Briefs

When their prototype fraud-detection software sounded the alarm over the financial statements of a high-profile technology company, programmers at Crystaliz Corporation thought little of it. But later that day, a Wall Street watchdog launched an investigation into the very same company's affairs.

"It was just a coincidence that it was the same day," says Sankar Virdhagriswaran, chief executive of Crystaliz, based in Massachusetts. But their probing software did not stop there, he says. "It then found a cluster of companies and three out of four were eventually investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission."

That was validation enough for the Crystaliz crew. Their software could successfully analyse "semi-structured information". This includes large amounts of free text surrounding just a handful of key numbers such as the real operating profit and bad debt figures buried in a long, complex report.

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