Bjørn kicked off the event at FASTforward’09 by noting the wide array of participants – 29 countries are represented here, over 100 C-level executive (and one chief nerd officer – I kid you not). Overall it is a packed event, which speaks to the importance of search as a technology that drives competitive advantage. In this interview, Bjørn defines what he means when he says “search” and why it is valuable to the enterprise during hard economic times.

BIO: Bjørn Olstad, Ph.D., serves as the chief technology officer of FAST and is a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer. Before joining FAST, Dr. Olstad held key positions within General Electric Medical Systems, including director of research and development for Cardiac Ultrasound. He has served as a professor in computer science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), where he was awarded the youngest professorship ever.

Many of the conventional news services will be going all out in Denver this week at the Democratic Convention. Many Bloggers are there too. But I think that this may be the Twitter Convention too.

Here are just a few from the PBS system:

Laura Hertzfeld, Vote 2008 producer: http://twitter.com/Laura_PBS
PBS Vote 2008: http://twitter.com/pbsvote2008
NewsHour: http://twitter.com/NewsHour
Tavis Smiley: http://twitter.com/tavissmiley

My Twitter feed has many more and all the breaking news services. But what I want is for those Twittering to give me a feel. To be like a composite eye whose many perspectives ad up up to a collective.

The “headlines” will be covered by the regular news channels. The feel of the floor and the deep background can be offered by a Twitter “Collective”. In time a station need not send its own staff at their own cost. It can use local volunteers to Twitter for them – creating a new kind of “Wire Service”.

But how to make sense of all these Twitter inputs? I already have nearly 400 feeds – how can I see the patterns from the noise? How could a station with say hundreds of volunteers Twittering the worlds news or simply using search to find the coverage separate the news from the noise?

I think that an answer may be TweetDeck

I have been using TweetDeck for a few days now and I am really impressed. I can easily create groups of meaning – beats for news – and I can easily use the search capability to extract content that has a focus. As Twitter users breach the 150 Dunbar number of followers and chaos and noise build, they can use TweetDeck to recreate meaning again.

I restrict my “Friends” group to my real friends. I have set up a Beat to cover media – all my pub TV and radio and Media folks go in here. I have set up a news channel.  To learn more bout Joe Biden, I did a serach for Biden and have a column there. It could have been any topic of course.

Is not the real value of social media in Convening or Meaning Making?

Assuming Twitter can solve its stability issues, the risk will always be noise. Success for twitter will bring too much noise for most people to handle.

A tool like TweetDeck starts to address this noise issue and starts to help us use Twitter to find more meaning and hence value.

Update: Jon Husband asked me to look at monitter – a tool that enables you to set 3 search variables and have access to everything that is happening in the Twitterverse. I have set it to Denver, NPR and Obama – I am really there!

Is there room for a “retail” Fast Search Tool that will enable me to “Parse the Web” for other content that fits my profile? A tool that would have a Dashboard that would feed back by my self selected groups things that I would like based on my prior actions and the actions of say a group of selected friends?

What would my web world be like then? What would be the value of such a tool?

Disclaimer – I have no connection to TweetDeck other than I have just donated some money to them!

Jerry asks John how it feels to see his small Norwegian company grow into a global company — and what the Microsoft deal means.

Bio: John Markus Lervik, Ph.D., is CEO and a co-founder of FAST. Dr. Lervik earlier served as the company’s CTO, and holds a Ph.D. from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Nate reviews the criteria for the Innovation Awards.

Brooks talks with Jerry about the new strategic importance of search for financial services companies in creating a consistent customer experience across multiple touchpoints.

Brooks Gibbins has worldwide responsibility for the securities, retail banking, insurance and financial information sectors at FAST. He has over 12 years of experience in enterprise software and hosted solutions in the financial services market. Prior to joining FAST, he was a key executive with Multex.com, a financial information and global research portals company. He oversaw the build out of the European business, co-led global sales, and headed up the firm’s investment management solutions business. He began his career with Price Waterhouse in their SAP technology consulting practice.

Zia Zaman’s take-aways from FASTforward’08 and his views on how search will change the world.

Bjorn discusses the demands of integrating the back end. He focuses on how to determining what needs to work and when.

Bio: Bjørn Olstad, Ph.D., serves as the Chief Technology Officer. Before joining FAST, Dr. Olstad held key positions within General Electric Medical Systems, including Director of Research and Development for Cardiac Ultrasound. He has served as a professor in computer science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), where he was awarded the youngest professorship ever.

I will leave Fast 08 knowing one thing. That Search will be one of the key ingredients in the new business model.

Imagine if I sent you a container full of DVDs. Packed to the top with DVD’s. Many of them great films and shows but many of them not. Imagine there are 50 million of them in the container. Would this be helpful for you? In your busy day, how much time would you invest in trying to find the gems? With so many unknown to you, would you bother to have a look to see if you would like them?

My bet is that you would give up after a while. And so all that content would in effect have little value – even though it may have cost a lot to make.

