Northern Light Kicks Off Another "Summer of Love" With Announcement of SinglePoint Version 11 With Machine Learning Search Enhancements

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the "Summer of Love" Northern Light delivers a new research portal that is music to the ears of executives and research pros

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Northern Light

Jun 16, 2017, 08:35 ET

BOSTON, June 16, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Exactly 50 years ago today, the Monterey Pop Festival opened its gates and kicked off what later became known as the San Francisco "Summer of Love." To celebrate the anniversary, Northern Light® (www.northernlight.com) is unveiling two radical innovations in strategic market research portals that it will begin delivering to customers this summer. This announcement marks the beginning of Northern Light's "Summer of Love (For Our Customers)."

Northern Light SinglePoint version 11 features a mobile-first, responsive user interface built with Google Material Design.

The innovations are embedded in SinglePoint™ version 11, a new release of Northern Light's strategic research platform for competitive intelligence and market research insights used by hundreds of thousands of professionals at global enterprises. Version 11 features a mobile-first, responsive user interface built with Material Design, Google's set of state-of-the art application interface principles, guidelines, and UI treatments that are becoming an industry standard for web application design. Version 11 delivers an aesthetically pleasing, modern enterprise application interface with great flexibility for clients to configure their own unique branding and artistic treatments for their market research portals. In addition to being fully responsive across all devices from smartphones to PCs, SinglePoint v11 uses "cards" to visually organize content on the portal. All user controls are reimagined to be mobile-friendly, simple to understand and easy to operate with a click on a big screen or with a tap on a small one.

Machine learning
SinglePoint v11 also features powerful machine learning capabilities for cognitive search based on Google's TensorFlow library of machine learning algorithms that enable the system to automatically synthesize, refine, and present critical information distilled from large collections of market intelligence content within a SinglePoint portal, changing the search process profoundly. Use cases include:

"More like this" – The user picks documents that are of interest from the original search result and clicks on the "more like this" button to have SinglePoint rewrite the search query to automatically generate an entire search result of on-target items.
"Recommended reading list" – The system generates content recommendations for the user based on his or her interests and preferences, determined through automated analysis of user downloads, saves, and shares. In essence, instead of the user searching for relevant content, the content finds the user.
"Automated search report" – The system examines documents on a search result that contain the most important ideas, and then automatically summarizes the key points in an easy-to-read report format. Each key point includes links to the underlying documents so users can drill in to read the original if they want to learn more.

"As a music fan and technology executive, I believe the major enhancements to SinglePoint that we are launching this summer are as exciting to our customers as the Monterey Pop Festival was to its audience," C. David Seuss, Northern Light's CEO, said. "I don't expect people to write songs about SinglePoint like the original Summer of Love, or stage a festival in its honor, but from the reactions of our customers that we have previewed the new releases with, they have come as close to standing up and cheering at what we were showing them as business professionals do.

"The automated search report is the feature that has elicited gasps from the audience when we have previewed it with customers," Seuss continued. "Every single customer that has seen the automated search reports in action have asked if they can become beta testers so they can gain early access to it. Perhaps this feature is the transformative moment in search as we know it, almost eliminating the need for traditional search altogether. Maybe when we introduce this new technology, just like the Monterey Pop Festival transformed the perception of rock music and kicked off the Summer of Love way back when, we can transform the meaning of what a search engine does. It is certainly touching off Northern Light's Summer of Love for our customers."

SinglePoint v11 is available now from Northern Light. The artificial intelligence features will be available later this summer.

About Northern Light
Northern Light has been providing strategic research platforms for competitive intelligence and market research insights to global enterprises since 1996. In addition, Northern Light pioneered the application of machine learning and cognitive computing for the automated analysis and extraction of meaning from large collections of market research and competitive intelligence. Northern Light's current clients include 10 of Boston Consulting Group's 50 "Most Innovative Companies" of 2016, and Fortune 1000 leaders across multiple industries such as information technology, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, and life sciences. Northern Light has over 250,000 users of its strategic research portals. Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, Northern Light has unique content aggregation partnerships with more than 150 of the world's leading syndicated technology and industry research publishers, aggregates business and technology news from over 6,000 news sources, and is a charter member of the Center for Complex Systems and Enterprises at the Stevens Institute of Technology.

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SOURCE Northern Light