Burn and Churn in Content Processing 2010
December 10, 2009
The addled goose is awash in rumors, claims, and counter claims. We are now trying to unravel the following bits and pieces of information:
Is Siderean Software alive and well or in hibernatino? The Beyond Search team heard that one of the founders of Siderean, a developer of semantic content systems and methods, has moved to a big European publisher? The news on the site has been frozen at February 2008. We liked the firm’s approach to semantic content processing.
What are the properties owned by Mondo, a Danish company that was the subject of a Computerworld story? We have conflicting reports about who owns what software properties and the financial health of the various companies with similarly named products. We anticipate more local color from Hamlet’s home and the “to be or not to be” of these firms.
How can reports of a certain software company’s record breaking year match statements by a former employee? This vendor is in the womb-to-tomb business and operates from a location near Washington, DC? This is particularly baffling because public information reports a firm with the heart of a decathalon winner. The former employee is not on the same athletic field which is a crowded one when it comes of scanning and indexing paper documents.
What is the state of the acquisition of a search technology company that may be the object of desire by one of the world’s largest software companies? Sorry, the goose cannot point to the wooer or the wooee. This is a particularly troublesome item because it surfaces each year and then fades away. Baffling because the * big name * vendor’s search system is quite a challenged table tennis player.
Who is running the search and content processing show at Microsoft? The addled goose thought he heard one of the firm’s senior mangers reference a new sheriff in town? One rumor is that the new guru hails from the country trying to put Google executives in prison. We are chasing our pin tails on this one.
What’s going on in search and content processing? The addled goose is more confused than ever.
Stephen Arnold, December 11, 2009
Alert the US Postal Service! The goose buys stamps. No one at the USPS or anywhere else pays for this marketing Web log.
Publishers Do the Movie Thing with Staged Releases for eBooks
December 10, 2009
Short honk: The movie folks now release movies in ways to maximize revenue. I have been in a miserable nowhere country where electricity is a hit and miss proposition. In the motion picture facility, the same film playing in Harrod’s Creek was on the screen. In the local video store a copy of the film was for sale, sometimes legal, sometimes not so legal. In “Simon & Schuster Imposing Four-Month Delay on E-book Versions of Major Upcoming Releases” and chuckled. Readers are not the largest group in the US of A’s demographic pool. Making me wait to get an electronic version of a book won’t change my buying habits. I think Kindle is miserable. My Sony reader was more miserable. Nevertheless, I travel with a Kindle in order to minimize the hassle of traveling with books. When i shipped books to myself before I went to Italy, those books never arrived. Why not treat those who read as customers, not as problems. Why not charge those who don’t read lots of books more. Punish them.
Stephen Arnold, December 10, 2009
Oyez, oyez, I want to fess up I was not paid to point out that eBooks weigh less than the real thing. Now to whom do I report? Oh, yes. Fish & Wildlife. That’s what we book readers are—“wildlife”.
Reed Elsevier and Trade Newspaper Paywall
December 10, 2009
Reed Elsevier is trying to deal with the digital avalanche that is sweeping down Mount Information. I read in the Straits Times’s “Variety to Begin Charging.”
We fundamentally believe that the readers should pay one price and get all or any of our content,’ said Neil Stiles, president of Variety Group, a unit of London and Amsterdam-based Reed Elsevier Group PLC. ‘If you don’t pay, you don’t get anything.’ While the 104-year-old newspaper expects to lose many of its roughly 2.5 million monthly online visitors, it values more highly the 25,000 subscribers of its daily printed version and 30,000 subscribers of its weekly printed version.
The question is, “Will there be enough Hollywood hungry folks to make the content generate enough revenue to keep the lights on?” My hunch is that there will be some people who will pay, but the margins of the print publication from 10 years ago are not going to be achievable.
What will happen? I anticipate these events:
- Big splash.
- Lousy numbers
- Regrouping
- Relaunch
- Sale of the property.
Don’t get me wrong. Silobreaker’s consumer service is generating cash. That service uses smart software, not humans. AOL and Yahoo offer entertainment sites. I can create a Hollywood feed on Congoo.com with a few mouse clicks. These competitors are not performing equally well. That’s not the point. There are lots of sites that generate Hollywood content. You can download a podcast from KCRW that delivers “the Business.”
