Information Today
Volume 17, Issue 7 • July/August 2000
bigchalk.com Signs $750,000 Licensing Agreement with Excalibur

Excalibur Technologies Corp., a provider of intelligent search solutions for intranet portals and Internet/e-commerce applications, has announced that it has signed a 10-year licensing agreement with bigchalk.com, an Internet education company dedicated to supporting the entire K-12 learning community on the Web.

Under the terms of the $750,000 agreement, Excalibur RetrievalWare WebExpress has been integrated into bigchalk.com’s line of eLibrary products, enabling over 40,000 schools and 100,000 consumers to intuitively and accurately search through millions of documents for answers or research material, according to the announcement. bigchalk.com also intends to integrate WebExpress into a number of additional products before the end of the year.

According to the announcement, Excalibur RetrievalWare WebExpress provides the highly advanced search-and-retrieval component to eLibrary, enabling researchers to find information on virtually any topic by searching through a database drawn from hundreds of popular magazines, journals, newspapers, and reference works, plus thousands of TV and radio transcripts, photographs, and maps. In addition, WebExpress was selected because of its natural language capabilities (researchers find answers by simply typing in a question); its ability to sort results by a high degree of accuracy and relevance, date, file size, reading level, publication, or source; and its ability to scale to support large numbers of simultaneous users.

“As we aim to double the amount of content available online, Excalibur plays a strategic role in delivering a powerful, highly scalable search engine that provides our audience with best-of-breed educational resources,” said Steve Cisick, bigchalk.com’s director of information technology. “Excalibur also hits our scalability requirements by enabling hundreds of thousands of concurrent users to search across our massive index of media types.”

“bigchalk.com has recognized the integral role that intelligent search technology plays in ensuring customer satisfaction,” said Nathaniel Palmer, analyst at The Delphi Group. “Through the licensing of Excalibur’s WebExpress, bigchalk has raised the bar on other e-commerce sites while adding a critical enabler for building customer loyalty—giving customers the tools to quickly find exactly what they want on the site.

Source: Excalibur Technologies Corp., Vienna, VA, 703/761-3700; http://www.excalib.com.


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