Now now metaphor. Imagine the web in say 3 years time. Now for every conventional film, there are a million made by us the public – some of which are very good. There are more films in 2010 than have ever been made before. Now every film made will be there. (If film bores you, think books, or music, or shirts, or shoes) Think of a store the size of America – with no order to the layout or shelving) Will you have time to sort through all of this? I doubt it.

So of course when and should you find something that you like it will have value. In this new world of personal film, there will be thousands of films that you have never heard of that you might like. But the barriers to finding it are very high.

So I am now convinced that in a world of infinite information, finding what I like and what I would like will become one of the most valuable processes. Search becomes not a nice tool but essential. I even use it myself now to find my own stuff. I can’t possibly keep up even with my own output let alone yours!

True search will not look like Google search box. I will want to know stuff that is important for me as a matter of course. I want events and stuff that will affect me to arrive before my eyes. I will want to be able to find stuff I don’t even know I need.

My bet is that my friends will play a role in this. Even today, I would rather, in my time starved life, accept the recommendation of a friend than a stranger. He knows me and is filtering better.

For time and attention are scarce for all of us.

So as I struggle to understand all I have heard today – I know this. That the web has made the world infinitely more complex. There are too many choices out there for me to comprehend.

Evolved search will give me a perspective that will enable me to make meaning of it. Evolved Search will be like my own nervous system on the web. It will be an extension of me. It will filter as much as find.

Our nervous system deliberately limits noise. The world and life offer us too much data. So our eyesight is confined to a narrow bandwidth. Our hearing can be selective – enabling most of us to hear what others say in a crowd. We have evolved to select out the important from the noise. So it will be with Search – it too will have to constrain but also allow – allow what is most meaningful for each of us.

The news today regarding FAST is big. Perhaps not as historic as the New Hampshire primary, but to the enterprise search teams at FAST and Microsoft, this is a new chapter in the evolution of the search software market.

For those who missed it, Microsoft has tendered an offer to acquire the shares of FAST. FAST’s board of directors has unanimously recommended to the shareholders to accept this offer, and shareholders representing approximately 35 percent of outstanding shares have already accepted, which makes this pretty much a done deal. We expect the acquisition to close in the second quarter, and the deal is valued at about $1.2 billion.

Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business Division, sums up the rationale for the move this way: “Enterprise search is becoming an indispensable tool to businesses of all sizes… Until now organizations have been forced to choose between powerful, high-end search technologies or more mainstream, infrastructure solutions. The combination of Microsoft and FAST gives customers a new choice: a single vendor with solutions that span the full range of customer needs.”

Quite simply, Microsoft and FAST share the same vision of the importance of search to the enterprise. The companies also have complementary capabilities across the board. The fit has been evident for many to see. Microsoft has said that their reasons for acquiring FAST are threefold: leadership and vision, an extraordinary team of talented people, and best-in-class enterprise search technologies and innovations. We’re blushing with pride. And excited about our joint future.

This deal validates what we’ve been saying all along regarding the importance of search in the enterprise infrastructure. And, it allows FAST to take advantage of Microsoft’s reach. Our CEO, John Lervik, puts it succinctly: “This acquisition gives FAST an exciting way to spread our cutting-edge search technologies and innovations to more and more organizations across the world.”

FAST has been tremendously successful on its own as a trailblazer in search, but the amplification that Microsoft will provide is truly synergistic. And I really don’t like using that word unless it’s apt.

So make sure to book your registration for this blog’s namesake, our industry conference FASTforward ’08 in Orlando! You’ll be watching the evolution of the industry in action. Now, more than ever, you can’t afford to miss it!

Why is Microsoft buying Fast and why should we care?

David Weinberger will be speaking at the Fast Forward conference in Feb. I mention this in the context of his helpful thoughts about how the world is going to be “organized” when there is so much content available.

The world no longer has to be organized in a hierarchy.  It can be found instead.

It appears that Micorsoft sees the value in enabling people within enterprises to discover the “Wisdom of Crowds”. No longer does the Enterprise have to Organize its information in an ever more cumbersome and complex hierarchy. What Microsoft hope they can offer the user is easy access to anyhting inside the organization – just as Google is allowing us such access outside. With this approach to search, the full power of the enterprise knowledge can be accessed relatively easily. This might actually start to change things?

This leads me to another point about Media, TV and Radio.

TV and radio Content is today largely organized as a library or worse. Much of the content is simply a set of lists or even worse a set of Banker’s Boxes with stuff in it that you have to rummage through to find. Look around station or Producers sites – I wont embarrasss them by linking. You will see a catalog or worse a long, long list of stuff with no way of finding it or finding out whether the content is worth looking at.
My sister lost a 4 carat diamond a few years ago while cleaning out the horses in her barn. The diamond remains latently valuable but only if a person was to find it. That is what it is like for most stations and producers. If you have diamonds, they are in the shit somewhere and no one knows how big they are. PS her old farm is in new Jersey.

So many in TV and Radio have not got one of the key value issues in the new media. If I cannot find it easily and if I cannot evaluate whether I should use my precious time, no matter how good the content is – it has little or no value.

Organizing content to be found and to be evaluated will be a critical source of value in the new media when content will approach the infinite.

More later