Humanizing Technologies, Inc.: A Local Tech Success

When you think of interesting technology companies it's easy to assume they're based out of one of the coasts.  There just don't seem to be too many hot ones sprouting up in the Midwest.  Humanizing Technologies, Inc., would be an exception to that rule.  I recently spent some time with their CEO and Chairman, George Witwer, CEO and Chairman.

George's company has three primary products: Lifepage, Concept Search and Widgets.  Lifepage is a tool that lets you grab pieces of webpages and create your own highly customized portal page.  Think of it like MyYahoo on steroids.  While the content on a MyYahoo page is limited by the elements Yahoo offers, Lifepage can feature pieces of any HTML page you choose, all dynamically updated.  Very cool.  I plan to set up my own Lifepage shortly and will report further on my experience in a bit.  In the mean time, I encourage you to watch a few of these short videos to see Lifepage in action.

Concept Search is an equally impressive tool.  In an effort to showcase the features of Concept Search, Humanizing Technologies has loaded up a database with all the U.S. Patent Office data from January 2006 through today.  Here are the results produced when I search for "Microsoft", for example.  The information on the right side of the screen looks much like what you'd get from other search engines, but it's the taxonomy info on the left side that makes Concept Search so useful.  I'm oversimplifying here, but the tool has enough language and terminology intelligence built in that it's able to parse the source documents and create the categories you see on the left, several of which can help you refine your search.  Wouldn't it be great if Google included a feature like this?

Finally, what makes the Humanizing Technologies Widget service so unique?  How about the fact that you can pull pieces of existing web pages and instantly create widgets for mobile devices in a snap?  For example, here's one we created in a minute or two, simply by grabbing a stock price feed off a Yahoo page.  I then added the URL to my Blackberry bookmarks and can use it on the go.  Again, this is just a user-selected portion of the Yahoo screen, not the entire page.

When I look at Humanizing Technologies products individually I'm very impressed with their functionality and ease-of-use.  I see all sorts of ways to integrate them into my daily solutions (e.g., replacing MyYahoo with Lifepage, using more widgets on my Blackberry, etc.)  Take a look at each of these services and I'll bet you'll find ways to utilize them as well.