UK Embraces Big Data
November 10, 2009
The BBC reported that the UK will move forward with its monitoring system. The idea is to treat communications as a dataspace. You can read the story “UK Surveillance Plan to Go Ahead” to get the details. In my opinion, the UK is getting into big data. The interest aspect of this surveillance plan is not addressed in the write up. My question is, “Who will provide the data processing services for these data?” My thought is that a company like Google might one option. Microsoft, in my opinion, does not have the dataspace technology in as mature a form as does Google.
Stephen Arnold, November 11, 2009
The Cost of IT Failure: A Financial Melt Down Every Year
November 10, 2009
That’s great news, if the analysis is correct. Read “$5.4 Billion a Year: The Cost of IT failure in NZ. New Analysis Attempts to Calculate the Total Cost Failed IT Spending”. The figure comes from a pretend Kiwi from Texas, Roger Sessions, the CTO of ObjectWatch. The most interesting passage in the write up was:
“The United States is losing almost as much money per year to IT failure as it did to the financial meltdown,” Sessions writes. “However, the financial meltdown was presumably a one-time affair. The cost of IT failure is paid year after year, with no end in sight.” Sessions calculates the US failure bill at US$1.2 trillion and the worldwide cost at $6.2 trillion. One reason the numbers are so high is because Sessions has included what many people don’t even think about: the opportunity cost of failure.
Will SharePoint 10 help remediate this problem? Google Apps for the Enterprise? IBM or Oracle? Maybe these folks rise above the fray?
Stephen Arnold, November 10, 2009
I wish to report to Organizing for America that I wrote this post without compensation. The free market economy is being cruel to me.
Pay Dike Being Rebuilt
November 10, 2009
I am not sure if this blog post by Jennifer Lush is 100 percent accurate. I found it suggestive. Judge for yourself. Navigate to EditorsWebLog.org and read “Murdoch Postpones Date for Introducing Paywalls.” In my experience, it is possible to generate revenue from content. Mr. Murdoch wants to charge for content and he has pointed out that some companies are ripping him off because he is not being paid for links, headlines, snippets, whatever. The delay, if real, may point to one or more reasons. What’s clear is that sweeping generalizations are easy to make; delivering is a bit more difficult in my opinion. Technology and cost issues are two challenges which come to my mind.
Stephen Arnold, November 10, 2009
To the Government Printing Office. I wish to report that this write up is free. I even recall the halcyon days when most of the US government’s information was available without a charge. Hmmm. Should this be disclosed?
Murdoch to Test the Magnetism of News Corp. Content
November 9, 2009
Yep, I see a big lab test coming. As a conservative goose, I will not predict the results of the test. I will let data speak for themselves. You can get the scoop and a sense of how big media views Mr. Murdoch’s most recent anti-free campaign in “Murdoch Could Block Google Searches Entirely”. In my opinion, it is pretty darned easy to block Google’s indexing software, but the headline illustrates the level of understanding about indexing, online, and Google that permeates big media. I am looking forward to four outcomes:
- News Corp.’s discovery that traffic on its sites declines, and that Google will offer AdWords as a way for News Corp. to regain some of its referral traffic. This is the situation in which AT&T finds itself. The company fights Google and then buys AdWords. The Google just chugs along. Only game in town in the phrase that comes to my mind.
- News Corp. will have to find a way to generate sufficient cash to deal with two challenges. The first is to make up lost print revenue. The second is to fund the marketing needed to find a solution to the traffic drop. The result will be a big cost hit because News Corp. is going to be a vacuum cleaner for outside experts. News Corp. will hire people to help fix the problem the “no Google” decision creates. Good for consultants. Not good for shareholders.
- News Corp. will have to figure out what to do when bloggers recycle News Corp. stories which Google then indexes and displays in pointers to these third party sources. I can see the lawyers drooling about this situation.
- News Corp. will have to figure out how to taser competitors who are in the traditional media game and sufficiently inventive to flow into the space News Corp. creates. Once some clever competitors figure out how to surf on Google, News Corp. has to fight a two front war. The evil bloggers AND the traditional publishers who see an opportunity in the News Corp.’s “no Google” method.
Exciting. In short, I don’t see much good news for News Corp. with this lab test.
Stephen Arnold, November 9, 2009
A publisher bought me lunch, but this publisher did not pay me to write this commentary. Quick report this fact to the US Postal Service.
Thetus Savanna
November 9, 2009
Directions Magazine published “Thetus Unveils the Savanna Analysis Solution”. Thetus describes itself as “a pioneer of semantic knowledge modeling and discovery software”. The Savanna product, according to the company:
… provides users with a model-centric environment that is optimized for analysis involving multiple perspectives, confidence and detailed lineage tracking. The solution provides extension points at every level of the architecture, allowing customers to adapt models, analysis tasks and user experience to meet their individual needs.
