Northern Light News & Views

Check out the new post at In-Depth Understanding by David Seuss, CEO of Northern Light: Using Meaning Extraction To Improve Search Results.

Here’s a brief snippet:

“…with plain old search results none of this intelligence from either document comes through at all.  We have the little summaries that provide a whisper of what the documents are about, but the additional information that both taught me things and got me interested in reading more was absent.  Now, finally, we can dump the structure of search results first used for users of search engines in 1994 and can make search results way more useful.  Northern Light believes that meaning-loaded search results are a game-changer for users.”

Great review of MI Analyst from Paula Hane at InfoToday - Northern Light Boosts Search Insight With Launch of MI Analyst 3.0.

Here is a snippet from the market research analysts she quotes:

“Susan Aldrich, an analyst with the Patricia Seybold Group, likes the new functionality in MI Analyst 3.0. “The new support for scenarios, with automated analysis of business strategies, really succeeds in reducing the time to insight-which is NL’s marketing message for this release.” As for Northern Light’s direction, she says, “NL is right on the target: Customers need the type of analysis that NL is providing in order to be effective. Actually, anyone who searches for information needs this type of analysis, in various different contexts, but for now, they’ll only get it using NL’s MI Analyst.”

Brad Bortner, an analyst with Forrester Research, says he’s been impressed with Northern Light for several years. He says the seamless integration of syndicated research and internal research the company offers to large enterprises is compelling: “As my kids would say, it’s way cool.” He even thinks the company should consider packaging the technology separately and selling it to online community vendors. MI Analyst offers quite a sophisticated new level of qualitative data extraction-some of the examples around medical research were really impressive, he says.”

Check out the new post at In-Depth Understanding by David Seuss, CEO of Northern Light: Meaning Extraction for Business Strategy.

Here’s a brief snippet:

“I am willing to bet you a contribution to your favorite charity that you have never, ever, seen search results like the ones [from MI Analyst]. [As outlined in the post] Cisco’s strategy in the VOIP market jumps right off the page of MI Analyst search results. Specifically, Cisco is targeting specific market segments in the VOIP market and using a combination of high levels of professional services and support and partnerships/acquisitions to penetrate the market. Each of the search results listed above is linked to a list of reports that discuss that strategy concept, sorted by the number of times the strategy concept is in the report so users can rapidly drill into the documents that best elaborate on Cisco’s strategy.

And by the way, when a user is presented with a group of documents that are conceptually related to his or her research interest with a meaningful indication of the concepts the documents contain, the user persists and actually reads more reports than when the user is forced to use the hope for amazing good luck strategy.”

Check out the new post at In-Depth Understanding by David Seuss, CEO of Northern Light: How Does Meaning Extraction Actually Work?.

Here’s a brief snippet:

Meaning extraction. What exactly is that, you ask?; Other than a catch phrase, one of those one of those unique combinations of words that marketing folks crave to have associated with their brand. I submit this definition of “meaning extraction” for your consideration:

Meaning extraction is an emerging technology that identifies elements of information contained within documents and document repositories, and surfaces combinations of these informative elements that imply meaning in the context of the business, professional, or technical purpose of the search process. Meaning extraction applied to search applications dramatically improves and accelerates a searcher’s ability to gain insight into a topic and answer specific research questions.

Since the above has a theoretical tone that drains all the flash and boom from the concept, I thought it might be useful to provide a real-world example from the pharmaceutical industry. But as the private meaning extraction applications Northern Light operates for its clients cannot be viewed by anyone but our clients, I will illustrate meaning extraction using a database of research documents that is publicly available.

Read more …

Today we announced MI Metrics™ - a new service for marketing managers, product managers, strategic planners, and analyst relations professionals.  MI Metrics is a custom, analytic reporting service that provides a quantitative and qualitative overview of the total body of analyst coverage for your company and its competitors.  MI Metrics reports include:

• Analyst coverage and sentiment metrics
• Share of voice profiles
• Net positives and negatives (to gauge analyst sentiment toward each company)
• Strategic business issues being discussed
• Summary of the analysts’ views on each company covered
• Representative quotes and report excerpts
• Northern Light Points of View editorial perspective on strategic business issues suggested

MI Metrics provides an in-depth analysis of IT industry analysts’observations, opinions, and sentiment about your company and competitors and their products, strategies and performance.  Our research indicates that approximately half of all analyst mentions of companies occur outside of published analyst reports in the news media.  Therefore, MI Metrics analysis is distilled not only from traditional market research reports but also from news media articles and industry-authority blog postings in Northern Light’s Business News collection.

MI Metrics reports are generated by our editorial team using Northern Light’s MI Analyst™, the only automated “meaning extraction” application designed specifically for market intelligence, market research and product research.  MI Analyst speeds and improves a researcher’s ability to analyze reports from internal and external sources, identifying the strategy issues and suggesting the business implications of the analyzed content.   Most media coverage services focus on only coverage metrics and sentiment scoring, MI Metrics goes a significant step further to include identification of corporate strategy and product marketing issues.

Both MI Analyst and Northern Light Business News are available as part of SinglePoint and other Northern Light products.

Read the full press release: http://www.northernlight.com/press/20081202.html

The Forrester report The Verizon Information Research Network Utilizes Technology For Strategic Impact, referenced in a previous post has been posted to the NorthernLight.com website and is available to download for free.

Enjoy!

Today we announced that our Business News service now exceeds 6,000 editorially-selected sources from:

• business news services
• local, national and international newspapers
• leading business publications
• online newswires
• industry authority blogs
• company white papers

Northern Light Business News provides researchers
with instant access to over 10 million business and industry news
articles and blog postings. The index is updated continually with
approximately 22,000 news articles and 4,000 industry authority blog
posts each day.

Northern Light Business News is available as part of SinglePoint hosted market research portals; in Analyst Direct - a subscription-based search engine for information technology (IT) analyst research; and in stand-alone Northern Light Business News Portals.  In addition, a consumer version containing a significant portion of the content can be used for free at Northern Light Search (http://www.nlsearch.com).

As our CEO David Seuss said:

“Over the past two years, there has been a sea change in the availability of high quality information from vertical industry and business news websites. Web sources have always been timely, but now more and more business-focused sites are using the techniques and philosophies of the blogging phenomena to move away from just reprinting press releases to providing commentary, analysis, and perspective. As a result, the role of this Web-based content in competitive intelligence, market research, reputation management, and product management has expanded dramatically.

“Across the board, we are finding that our strategic research portal clients need business research incorporating the deep industry expertise that can be found in news from industry websites. With this new release of Northern Light Business News, we have greatly enhanced the business research content that our corporate clients can bring to bear on the important issues facing their companies in today’s hyper-competitive environment.”

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

On Friday, Forrester published The Verizon Information Research Network Utilizes Technology For Strategic Impact with is the second document in the “Market Research/Intelligence: Challenges & Solutions” series by TJ Keitt and Brad Bortner.

Executive Summary
The challenge of managing numerous research requests with a small staff is one that affects many market research organizations. Verizon’s repository of secondary research, managed by the Verizon Information Research Network (VIRN), has adopted a robust self-service model to tackle this problem. Its research portal, powered by Northern Light’s SinglePoint, provides knowledge workers with enterprise access to research from more than 20 sources. However, the VIRN staff encourages Verizon employees to contact them directly when they cannot find specific information. VIRN fields 2,500 research requests a year and has managed this by funneling requests through its Web site and adopting customer relationship management (CRM) systems. This approach has allowed VIRN to grow into a trusted partner of the business.

The report is available for for free at NorthernLight.com.

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.