Firefly Flitting to Businesses

July 5th, 2007

Firefly Network, the company that pioneered the use of intelligent agents on the Web, plans to offer its technology to businesses and application developers that hope to build Web and intranet-based communities.

Firefly’s Web site allows you to obtain film and music recommendations by entering your likes and dislikes among titles you’ve already seen or heard. On Monday, the company announced plans to market that same agent technology to make groupware more effective at sharing and winnowing corporate information.

These agents…learn while they work and they learn from one another, said Saul Klein, marketing vice president for Firefly.

So for example, if I have looked at a particular document and I’ve found it useful, my knowledge of that document becomes part of the networked knowledge base. So next time you’re looking for a document, not only will you be able to leverage what your agent has learned about your likes and dislikes and interests, but you’ll also be able to leverage the entire knowledge base of the community.

Klein said Firefly is already working with several groupware and information management vendors, and that product announcement should be coming shortly. Firefly currently offers companies an option to beta test its suite of tools.

Workgroup computing expert Dave Curley of the Meta Group says agent technology may help corporate users overcome the information avalanche.

Agent technology applied to groupware to help with some of the routing is important, but more importantly, some agent technology applied to what we call information management is going to be really critical, Curley said.

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