Category: Enterprise search & search technology (Page 49 of 61)

Autonomy Corporation plc and Virage, Inc. announced they have signed a definitive agreement under which Autonomy will acquire Virage for a purchase price of $1.10 per share in cash. The transaction reflects a fully-diluted cash purchase price of approximately $24.8 million, and a net cash purchase price of approximately $13.3 million adjusted for Virage’s expected cash balance as of September 30, 2003. The Boards of Directors of Autonomy and Virage have approved the transaction, and stockholders representing approximately 40% of Virage’s outstanding shares have signed agreements to vote their shares in favor of the transaction at a special stockholders meeting to vote on the transaction. The transaction is expected to be completed late in the third quarter of 2003. Autonomy expects the transaction to be accretive to earnings per share within six months of closing, and expects to have a cash balance of approximately $110 million following completion of the transaction. Combined Autonomy and Virage products are expected to be generally available during the first quarter following completion of the transaction. www.autonomy.com, www.virage.com

Inxight Software, Inc., announced the release of Inxight ThingFinder 3.5. The latest version of its ‘entity extraction’ software enables developers to extend the value of their applications, including information categorization, link analysis, data mining, business intelligence and CRM, by providing a means of quickly retrieving the most important pieces of information contained in large volumes of text the people, places, companies and other “things” contained within. New features and enhancements to the product include improved accuracy and speed, new relevancy ranking capabilities, the addition of support for three new languages and enhanced data normalization features. The latest version of ThingFinder provides new language support for Arabic, Farsi and Simplified Chinese. ThingFinder also supports English, French, German and Spanish. ThingFinder includes new relevance ranking capabilities that provide users with a score reflecting each entity’s importance to a document as a whole. Inxight ThingFinder 3.5 is available immediately in a software development kit format. The ThingFinder functionality will also be made available in SmartDiscovery, Inxight’s enterprise search and information discovery solution, later this year. www.inxight.com

ISYS/Odyssey Development Inc. announced the release of ISYS 6.02, which supports full-text searches of Macromedia Flash files. Based on the .swf file format, the multimedia development software is frequently used to develop visually rich Web sites and presentations, often including animated components. Available for its core solutions — ISYS:desktop, ISYS:web and ISYS:spider — ISYS 6.02 indexes text held in Flash files and also navigates through the files to index HTML or other document formats to which Flash files point. Additionally, ISYS can index and retrieve Flash files held on local file servers, or via ISYS:spider, which can capture and index Flash files found on external Web sites. www.isysusa.com

Pound Hill Software Inc. announced the Catalyst XMP Solution, an integrated set
of tools for Adobe’s eXtensible Metadata Platform (XMP). With Catalyst, creators and managers of graphic arts intellectual property can specify both the metadata embedded in graphic arts documents and the look-and-feel of the dialogs that collect the data. In addition to designing and defining these controls, enterprises can generate their own plug-ins for applications such as Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat and QuarkXPress to collect the data.
The Catalyst XMP Solution also includes a companion application called Metavue, a metadata browser and search tool. You can build customized metadata dialogs with properties and values unique to your workgroup in Catalyst and use these values and properties as search criteria in Metavue. Catalyst runs on Macintosh OS X. Catalyst plug-ins and XTensions run on Macintosh and Windows versions of the supported applications. Metavue runs on Macintosh and Windows operating systems. Catalyst, Metavue, and Catalyst Plug-ins and XTensions modules are priced at Enterprise, Workgroup, and Individual Freelancer levels. www.poundhill.com

Convera and Sirsi announced that Sirsi is enhancing the search and retrieval capabilities of its Hyperion Digital Media Archive offering by integrating the product with Convera’s RetrievalWare technology. As a result, Hyperion now offers users the ability to perform full text searches in multiple languages across multiple data types. Sirsi’s Hyperion Digital Media Archive system provides librarians with a way to store, organize, and access their library’s or archive’s non-book holdings. With Hyperion, users can access and view full digital images of a librarys collection (documents, maps, photographs, multimedia clips, etc.) from anywhere via the Internet. By embedding Convera’s RetrievalWare, the Hyperion Digital Archive is strengthened in the following areas: enhanced search functionality, multilingual and cross-lingual searching, and scalability. www.sirsi.com, www.convera.com

Verity Inc. announced the availability of release 5.0 of its Verity K2 Enterprise (K2E) software. The latest version includes features and functions designed to better allow enterprises to create or expand intellectual capital management systems that match their global scale and scope. Verity K2E 5.0’s new multi-domain feature lets users from multiple organizations conduct authorized searches in each other’s content repositories. Connections between different K2E-based intellectual management systems can now be achieved with full security, presenting the knowledge bases of numerous repositories via a single access point. A more powerful recommendation engine now suggests individual documents, similar users’ queries, categories of documents as well as experts, communities of interest and other user-defined elements. When deployed with the Verity Federator, this extended social networking engine enables recommendation of documents even if they are beyond the content indexed by Verity K2E. Users can now create and share their own taxonomies, participate actively in the enhancement of their organizations’ taxonomies, and have the engine to automatically analyze and recommend related categories. K2E supports document-level security based on integration with identity management and single sign-on solutions from IBM, Netegrity, Oblix and RSA Security. www.verity.com

ZyLAB announced the formation of a dedicated public sector business unit to sell Federal and State & Local customers the company’s Records Management & Archival Solution (RM&A) – ZyIMAGE. ZyLAB also announced the immediate availability of ZyIMAGE 5.0. ZyIMAGE 5.0 offers government organizations with an XML framework for storage and integration and is DoD 5015.2 compliant. This solution offers new “add-on” capabilities to support the specific requirements of security, intelligence, law enforcement, and legal users. Features of ZyIMAGE 5.0 include: XML framework for storage and integration, support for over 90 languages, full color and gray scale support, higher quality OCR engine, and 64-bit indexing. www.zylab.com

Fast Search & Transfer (FAST) announced the acquisition of the AltaVista enterprise search business, including more than two hundred customers, from Overture Services, Inc. for an undisclosed cash amount. Overture obtained the enterprise search business as part of the acquisition of the business of AltaVista, which was announced on April 28, 2003. FAST’s acquisition of AltaVista’s enterprise search business will allow FAST to provide AltaVista’s customers uninterrupted support and maintenance on their current platform and an opportunity to migrate to FAST Data Search, FAST’s suite of enterprise search and real-time filter solutions. This acquisition will not affect FAST’s product direction, as there are no plans to integrate the AltaVista enterprise search technology with FAST Data Search. As FAST continues the support and maintenance of current AltaVista enterprise search customers, it will encourage them to migrate to the FAST Data Search platform. www.fastsearch.com