to the authorized users of the corporate portal and all document access rights are strictly enforced.

Read the full press release: http://www.northernlight.com/press/20080520.html

Executive summary from Forrester.com:

Ensuring that high-cost market research maximizes return on investment is hard to do. A simple way to start tracking ROI is to make certain that key stakeholders at least read the research or, even better, act on it — for example, a sales manager using competitive market research on a sales call. Today, market research distribution techniques to maximize research readership run the gamut from emailing reports to sophisticated, personalized portals that handle the complex licensing, content management, and security of multiple sources of market research. At the head of the class is Hewlett-Packard’s (HP’s) MarketVision. MarketVision’s far-reaching data, ease of use, and facilitation of content sharing have made it popular, with 90,000 employees logging on since 2001, eliciting use in key areas like engineering, sales, and marketing. HP is pushing the envelope, using Web services not only to have market research available on the portal but also to incorporate market research into key business processes.

Read the full report at: http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,45758,00.html
(A Forrester account is required to access the full report.)

For more information on SinglePoint download the HP Case Study or our Customer Voice White Paper.

According to reports from McKinsey & Company and Forrester, adoption of the Software-as-a-Service model is on the rise. SaaS is moving beyond its place in the small and medium sized business (SMB) space and is increasingly being implemented in larger enterprises. “For platform vendors, the only falloff in interest comes at the largest enterprises, those employing more than 25,000 people. In short, nearly every company – or division of a larger enterprise – is a customer or a prospect for SaaS platforms,” states McKinsey’s 2008 Enterprise Software Customer Survey. This thought is mirrored by Forrester research: “SaaS use is growing across types of applications, companies, and user groups.” The momentum created by this movement is pulling in established software vendors and fueling quick-moving startups. As both vie for position, it is acknowledged that some will fall, but the model is predicted to survive.

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Forrester Research defines Web 2.0 as, “A set of technologies and applications that enable efficient interaction among people, content, and data in support of collectively fostering new businesses, technology offerings, and social structures.” According to Forrester’s research and blogs, everything is rosy in the Web 2.0 world. Recession or not, the space should continue to heat up for at least the next five years.
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The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) recently published its seventh annual Internet Crime Report. The organization works in partnership with the White Collar Crime Complaint Center and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and serves, “as a vehicle to receive, develop, and refer criminal complaints regarding the rapidly expanding arena of cyber crime.”

Between January 1st and December 31st 2007 the IC3 processed 219,553 complaints: 206,884 complaints were received via their website (a drop of 0.3 percent from the previous year), the remaining 12,669 were referrals from other agencies. Though the IC3 tracks numerous types of complaints, those which come via the website typically, “do not represent dollar loss but provide a picture of the types of scams that are emerging via the Internet. These complaints in large part are comprised of fraud involving reshipping, counterfeit checks, phishing, etc.” 2007 was the second year in a row that the number of complaints to the IC3 website dropped; 231,493 complaints were received in 2005 and 207,492 in 2006.

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Today we announced the release of Northern Light Search (http://www.nlsearch.com) - the only free search engine of business news and industry authority blogs that also offers powerful, automated meaning extraction capabilities and collaborative social computing features.

Northern Light Search allows business researchers to search relevant business and industry news from thousands of business news sources, leading business publications, and hand-selected industry authority blogs.  Researchers can automatically also analyze their results to extract meaning from the articles discovered in the search.  In the context of business-centric search, meaning extraction determines what information is contained in the documents on a search results list, such as companies, markets and technologies; suggests what business issues the documents address; assesses the tone of the documents; and directs the researcher to the documents that are most interesting based on their meaning rather than on their statistically-derived search relevance.

The social computing, or Web 2.0, features included in Northern Light Search are a Market Intelligence Wiki and a series of “widgets” that leverage the search activity of the Northern Light Search community.  These search widgets include tag clouds of most popular search terms and lists of the most popular articles accessed by other researchers.  Other widgets leverage MI Analyst to show the most mentioned entities in the news - the most mentioned business issues, the most mentioned IT technologies, and the most mentioned venture funded companies.   Northern Light’s internet librarians have seeded the Market Intelligence wiki by scouring news and industry sources for authoritative news, analysis and commentary to create comprehensive, concise wiki sites for a dozen industries.

Read the full press release.