Competitive Intelligence Marketplace

Reuters Playing Tag

Reuters' launch of their API Open Calais could have an interesting effect on secondary research.  From ReadWriteWeb's article on Open Calais which, by the way, is a nice overview:

The API does a semantic markup on unstructured HTML documents - recognizing people, places, companies, and events. This technology is the next generation of the Clear Forest offering, which Reuters acquired last year. We have profiled Clear Forest on ReadWriteWeb and in this post we will look at what Reuters opened up and why...

The idea behind Calais is simple - identify interesting bits into metadata in documents. In this implementation the focus is on People, Companies, Places, and Events, but surely the technology can be adopted to other entities. The heavy lifting is done by the combination of a natural language processing engine and a massive hard coded, learning database that Clear Forest has built.

So You Thought Those PS3s in the Game Room Were for Games

Here's an interesting item from PC World:

Nick Breese, a senior security consultant at Auckland, Australia-based Security-assessment.com, has come up with a way to drastically increase the processing capability of cracking passwords.

By implementing common ciphers and hash functions using vector computing, Breese has pushed the current upper limit of 10--15 million cycles per second -- in Intel-based architecture -- up to 1.4 billion cycles per second.

Breese, who has been working on the project, called "Crackstation", for the past six months, used the Sony PlayStation 3 gaming console for his break-through research. PS3's Cell Broadband Engine technology was created by IBM, Toshiba and Sony. The companies collaborated to create the CBE, commonly known as Cell, processor, which consists of one scalar processor and eight vector processors.

By design, PS3 is very suitable for cryptography, says Breese. Intel processors are designed to do all kinds of complex calculations, whereas the PS3 is good at doing simple things very quickly. "And believe it or not, cryptography really is simple," he says. "Lots of simple operations being done one at the time."

Visual Information Management

Yesterday I wrote about searchCrystal and noted that I liked the graphical display of its search results.  Today I stumbled upon a couple of sites that deal with visual information management.  First I came across VisualComplexity.com which is best explained by this description from the site's "About" page:

VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project's main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.

From the VisualComplexity site I found TheBrain.com.  These guys have visual content management products, one for individuals and the other for enterprises.  They describe their products this way:

TheBrain Technologies is the leading provider of visual content management solutions. The company was founded in 1996 and has been delivering award-winning information management solutions for over a decade. By connecting people, processes, and information, TheBrain's products provide unparalleled context for smarter information discovery and more informed decision-making.

      

TheBrain technology can be utilized on corporate intranets, desktops, and the Internet. Some       applications include: customer care, project management, dynamic mind mapping, IT management and helpdesks,       impact assessment, competitive intelligence, marketing and sales support, and personal information management.

       

TheBrain has two primary products: PersonalBrain for         individual users and BrainEKP, an enterprise knowledge platform for group collaboration.

I've always struggled with content management.  In the physical world I'm a "pile don't file" kind of guy because when I file it I forget about it.  (A happy compromise for me is binders; active projects are organized in binders that I keep on my desk and then I shelve the binders once the project is complete).  I'm constantly hunting for files online because my folder systems tend to get too complex and so I forget if I saved a file under "Taxes" or "Accounting."  These products offer hope for folks like me.