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Sonic Foundry® Inc. (NASDAQ: SOFO), a leader in automated rich media communications technology, today enabled advanced search capabilities for Mediasite.com (www.mediasite.com), the first searchable Website focused exclusively on offering expert information via rich media presentations with video, audio and graphics. The site enhancements represent a major breakthrough in the way search is conducted for online audio, video, text and graphical information by combining phonetic search, optical character recognition, language processing and contextual analysis.Building on a long history of developing unstructured media search technology, Sonic Foundry has steadily rolled out advanced search capabilities as the market need accelerates for solutions that make it easy to identify and retrieve specific content within rich media presentations and video files. The company first demonstrated their development efforts in late 2006, and now offers Mediasite.com visitors unprecedented access and retrieval of granular information within rich media content.
Continuously growing, Mediasite.com aggregates nearly 13,000 rich media presentations, including over 250,000 slides and almost 9,500 hours of analyzed audio on topics ranging from the treatment of contagious diseases and general health-related issues to robotics, business start-ups, sociology, ethics, financial advice, personal improvement and career advancement. Every day, universities, businesses and government agencies create and archive presentations using Sonic Foundry’s webcasting and content management system, Mediasite®. Mediasite.com provides visitors with a directory of these publicly available presentations created by hundreds of experts around the globe.
With today’s announcement, Sonic Foundry brings these search advancements to the public through Mediasite.com. Optical character recognition allows for quick word and phrase spotting within slide content or visual aids. Advanced phonetic search algorithms coupled with language processing and contextual analysis provide the ability to quickly and easily locate specific spoken words or phrases within a rich media archive, based on sophisticated algorithms developed by Sonic Foundry. Sonic Foundry customers can now take advantage of these advanced search features for their own Mediasite content through new hosted services offered exclusively through Sonic Foundry’s professional services group.
“The need for better, faster communications and learning opportunities will increase because of worker globalization and the desire to reach a broader customer base,” writes Senior Analyst Claire Schooley in the January 17, 2007, report released by Forrester Research, Inc., “Webcasting Grabs Corporate Attention”.
Schooley notes that, “Features that show the depth of functionality possible with an on-premise [webcasting] solution include… content management of video content libraries with easy search and retrieval; multimodal content search with speech recognition, language processing, and contextual analysis.” She continues, “Webcasting is a new technology and strange to many. But a cultural change is happening quickly in the way information and knowledge is communicated. Within three years, Webcasts will be an essential part of business productivity tools.”
“We believe rich media is becoming more powerful as a medium because it engages the viewer through video, sound and physical interaction – Q&A, polling, click through navigation and now search,” explained Rimas Buinevicius, chairman and CEO of Sonic Foundry. “The rapid growth of online video is inspiring greater adoption of multimedia webcasting within the corporate and university enterprise. As a result, knowledge workers are engaging more fully with rich media content and requiring more efficient tools to find the information they need. We look forward to powering new, more accurate search results for rich media content that instantly connect workers with the information and expertise they require.”
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