software founded 2001 headquarters vienna va united states key people patrick c. condo president and ceo ronald j. whittier chairman of board matthew g. jones cfo revenue 1.3 million usd 2009 1 net income 23 million usd 2009 1 number of employees 32 1 website convera.com convera was formed in december 2000 by the merger of intel s interactive services division and excalibur technologies corporation . until 2007 convera s primary focus was the enterprise search market through its flagship product retrievalware which is widely used within the secure government sector in the united states uk canada and a number of other countries . convera sold its enterprise search business to fast search & transfer in august 2007 for 23 million at which point retrievalware was officially retired . 2 microsoft corporation continues to maintain retrievalware for its existing customer base . in february 2010 convera corporation merged with firstlight era to become ntent 1 bringing with it its web scale semantic search engine . contents 1 history 2 services 3 shareholders 4 ntent 5 references 6 external links history edit excalibur technologies had a history of search technology development dating back to the early 1980s . originally founded by jim dowe in february 1980 3 4 excalibur sought to exploit neural networks through its proprietary adaptive pattern recognition processing aprp . in 1985 the company entered into a multiyear research development and royalty contract with nikkei information systems co. ltd. nis a japanese company . 5 for the japanese market excalibur packaged the technology for broader adoption . dowe presented ticol a development tool for fifth generation programming environments along with mr. toshi arai of nis 6 at the 1988 forth conference on programming environments . the conference was hosted by the college of engineering and applied science at the university of rochester . 6 in parallel excalibur demonstrated several successful applications of aprp pattern matching using multimedia data types including text data signal data and video data and packaged these as trs srs and vrs targeted to us government agencies . one of those early applications of aprp for text retrieval proved that pattern matching search tolerated spelling variations and optical character recognition ocr processing errors over large volumes of scanned ocr material . this led to the release of excalibur efs for electronic filing and search . digital equipment corporation dec began distributing the excalibur products in 1990 . 7 pat condo represented dec in the transaction and later joined excalibur and began to package the technology behind the applications into a server based offering . in 1995 condo was named president ceo . that same year excalibur acquired conquest 8 for its scalable distributed software architecture and renamed the product to retrievalware . the acquisition provided real time profiling boolean search statistical and heuristic search natural language query semantic network tools knowledge bases and a complete set of application development tools . 8 on may 5 1997 the company acquired interpix software corporation interpix located in santa clara california a privately owned company and developer of a commercial technology enabling the collection indexing management and presentation of multimedia data on the internet and corporate intranets . 9 condo continued to architect and build out a complete multimedia semantic software as a service search platform partnering with ronald j. whittier head of intel s interactive media division . on december 21 2000 those efforts resulted in the merger of excalibur and intel s interactive media services division to form convera corporation and whittier left intel to join convera as chairman . 10 as part of that transaction convera was assigned intel s contract with the national basketball association to develop and distribute interactive nba content including enhanced broadband programming and interactive game broadcasts . on march 7 2002 convera acquired semantix inc. a private software technology development company specializing in cross lingual processing and computational linguistics technology . 11 later that year on august 1 2002 condo hired dr. claude vogel founder and chief technology officer of semio corporation . vogel as convera cto drove the development of the new categorization and dynamic classification capabilities while bolstering the extensive search and discovery strengths of the platform including facets and a multi million term ontology . in a december 3 2004 article in the washington post condo disclosed the company s strategy to apply the technology built for the intelligence community to an advanced development project to index the web . 12 services edit 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 . shareholders edit a controlling interest in convera was held by allen & company a new york based investment bank . allen & company has been associated with convera since its foundation in 2000 and was also a major shareholder in excalibur technologies for many years . legg mason opportunity trust also had a sizable holding . 13 donald mccauley and john yauch maintained a large but minority share of the company . they were two of the most vocal backers often referring to the company as a coiled spring . ntent edit after the merger with firstlight era in february 2010 convera s remaining assets and technology became the property of ntent . ntent continues to provide web scale semantic search for vertical applications and also provides context sensitive advertising services for both web pages and search results . 14 15 16 17 18 references edit a b c 10 k . retrieved 2009 04 25 . fast acquires convera s retrievalware business . information today inc. 2007 04 09 . while fast will continue to support the retrievalware platform it will not continue development on it or add new features . retrievalware customers will be offered an upgrade path to fast s own offering . james dowe . forbes.com . retrieved 21 september 2014 . sec filing . sec.gov . 1996 04 04 . retrieved 21 september 2014 . excalibur technologies 10 k . retrieved 2014 09 20 . a b 1988 rochester forth conference programming environment . forth.org . 1988 . retrieved 21 september 2014 . peter hayhow boston globe staff 1990 01 10 . digital excalibur deal . highbeam research . retrieved 21 september 2014 . a b form 8k . sec.gov . 1995 11 21 . retrieved 21 september 2014 . excalibur 1998 01 31 . 1998 10 k . sec.gov . retrieved 21 september 2014 . intel corporation 2000 12 21 . intel and excalibur technologies close transaction to form convera corporation . intel corporation . retrieved 21 september 2014 . excalibur 2002 03 07 . form 8 k . sec.gov . retrieved 21 september 2014 . vide david 3 december 2004 . washington post agencies find what they re looking for . the washington post . retrieved 20 september 2014 . form sc 13g a . sec.gov . 2007 02 15 . retrieved 21 september 2014 . convera completes merger of its operating subsidiaries with ntent quick facts . rttnews . 2010 02 11 . retrieved 15 november 2010 . starr barbara 2012 10 25 . for google shopping & more ntent . search & retail . search engine land . retrieved 8 january 2013 . ntent is the name of a company based in new york london vienna and carlsbad that offers users an alternative to google paid search ads . they also offer several niche vertical search engines of their own such as wedding food woodwork and more . sullivan laurie 2011 07 12 . brand images heighten paid search ads . searchblog . media post . retrieved 8 january 2013 . in february 2010 convera a developer of search technology for the u.s. intelligence community and firstlight era an advertising sales technology company merged to create ntent . the one company supports semantic search indexing and ad matching to understand concepts and the context of information in a way that is similar to humans . today the engine operates on publisher sites . in the future it could turn into a stand alone engine . the semantic technology helps the engine find the difference between jaguar the car and jaguar the animal . sullivan laurie 2012 01 16 . foodies get search engine organizing results in categories images . searchblog . media post . retrieved 8 january 2013 . sullivan lauri 2011 09 02 . semantic search and raw data on rise . searchblog . media post . retrieved 8 january 2013 . search engines are also looking more toward semantic search . colin jeavons ntent president and ceo said the company will launch mobile voice search for the iphone and phones running android operating system next week to support the company s semantic search engine technology for computers and tablets . external links edit ntent website retrieved from https en.wikipedia.org w index.php title convera corporation & oldid 737968970 categories intel corporationinternet search enginescontextual advertisingsemantic webmobile webhidden categories pages using infobox company with unsupported parameters navigation menu personal tools not logged intalkcontributionscreate accountlog in namespaces article talk variants views read edit view history more search navigation main pagecontentsfeatured contentcurrent eventsrandom articledonate to wikipediawikipedia store 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