Attensity named a finalist for Red Herring's 100 Award

We hate to play favorites, but we have always been fans of Palo Alto-based Attensity, a leader in the text analytics field. The company specializes in managing the 85 percent of corporate text found in unstructured formats such as e-mails and reports — a good business considering that the worldwide market for natural language software is estimated to reach $1.84 billion by 2008. In-Q-Tel has invested $3-4 million in the company, and it has enjoyed strong working relationships with such companies as Northrop Grumman, IBM, and General Dynamics. Now we hear that the company has scored two additional successes: a deal with Virginia’s Chesterfield County Police Department (CCPD) to supply Attensity Law Enforcement Analyst Desktop Solution (LEADS); and the announcement that it had been named a finalist for the Red Herring magazine 100 Award, a selection of the private companies based in North America playing a leading role in innovation and technology.

Attensity’s unstructured text management software is well-designed for CCPD’s needs. The department already has a world-class records management process that captures high-quality narrative reports from officer dictation. However, analysts must still painstakingly read, study, annotate, tag, parse, and process these narratives in order to assist detectives in finding leads to help solve crimes. Attensity’s systems will help the CCPD exploit this data by identifying actionable relationships among these freeform text files. “The department is eager to implement Attensity’s applications to quickly find previously unknown events, facts and relationships hidden in the text so we can catch more criminals in less time,” said commander Jack Ritchie.