The Diving Board

We were fortunate to meet up with Kathleen Reidy with the 451 Group.  Here is who they are:

“The 451 Group is an independent technology-industry analyst company that was founded in 2000, and has offices in the US and Europe. Our research makes sense of swiftly moving trends in the industry creating information technologies (IT) used by large and midsized organizations.”

Kathleen spent about an hour with us.  We gave her an overview of the company, a demonstration of GroupSwim, and discussed our semantic technology.  After the session, she asked to speak with one of our customers.  She then interviewed Andy Jenks, Senior Vice President of Sales, at Discovery Mining.  As always, Andy did a great job describing how GroupSwim is helping their company collaborate more effectively and saving them time.

Here is Kathleen’s blog post and impression of GroupSwim.  She discusses our use of semantic analysis and how unique we are.  My favorite quote is “applying this sort of text analysis in a group collaboration / social software tool isn’t something I’ve heard much about lately.  It will be this sort of thing that will differentiate vendors from the increasingly large pack moving forward.” We are grateful for the praise and look forward to ramping our sales and marketing, and making serious noise in the Social Collaboration space.

We met up with one of our customers last night to compare notes on semantic technology. This was a great case of two companies trying to accomplish similar goals (making sense of unstructured data) in different ways. They heavily use statistical analysis on massive data sets. By importing and analyzing the data, they can draw mathematical relationships between words, documents and document sets and then use crazy smart algorithms to make sense of them. Their ultimate goal is to make these massive data sets manageable and discover relevant content. We take another approach and use natural language processing to analyze the data our customers put into their sites. Our datasets tend to be much smaller but are high quality since someone doesn’t add something to GroupSwim unless they want to share it. Then, we compare the language used in the content to other semantic sources including WordNet, Wikipedia, etc. to do our automatic tagging and analysis. Our ultimate goal is to make it easy for people to add content and then for others to find it through meaningful semantic relationships and search.

The exercise of comparing the two methods and seeing the high level similarities was fun. We also brainstormed different ways they could use GroupSwim since they are a great customer. I was definitely the least intellectual person in the room, but it was something to behold when our CTO and their scientist guy started throwing around terms like the semantic web, divisive clustering, agglomerative clustering, and a bunch of other stuff I can’t pronounce.

This is a very interesting and tough topic.  Communities come in all shapes and sizes.  Some are internal, and some are external.  Some are business sponsored, and others are totally organic and rely on the users to keep things rolling.  I wanted to reference one of the best posts I’ve read on this issue.  Chris Brogan is a well known blogger and prolific writer.  Check out this post on managing a community.  It is the best I’ve read.

We were fortunate enough to be invited to the VCTini last night. This was a schmoozing event for VCs to mingle with selected entrepreneurs and see our products. They had computers set-up throughout the room for us to demo our various solutions; it was really fun. The great dynamic was that everyone was very informal (and buzzed) so the demos were loose and interactive.

The reaction to GroupSwim was very strong. They liked our focus on using collaboration to solve business problems and make employees/customers more productive. The reason I know we were on our game last night were several VCs actually gave me their business cards. This is a sure fire way to know if someone is legitimately interested in what you are saying versus listening politely and then claiming they are out of cards.

My favorite part of the night was seeing some of the other companies demoing. There are some very cool applications out there in the world. However, several of them fell into my “how are they going to make money” category; this is one of my favorite questions to ask. Not that this is the end-all goal for all things, but most businesses need to make money at some point. It is amazing how many Web 2.0 companies out there that I literally have no idea how they intend to monetize what they are doing. I guess I just don’t get it

I’m so geeked about our new release (details on the Pool), I can hardly contain myself. File collaboration is a game changing release for our company. We built an incredibly strong file offering on our first try. I’ve used lots of products in my enterprise and consulting days, and this is by far the best I’ve seen. Why do we think this is so cool?

1. You can add files to GroupSwim in 3 ways; uploading directly, attaching to a discussion, or emailing in. This provides tons of flexibility for our customers.
2. We tag and index every document in GroupSwim. This allows people to find what they need in an instant. No need to worry if a file is on computer, if you are searching the right directory, if you are logged into the right application or server, etc.; it is all in one place.
3. We suggest related content as you review a file. This is very powerful stuff. Let’s say you are reading a Word Document about capital budgeting. GroupSwim knows you are interested in capital budgeting, and will pull up related discussions and files for you to check. This great because users don’t always know what they are looking for, and we give them suggestions automatically.
4. We use this very cool API that allows users to preview a file right on the web page. This is a great time saver for people on the go who don’t have time to download and find what they need.  You can also search within the document right from the preview and it takes you right to the place in the document that you want.
5. You can manage multiple versions of a document right in GroupSwim. All previous versions are available if you need them, or you can get rid of them.

Here is what the preview looks like.

All these features are very cool, but the best thing it is all tied together with our Web 2.0 interface and semantic technology. We are going to have a wiki soon with the same benefits. If you can’t tell, I’m pretty excited.

Check out this quote from Gartner:

“Most enterprise collaboration environments are either too formal or too chaotic to really help workers share ideas and solve problems. Enterprises can use social software to build more agile enterprise collaboration environments.” (Gartner, Use Social Software to fill the Gap Between Formality and Chaos, February 1st, 2008, Nikos Drakos)

We love this because it says 2 very important things:

1. Our competition doesn’t have an A game

2. Businesses really need what we are building

Very good stuff.

