Launching Eqentia!

Posted on September 2, 2009 by william

: Image by jurvetson via Flickr

Today, we have publicly launched (Beta). Although the Eqentia service has been available for a few months as we worked with early customers, we weren’t as public as we wanted to be. Now we are.

Richard MacManus has written a launch post about Eqentia in ReadWriteWeb where we are compared to two highly respected companies: OpenCalais and Evri. But we are different.

One of our differentiations is that we have focused on providing a ready-to-use, out-of-the-box experience by serving the needs of a business user who is not interested in tinkering with the technology or manually managing feeds, while requiring deep and rich content at the same time. These users will not be satisfied with general-purpose news aggregators, and will be missing a lot of content if they rely entirely on Twitter feeds.

Another point is that we have we have tried to “dumb down” the implementation of a specific customization via business-level dialogs and text-based configurators that insulate the user from the technology and hopefully speed up the personalization process.

In essence, we have 3 products:
1) Out-of-the-box portals with access to 14 topic streams (and growing). Registered users can customize their email preferences. Widgets and RSS are available by request for any portal or any of the 4,000 Connections.
2) Personalized portals. These can be configured either for an individual, a community or an enterprise. And they can be private or public.
3) Enterprise. We make our platform available via a SaaS, and provide users with admin capabilities to customize and configure several environments according to their different internal departmental needs.

Here are some use cases. If these resonate with your needs, please send me an email.

• Rapid creation of topic portals or semantically enhanced widgets for publishers who can choose from existing topics or create new ones. Content is pre-semanticized and governed by your own taxonomy.
• Companies that want to track very unique and specific subjects for competitive or business development reasons.
• Power users who want to aggregate news around their interests into a private or public portal.
• Large companies that want to disseminate organized news intelligence for their employees across distinct groups or market segments
• PR agencies who want to provide customized news tracking for their clients without the pains of daily manual curation or edits.

This market segment is still defining itself, as users are trying things and getting educated on the value of semantically-enhanced news streams.

It’s a great time to be in the field of providing knowledge to users. Our mission is to help in improving the productivity of knowledge consumption.

Key question is: how much time do you want to spend customizing news versus consuming it?

Lazyfeed Goes Live For Everyone (techcrunch.com)
TweetMeNews.com – Personalized News A La Twitter (killerstartups.com)
Timelimes: Aggregate Your News, Mail and Social Updates (techie-buzz.com)

Seth Grimes

William, that ReadWriteWeb comparison of Eqentia with OpenCalais seems to be based on a comparision you all made. But while OpenCalais’s SemanticProxy can get used to generate indexable content, neither it nor OpenCalais is a search engine and the company behind it is very different from yours so I just don’t see the comparison. Maybe you could explain.

It does seem to me that Newssift and, especially, Netbase, would be closer comparators.

Anyway, good luck.
William Mougayar

Grimes,
Yes and No.
The context for the OC comparison was for a publisher that wants to integrate customizable topic portals into their publishing platform. We can both do that, albeit via different methods. I believe the comparison was about the products, not the companies.
My understanding is that Newsift is not a platform that you can totally customize, and it strikes me that their starting point is a general purpose aggregator, which we are not. For e.g. try searching for “Outsourcing” or “Cloud Computing” on Newsift and you will get very different results from our portals, and you don’t have a faceted navigation that is germaine to the topic.

Netbase is a platform, but I don’t consider them as a 1-to-1 competitor.

The proof will be in market/user adoption and innovation around specific implementations. I think the market is large enough for each to have their niche and work with clients.

Launching Eqentia!