Northern Light Launches MI Analyst 2.0 Offering Deeper, Faster "Meaning Extraction" from Market Intelligence Search Results

New release fortifies search results with identification of strategic business issues
in information technology and pharmaceuticals research documents

CAMBRIDGE, MA, Feb. 25, 2008 - Northern Light (www.northernlight.com) today launched its second major release of MI Analyst™, the only automated "meaning extraction" application designed specifically for market intelligence, market research and product research. Meaning extraction marks the evolution of search engines, imbuing a search application with an in-depth understanding of the searched material. By combining best-in-class free-text searching with advanced text analytics, MI Analyst speeds and improves a researcher's ability to analyze reports from internal and external sources, identifying the strategy issues and suggesting the business implications of the analyzed content.

MI Analyst 2.0 adds many new "facets" (categories of terms) by which the software can instantly analyze search results, automatically extracting meaning from internal and research documents, licensed secondary research, news stories and Web sources. Joining the previously released facets (Companies, Venture-Funded Companies, IT Technologies, IT Markets), new and expanded facets include Government Agencies, Industries, Business Issues and Strategic Scenarios.

Business Issues are conditions, events, trends and situations - such as falling prices, shifting market share, emerging market trends and over a hundred additional factors - that can impact a company's plans and decisions. Strategic Scenarios identify the strategic outcomes, competitive interactions and plans for specific companies discussed in the research material being analyzed. By clicking on a Business Issue or Strategic Scenario, users are directed to those documents in a search results list that contain information and perspective about that specific issue or scenario, thus greatly streamlining the research process and uncovering meaning that might otherwise be overlooked.

Also new in MI Analyst 2.0 is a facility to improve the value of search results based on the proximity of specified terms or phrases to each other, and more importantly, to any of the terms in any of the facets in MI Analyst. For example, a strategic planner looking for acquisition candidates could specify a phrase of interest as a search query and then use the MI Analyst proximity facility to find venture-funded companies being mentioned near the query terms phrase. Or a competitive intelligence professional could look for documents that describe a competitor's sales focus by looking for documents with the competitor's name near the Business Issue: sales strategy.

New facets address pharmaceuticals research
With the 2.0 release, MI Analyst expands beyond its roots in the IT sector to the pharmaceutical industry research. New facets relevant to pharmaceuticals include Human Anatomy, Diseases, Drugs, Cells, Cell Receptors, Proteins, Genes, Enzymes, Pharmaceutical Markets, Life Sciences Scenarios and Research Strategies and Therapeutic Approaches. Not only can Northern Light apply MI Analyst to a company's research documents, it can also be used to analyze news, published syndicated research and specialty databases of particular interest to pharmaceutical research, like patents. With Life Sciences Scenarios, for example, MI Analyst can analyze huge repositories of documents (such as patents and news) letting the user know which companies are working on drugs for particular diseases, or that a particular protein is often mentioned in articles about certain cells, which in turn are related to particular diseases.

"Northern Light continues to define the future for the automated discovery and analysis of business meaning across large stores of market intelligence and research content," said C. David Seuss, Northern Light's CEO. "Professionals who use market intelligence and research databases in knowledge-intensive industries such as information technology, pharmaceuticals - any industry trying to cope with and drive change - will find that MI Analyst is a highly intelligent, computerized assistant that surfaces the golden nuggets of meaning in their research databases. They go right to the gold without wasting any time on the rest."

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About MI Analyst
MI Analyst reads available news articles as well as all the market intelligence and research reports that a company creates or licenses from third-party sources. The application tells the researcher what is in the documents that are returned by a search query, suggesting what business issues they address, and then directs the researcher to the documents that are most interesting based on their meaning rather than on their statistically-derived search relevance.

In addition, MI Analyst can discern the tone of content - for example, assessing which market research reports and research analysts reflect a positive sentiment and which ones demonstrate a negative sentiment about a company and its competitors. Such sentiment scoring can be particularly useful in an analyst relations setting where marketing personnel need to monitor and influence analyst coverage. Using entity extraction, MI Analyst also calls out business-critical facets of searched content, including companies, venture funded companies, technologies, markets, job titles, business issues, government agencies, identified phrases, and research sources.

Price and availability
MI Analyst is immediately available from Northern Light as an added-value option for SinglePoint™ enterprise market research portals, and as an integrated capability within Analyst Direct™, Northern Light's subscription-based market research search engine.

SinglePoint is the only turnkey enterprise search application that provides centralized search, analysis, and access for diverse sources of internal, external, and licensed market intelligence. Offered in a secure, hosted, user self-service portal environment, SinglePoint is customized to the precise market research and competitive intelligence purposes of each of Northern Light's enterprise clients. Unlimited enterprise-wide access to MI Analyst starts at $48,000 annually.

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About Northern Light
Northern Light has been providing strategic research portals, business research content, and search technology to global enterprises since 1996. During that time, Northern Light has built and deployed over 200 custom research portals and enterprise search applications for large enterprises. Northern Light's clients include one or more of the top five companies in each major technology sector of the Fortune 1000. Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a development center in St. Petersburg, Russia, Northern Light Group LLC is a profitable, privately-held, self-funded company with more than 50 employees.