Meshin, a start-up company funded by Xerox, has designed a new search tool, called Meshin, for scanning e-mail, RSS feeds, and social networks. Rather than appearing like another search engine, Meshin has an almost human quality - acting like a super efficient personal assistant.
The tool uses semantic technology to reach beyond keywords and metadata and gather information via meaning and context.
“It is the first time semantic technology has been applied to a search tool that scans not only e-mail messages, but also RSS feeds, and social networks inside e-mail,” says Rabin Ram, MD of the Xerox division at Bytes Document Solutions, authorised Xerox distributor to 27 sub-Saharan countries.
As a result, when Meshin is downloaded onto a PC, it can help - for example - a VP of sales prepare for a last-minute customer meeting by pulling together relevant e-mails and document exchanges, Tweets, blog postings and a customer's company news.
“Our challenge in the workplace is not only having too much information. It's also finding, linking, reconciling or organising multiple pieces of information logically and rapidly so we can use this information to do our jobs effectively,” says Chris Holmes, CEO of Meshin. “That's what Meshin does.”
Incubated at the Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC), a Xerox company, Meshin is part of Xerox's effort to develop technologies that help businesses regain productivity lost while trying to manage the overload of information today's knowledge workers face.
“Meshin is a great example of the next wave of human-like search tools that are more in tune with the way people actually think, work and relate to others,” says Sophie Vandebroek, CTO and president of Xerox Innovation Group. “We are developing tools like Meshin because they help typically overtaxed and overwhelmed professionals focus on the content and connections that really matter.”
Meshin is being launched as a Microsoft Outlook plug-in in a public beta release. “We have rolled out our semantic technologies with Microsoft Outlook because e-mail is so core to how work gets done in offices of any size, anywhere,” Holmes says. “However, our technologies are platform-agnostic and can be applied beyond Outlook.”
* To see a video about Meshin, visit http://www.meshin.com/video-meshin-in-context.php.
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