For all corporate America's efforts to solicit customer and employee feedback, companies have never quite figured out what to do with all those e-mails and phone messages once they get them. Attensity—a startup with 2004 revenues of more than $4 million and big backing from In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA—has created software to turn those texts into an easy-to-analyze database. Think of it as lightning-fast computerized sentence diagramming: Each document is distilled into a spreadsheet of who did what when, where, and to whom, making patterns, repetitions, and relationships between words easy to spot. Major companies such as Whirlpool have bought the software, hoping it will help them identify and address product and service issues more efficiently. And federal antiterror agencies have used Attensity's software to sort out a 17-year backlog of intelligence and parse intercepted communiqués quickly enough to make arrests. — Nadira A. Hira