It is surely a sign of a maturing market when you can take the copy from one company web page and insert any of the competitors' names in it without significantly changing the text's validity. Take the following, for example:
COMPANY continually tracks sources such as online newsgroups, blogs, company web sites and syndicated sources. Data mining technology searches the collected data for trends, clusters and sentiments which are then used to compile reports according to client requirements.
Who could this be? Umbria? BuzzMetrics? It is actually a reasonably new player - Attentio (circa late 2004, early 2005). Also, there's nothing like a good job posting to tell you what the company is up to:
Candidates should have unique skills and experience in at least one of the following areas:
- Text-based Information retrieval
- Web mining, data mining
- Machine learning/AI techniques
- Web application development
- Search engine, crawler and wrapper development
- Web services, XML/RSS, Microsoft .NET, Sun J2EE
- Scalability, distributed systems, clusters, grid computing
- Object oriented programming techniques, Java, C++
- Relational databases/DBMS, SQL
- OS experience incl. UNIX/Linux
- Project management, software specification, methodology
Simon McDermott, co-founder, also keeps a blog.