Track Folks Down via People Search Systems
June 14, 2009
You too can be a private eye. A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to a list of 25 search engines that can help you find a person. “25 Free People Search Engines to Find Anyone in the World” is quite useful. I learned about some systems that the goslings did not have in our list. A couple of quick examples and then you can navigate to Findermind.com and snag the full listing:
- Tweepz—Looks very strong
- Private Eye—Like having Peter Gunn at your side
- Criminal Searches—Very, very useful
Add all 25 to your bookmarks.
Stephen Arnold, June 14, 2009
Why Search Vendors Chase Customer Support
June 14, 2009
MSN Money (I guess it is still in business) released information about customer support survey. “MSN Survey Shows the Good Guys and Bad Guys in Customer Service” makes clear that talking about customer service is not the same as delivering customer service. The Beyond Search goslings don’t do customer support but based on our reading of the MSN survey data, other companies are following the example set here in the mine drainage ditch. Since most folks have aspirations beyond the moonscape of rural Kentucky, firms may want to look at these data and then ask, “How can we actually help our customers?”
The write up lists the 10 worst customer support offenders. Leading the list is America Online, which recently bought its new president’s start up. Those folks probably were right on top of calls from the investment wizards who made this deal happen. Other types of calls received less attention. So, if the MSN data are accurate, AOL delivers less than stellar customer support. I don’t know. I don’t do AOL.
AOL’s former good shepherd Time Warner comes in at number five in the worst customer service department. Maybe the firm will deteriorate enough to take over the AOL spot.
One the “good” customer support side of the coin were some surprises. Netflix and Amazon cross the finish line in spots three and four. I am not a Netflix customer but my neighbor seems happy. Amazon is a bit of baffler since I have never interacted with Amazon other than buying some books. I guess if you don’t try to contact the company, that earns a number four rating.
Check out the scorecard yourself. Let me point out why search vendors are after this sector:
- Search vendors can assert that a search system allows customers to obtain self service support. The idea is to make me run a query and read lots of stuff instead of talking to a person who in theory will know the answer to my question. Companies with lousy customer support are eager consumers of this type of sales pitch.
- Search can in theory reduce costs. Companies with lousy customer service got their because of cost cutting. More cost cutting makes great sense. Search vendors can argue that their system will save companies with customer support problems money. Go for it is the cheer I hear.
- Content processing companies argue that sentiment (finding emails that include clues like “I am going to sue you guys”) can head off problems. Integrating these content processing subsystems is often an expensive proposition. Do they work? Some do, some don’t.
I expect to see more search and content processing vendors dressing up in customer support duds and hitting the conference circuit.
Stephen Arnold, June 14, 2009
Bing and the Yahooligans
June 14, 2009
I don’t know the Star, and I have no way of knowing if the information in the article is spot on. What I want to do is present what the Star said in the article “Within a Week, Bing Gets More Searches than Yahoo”. The Star made the point that Bing.com has had some success and tallied more searches than Yahoo’s search system. The Star reported:
According to StatCounter, Bing has gained 5.62% of the global search engine market which is a considerable market share that it has grabbed from Google. In the first week of June, Google’s market share declined to 90.45%, while Yahoo had 5.13% and Bing had the rest.
My take is that Yahoo is more vulnerable to Bing.com in the short run. Yahoo’s search system is a side show compared to the dozens of services that Yahoo pushes in my face. When I read mail, I have to click click click click before I see the messages. My tests of Yahoo reveal that third parties who use Yahoo’s search results deliver a more useful slice of the Yahoo’s index. Check out the little known http://www.cluuz.com.
Yahoo, in my opinion, is likely to find its tail feathers singed. Googzilla in the meantime will be “waving” to the crowd.
