Eqentia: the Enterprise-Grade Web Publishing Tool

There are so many new tools coming to market every day that it's daunting to figure out what will be useful and where to invest your time learning. Those I review here are usually the result of a conversation with the founder(s) based on understanding the business cases and utility of a technology.

Which is another good reason why, if you'd like to be featured here, you take the time to engage with me at conferences and events, and are working on a seriously useful product.

Since so many ask, the options are: Read my content, hire a good publicist who has developed a relationship with me, or plan to sponsor the weekly feed here.

I met William Mougayar, Founder & CEO, EQENTIA, Inc. at Mesh in Toronto last month. In our conversation, it was clear we had much in common, including speaking multiple languages, the love for all things Italian, and the idea that there could be an About.us page inside an organization.

That last idea is what got me interested in looking at Eqentia as a publishing platform.

How it works

The tool uses real-time aggregation, text-mining, and semantic extraction to pull the stories you're interested in from mainstream media, blogs, academia, industry information, into one place. You control which sources to track, how to filter the content, and how to zero in on concepts that are relevant to your business or interests.

Eqentia integrates with DBpedia and has built a taxonomy of 30,000 topics. Like a super digial library. Because it was born in Canada, it includes French, too.

It includes social media integration. So far so good. Where it differs is that you can customize it to include both public and private feeds.

It can be branded across personal, departmental, and organizational boundaries with the ability to track competitive intelligence and company knowledge, and to monitor content, thought leadership, hyper-local news, social newsrooms, etc.

I immediately thought of a repository to capture information shared before and after a group meeting. How many times did you wish you had something you could build in real time like this?

Or say you're tracking what's being said about a topic, like Techmeme. You can do that and curate how you present the information, too.

Other use cases

Include:

• Companies that want to track very unique and specific subjects for competitive or business development reasons.
• Power users who want to aggregate news around their interests into a private or public portal
• Large companies that want to disseminate organized news intelligence for their employees or prospects across distinct groups or market segments
• Publishers who would like to enrich their pages with deep topical content while boosting their SEO rankings
• Aggregation of specific channels of information into one homogeneous and controllable environment (e.g. social media mixed with news)

You could build a portal with keywords and put all resources in one place. Then, you can use the semantic engine to discover new, like content, and pull it in. Which gets you on the way to building an implicit social graph. Another hot topic because it points you to actual behaviors and actions.

Here's my public portal, if you want to look around. I haven't done a whole with it, yet, so be kind. What I like about the tool is that it allows you to see what you put out, and what others write about you and your content and how they share both.

Going back to the enterprise application, you could help your sales team pull intelligence and research into one place -- say you have a regional meeting -- and the administrator can then view what people have looked at and used most. If you ever built Intranets sites, you know this is big.

And you can serve up content from your internal communications and marketing research to it. When you know that sales is from Mars and marketing is from Venus... imagine what happens when you put them both in one place.

 

If you enjoyed this post from Conversation Agent, subscribe, share and like it. Sign up for my Premium Newsletter.

Comments

[twitter.com/wmougayar]

Thanks for your insights, Valeria. I think you've explained what we do better than we have! The perspective you have offered presents an excellent ground for various enterprise adoption scenarios.

[awaldstein]

Good piece Valeria.

I'm an early user as well @ http://portal.eqentia.com/awaldstein/headlines and friend of the company. Great to see another point of view.

Besides the power of the engine itself, I like the control it gives me to balance my needs and the stream of social recommendations. Companies and individuals alike need to be the ones to pull those levers and make those choices.

re: implicit discovery...that's the big leap. It's like two lines going off into the horizon. Getting closer all the time but not there yet. Eqentia has their eye on this intersection.

BTW...If interest in all things Italian includes the organic wines of Etna, Puglia, and Piedmont, I'm part of that club.

[Valeria Maltoni]

with so much designed for everyone these days, it's really good to come across a tool that was designed with the enterprise uses and needs in mind. My vision is to help organizations become stronger, more resilient, and build endurance.

[Valeria Maltoni]

it's "both/and" indeed. Good point on implicit discovery. I'd like to add that some people are better "leaves readers" for that than others. Why "who" you hire to develop and lead in those areas matters a great deal. I am astounded that organizations would not take a more aggressive role in the hiring process and still outsource most of it to recruiters who clearly demonstrate a very weak understanding of what the business needs. So far, I have met a one or two who were willing to spend the time qualifying the ask.

[Steve Ardire]

>There are so many new tools coming to market every day that it's daunting to figure out what will be useful and where to invest your time learning.

Yes indeed and have looked closely at and/or used many but usually abandon. However, I'm now getting more into Eqentia for reasons outlined in your fine post.