View From The Top: Northern Light

Every year, for enterprise clients, Northern Light provides aggregation and search for 500,000 market research reports with a street value of $1 billion from 60 of the leading analyst firms. On a late night last summer I was sitting alone, brooding about the future of information technology, as I often do. The thought occurred to me that if one could read every report we aggregate each year, then one would be a lot smarter about this question, or at least much better informed. Well, I mused, one cannot read 500,000 reports, but the computer can.

In that moment, the future just reached back and hit me. What if search engines could read all the market intelligence documents a researcher has access to, identify the business issues reported on, suggest the trends, flag the threats, highlight the opportunities, and distinguish those documents that are the most important, not from a search relevance perspective, but from a meaning perspective?

For example, what if you could conduct a search on one of your product lines and have the search engine zero in on the reports that describe threats to your company's market share or pricing strategy?

At Northern Light, we are defining the future for the automated analysis and discovery of business meaning from large stores of market intelligence content. Search engines must evolve to have in-depth understanding of the searched material. Beyond search, categorization, facets, and entity extraction, which we all understand by this point, the future is meaning extraction.

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Northern Light
Ten Canal Park
Cambridge, MA 02141
Phone: 617.674.2074
Fax: 617.674.2076
E-mail: pr6@northernlight.com
Web: www.northernlight

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