Stephen Arnold, June 14, 2009
Google, Microblogging, and the Building Wave
June 14, 2009
Over the last several days, I have spoken with a number of people about dataspaces and one component of that subsystem, Google Wave. I am not willing to present that detail in this free Web log, but I can point to one article that is useful. Google’s own announcement comes when most mavens and pundits are resting for the long public relations charged week ahead. On the surface, the Google is getting into the Microblogging game. Twitter is the poster child but the teen idol is about to make an appearance. What’s the protein that hooks together the three genetic blobs? How do dataspaces, wave, and microblogging mesh? One hint: Microblogging is one building block, not the arm or the leg. Mashable asks a couple of other questions, which in my opinion, miss the main event, but decide for yourself:
Could Google have made a deal with Twitter? Or is Google undertaking this project on its own? These are questions we’re going to ask as more details about this project are released (or get leaked). What do you think – is this a smart move by Google? And what effect could this have on Twitter?
Stephen Arnold, June 14, 2009
SAP and Open Source
June 13, 2009
Gwyn Moody and I seem to be on a similar frequency. I like his work. The article “SAP: Open Source’s Friend or Foe?” is an excellent example. Gwyn Moody tackled SAP’s reluctance to cozy up to open source. He wrote:
For an outfit that calls itself “the world’s largest business software company”, the German software giant SAP is relatively little-known in the open source world.
Now SAP wants to support the Eclipse Foundation. Gwyn Moody reported:
There are many well-known benefits that accrue from mandating open source for European contracts – level playing-field, absence of lock-in, ease of moving between suppliers etc. More generally, it creates a bigger software commons that everyone can draw upon – not just companies, whether giants like SAP, or small startups, but educational establishments too (an important but often-overlooked sector). Companies that have adopted a mixed model can simply re-jig their product line, offering wholly open source versions for European government consumption, and making money through their proprietary add-ons elsewhere; adoption by Europe would be a huge marketing boost, making it much easier to do this. And if they won’t adapt to the situation, that creates an opportunity for new players who *are* willing to do so. That’s not the only place where SAP’s attitude to open source is ambiguous, to put it mildly.
My hunch is that SAP is feeling pressure from its fee boosts, customer push back, and escalating demands for cash from SAP engineers who have to keep the complex SAP solutions up and running. Innovation, well, that’s another hungry mouth begging for euros too.
In my opinion, SAP has to find a magic hat and start pulling bunnies from it. I am not sure open source will yield the bunnies SAP needs.
Stephen Arnold, June 13, 2009
Google the Victim, Poor – Poor Google
June 13, 2009
The Times (London) ran a story on which I was not going to comment. But “Can You Live without Google?” kept popping up in my mind. You can find the story by James Harkin on the Times’s Web site in the Tech & Web section. The angle the essay took was interesting. Listen to Mr. Harkin:
When Google decided to measure the worth of a piece of information by looking at how many other people found it valuable, it sowed into its operation a feedback loop that helped traffic flow around the web much more quickly and smoothly. As a result, it gobbled up about four fifths of the global search business and became one of the richest companies on Earth. Google is now worth roughly £100 billion. The open, collaborative way that Google uses us to organise its material works wonders at finding interesting nuggets of information, but it is far from ideal. Sometimes, for example, the signposts it sends us are topsy-turvy.
The idea is that Google started out on the right path and now, gentle reader, has strayed. Bad, Google.
Mr. Harkin comments on Bing.com and Wolfram Alpha. He then wrote the section that stuck with me:
Google has one of the most powerful brands in the world at its disposal and it will be not to be easy to prise people away from a company whose name is synonymous with searching the net. One thing is clear: the technology is improving and the whiff of change is in the air.
Several comments;
- The Google is a publicly traded company and it has little choice but take steps to generate revenue. I suppose it could follow the path of GM, but I am pretty happy to let market forces operate.
- Google has had 11 years without significant competition, and, in my opinion, it doesn’t have significant competition now. Bing.com is incremental, not a leapfrog. Wolfram Alpha has jumped over the heads of the average Internet user. So what’s Google to do? Help its competitors.
- Google’s Wave is a big deal, and it will work some changes that may leave Mr. Harkin once again hoping for a Henry Turtledove solution.
In short, as I have written before, the horse is gone, the barn has burned, and Wal*Mart built a superstore on the spot.
