US sale boost for Waikato software

By ADAM GIFFORD

Data mining software developer Reel Two has sold a 20-user licence for its Classification System text and data mining application to AstraZeneca's California-based global research and development unit.

Reel Two senior vice-president Nicko Goncharoff said AstraZeneca - the world's fifth-largest pharmaceutical company - would be a key reference customer for the Hamilton-developed software.

"The sale is to just one part of the R and D division, so we have high hopes for follow-on sales once that department defines its use cases," Goncharoff said.

He would not reveal the price, but a 20-user system would typically cost a third to a half of the US$100,000-plus paid for competing systems.

The Reel Two Classification System uses patent-pending technology to rapidly analyse large volumes of information and categorise unstructured data. While other data mining systems work on keywords or categories, the Reel Two software can search by concept.

Researchers can feed in a paper on the topic they are seeking, and the software will analyse it, then go off and look for related material.

Howard Asher, the head of life sciences division of Sun Microsystems, has described Reel Two's technology as world leading and "revolutionary for the life sciences community and the medical community".

AstraZeneca is using the software to look for articles about certain types of cancer.

It would be impossible for researchers to go through the tens of thousands of papers and journals available in medical and scientific databases such as Medline.

"Indexers will attach meta tags to documents, but they are often too broad to be useful to the researcher," Goncharoff said.

"If you are relying on a human to categorise something, you are dependent on their bias."

Goncharoff said Reel Two was looking for first-round funding of up to $10 million to hire more marketing and sales staff.

Reel Two