That same spirit of adventure can be found on the YellowBrix road, which takes you into a realm of Internet magic where machines know what you think and what you want. At YellowBrix, based in Alexandria, engineers are working on ways to use artificial intelligence to personalize the flow of information to online users and, especially, to online shoppers. YellowBrix, which supplies news content to many Web sites, tries to figure out what products online shoppers might buy, based in part on their on their news preferences. Neural networks are the most widely used form of artificial intelligence on the web. They are collections of mathematical models that are highly interconnected in a fashion similar to neurons in a person's brain.
Artificial intelligence is a wide-open field.
Thus, YellowBrix has many competitors. They include Blue Martini Software, Dow Jones, Infospace, Nexis, Open Market and Vignette. If history is any guide, the discovery of a new technology is generally followed by a period of intense competition and then by a shakeout which leaves only a few survivors. YellowBrix says that as of last August it had contracts with 156 customers and placed its services on 97 web sites. Most of its revenue, the company said, has come from a relatively small number of customers.