Convera Corporation

Did You Know?

• In 1985, Excalibur Technologies entered a multiyear research, development and royalty contract with Nikkei Information Systems Co., Ltd. (NIS), a Japanese company.
• A controlling interest in Convera was held by Allen & Company, a New York based investment bank, which had been associated with Convera since its foundation in 2000.

History

Excalibur Technologies was founded by Jim Dowe in February 1980, and its work in search technology stretched back to the early 1980s. The company aimed to use neural networks through its own Adaptive Pattern Recognition Processing (APRP). In 1985, it signed a multiyear research, development, and royalty deal with Nikkei Information Systems Co., Ltd. (NIS) of Japan. Dowe and Toshi Arai from NIS presented TICOL: A Development Tool For Fifth Generation Programming Environments at the 1988 Forth Conference on Programming Environments, which was hosted by the University of Rochester's College of Engineering and Applied Science. Excalibur showed that APRP pattern matching could work with text, signal, and video data, and it sold these as TRS, SRS, and VRS products to U.S. government agencies. One early text retrieval application proved that pattern matching could handle spelling mistakes and optical character recognition (OCR) errors across large amounts of scanned material, which led to the Excalibur EFS product for electronic filing and search. In 1990, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) started distributing Excalibur products. Pat Condo, who represented DEC in that deal, later joined Excalibur and began turning the underlying technology into a server-based product. Condo became President and CEO in 1995. That same year, Excalibur bought Conquest for its scalable, distributed software architecture and renamed the product RetrievalWare. This purchase brought in real-time profiling, Boolean search, statistical and heuristic search, natural language query, semantic network tools, knowledge bases, and a full set of application development tools. On May 5, 1997, Excalibur acquired Interpix Software Corporation, a Santa Clara, California company that had technology for collecting, indexing, managing, and presenting multimedia data on the internet and corporate intranets. Condo kept building a complete multimedia and semantic software-as-a-service search platform, working with Ronald J. Whittier, who led Intel's interactive media division. On December 21, 2000, Excalibur and Intel's Interactive Media Services division merged to form Convera Corporation, and Whittier left Intel to become Convera's chairman. As part of that deal, Convera took over Intel's contract with the National Basketball Association to create and distribute interactive NBA content, including enhanced broadband programming and interactive game broadcasts. On March 7, 2002, Convera bought Semantix Inc., a company focused on cross-lingual processing and computational linguistics. Later that year, on August 1, 2002, Condo hired Dr. Claude Vogel, founder and former CTO of Semio Corporation. As Convera's CTO, Vogel led the development of new categorization and dynamic classification features, while also improving the platform's search and discovery strengths, including facets and a multi-million term ontology. In a December 3, 2004, Washington Post article, Condo revealed the company's plan to apply technology built for the intelligence community to a project for indexing the entire web. Convera was a private software company based in Virginia, operating from 2001 to 2010. Until 2007, its main business was enterprise search, driven by RetrievalWare, which was widely used in secure government sectors in the U.S., UK, Canada, and other countries. In August 2007, Convera sold its enterprise search business to FAST Search & Transfer for $23 million, and RetrievalWare was officially retired. Microsoft continues to maintain RetrievalWare for existing customers. Convera also offered software-as-a-service vertical search services to publishers and media companies, including John Wiley & Sons, Centaur Media, Incisive Media, Lebhar-Friedman, and Advanstar. These vertical search applications were usually branded by the publisher and combined public web data, the publisher's own content, and third-party content. A controlling interest in Convera was held by Allen & Company, a New York investment bank that had been involved since the company's founding and was also a major Excalibur shareholder. Legg Mason Opportunity Trust also held a sizable stake. Donald McCauley and John Yauch held a large but minority share and often called the company a "coiled spring." In February 2010, Convera merged with Firstlight ERA to become NTENT, bringing its web-scale semantic search engine along. NTENT continues to provide web-scale semantic search for vertical applications and context-sensitive advertising.

Services

Convera Corporation provided software as a service (SaaS) vertical search services to publishers and other media companies. Publishers used the web search platform to create customized search experiences for specialist audiences. Convera's vertical search service was used by many of the leading publishing companies, including John Wiley & Sons., Centaur Media, Incisive Media, Lebhar-Friedman and Advanstar. Vertical search applications were usually presented under the publisher's brand and typically combined a mixture of public web data (selected by the publisher as being the best public content available on the subject), the publisher's proprietary content and private content provided by third parties.