For some fun summertime reading check out IDC’s white paper on the “Digital Universe” (http://www.emc.com/digital_universe). This vendor-sponsored study boldly estimates and forecasts what IDC calls “The Digital Universe” — essentially the total quantity of digital information created, captured and replicated worldwide. It is measured in exabytes (one exabyte= 1 billion gigabytes) and is forecast to grow rapidly, reaching 1,800 exabytes by 2011.The study notes that

The tools are in place–from Web 2.0 technologies and terabyte drives to unstructured data search software and the Semantic Web–to tame the digital universe and turn information growth into economic growth.

illumin8 is a good example of a tool designed exactly for this purpose: converting masses of raw content into business value. This is a critical task for those of us in the information industry and it’s not an easy one. As IDC notes: “searching for meaning in the content of unstructured data….is the rocket science of the digital universe”. We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

On July 7 we went live with our second major release this year! Kudos to the development team for once again delivering a major product enhancement release in an extremely compressed time frame. The highlight of the release is a new Result category: Authors and Inventors. Now, when you enter a search, we will display the leading authors and inventors drawn from our vast journal and patent content. Our customers have asked for this, and it is a great start on pinpointing experts associated with a query. With this addition, any illumin8 search will display an even more powerful overview covering technical approaches, companies, organizations, products and now, authors/inventors. Besides the author/inventor output, we’ve also made some significant usability improvements, including a redesigned tabbed profile view and a new, more informative welcome page.

Stay tuned: there will be more exciting product enhancements to come throughout the year.

Since launching illumin8 back in February, we’ve had a lot of memorable moments while making customer presentations. We have heard quotes like “this is amazing!” or “how did you do that?” or “i love this product”, but none was as rewarding as what happened last week. Right before we got into presenting illumin8 at a Fortune 100 company, a current illumin8 user at the company interrupts the meeting to let his colleagues know they should pay attention to the presentation. Why? Well, the fact that he spent a year looking for a solution provider that illumin8 was able to uncover in 3 minutes and are currently utilizing the solution provider’s services. Imagine his excitement…that’s awesome! Is this the result of every illumin8 search? Probably not and we can’t guarantee this result (nor can anybody actually in reality), but it is NICE when it happens.

I’m a little behind with this post, but hopefully it will be worth it. More than 1,000 participants from around the globe converged on the San Jose Fairmont toting laptops, notebooks and, well, ontologies.Too bad I couldn’t get Occam’s razor through security (bad joke I know). Here are some quick highlights from what was a really interesting and even, at times, exciting show:

• The big buzz was around a “social interest” RDF enabled site, backed by Paul Allen, Vulcan Ventures, and currently in beta-invite only mode. It is called “twine”; the other milder buzz was around PowerSet (natural language search over Freebase and Wikipedia), which just launched.

• I could find no one offering a commercial product based on natural language processing (NLP) at internet scale. Nor could I find anyone offering semantic search with integrated premium scientific content. So illumin8 is currently unique in the industry, and our ability to apply our NLP engine over this vast content remains a very compelling differentiator.

• Google played the role of spoiler in the semantic party. It is skeptical of the semantic web, and very skeptical about the potential for semantic search on a global consumer scale. Yahoo, on the other hand, is a strong believer and they were pushing their Search Monkey platform very hard.

All in all, a very worthwhile show; I hope to be back next year.

They say a NY minute is fast, but it’s nothing compared to a combined NY/Silicon valley minute. Witness the i8 product development cycle. We launched the product at the end of February, and in slightly more than a month we had a major product release. This was the release which organized the solutions summary panel into neat categories. Our customers were really happy with this overview, but we’re just getting started. We’ve got more exciting enhancements coming throughout the summer and rest of the year! Stay tuned.

Hello and welcome to the illumin8 blog.

It’s all started in an Elsevier Library Connect meeting in October 2006. I was talking with one of our customers (3M) about the text mining initiatives within her company and she (unfortunately I can’t recall her name and I could not retrieve my archive emails now) mentioned that they had started using a company recently and they were very pleased from the results. She told me they were not like a regular text mining company but they are doing something very unique. So I asked the company name. The company’s name, “Accelovation” (since renamed to NetBase), did not ring a bell in my mind, and I was kind of upset that I hadn’t heard of them until that point in time.

In November, I sent an email to Michael Osofksy “to see if there is an opportunity between two companies.” Michael sent me an email stating that Jonathan Spier, NetBase co-founder, would get in touch me. And he did.

After a few phone calls and meetings in New York and Mountain View and some sushi and sake, we realized that, together, we had all of the ingredients to develop a very unique solution to bring our shared vision to life.

Almost five years ago Michael, who was doing his graduate studies at MIT, was meeting once a week with Jonathan, who was at Harvard, to discuss how the Internet could impact innovation and business. This was before blogging took off, before social networks, and the web was tiny, barely a few billion pages. They saw that the challenge for business research was going to be too much information, so they started NetBase.

At almost exactly the same time, at Hoboken we were exploring new ways to find insights from the trusted content sources we have at Elsevier and the web. We wanted to develop a new online solution that would help R&D knowledge workers in their technology intelligence activities, and find solutions to their critical R&D questions. (More on how we developed illumin8 with our development customers and our UCD team in a future post)

14 months (and lots more sake) later, and we are profoundly excited to be announcing illumin8

Our idea is to use this blog to update you on illumin8 and the research industry in general. Even better we would like to hear from you. Its been a long path from Hoboken and MIT to our illumin8 launch. We’re glad you are here for the next phase of the journey.

While Hollywood  is preparing for Oscars, we are preparing for our own celebration. Mountain View and New York have started the countdown for the launch of an  unique online research solution

to a browser near you, something that will reveal insights and solutions from billions of documents