Company Profile: Nstein
Company: Nstein URL: http://www.nstein.com/ HQ: Montreal, Canada Products (Primary): Web Content Management, Text Mining Engine, Digital Asset Management, Picture Management Desk Survey Respondents: David Crouy, Christopher Hill Vendor Category: Vendor
Employees: 200 Revenue: $24M Installed base: 115+
Primary Offering:
For the past two years Nstein has been on a mission to integrate its Text Mining Engine (TME) with the Content Management System (CMS) it gained in its acquisition of Eurocortex. After honing TME for several years prior to acquiring Eurocortex, Nstein discovered that many customers either didn’t know what to do with the resulting metadata or there was no way to use the metadata in existing CMS products. By combining Natural Language Processing (NLP) and CMS, Nstein believed it could pursue significant business opportunities and the company’s client list certainly supports their intuition.
TME is a full-blown NLP product capable of extracting and categorizing the metadata contained within documents, specifically the people or organizations, places, and events that are mentioned in these files. Add-on modules are available that provide document summaries, detect sentiment, search for similar documents, as well as topic clustering. The net effect is that customers can process their documents, categorize and provide search capability within the results, and support their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts.
For publishers, using metadata to create links to relevant content (their own or third party) and a search engine “friendly” Web site is important in capturing incremental revenue. In fact, Nstein actively positions itself as a company that seeks to create additional revenue opportunities for its customers – more on this in a moment. It’s not unusual for many or most publishers to rely on human editors to create categories, relevant links, and manage the posting of these links to the title’s Web site. Obviously, paying people to perform this task can become expensive at a time when the publishing industry is already experiencing a high degree of turmoil.
Solutions like Nstein’s and others can help to reduce the expense of human tagging or even introduce tagging where there’s been no human available to perform this task. Utlimately, costs can only be reduced to zero and businesses rely on revenues and profits for success. Nstein is cognizant of this fact and tries to point its customers in the right direction – for example, once a publisher’s content has been tagged it can be tailored to produce a feed based on a person, place, or thing. For some publishers this can represent a new and very welcome revenue stream. Another example is a common trait of NLP technology, which is the publication of additional content links that are related to the primary article on a given page. Again, some publishers will find the resulting performance an improvement over their current state of affairs.
Key Differentiators:
Aside from being the only CMS platform (or at least one of the very few) to have integrated NLP, and the company’s active focus on creating revenue opportunities for their customers, Nstein’s products include a “Picture Management Desk” designed to manage, tag, and categorize high volumes of images. In fact, a series of virtual desks can be set up to process images depending on the inbound channel.
Six/Twelve Month Plans:
For the moment, Nstein will continue its focus on improving its text mining and associated performance. The company has additional goals to extract even more information where possible and it plans to begin exploring the use of “analytical” queries such “Who was involved in car crashes over the last six months?” or “How many times was John Doe mentioned in articles related to crime?”
Analysis:
Nstein clearly has a head start on most, if not all other vendors in the Content Management System game. Its combination of CMS and NLP is a natural evolution in the management and delivery of Web content and any customer seeking a CMS solution generally would do well to take a close look at Nstein’s products. Far from being an early stage company, Nstein has proven itself during the lull after the dotcom bust, which makes a very positive statement about the fundamental value the company offers. Add to this track record the combination of CMS, NLP, Picture Management, and Digital Asset Management, and a broad range of possibilities become quite clear – both for Nstein and its customers.