The Savanna technology uses flexible knowledge models uniquely suited to cultural, geo-cultural and Human Terrain analysis. The Savanna framework includes out-of-the-box connectors to leading providers of content management, entity extraction, geospatial analysis and temporal analysis products including MarkLogic, Janya, MetaCarta, and ESRI. These integrations deliver a new level of deployment speed and ease to customers and enable Savanna to address a broad range of structured and unstructured data typical of today’s intelligence process.
For more information, navigate to www.thetus.com.
A freebie, pure and simple. Grrr.
SharePoint 2010 and the Four Gigabyte Gotcha
November 9, 2009
The goslings and I have been trying to figure out some of the implications of migrating from an “old” SharePoint to the whizzy new SharePoint 2010. We ran into a four gigabyte barrier and began the all-too-familiar practice of hunting for explanations, work arounds, and explanations. We found “A Couple of Worrying Changes in SP 2010 Products Compared to the v3 Equivalents” interesting. You will want to read this write up from Mindsharp and then check out the comments to write up.
First, there four gigabyte database size limit is still an issue. Mindsharp point out that “the only slightly bright spot is that it was also confirmed that SPD 2010 and SPD 2007 can be run together on the same client machine. So you don’t need two machines just to be able to work with v3 and v4 sites.”
With regards to this point, Mindsharp reported:
That problem area however fades rapidly into insignificance if you are a WSS 3.0 user using Windows Internal Database. As such you have a free database system which unlike the standard SQL Server 2005 Express it is based on does not have a 4GB database size limit. Well it looks as if people who are running this and have exceeded this figure (non-limit!) or about to do so will have serious problems if they want to upgrade their system to SharePoint Foundation 2010. I don’t have any other explanation that in yesterdays massive batch of over twenty KB articles on the “Pre-Upgrade Checker for WSS 3.0 SP2″ two of them are about the Windows Internal Database and both of them are about warnings that you get if you exceed 4GB in the size of a database “The large size of a database can prevent it from being upgraded”.
Second, the comment that caught my attention was:
The second one is not a problem
Within reasonable limits, the second issue is not a problem. Take a look at the following article on Technet: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee663471%28office.14%29.aspx. Databases larger than 4GB (again, within reasonable limits) will be migrated to SQL Server Express with Remote Blob Storage during the upgrade process. BLOBs stored on the file system don’t count against the 4GB limit of SQL Express. Mike’s comment: Setting up Remote Blog Storage is probably beyond the possibilities of many people who today install the Basic Installation version of WSS 3.0. (Anyway Search databases still have a 4GB limit as they can’t use RBS). But my main objection is that having moved to an unlimited database size in one version, MS take it away in the next. Providing a workaround for some cases mitigates that very poor and unfair decision but doesn’t imo justify it.
We downloaded the Microsoft documents. Lots to think about when upgrading SharePoint. Great for billing clients too. Simplicity not. Hard database limits are very 1980 in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, November 9, 2009
No compensation, not even a wink from a Certified Partner. Too busy billing I assume.
Cell Phone Early Warning System
November 9, 2009
A happy quack to my colleague in the Near East for pointing me to “Cellphone Alert System Expected in 2 Yrs.” The point of the story is that Israel’s home front command “will be able to calculate the precise location of an impact zone, and alert residents in an affected neighborhood via their cellphones.” I also noted this passage:
Soffer [Israeli official] said that 90 percent of the civilian casualties sustained by Israel during the Second Lebanon War and Operation Cast Lead in Gaza involved people who were struck by projectiles while they were in open areas away from buildings. Civilians who seek cover in designated safe zones during rocket attacks are not likely to be wounded or killed…
Interesting use of “push, real-time mobile technology in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, November 9, 2009
I was at the Jewish Community Center last night but I had to pay to get in. I don’t think that counts as payment for this write up. To be safe, I will alert the Jefferson Country Animal Control Office.
Coveo Expresso Breaks New Ground in Information Access
November 9, 2009
Coveo, a leading provider of enterprise search technology and information access solutions, recently unveiled a free, entry-level enterprise search solution, Coveo Expresso™ Beta. Coveo’s new solution places the power of enterprise information access in the hands of employees everywhere, at no cost, for up to 50 users. The free version of the Expresso content processing system can index one million one million desktop files and email items as well as 100,000 Intranet documents. Licenses can be expanded at minimal cost to as many as 250 users, five million desktop files and email items, and one million SharePoint and File share documents, just by typing a new access code. Administrators simply add new email accounts and SharePoint or file share documents within the intuitive administrative interface. Coveo Expresso is available for immediate download at www.coveo.com/expresso.
Laurent Simoneau, President and CEO, told Beyond Search:
Although enterprise search solutions have been available for nearly a decade, most are built on legacy systems that are difficult to implement and have not lived up to the promise of intuitive, secure and comprehensive information access across information silos. We want to re-educate businesses about the ease and simplicity with which enterprise search should work, as our customers can attest. Coveo Expresso does that—and takes enterprise search one step further with ubiquitous access interfaces such as the Coveo Outlook Sidebar or the desktop floating search bar, which provide guided, faceted search where employees ‘live’—in their email interface or on their PC/laptop. We’ve been testing this feature for a number of months with our current customers and have found it to be one of the biggest boosts to productivity for all employees, regardless of their roles.
