LexaBlog: Our Sentiment about Text Analytics and Social Media
Please welcome the newest member of our product family - Lexascope
So, it's not like this has been a huge big secret, but tomorrow marks the day when we're going out to a broader public with our first-ever web service offering: Lexascope.
You can click here for more detail, but allow me to fill you in on a bit.
The Lexascope Web Service is free for up to 1000 documents a day, and it's only $400 for 50,000/day. This covers tweets, spreadsheet rows, regular documents, blog posts, whatever.
You can feed it text, ask for it to get RSS feeds or direct searches on Google News/Blogs, Twitter, Blogpulse, and Wordpress.
We've built two open-source reference clients to go with the service - Lexascope-AIR (a GUI built for surfing content and connections between entities and themes), and Lexascope-Excel - a plugin that directly integrates into Excel - showing the power of the Lexascope Web Service as applied to spreadsheets.
Anyhow - go check it out and sign up for a free account now!
I'm a cloud convert...
Historically, Lexalytics has been very focused on the enterprise software market by building products that are easy to install, configure and get running. (Don't worry, we're not abandoning that model.)
However, over the last 6 months or so we've been focused on the idea of building out a number of web based services aimed at extending our reach. In doing so, we made the decision to use Amazon's cloud services (EC2 and S3).
The power and cost efficiency of these services has allowed us to build not just one, but two new services that will open up our abilities to a whole new group of users. But this post isn't about our new services (we'll share more about that in the coming week), it's really about the cloud. I'm a big-time convert to cloud computing and believe Larry Ellison got this one wrong.
For businesses, deploying new web based services just got a whole lot easier, and a whole lot less expensive. For example, we will roll out a web API to our core Salience Engine soon and we've been able to do it without having to fight the "co-lo wars". In addition, we saved by not adding IT staff to the payroll to make sure the machines are up, configured and maintained.
Wrapping up Salience for Amazon's cloud and rolling it out took less than a month and has cost us very little. What this means for prospective clients is that they can access our API through the web at a price that will be very attractive, particularly to smaller companies that aren't trying to "boil the ocean" of data.
Simply put, this quick turnaround was all possible because Amazon is handling all the complicated machine maintenance and has offered machine cycles and storage at a very appealing price.
Now that I'm a cloud convert, I expect us to roll out more cloud based products in the next year.
What experiences have you had with the cloud? I'd love to hear your feedback on how it has worked, or hasn't worked, for your business.
The Changing Face of Text Analytics
So, it's been a while since I penned a blog post, and in this case that's a good thing, because its been a pretty busy summer. As I haven't blogged in a while, I thought it would be a good time for a "State of the State" sort of post, so without further delay...
Historically, Lexalytics has tried to cast a pretty wide net into the OEM world, but most of our success has come in the Reputation Management space, but I'm happy to report that this appears to be changing. We're still doing very well in Rep Mgmt, but we are seeing an ever increasing percentage of our leads in other areas like financial services and Customer Satisfaction. The really good news on this is that it appears to be due to the maturing of the industry, and not some specific marketing program we're running. There are more and more prospects showing up at our door, who have specific "text analytics" needs, and this bodes well for the future. In spite of a tough environment, it looks like we'll grow the business at least 10% this year, which in the new world order of "Flat is the new up" is a pretty solid performance.
On the technical side, we're rolling out a number of interesting new things this fall, the most important of which is a web services layer and SaaS version of our Salience engine for smaller companies that need some high end text processing capabilities but don't have the budgets to bring the engine in house. We're using this SaaS service ourselves to roll out a new Excel plug in that will bring lightweight text analytics (entities, themes, sentiment) to anyone with excel, and at a price (<$100/month) that just about anyone can afford.
