Factiva First to Dip Into IBM's Web Fountain
Premium content aggregation took a major step forward today as IBM and Factiva announced that they will be applying the text search and analysis capabilities of IBM's Web Fountain platform to Factiva's extensive collection of premium content sources. Significantly Factiva's first target is tracking corporate reputation via Web Fountain's analysis of Factiva sources, Internet pages and newsgroups. While Factiva still provides value via simplifying the acquisition of premium sources, the value of simply assembling content collections has been diminishing very rapidly in the face of enterprise and public search tools. Web Fountain's capabilities provide Factiva with powerful leverage to define new premium levels of content value using leading edge technology, creating highly tailored content services that can produce highly profitable results. Both IBM and Factiva stand to win a great deal via Web Fountain, but its ability to scale to enterprise-wide content and expectations is still a work in progress.