Features
The free download features a number of Coveo innovations, including:
- Cross-enterprise Email Search, for 50 email accounts, including PST files and attachments, on desktops and in servers for up to 1 million total items.
- The Coveo Outlook Sidebar, the industry’s first true enterprise search Outlook plug-in, which provides sophisticated features such as conversation folding, related conversations, related people, related attachments, and the ability to search any indexed content without leaving Outlook, as well as the ability to launch advanced search with guided navigation through search facets.
- The Coveo Desktop Floating Search bar, enabling guided searches without leaving the program in which the user is working.
- Enterprise Desktop Search, including always-on indexing for 50 PCs/laptops.
- Mobile access via BlackBerries for 50 users.
The Espresso Interface
Search results appear in a clean, well-organized panel display.
Google Developer Video Now Available
November 9, 2009
The third video of the six-video series called “How to Make Money with Google” premiered today at http://www.arnoldit.com/video. This video, released by Arnold Information Technology, http://www.arnoldit.com, focuses on developing program interfaces using Google resources and leveraging those applications for business use.
The purpose of this short video series–watching all six videos takes about 30 minutes–is to give clear, factual information on four specific ways an enterprising individual, a services company, or a diversified company can use the Google platform to produce revenue while meeting the needs of their customers and prospects. The videos are available for personal and educational use with no fee.
This newest video highlights how using and developing Google APIs–application programming interfaces–can be a big money-maker for your online business. It also describes Google’s certification program which is beginning to take shape. Arnold characterizes how a third party developer can put technical skills to use to build a large business around Google.
Keep in mind that Google is a moving target. The company is evolving and changing policies and procedures very rapidly,” Stephen E. Arnold, president of Arnold Information Technology, said. Arnold has published three Google monographs and these videos are based on the information compiled for The Google Legacy, Google Version 2.0, and Google: The Digital Gutenberg. The monographs are available from Infonortics Ltd., in Tetbury, Glos., at http://www.infonortics.com.
Other videos include an overview of money-making opportunities, including why the Google opportunity is similar to the opportunity Microsoft created with its MS DOS software in the early 1980s; using Google’s AdSense advertising module; search engine optimization consulting and services; the Google partner and reseller program; and a video titled “Google Creates Opportunity,” which emphasizes the opportunity to grow with Google as the company strives for $100 billion in revenue.
“I wanted to provide some basic, factual information about what I see as the Google revenue opportunity. Information about Google is everywhere, but the upside of Google as an opportunity is not widely known,” Arnold said. “The increase in ‘get rich quick’ with Google e-mails I was receiving convinced me that a more measured discussion of the opportunities was needed. I will make these videos available without charge in the hopes that the Google revenue opportunities get broader dissemination.”
The series will be posted at http://www.arnoldit.com/video. Videos will be released on a seven- to 10-day cycle from today to Nov. 20. ArnoldIT.com has no relationship with Google. The information presented in the video represents the views and findings of ArnoldIT.com’s analyses of Google. The videos were directed by Chris Forrester, Perceality Productions, at http://twitter.com/perceality. The samba music is courtesy Sounddogs.com. For information about other uses of the videos, contact ArnoldIT.com at seaky2000 [at] yahoo dot com
The company’s Web site is http://arnoldit.com, and the Beyond Search blog is at http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/.
Jessica Bratcher, November 9, 2009
Jessica was paid to write this marketing write up. Yep, filthy lucre.
ZyLAB Integrates Google Maps
November 8, 2009
According to Documanager.de, ZyLAB has integrated Google Maps with its ZyIMAGE Information Access Platform. Users now have the ability to identify the location of documents in a hit list. ZyLAB says that coordinates detail of the contents of a document can also be displayed on a Google Maps. The function requires no additional work on the part of the user.
Uses of the functionality range from law enforcement to eDiscovery. A user runs a query and each pin represents a document or a set of documents that are displayed on the additional metadata when you hover the mouse over it.
ZyLAB’s Rijnbeek Vincent, said:
This new functionality provides additional options to our use of visualization tools and ensuring more transparency in the information jungle. If, for example included in the context of criminal investigations coordinates of a crime scene in a document, it shows a pin exactly in these Google Maps to. But even in the building and construction sector is the new integration useful, by example, location information from complex construction plans quickly and clearly represents.
The use of visualization tools solves a major problem of the usual file structures: These traditional structures typically do not allow users to view an item that is not currently displayed on the screen. Large document sets pose a particular challenge. A collapsible folder structure is unwieldy, especially if users have to follow several nested folders. The constant scrolling, as is required in table structures, is cumbersome and not conducive to efficient and accurate data investigations.
More information is available from ZyLAB at http://www.zylab.com.
Stephen Arnold, November 8, 2009
No joy, no payment. Report this charitable act to the Red Cross.
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