NetBase Launches World's First Content Intelligence Platform to Deliver Actionable Answers and Insights From Any Content Source

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwire - April 22, 2009) - NetBase today launched its Content Intelligence platform, the most comprehensive intelligent search solution designed to harness additional value and insight from any content source including the Internet, premium and enterprise content. NetBase is transitioning from an application provider focused specifically on R&D to opening up to a deeper, broader platform that is powering a new generation of consumer and B2B content-rich applications. This Content Intelligence technology powers applications for recognized global leaders in publishing, healthcare, government and Fortune 500 organizations like P&G and 3M.

NetBase also announced that it has expanded its customer relationship with Elsevier, the world's leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical products and services, for several more years. This agreement validates NetBase's leadership position in helping large publishers such as Elsevier transform rich content into fully searchable insight applications that easily map to the workflow of today's fast-paced knowledge worker.

In 2006 alone, the world produced 161 Exabytes (trillion Megabytes) of digital data encompassing 70 million blogs and 150 million Web sites -- the equivalent of three million times the information contained in all the books ever written. By 2010, it is estimated that this number will grow tenfold.(1) Yet traditional keyword search fails to address this information explosion because it returns too many documents, too much duplication and too much irrelevance.

NetBase's Content Intelligence technology reads every sentence inside documents, linguistically understands the content and powers breakthrough search experiences that deliver highly relevant answers and insights. It's the world's only technology that can harness billions of documents, linguistically understand sentences and automatically find answers to questions, not just lists of "results."

"In our world of exponentially growing digital content, people in every industry and job function are demanding better solutions to find answers and insights quickly. They want new ways to search that deliver rich, meaningful, relevant insights -- fast," said Jonathan Spier, CEO of NetBase. "Our platform is pushing the state of the industry forward by reading and deeply understanding content on a massive scale. The result is search that is orders of magnitude more relevant and valuable than past approaches."

NetBase's sentence-level understanding is used to help searchers explore problems and solutions, pros and cons, causes and effects, experts, applications, and technologies. Because NetBase doesn't rely on custom taxonomies, manual annotations or coding, the solutions are fully automated, massively scalable and able to be rolled-out in weeks with a minimal amount of effort. NetBase's semantic index is easy to keep up-to-date since no human editing or updates to controlled vocabularies are needed to capture and index new information.

NetBase can be deployed in a number of ways ranging from a simple API used to enrich Web pages or applications, to full packaged solutions powered by NetBase.

Content Intelligence for Healthcare

One industry leveraging NetBase's Content Intelligence platform is healthcare. At a time when people are looking to save on the cost of medical expenses and treatments and doctors are looking to collaboratively leverage research, intelligence and new technologies, cutting time to finding relevant information has become all the more important and is almost an expected norm.

For healthcare professionals, medical researchers and consumers, reading, interpreting and making sense of often thousands of results from a health search is still a manual and time-consuming effort because an enormous amount of health information is trapped within text-based books, research articles and health records. Current research approaches rely on manual, hard-wired approaches to index and categorize information, and are not sufficient in effectively transforming the enormous amount of health-related data into actionable knowledge in a timely manner.

Content Intelligence for Healthcare enables researchers, doctors and patients to quickly and efficiently search a vast and rapidly expanding number of books, medical journals, databases, Web sites and patient records, creating a new way to discover and use medical content. For example, doctors and nurses can look up a symptom like hypertension and instantly see an organized, up-to-the-minute summary of the causes, effects, symptoms, complications, side effects and treatments of the condition. Additionally, consumers and patients can do their own research for alternative treatments, suggested lifestyle changes, or less expensive medications or treatments to cut down on burgeoning healthcare costs.

NetBase Powers World's Largest Publisher of Scientific, Technical and Medical Information

NetBase Content Intelligence powers Elsevier's illumin8, the first major semantic search-based application for corporate users. Offered and sold globally by Elsevier, illumin8 helps R&D professionals answer complex questions with greater speed and effectiveness.

illumin8 integrates NetBase's linguistic technology with the breadth of Elsevier's full-text scientific articles, millions of scientific abstracts, millions of patents and eight billion Web pages, and fuses them into an organized, unified view, making it the richest business search solution in the world. Today, thousands of R&D professionals rely on illumin8 to speed innovation, identify new technologies and find potential partners/collaborators. illumin8 guides research at the front-end of innovation by uncovering undisclosed concepts, finding new technologies and identifying the leading experts and innovators in new areas.

"By applying NetBase's technology to our collection of premium and scholarly content, we are able to unlock new value from our world-class content in a format that is exponentially more valuable for our own end-users," said Shawn Holt, VP of business & product development for Elsevier's Engineering & Technology Division. "The quality and breadth of our content is what makes us unique, and being able to present this data in a way that is searchable and tangible for users is of utmost importance. Because of the level of intelligence that NetBase's technology is able to lay on top of our libraries of information, R&D knowledge workers no longer need to spend hours, days or weeks sifting through and reading thousands of search results or full-text documents to find the actionable answers they are looking for."

About Elsevier

Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. Working in partnership with the global science and health communities, Elsevier's 7,000 employees in over 70 offices worldwide publish more than 2,000 journals and 1,900 new books per year, in addition to offering a suite of innovative electronic products, such as Science Direct. (www.sciencedirect.com/), MDConsult (www.mdconsult.com/), Scopus (www.info.scopus.com/), bibliographic databases, and online reference works.

Elsevier (www.elsevier.com/) is a global business headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and has offices worldwide. Elsevier is part of Reed Elsevier Group plc (www.reedelsevier.com/), a world-leading publisher and information provider. Operating in the science and medical, legal, education and business-to-business sectors, Reed Elsevier provides high-quality and flexible information solutions to users, with increasing emphasis on the Internet as a means of delivery. Reed Elsevier's ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).

About NetBase

NetBase provides Content Intelligence solutions to harness additional value and insight from any source, including the Internet, premium and enterprise content. Unlike traditional search approaches that produce an overwhelming list of links as "results," NetBase reads every sentence inside documents, linguistically understands the content and powers breakthrough search experiences that deliver highly relevant answers and insights. Using NetBase Content Intelligence solutions, companies can deploy new applications and search experiences to speed discovery, innovation and decision making. NetBase customers include global leaders in publishing, manufacturing, consumer packaged goods and government such as Elsevier, Clorox, 3M, Pepsi and many more. For more information, visit www.netbase.com.

(1) Gantz, John F. "The Expanding Digital Universe A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010." IDC, March 2007.

Contact Information: Contact: Netbase Melissa Biles and Jesse Odell LaunchSquad 415-625-8555 netbase(at)launchsquad(dot)com