Eqentia Launches Semantic Portals - Competes with OpenCalais, Evri
At the SemTech conference in June I met with William Mougayar, founder and CEO of a semantic news platform called Eqentia. At the time the product was in development, but it is officially launching today. In a nutshell, Eqentia aggregates content into topics using semantic technology. In that respect it is similar to OpenCalais (our coverage) and Evri (our coverage). While all three products have different focuses, each semantically tags and aggregates content in a contextual manner.
The difference, claims Eqentia, is that "with Evri or OpenCalais, the onus is on the programmer." Eqentia says that with its product, "the content is already semanticized and all you have to do is to place it on your portal while preserving your SEO." The other two companies may disagree with that, but let's take a closer look at Eqentia.
Disclosure: We have decided to use this product on ReadWriteWeb, to fuel our upcoming topic pages. Expect this feature to launch within a few weeks.
At its heart, Eqentia is an aggregation platform. It promotes itself as "an aggregator of context, not just content." The way it does this is to add context in the navigation. Each portal has its own taxonomy, which Mougayar described as "a bit like a hierarchical tagging structure." He said that "we basically wrap any content with a semantic wrapper."
How it Works
Under the hood, Eqentia does "content harvesting" from social media sites such as Twitter, blogs and more. Currently Eqentia is getting content from over 13,000 feeds, collecting an estimated 65,000 articles daily.
Eqentia told us that it's indexed 20 million articles so far. The largest topic currently is Outsourcing, with 90,000 articles. Other topics include: Cloud Computing: 60,000; Supply Chain Management: 40,000; Twitter: 20,000; Social Media: 11,000.
Eqentia then does "text mining and filtering" and the results are run through an "Aggregation Engine" (which has rules for sources and filters). Finally there is what Eqentia calls "Semantics Management" - including entity extractions, taxonomy definition, controlled vocabulary.
What The User Gets
Eqentia is starting off with a focus on "professional" content topics. It will target business and technology content, ignoring more mainstream topics like current affairs, sports, entertainment.
Eqentia is launching with 3 products:
1) Out-of-the-box portals. These will give general users free access to topic streams (of which there are 12 at launch, with more coming). There will be email options, widgets and RSS feeds available.
2) Personalized portal. These can be private or public. [note: this is what ReadWriteWeb has signed up for]
3) Enterprise. A SaaS platform that can be customized. A stated use case is for large companies to "disseminate organized news intelligence for their employees across distinct groups or market segments."
Conclusion: Tough Competition, But Important Market
The proof will be in the pudding as to how Eqentia compares to OpenCalais and Evri. We've been very impressed with both OpenCalais and Evri in our previous coverage, so Eqentia has high standards to live up to. In particular Eqentia is going to have to nail the User Experience, because it is relying on its interface a lot to give value to the user.
Finally, Mougayar noted to us that "if web 2.0/social media rewarded the socially savvy user, the semantic web/web 3.0 will reward the research oriented user." It's a nice marketing line, but we are apt to agree that products like Eqentia, OpenCalais and Evri are bringing much needed smarts to the oceans of content in the Web.
Share
Facebook
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
I have a lot of respect for OpenCalais & Evri (or any other competition); but we have focused on providing a ready-to-use out-of-the-box experience, i.e. serving the needs of a business user who is not interested in tinkering with the technology while requiring deep content at the same time.
William Mougayar
Founder & CEO, Eqentia
I think the whole "competes" with thing is getting a little too much attention here. Using semantic technologies to drive business value is a rapidly evolving space. There will be players that focus on technologies, there will be players that focus on capabilities and there will be players that focus on delivering end-user consumable solutions.
So - great! Welcome to the game. There's a sore lack of simple value delivering tools in this space. I hope you do well.
(Though of course I wish you'd built this on top of OpenCalais services of course!).
Regards,
Tom
Posted by: tlt.intivo.com
|
September 2, 2009 7:57 AM
Thanks Tom!
I agree about the competition part. The market is still emerging and defining itself, while users are getting educated and trying things.
Yes, we have tried to "dumb down" the implementation of a specific customization via business-level dialogs and text-based configurators to insulate them from the technology and hopefully speed up the process.
But ultimately, it will boil down to a segmentation of user needs and situations.
The competitive set for semantic aggregation is quite a bit more crowded than the piece suggests. I think William is right is his comment above where he characterizes the market as emerging. At the same time the players in the space are very quickly converging on a couple of consistent offerings; some type of direct access to data through an API, a hosted topic page/site solution.
We are seeing speed of implementation, quality of aggregated data, flexibility to extend the technology and price emerge as the real areas of competition.
Lowell Goss, LOUD3R
Thought I would join the party here. I agree with both Tom and William, this is a rapidly evolving space - from my perspective, competition or co-opetition will help drive innovation and further accelerate the unlock of the semantic web's potential - in that vein, I will echo Tom, welcome to the game!
Will Hunsinger
CEO, Evri
I agree with all above comments, except for the "field is wide, there is room for everyone". Sure, it's nice to all be friends, but ultimately this is business and there will be one or a few big winners and many losers. The fact is, if you focus on the platform play, there is little room for more than one or two major plays. So let's first talk applications instead :)
In my opinion, Eqentia as it is really competes with RSS feed aggregators, vertical portal newsletter, and services like Google Alerts, Factiva etc... None of those really do a good job at filtering and organizing information.
Just looking at the small semweb space for a minute, Eqentia competes with Twine. Sure, it focuses on B2B, but the service it just launched really does something similar to Twine: tag information semantically and use that to distribute it intelligently. Ultimately, whoever does that better and makes the most money will likely kill the other. Who does it better? I have long stopped looking at my twine digests because unlike the name suggests, they give me an indigestion. I have een receiving the semantic digest of Eqentia for a while now and together with twitter (which Eqentia does sparse too), that has become my main source of news on the field. It's reach is still limited and I can't customize my feeds, but if that changes soon - a direction I'm sure William is exploring - then all bets are off.
Now, Eqentia vs. Calais.... Eqentia offers a very accessible and tangible application of semantic technologies. Calais has been focused on other things, wooing the publishers and now Oracle, and relying on them to take that to users, rather than creating applications. I'm sure Calais is doing a great job serving their audience...
... but I'd argue that the real battle is going to be at the consumer level. And so far, Calais hasn't delivered on that, perhaps because it hasn't really tried to, perhaps because it's not equipped for it (Tom, hope you get the Dare ;) Last I checked, Calais's public API wasn't doing a good enough tagging job to support an app like Eqentia.
I wouldn't bet the farm on that approach, because crossing the chasm with a platform play is extremely difficult, and as Moore put it in his book, you really need to "dress your platform in application clothings". As far as I see it, Eqentia is doing just that.
The main challenge for Eqentia now is market adoption. As I understand it, it has followed a process quite similar to most semweb startups, i.e. build the product first, and the organization latter. Now it has a product, but little brand awareness, and no organization or money to change that quickly. I am curious to see if the RWW experiment will change that.
Sorry for posting twice, pls remove latest post (has a wrong url too)
@william
Great to see you launch the service! I have to try it out a bit however right now I am getting some server-side errors. I really hope it is as good as Richard says :)
William, hope to meet you again soon!
bye
Andraz Tori, CTO at Zemanta
Thanks Andraz- The service is up; could have been due to the surge in traffic.
Pls try it and email me feedback.