News - 03 Aug: Brainiac

By Bill Saporito, Time Magazine

When it comes to search engines, your brain has it all over Yahoo! and Google. If you think of the word airline, your brain makes connections in all kinds of directions: planes, places, faces, food, money--and even airline companies. Plug airline into a search engine and the first thing you get is a list of airlines. Not bad, but it's limited and not necessarily informative. "Your brain is associative," says Lars Bjork, CEO of QlikTech. "Think of trying to remember the name of someone you met 20 years ago. You don't drill down. You probably try to remember a situation, someone else who was there."

Making search much more like your brain--and applying it to business analysis--is what has transformed QlikTech into one of the hotter business-intelligence-software companies around. The firm's QlikView program lets users search intuitively across databases and quickly displays information in charts and graphs designed for it. Last year, not exactly a joyride for most companies, QlikTech's revenues grew 50%, to $120 million, and it expects similar growth in 2009. And while most businesses have been shedding workers to reduce costs, the Radnor, Pa., firm added 160 new employees in 2008, a 50% increase from the previous year.

Read the full article at Time.com