Briefs

... I pointed out how search engine marketing firms are gradually morphing into the Gartners and IDCs of the search engine economy. Not only that, companies that mine web statistics, from Comscore to Hitwise have been scoring significant paydays. (Comscore's stock is up 41% since its IPO, and Hitwise was recently sold to Experian for $240 million. Hmm...I wonder when Amazon will think to spin Alexa back out as an independent company?) In short, there is a new economy of specialized trend tracking and data mining companies that is growing up in the shadow of the search engines and other Web 2.0 applications.

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• DataUnison, whose analysis products were originally developed to help eBay powersellers, is now becoming more widely used by anyone who wants an inside peek at aftermarket demand for products. This, of course, can tell you whether a new product introduction was a winner or a dud, and may thus shed light on the upcoming financials of said company (and its suppliers).

• Altos Research, a company that originally developed real estate market analytics for brokers, home sellers and buyers, has discovered that their data is equally interesting to financial institutions

• Connotate, unlike the two companies above, provides a generalized platform for data mining topics on the internet, from news sources to blogs to gossip on mailing lists and forums