2007 April 25

Autonomy+Virage = Dominant *media* search engine?

Autonomy announced Wednesday that they’re getting back into the consumer search space…one they quietly exited in 2000. Search is key for certain, but what REALLY trips-my-trigger is a company they acquired some time ago.

When I was at Vignette during and after the dot.com adventure, we were the web content management engine behind numerous marquee sites with rich media. One of our partners — on whom I drank the KoolAid about their value proposition by the gallon — was a company called Virage. These guys had an incredibly cool technology that could index a *huge* amount of video, audio or images and index what lived inside this unstructured media content: facial recognition; the closed captioning track; speech-to-text; real-time analysis and encoding of streaming media (which to me was THE COOLEST thing and something uStream.tv, Podshow or any other media site should drool over); and a whole lot more.

Virage’s customer list is a who’s who of media companies globally. In the summer of 2003 they were acquired by Autonomy who has also sold licenses of their core search technology to intelligence agencies (seemed like a good fit: the Virage sweet-spot is media…Autonomy’s is static content plus context and more and both needed desperately in a post-9/11 world).

Here’s some of their marketing speak and why you might be interested:

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Vision: THE most important first step…

Nothing happens without a vision. Nothing gets created, manifested, built, or moved forward without a vision of an outcome.

Almost on a daily basis, I’m being bombarded with the benefits of visualization in my work, my personal life and as I guide others. If you don’t already visualize before you set personal goals, build a plan or, especially, if you lead an organization, team, or group, then you owe it to yourself to begin.

Just to illustrate how vision is showing up everywhere, at the Web 2.0 Expo’s Hybrid Designer session Chris Messina said something that hit me in the face and has stuck with me. In a discussion about the challenges facing designers with a creative vision struggling to get programmers to see the outcome of that vision so they could code to it, he talked about how he mocked up a visual when they were creating Flock, posted it to Flickr so that the geographically disbursed development team could all get on a call and talk about that vision. Without that shared vision, Chris said, the coordination of the team on a shared vision would’ve taken 6 weeks and dozens of threads in a discussion forum. Instead, it took 2-3 days.

No question this sharing of vision — and the co-creating that goes along with that sharing — is the single reason that I’m so incredibly enthused about the accelerating connection of humanity via the Internet and all the open source projects, Web 2.0 startups, and commercial software companies that are rushing to deliver ever-increasingly functional collaborative applications and platforms.

After dozens of people my bride and I know talked about the film The Secret, she purchased it. It was very well done and focused on one piece of sage wisdom: The Secret is a feature length, historic and factually based account of an age old secret, said to be 4000 years in the making, and known only to a fortunate few. The Secret promises to reveal this great knowledge to the world – the secret to wealth, the secret to health, the secret to love, relationships, happiness, eternal youth, the secret to life. The secret? The Law of Attraction which is creating a vision of what you want and expect to show up…and how it works when you align your intent, your energy and your focus on it.

Why should I care about vision Borsch?

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