ReadWriteWeb

In a New York Times interview published yesterday, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff - who was no doubt relishing his place in the spotlight - poked a little fun at his competitors, whom he now perceives as challengers to his position. "Where are SAP, Microsoft, Oracle?" Benioff asked. "Why haven't they taken our customers?"

Well, Mr. Benioff might want to look over his shoulder. SAP, which still touts itself as the world's largest provider of business software, is entering one of Salesforce's prize markets in a very big way this morning: with a live social media analytics tool that leverages an existing mother lode of data on consumer sentiment from market research firm NetBase. The objective is to enable manufacturers and service providers to get live analysis of consumer sentiment about the services and products they offer, based on what they're tweeting to Twitter and Facebook.

We've all seen how semantic technologies improve search results, but rarely do we see those results put to use in such a targeted way. Jens Tellefsen, VP of Marketing and Product Strategy at NetBase Solutions spoke to ReadWriteWeb about today's launch of healthBase - a medical search and discovery application. Using a variety of semantic indexing techniques, the company crawls the web's leading medical and health players including the Mayo Clinic, PubMed (US National Library of Medicine) WedMd, Medical News Today and Discovery Health. What makes this a truly unique technology is that rather than requiring any data manipulation from humans, Netbase's search results are completely automated.