Learning about the market's periphery: IBM's WebFountain

The web can provide valuable information to an organisation on upcoming trends, competitors' movements and customers' gripes. More important, the information is within reach of every organisation. The problem is that there is so much of it. This paper describes how IBM set up and utilised WebFountain-a tool to help it extract trends and detect patterns from the vast amounts of raw data available. Still, the authors argue, any organisation needs to do more to use to its full potential such a system for extracting analytic solutions from the web: the most important being to ask the right questions in the first place. © 2004 Published by Elsevier Ltd.