Exalead Blog - The blog of Exalead

On April 6th, CIO, LeMondeInformatique.fr and IT NEWS INFO’s ceremony for Enterprise and Business Trophies for Information 2009 was held.

We are very proud to announce that GEFCO has won the CIO-online.com trophy: “Grand Prize and Innovation Trophy” thanks to its new vehicle track & trace service built on Exalead CloudView’s platform.

The Innovation Trophy awards efficient and effective audacity; the Grand Prize awards a particularly relevant and complete IT strategy that services the organization that installed it. With 2 of the most prestigious prizes, GEFCO is the big winner of the night.

This critical application for GEFCO’s business, conceived with the ST Groupe, constitutes one of the first major SBA applications (Search Based Applications) from Exalead. This prize bestowed by Chief Information Officers from the biggest companies, awarded both GEFCO’s choice of innovation and Exalead’s vision that has promoted the use of Index type technologies to construct business applications for several years, like operational reporting, with a guaranteed return on investment.

More information about this award >>

More information about the GEFCO case study >>

And a bonus, images from the event!

Our friends from the well known site Pandia have pushed the button very far with their April 1st posting.

In case you have doubts, we have not had private meetings with Serge Brin (we would be very honored) and Exalead continues to develop worldwide in an independent manner, increasing signatures, innovating daily with our clients. Thanks to the readers of this blog for supporting us with so much energy.

Greetings to Per and Suzanne who have supported us for several years, our revenge would be sweet.

On behalf of Exalead and its frog-eating poets.

PS: Between us, we have heard that some of our competitors were using this info to counter us at prospects and customers. The masks fall

…and we just got another!

EContent Magazine has named Exalead to the eighth annual EContent 100 “list of companies that matter most in the digital content industry.” The judging team for the EContent 100, which consisted of 14 analysts, journalists and industry experts, examined a wide array of information access vendors across 12 categories.

Exalead was ranked in the “Search Engine & Technologies” category, but, of course, CloudView is much more than a pure search engine. It’s a platform for creating information applications that access structured and unstructured enterprise and Web information — it opens up the enterprise content cloud and makes navigable the murky sea of corporate data.

2008 has been a big year for us, and this recognition from EContent Magazine is a nice bit of icing on the corporate cake.

BAAGZ version 1.1 has been released recently.

On the agenda : bug fixes (”error 500″ problems are solved) and a bunch of new funny features.

- Massive upload for images

Stop uploading pictures from your computer one by one. You can now select several files at once and save time. It is a invaluable tool to create image galleries.

- Gallery

You can now add one (or more) image galleries in your baagz. Customize a gallery the way you want by changing picture size, borders for each photo or display order.

New borders have also been added. Do not hesitate to play with them to create nice effects in your baagz.

Tip : try and click several times on a border icon and see what happens

- Wall

To give your visitors the ability comment on your creations, you can add a fully customizable wall of comments anywhere in your baag.

Have fun with those new features and do not hesitate to leave a message to show us the baag you’re especially proud of !

The Company Plantronics launched a contest to find a new and more appropriate term to define people that work beyond the office.

The jury of 7 bloggers had an intense debate to chose 10 “finalists” from more than 500 submissions. Final terms were submitted to public vote for two weeks.

After more than 2200 votes cast, the word that now replaces ‘telecommuter’ is ‘cloudworker’. According to the winning submission, “a cloudworker is somebody who uses on-demand technology and collaboration tools, such as unified communications, to work anywhere and anytime, and uses the resulting freedom to enable a my-size-fits-me career path and lifestyle”.

And coincidentally, Exalead’s CloudView product range fits in perfectly with this concept!

Source

Discover Exalead CloudView

Stephen E. Arnold, a famous analyst in the online search engine field came to our French offices last February to interview François Bourdoncle.

A few months later, he came back to our Madeleine headquarters and granted us a video interview.

He tells us about his vision of the enterprise search market – the new study he wrote for The Gilbane Group ‘Beyond Search : What to Do When Your Enterprise Search System Doesn’t Work’ has just been released. He also shares his opinion about two ExaLabs projects he tested. The first one is Voxalead (available at http://voxalead.labs.exalead.com) which is a demonstration of the Speech-To-Text technology born from the collaboration between Exalead and LIMSI (Informatics Laboratory for Mechanics and Engineer Sciences).

The second demo is an occasion for you to discover an unrealeased search project called Restminer. Focused on New York Restaurants, Restminer gives the user structured information extracted from the unstructured web -dedicated press, blog posts, restaurant reviews, directories data…- with relevant tips such as sentiments analysis coming from different sources.

Here is the whole interview.

Exalead thanks Stephen Arnold for making himself available and being so professional !

Stephen Arnold’s Website : http://arnoldit.com/
Stephen Arnold’s Weblog : http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/

Are you trying to find an embedded search solution that meets your users’ needs and your specific application requirements?

Have you tried to embed search into your application, but found it difficult and expensive to customize and integrate?