Stephen Arnold, June 13, 2009
The Difference between a Blog for Marketing and a Journal for Science
June 13, 2009
I write a blog containing opinion, ads, and old info. I get some help from Jessica, Stu, and others.I don’t pretend to be a journalist (heaven help me), a scientist (my goodness), or a very bright human (addled goose, please). When I read “CRAP Paper Accepted by Journal” on the New Scientist Web site, I did a double take. A software program generated a fake paper. The authors submitted the hoax to a publisher who charges authors to publish the article in a “respected journal”. The journal is a variant of vanity publishing. An author pays a publisher to create a book. The author has lots of books but a great birthday gift, just no sales.
The New Scientist writer offered this comment:
What’s more, it seems that even some journals that charge readers for their content may be prone to accepting utter nonsense. The SCIgen website reports another incident from 2007, in which graduate students at Sharif University in Iran got a SCIgen-concocted paper accepted by Applied Mathematics and Computation, a journal published by Elsevier (part of Reed-Elsevier, the publishing giant that owns New Scientist). After the spoof was revealed, the pre-publication version of the paper was removed from Elsevier’s ScienceDirect website. Still, the succinct proof-correcting queries sent to the hoaxers by Elsevier, made available here by the SCIgen team (pdf), make for interesting reading.
I love the notion of publishers playing a custodial role. Custodian also means clean up. That’s what the $800 payments made by the hoaxers to the publisher. I label my Web log. No pretense here: 100 percent marketing.
Stephen Arnold, June 13, 2009
Microsoft Gets Serious about Exascale Computing
June 13, 2009
One of the Beyond Search goslings quipped, “Yep, only a decade later than Google.” I chastised the young goose. Better late than never. In July 2009 I am going to print in this Web log some info about the queries per second one can expect from Microsoft Fast and from the Google. Startling data if my sources are on the money.
In the meantime, you will want to read Mary Jo Foley’s “New Microsoft eXtreme Computing Group Takes Aim at Exascale Calculations.”
Ms. Foley wrote:
“XCG was formed in June of 2009 with the goal of developing new approaches to computing hardware and software for ‘exascale’ computing (more than one quintillion, or 1018, calculations per second), an area of research that the U.S. government has identified as critical for the future. The group’s research activities include work in the fields of computer security, operating-system design, cryptography, datacenter architectures, specialty hardware accelerators and quantum computing.”
Keep in mind that Hewlett Packard has a pricey new line of Extreme servers. Could there be a happy coincidence? Will Microsoft be able to draw even with the Google or will Microsoft’s late start doom it to lag forever behind Googzilla?
Stephen Arnold, June 13, 2009
More Advice for the Buggy Whip Crowd
June 12, 2009
Google executives have been known to suggest that newspaper publishers rely on technology to cure their woes. I think that Googlers and other advice givers may want to curl up with the thrilled non fiction book by Jacques Ellul in either English or French and read what the sociologist has to say about la technologie. You can find a copy of the here. My copy carries the title Bluff technologique, but translation is a wondrous profession. Summing up 400 pages of turgid analysis, let me say that when technology bites someone on the backside, today we use technology to solve the problems created by technology. The alternative is a more human method of sucking the poison from the wound. Not too popular, eh?
I just read another of these “technology will save your tail” programs. I scanned “Scoble’s Building 43 Launching Tonight with Practical Tips for businesses Stuck in the 90s” here. I liked the write up. I didn’t like the concept of providing advice to people who are faced with technology snakes biting their ankles and fleshy parts.
I read Building43’s “the New Economics of Entrepreneurship” and realized that talking about this stuff is indeed exciting. When a Silicon Valley luminary such as Guy Kawasaki dispenses the advice, those in the know should listen. Check out his essay here. I agree with most of what he says.
My concern is that none of the Silicon Valley wizards has thought about the implications of using technology to solve today’s problems.
I don’t think technology can solve the problems of newspapers or any other business that is being bitten by competitors and customers who have embraced different business methods or alternative methods of meeting needs.
I don’t like the buggy whip analogy either. Every MBA student and future Bernie Madoff reads this essay and realizes the reason the buggy whip guy failed was that he did not know how to think about the horseless carriage. In fact, no amount of first hand experience, thinking, or talking could close the switch between the guy’s synapses and grasp that the oddity was going to have some profound impacts. These range from roller skating car hops at Sonic Drive In to teen pregnancy and that environmentally friendly sport of NASCAR racing. Go figure.
