Friday, October 17, 2008

McIsaac bringing semantic web to messaging

By Christopher Calnan

Burlington technologist Joseph McIsaac was at work coding last week — hunched over doing the grunt work not usually assigned to someone who has launched five tech companies.

But McIsaac was as enthusiastic as ever when talking about his semantic web venture, Dialog Science Inc.

The three-person Burlington company is a spinoff from McIsaac’s previous firm, Reflexion Networks Inc., an e-mail security software developer founded in 2001 that continues to operate in Woburn. Using semantic web technology — software that is able to identify keywords and translate an Internet user’s meaning based on context — developed at Reflexion, Dialog Science plans to tap into data within e-mail and text messages, McIsaac said.

For example, a message with the name of a company would automatically send users content about that company. McIsaac expects it to be a popular tool with customer relationship management companies such as Salesforce.com Inc.

Yet Dialog Science, which started in March, is pre-revenue and operates with just three employees, so McIsaac is busy serving as the CEO, raising a Series A round of funding from venture capitalists, and acting as the CTO, generating code for three versions of the product, with the first one ready to beta-test later this month.

“Everybody wants to see more,” he said. “It’s a classic spinout, garage-type of company.” Basically, McIsaac said, the technology takes human conversation and content browsing and combines them into a single interconnected activity. The net result is that conversation is enhanced with having access to the right content at the right time.

“When you take (web) browsing and communication and put them together, it improves both,” he said. “We focus on communication as a resource platform.”

Local companies developing semantic web-related products include Dedham-based Metatomix Inc., and Cambridge Semantics Inc., which is scheduled to go to market at the end of the year with a semantic spreadsheet, and AdaptiveBlue Inc. in New York City, among others.

McIsaac, a Winchester native, took an unusually direct route to entrepreneurship: He skipped college and went straight from high school to the world of software development, learning code from his father, who was CEO of Woburn-based Datavantage Corp., an original equipment manufacturer for Data General Corp.

At Dialog Science, McIsaac said his product’s information will be provided free to users — he plans to generate revenue by charging content providers a fee for the additional exposure. The company could also get revenue through advertising and possibly through direct e-commerce sales, he said.

It may be a difficult time to raise funding, but McIsaac expects to garner about $1 million in venture capital for Dialog Science before the end of the year — just enough to enable him to hire people to grow the nascent company.

“We’ll get there,” he said. “And I would definitely get right out of the coding.”