Have you already embedded a solution only to find that it lacks the performance and functionality your customers are demanding?

Would you like to learn about how you can cost-effectively give your customers access to search that has been architected for ISVs, offers value-added features, and scales?

If so, we’d like to invite you to join our webinar, “12 Leading Insights on Embedded Search for ISVs.” Learn about:

• Major Market Trends for Embedded Search
• Key Challenges Facing ISVs with Embedded Search
• 5 Most Important Embedded Search Requirements
• What Works and What Doesn’t
• Overview of Exalead CloudView OEM Edition
Moderator
• Eric Rogge, Senior Director of Marketing, Exalead

Featured Speakers
• Ranjeet Vidwans, VP of OEM, Exalead
• Miles Kehoe, President, New Idea Engineering

Date/Time
• Friday, December 5, 2008 at 11am PST

Registration:
To register for the webinar, please click here.

To download the Exalead whitepaper “The ISV Challenge: Satisfying the Demand for Better Search,”

View a brief video interview about the webinar with Miles Kehoe.

Innovation is a leading priority for Exalead. That is why the company often gives its support to external initiatives like this project set up by students from U.T.C. that developed Gephi, in collaboration with WebAtlas association. Gephi is an open source software under GPL3 license that enables 3D networks graphics manipulation, exploration and visualization.

What is this graphic about?
It represents a semantic analysis of the relationship between terms used on the Web to speak about Intellectual Property Rights in the French language.  Each node symbolizes a word or a group of words and each edge connects two expressions when these are co-cited in more than 120 000 web pages.  Each color refers to a “semantic cluster”, which is a bunch of words than concern the same topic.

How can I get this type of graphic?
After an extraction of related terms found on Exalead databases and a manual filtering phase, the project team receives a GDF file with ordered data.  Then, the exploitation of this file by Gephi combined with a specific algorithm leads to the data “spatialization”. Then color filters highlight different semantic clusters.

Here is one of the first demonstrations of Gephi with real-time spatialization of several keyword clusters. In this video, the blue color refers to a “genetics” cluster, orange nodes relate to terms about biology and laboratories, green ones concern words speaking about controversy in the domain of GMOs and purple nodes relate to innovation and research development in biotechnology.

Gephi – Dynamic demo from gephi on Vimeo Congratulations to the project team for this great web mapping tool!
Do not hesitate to visit the Gephi website to obtain more information and test this software.
If you are interested in this subject, you should know that the team continues to recruit.

We are pleased to report that Exalead was named to Gartner’s 2008 Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology, receiving high marks for “completeness of vision.” In fact, Exalead is one of only two Visionary companies in this year’s quadrant, as changes to the inclusion criteria eliminated several previous members.

An interesting point is that several of our key competitors in the space took a few steps backwards between now and 2007. Endeca, Google and Autonomy all took hits on the “ability to execute” scale, Microsoft FAST lost some ground on vision. We don’t want to speculate about why exactly this is, but it does seem to indicate that the demands of the space is shifting as it grows (Gartner estimated that globally the total 2007 software revenue in the enterprise search market neared $860.3 million and is expected to grow to $1.5 billion by 2012), and that perhaps it is time for a new breed of search vendor to take the lead.

According to the report, “Visionaries demonstrate imaginative and insightful approaches to the information access technology market… and possess architectural flexibility and creative means of establishing relevancy.” Of course, we don’t wear blinders ; we know Gartner thinks that we need to establish more traction and financial resources to make the jump to the Leaders quadrant, but with 170 customers worldwide and 100 million unique viewers a month we feel we are in a position to do this.

Additionally, we just found out we received a high ranking on this year’s Software 500 list (with a 310.8% growth rate); in fact, from 2007, our rank jumped by more than 70 points. We were also named one of the Top 10 companies in the $10-30 Million revenue range as well as one of the “Top 10 Leaders in Software Revenue Growth Overall.

With these numbers and our recent expansion into the U.S., the Leaders quadrant could be just around the corner….

Over the past few months Exalead has had interesting conversations with a number of leading analysts and pundits as we led up to our launch in the U.S this past week. Almost without fail, the analysts agreed that information access is being transformed into something new – and Exalead is one of the leading vendors adapting to the required changes.

On Tuesday the 23rd and Wednesday the 24th, Exalead exhibited (and was a sponsor) at the Enterprise Search Summit West in San Jose, California. Organized by Information Today (which brings you KMWorld and eContent Magazine), the two-day conference highlighted the best and the brightest in the content management domain. Discussion abounded around the challenges that customers face as their structured and unstructured data pools expand and around the top content management issues that plague enterprises (diversity in data type and sources? Connectivity? Security? All of the above?).

And speaking of customers, our industry is filled with lots of unhappy ones. We plan to continue to use our experience (our executive and development teams include some of the leading search visionaries on the planet) and our technology to change this.

As testimony of this will, here is an interview by Peter Brooks-Johnson, a Product Director from Rightmove, UK’s number one property website that has recently implemented Exalead’s technology.