InfoGlide Corp, maker of a similarity search engine, says it is in talks with one of the big six internet search engines with a view to licensing its patented technology. InfoGlide’s product typically interrogates law enforcement and financial databases, looking for patterns which may be indicative of crime and fraud. Unlike conventional search engines, the product can recognize similarities, such as between red and maroon, as well as simple identities. According to InfoGlide CEO Jay Valentine, the internet portal company in question was researching the technology it needed to allow users to perform very complex searches. When the company came up with some preliminary designs, it ran a patent search, only to find that InfoGlide already held patents on very similar technology. They are licensing our patents, Valentine explains, saying the service should be available on the internet shortly after January 1st. We and they are testing the technology against pretty big databases, he says. We’re finding tremendous fidelity in the results. Valentine says InfoGlide itself want to concentrate on providing systems and services to the corporate space. We’re not internet people, he says, we’re database people. InfoGlide has raised $7m in venture funding and says it has no trouble finding investors. The challenge is rather to build a viable business for the long haul. Accordingly, Valentine says the company has settled for a few million for the licenses, in exchange for volume-based royalties if the search engine business comes true. InfoGlide CTO David Wheeler developed the software to help police after his millionaire father was murdered in 1981. Last year InfoGlide helped bring the perpetrators of a large insurance fraud to justice, but ironically, Wheeler’s father’s murder remains unsolved.
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