Northern Light Technology Launches SinglePoint Enterprise Information Portal

Business Wire, Dec 5, 2000

Business/Technology Editors

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 5, 2000

"A relief and a boon to enterprises...a worthy competitor..." says IDC

White Paper

Northern Light(R) Technology, Inc. [www.NorthernLight.com], the award-winning search engine, today formally introduced SinglePoint(TM), an advanced information portal described as "a relief and a boon to enterprises that need to provide excellent and swift access to information" in a recent IDC White Paper. SinglePoint joins a suite of information management solutions that Northern Light offers to the enterprise market.

From its inception, the Cambridge-based research engine has offered its business users custom solutions to help them manage the explosion in business-relevant information. Northern Light's success in the enterprise channel has far exceeded expectations and can be measured by the number and quality of the companies that have adopted the company's search and content management tools including Agilent Technologies, Student Advantage, Fortune.com, Medialink, and, most recently, Economist.com.

"As companies strive to keep their edge, easy and manageable access to relevant industry and competitive information can frequently spell the difference between success and failure," said David Seuss, CEO of Northern Light Technology. "SinglePoint is a customizable and scalable solution for any company wishing to harness the vast resources available electronically and use them effectively to make critical business decisions."

"The Northern Light enterprise information portal business model is an intriguing one," said Susan Feldman, analyst, who recently wrote Northern Light: A New Model for the Enterprise Information Portal, a White Paper, for IDC. "It is one part ASP, one part outsourced service. It is scaleable and quick to implement. In a fast-changing technology environment, this can be a relief and a boon to enterprises that need to provide excellent and swift access to the information they need. The outsourced model makes this a persuasive offering that may disrupt the current market in Northern Light's favor."

Unlike other enterprise knowledge management solutions, SinglePoint includes a set of capabilities, tools and methods for integrating and searching content according to the specifications of the customer. Typically an intranet-based service within a corporation, SinglePoint has evolved from the underlying search, content integration and classification technologies that have characterized Northern Light since its inception. For its many enterprise and partnership customers, Northern Light has developed over 300 vertical content categories, each including millions of Web and Special Collection(TM) documents. Through its NorthernLight.com Web site, the technology behind SinglePoint serves millions of searches and loads an average of 10 million new documents each week.

The SinglePoint search technology has consistently won industry awards and accolades for its excellence in query interpretation and relevancy ranking. The company's patented classification technology - demonstrated on NorthernLight.com through the display of the "little blue folders" on a results list - includes a taxonomy of over 20,000 terms that can easily be customized for a specific industry or business specialty. And, Northern Light's Special Collection of over 7,100 licensed full-text business sources provides SinglePoint customers with a rich content database of non-Web data to complement its comprehensive Web index of more than 315 million documents.

In her IDC White Paper, Ms. Feldman notes that today's knowledge worker spends at least 50% of his time looking for information. Clearly, any improvements to this time-consuming task can have a significant impact on performance and profits. In describing SinglePoint, Ms. Feldman concludes: "Northern Light provides an advanced information system that has confronted the technical challenges of retrieval, categorization and usability successfully. Outstanding search and relevance ranking, together with careful classification and a host of customizable features, make Northern Light a worthy competitor in the Enterprise Information Portal market."

About Northern Light Technology

Northern Light Technology, Inc., headquartered in Cambridge, MA, is a leading Internet provider of information solutions for enterprises and individuals. Founded in 1996 by a seasoned team of librarians, software engineers, and information industry professionals, the company's search engine (www.NorthernLight.com) is among the world's most comprehensive, indexing more than 315 million Web pages as well as over 50 million pages of business information not generally available on the Web from over 7,100 licensed business and information sources.

Northern Light uses classification intelligence and precision relevancy ranking to significantly improve online searching. Combining the capabilities of Web search providers, licensed third-party business information suppliers, and text-retrieval database software vendors, Northern Light provides customers and partners with a new generation of custom enterprise information applications. The company has received multiple Editors' Choice awards for its search capabilities from PC Magazine and was recently named a 2000 Web business award winner for online excellence by CIO Magazine for its www.NLResearch.com Web site.