Bill Inmon of Inmon Data Systems says that at last we’re able to combine structured and unstructured search, so that (for example) a search for a customer will find transaction records in the database and emails the customer may have exchanged with customer support.
James Robertson of Step Two Designs explains why “search sucks,” and how it can be kept simple and made more effective if the implementers do more work up front.
Sandeep Swadia, head of Search Business Consulting for Fast, talks about the intersection of customer needs for search and the evolving media business model.
John Markus Lervik, founder and CEO of Fast, talks about who is a bigger competitor, Oracle or Google, and the ways in which Fast internally is a Web 2.0 company…wikis and blogs, emerging bottom-up.
Zia Zaman, SVP of Strategic Marketing at Fast, talks about search as the visible surface of deep business processes, and what this means for Fast as a partner.
Hadley Reynolds, VP of Fast’s Center of Search Innovation, discusses the implications of the fact that in enabling sites to provide us with highly relevant results, we may trade-off some of our privacy.
Jim McGee of Huron Consulting Group talks about the need for businesses to allow employees time to think, and the extent to which thinking can be done in the social public of blogs.
Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail talks about when taxonomies, text search and tagging works, and how this applies to a magazine site. And what about tagging’s own long tail?
David Watson, VP of Product Design and Development for Digital Media at Disney/ABC, talks about the role of user-generated metadata in guiding people toward his company’s content. Look for looser licensing of news content before creative content.
Tom Mandel of ConnectBeam, a social software company, explains why tags are like poetry.
Lydia Loizides, a former VP of technology and emerging media at IPC.
Kathleen Gilroy, who’s also doing video blogs at the conference, answers her own question, “How has search changed her life?” If you want to know, just ask her husband.
Euan Semple, formerly the knowledge management guru at the BBC and now an independent consultant, says that he thinks search is overrated. He trusts more the answers given to him by his social network.
Dorothea Herrey of Dow Jones Consumer Media Group, Director of Franchise Development and Partnership (a subsidiary of the Long Titles Divisional Department 
talks about how Dow Jones organizes itself in the multi-dimensional world of the Web, where the dimensions include content, brands, devices, markets, interests….
Susan Feldman, an analyst with IDC, gives an advance peak at a study she’s going to be announcing tomorrow that upsets expectations about how people find sites…and opens a possibility for “long tail” advertising.
Jeanette Borzo of the Economist Intelligence Unit talks about her survey of 400 executives that showed that even though they’re unclear about what Web 2.0 means, they’re planning on using it to increase revenues and drive down costs.
Matthew Brown, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, talks about the future in which search is ubiquitous but also frequently less visible.
Dan Keldsen of the Delphi Group talks about the intersection of full text search and tagging.
Carl Frappaolo of the Delphi Group explains why we should think of search not in terms of finding so much as in terms of teaching.
This site is a companion blog to the FASTforward conference and summit series and is sponsored by FAST, A Microsoft Subsidiary. The blog, like the conference series, aims to drive and deepen conversation about how today’s companies can use technology to place users in control of information, and is home to ongoing discussion about the user revolution and Enterprise 2.0 opportunities and challenges. More info here...
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The FASTforward blog is editorially managed by Corante and produced by Beeline Labs.
Be sure to catch dozens of great interviews from this year's FASTforward. Among the topics discussed between host Jerry Michalski and the speakers, panelists, attendees, and contributors to this blog: enterprise 2.0, search, the user revolution, the future of content, and much, much more.
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