The Flow of Consciousness

Near the end of March, I took a a job with Vivísimo as an applications engineer. Vivísimo sells Velocity, an enterprise-class search platform.

Essentially, a company wishing to increase the productivity of its workers by enabling those workers to leverage content created or acquired by other workers would use Velocity to built a search engine which consolidates and presents a single, searchable interface to a number of possible information repositories. Velocity can connect to network storage systems, web sites, email servers, wikis, and just about anything else which exposes some kind of interface, often called an API. It can restrict the content by user, maintaining critical document-level security.

The real power of Velocity is its clustering engine. This unique feature provides contextual choices based on the search results presented. For example, if I searched for the work “deck”, I might be presented with results about boat decks, a deck of playing cards, porch decks, Deckmaster (card games), flight decks, and so on. Velocity can detect this context based on the results and present a list of clusters, or essentially contexts.

In my job, I help clients develop their solutions. Most of my work thus far has been configuring web site crawls, but it will surely expand as I become more familiar with the platform and the company’s clients.

I really like Vivísimo and hope to grow professionally while there. It’s doing great: strong product, strong management, and strong financial status shows that Vivísimo will likely be around for a long time.

On a side note, in order to reduce the amount of time I spend commuting daily and to save some cash, I’m moving into a large apartment in Squirrel Hill with some friends. I’m sad to leave Forest Hills, but despite giving up my “I live alone” status, living in Squirrel Hill will negate my nix commute and cut my rent in half! I can’t pass that up.