Search is a continuously evolving field of innovation. Within the last 10 years, mainstream search has improved significantly through the introduction of statistical methods and collective intelligence. Google is of course the main example of how successful an improved search service can be. Improved collective intelligence functions, such as those introduced by Amazon, show how much users appreciate getting relevant and related information automatically. As the amount of information available on the web increases, so does the importance of search and filtering. This development shows in the number of new search companies popping up and starting to apply advanced techniques. The approaches vary widely. Some companies such Qihoo mine communities for questions and answers. Other services such as Quintura focus on cognitive models and visually driven search functions. Yet others such as Hakia and PowerSet focus on natural language analysis. In addition, new services such as Twine and Freebase attempt to add semantic meta data so that applications can intelligently find semantically related data. These companies all hope to be the next revolutionary search function, providing a user experience that will overshadow existing search services.

I have always been a proponent of applying techniques and technologies based on the problem at hand. I remember as a student when I met researchers who insisted on developing everything in Prolog or Scheme regardless of the problem at hand. Or object fanatics who could not accept any other tool than Eiffel or Smalltalk. In my mind, the best solutions are built by combining the techniques to highlight the best aspects of each one. I think most developers would agree with me here, but it can be very difficult to build such systems unless you have a good understanding of the problems you are trying to solve. The trick is to delay selecting the specific tool or technology until you know how you want to approach the problem.

In GroupSwim, we use a toolbox including proximity search, natural language processing, tagging and semantic web components to implement search functions. Each of them is used to solve specific aspects of our search problem, and we often combine them. Tag search is obviously a very popular search method in GroupSwim. To facilitate and improve tag search, we automatically perform natural language analysis on the data that is not tagged. We then auto-tag the data so that it will be included in tag search. The quality of these generated tags depends on both the language analysis, techniques from text summarization, language analysis using synonyms and hypernyms as well as community specific ontologies. We use the same techniques to do real-time natural language analysis and suggest appropriate tags to simplify the task for users. But it does not stop there. We use semantic web and linguistic information to find and suggest related information helping users narrow or widen their searches along semantically meaningful dimensions. Communities in GroupSwim are able to create their own ontologies for that purpose, and even if they do not, we apply universal ontologies to help users.

GroupSwim is also different in how we apply search in very problem-specific ways. Our focus is not on the general search problem.  Rather, our objective is to help communities for organizations and companies find information related specifically to their organizational and business needs. This makes it easier for us to apply natural language techniques and semantic web technologies. It also means we will be able to provide a superior search experience.

The figure below positions GroupSwim’s search function with respect to other available search functions. To do this, we identify three dimensions along which we characterize the functions. The first dimension is the degree of semantic awareness that the search functions have. We simplified the diagram so that the dimension has basic text search on one end and artificial intelligence based search on the other extreme. The second dimension concerns whether the search is intended to address the universal search problem at one extreme or one specific problem at the other. The third dimension concerns the domain specificity of the search function. A search such as Yahoo is very general and applies to any domain. One could easily imagine searches that are very specific to a problem domain such as medicine using domain knowledge to improve the search. GroupSwim enables communities to continuously add domain data to their community and thereby improve the search over time as the domain knowledge evolves.

In summary, GroupSwim offers a balanced approach to search technologies, focusing on solving specific business related search problems in a superior way. We also enable communities and the system itself to improve and evolve search by building up and leveraging semantic web data created within or outside of GroupSwim. We believe this is the best way to introduce next generation web search and discovery techniques for our customers.

We are positively giddy about our next generation of GroupSwim that’s coming out in April. This release includes two game-changing technologies:

1) Files

GroupSwim will consume files of all types as new content. Our platform now integrates discussion and file-based knowledge seamlessly. Here are some sample screen shots:

A couple points of note:

1. All files (PDF, word, powerpoint, excel, etc.) are automatically indexed and auto-tagged by GroupSwim making them discoverable and searchable.
2. GroupSwim automatically identifies related files and discussions based on the content in the file. This helps when the user isn’t sure what they are looking for, which happens frequently.
3. Version control is built-in and extremely easy to use.
4. GroupSwim automatically determines the primary contributors to the file.
5. File preview is built-in so the user doesn’t need to download the file unless they want it.

We are extremely excited about files as we turn the corner and become the collaboration platform we’ve been planning for months.

2) Semantic Search

The other big feature is Semantic Search. While we think our search is good today, come April, it is awesome. Semantic search does the following:

1. Helps you widen or narrow your search by suggesting related terms, based on the semantic relationships with your search terms.
2. Returns results for all variants of the search term, not just the one entered (e.g. bicycling, bicycle, bicycles); this is called stemming.
3. Checks search terms for spelling errors and suggests corrections.

Naturally, everything is integrated into our group permissioning, email and RSS notifications, tagging, etc.
Wikis are next and will be out sometime this summer. We’ll keep you posted on our progress and welcome your comments and feedback.

A prominent blogger in New Zealand recently reviewed GroupSwim. His name is Michael Sampson. He focuses on Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams in his writing. We really like his material. The two things about GroupSwim he likes the most are our Semantic Engine and Inferred Expertise Identification. Check the post here and let us know what you think.

Bill Ives recently wrote a review on The App Gap. He did a great job describing our solution. Check it out here.