A lunch conversation - Insightful InFact

I was at SES today and I randomly ended up having lunch with Ron Faith of Insightful. Ron works on this:

Text mining and fact discovery | Insightful InFact
In today’s data-driven world, the rising tide of information threatens to overwhelm our ability to make informed decisions. Faced with the exponential expansion of information and information sources-reports, research, emails, blogs, news stories, documents, and much more-how can anyone know with certainty that they have reviewed all available relevant information? Or uncovered the facts and relationships critical to sound decision-making?

It was a very interest conversation, covering topics such as cultural changes at Microsoft, to too much VC money chasing money (recurring meme!), to search algorithms that are not PageRank, to organic/dynamic taxonomies/ontologies. Very fascinating stuff. What struck me the most was how excited he was about the work that Insightful is doing. Indeed - this is a very interesting problem space and the strategies they are using have a very good moat. Check out the link above to learn more.

I’ll have to keep my eye out on this firm. If only I had a data mining tool to do so.