I want to assert that arrogance is part of the problem. There may be presumptive behavior operating, but I think the difficulty goes back to the failure of some folks to see connections. A buggy whip maker can stare at an automobile all day and not think about fuzzy dice for the rear view mirror, leather seat covers from a West Coast Custom rebuild, or a steering wheel wrap with perforations to allow the driver’s hands to perspire without losing a grip on wheel in rush hour traffic in downtown Boston.
Telling someone with buggy whip synapses to use technology means zero. In fact, when pundits tell publishers to embrace technology, most of the publishers believe that they have been married to technology for years. The problem is that “technology” to a publisher may mean color capable Web presses or a content management system to push story drafts around the newsroom. Technology may mean digital cameras or remote control robots to adjust lightning instead of paying a kid to climb the rafters in a motion picture studio.
You get the idea.
The problem is language and understanding what a Silicon Valley maven means when he or she says, “Technology.” My thought is that the Mr. Scobles and the Mr. Kawasakis and the Mr. Schimdts mean to use the mental equipment possessed by those who can do math in their head, analyze a circuit, see how software works by scanning code, or performing other mental tricks that have to do with scientific and technical capabilities.
Publishers and the guy who runs the tire company may have some of these skills, but the life experiences, interests, and business demands require different mental equipment. Therefore, when you say “technology” to my Big O tire dealer, he points to a digital tire gauge, not to his iPhone.
Bottomline: those who don’t understand the meaning of the word “technology” when offered an a cure all, often don’t have a clue about:
- What particular technology or technologies are appropriate
- How to apply to technologies to an existing business process
- What to do to minimize the negative effects of a technology when it spring a surprise
- Where to find people who can “translate” the rocket science into something that can be used by a regular person.
Do most people in Silicon Valley or New York or London define their terms before talking about technology? Not many in my experience.
Grab a copy of Jacque Ellul’s book. Let me know if you agree with his analysis formulated in the dusty days before the “Internet”. Just the opinion of an addled goose.
Stephen Arnold, June 12, 2009
Social Networking to Marry Call Centers
June 12, 2009
Hmmm. Interesting concept. A big space like social networking marries below its station in life. Don’t think so, asserts this addled goose. To get the other side of this story you will want to read this summary of a consulting firm’s report. The title is “Social Networking and Contact Centres to Merge” here.
The passage that set my pin feathers spinning was:
When Oprah Winfrey and Ashton Kutcher start to use social networking services, it makes headlines across the globe and raises consumer awareness of these emerging communications channels. But according to independent market analysis firm Datamonitor, companies of all sizes have also begun to engage customers and prospects on social networking services.
Oprah! I found this segment interesting as well:
… complaints about products and services go viral very quickly. Ian Jacobs, senior analyst for customer interaction technologies at Datamonitor and the report’s author, said: “Given the boom in popularity of social networks, enterprises of all stripes have started to look for ways to market their brands to potential customers through these services. Whether it is through online contests, coupon and discount offers or just an extended presence to shine positive light on brands, social networking has become a darling of the marketing world.” The increased corporate presence on these networks has also led to service interactions between company and customer. Some of these interactions result from a direct contact from a customer to a company, akin to a phone call into a contact centre. But with new social media monitoring tools, companies have also begun to inject themselves into customer conversations. If, for example, a customer complains to the world at large about poor service, the company being complained about proactively reaches out to the customer to try to solve the issue.
I agree that some social networking services apply to customer support. I think the impact of social networks will be to give customers a way to get help without getting involved with an organization’s customer support unit.
Azure chip consultants are working overtime to whip up business, and I admire that. What makes me quack happily is the silly glittering generalities used to make the obvious momentous. I suppose I could call the consulting firm’s customer support unit. Oh, I forgot. Azure chip consulting firms don’t need customer support. Clients get a billable expert to resolve any sticky wickets. Billable is as billable does.
Stephen Arnold, June 12, 2009
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