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My 2 featured articles for the week ending Dec. 7, 2007:

Archived blogs for the week of January 7, 2008

1403 - Jan. 9, 2008 - 12.08 PM EST

Microsoft acquires a search company

Yesterday, Microsoft announced that it plans to make an offer to acquire enterprise search technology provider Fast Search & Transfer (FAST) for about US 1.2 billion. The acquisition is expected to be finalized in the second quarter of 2008.

The software giant says it has received approval from FAST’s board of directors to go ahead with the transaction. Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft’s business division said "underscoring the partnership deal is a common vision for enterprise search, and the belief that it will be for workers of tomorrow what Web search is for consumers today."

Raikes offered some statistics from an IDC report published in 2007 suggesting that a company employing a thousand information workers can expect to lose more than US $5 million in annual salary, simply searching for specific corporate information.

He added that several key factors have come together to bring enterprise search to a tipping point, including the realization among companies of the importance of the technology to their business and the fact that the technology has become better and easier to use.

Raikes also said "furthermore, companies will face the challenge of merging increasingly sophisticated enterprise search technology with broader infrastructure tools."

The overall combination of the two merged companies will mean users will have a single vendor for enterprise search technologies, said Raikes, adding that before this, customers were forced to choose between high-end specialized and mainstream infrastructure search tools.

He also added "I find it mind-boggling that today you can find football scores faster online, but inside somebody’s company it can take five hours or more to track down last year’s business plan."

Being acquired by Microsoft will allow FAST to “further extend its reach” and take its technology to “the next level,” according to FAST’s CEO, John Lervik. The company will also be able to take advantage of the “tremendous momentum of SharePoint and also use Microsoft’s extensive partner and developer network,” he added.

In terms of what FAST brings to the table, Lervik added that the company has been working on expanding search capabilities beyond the usual e-mails and documents to content like numerical data, for instance. In defense of its offering versus IBM’s OmniFind search tool, Lervik said its technology is based on services-oriented architecture, and is global and scalable. “It’s much larger scale than anything else that is out there.” Read more...

Posted on Businessblog™

1402 - Jan. 7, 2008 - 11.46 AM EST

Google patents new image search technology

In July of last year, Google filed a patent application on image search technology. But it was only recently that it made the news public.

Google wants to patent technology where search bots can understand specific text in images and video clips.

This has the potential of further changing the search landscape, especially as it concerns websites that have a lot of photos or links to video content.

I suggest that privacy issues raised by Google Maps' Street View will get more complicated as eventually YouTube videos will be indexable via the text that appears within them.

Google's new image search technology would mean photographs indexed by Google would be searchable by the text located within the image or video itself. This of course is a huge step forward in indexing sites that have not previously been available for search. Read more...

Posted on Businessblog™

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