Something more than a paywall will be needed to keep Variety healthy. I have some ideas, but these are not for this free, Web log. Get my drift?
Stephen Arnold, December 10, 2009
I feel compelled by the imperative of a 40 page movie script to report to the custodial contractor for the Old Executive Office Building that I was not paid to write this opinion piece. Wow, confession cleans out the doubt.
Adobe Winning a War or Adobe Trying to Make a Paper Canoe
December 10, 2009
Short honk: You will want to read “Amazon’s Kindle Winning Battle, but Adobe Poised to Win E-book War.” * Then * you will want to do some walk throughs of publishers, assuming you can find one that is giving tours and has staff on site. In today’s world 100 of anything is not exactly a crowd that will fill the River Creek Inn here in Harrods Creek. Libraries face some severe budget pressures. Publishers are late to the online game and generally not exactly the best fishermen at Lake Cumberland, also in Kentucky.
In my experience, Adobe’s software is a standard in photo editing and illustration. I am not to thrilled with Adobe’s handling of Framemaker. I use Version 7.2, which is pretty annoying when it tell me I can’t undo an image import, when I can. Versions 8 and 9, in my opinion, rival Venture in the Corel era. Adobe’s Acrobat software, which I supported when I was at Ziff Communications, has become a bloated boatload of code. After more than a decade of “innovation”, it is still not possible to have a PDF kill itself after a specified number of opens.
The notion that 100 libraries and publishers are going to win a battle strikes me as the type of assertion that gets sold to a buyer who has just stepped off a flight from LAX to Auckland, a flight taken without sleep and moderation in the food and drink department.
With content shifting to new types of platforms and different types of information companies sprouting in the fertile field of those born after 1994, I think Adobe is fighting Harvey the Rabbit. Maybe Adobe can see the rabbit, but I can’t. Furthermore, the rabbit is not much of a competitor. Adobe will have its hands full with customers saying no to meaningless upgrades. Adobe will have its hands full with dear old Googzilla who may change course and drive its nuclear power destroyer up to Adobe and blast away. Adobe will have its hands full with next generation information systems, including some “toys” like blogging software, enterprise publishing systems, and data management systems.
Just my opinion. But if you buy this “war” stuff, just load up on Adobe stock and buy your own ocean going vessel. You can get a heck of a deal on a ghost ship anchored off the west coast of England.
Stephen Arnold, December 10, 2009
I wish to disclose to the Government Printing Office, one of the early supporters of XyWrite III+, that I was not paid by anyone to share my views of Adobe’s technical mastery of publishing systems. I wanted to use the word “boat” with “bloat”, but I was not in the mood for rapping.
A Twitter over a Google Triviality
December 10, 2009
The Google is so darn good at making a relatively trivial service into headlines, the Google gobbling mavens miss the air craft carrier as it sits off shore. Its very presence is masked by twits, blogs, and assorted punditry. The example this morning is “Join this group: Google Groups joins Google Apps”. No sooner does the Google hook together two services than the Megites and the Techmemes overflow with posts. Sigh. The fact is that the Google is a more homogeneous set up than Microsoft or Yahoo. This means that “connecting” Google parts is more complex than a kid’s snapping together Lego blocks but certainly not Ramanathan Guha-type or Simon Tony-like rocket science. There will be more of these connections coming down the pike. Perhaps the world of CMS experts with roadmaps, the SEO wizards, and the point-and-click poobahs will step back and focus on plumbing and scale. I will post a short example of serious Google mojo later today. Serious Google magic this is from the depths of the Black Forest.
Stephen Arnold, December 10, 2009
Google Mojo: The Real Deal in Data Efficiency
December 10, 2009
i know you are up to speed on the Google wizardette Monika H. Henzinger. You know she is pretty good at abstract thinking applied to data issues in massively parallel, distributed computational environments. You may have heard me mention that a certain Google wizardette keeps a low profile and has been know to enjoy the forest. At the Google, according to my research, there is an old fashioned nerd hierarchy. The folks who stick stuff together to make Google Groups talk to Google Apps are smart, but then there are the couple of hundred people at the top of the tech totem pole. Up there with Messrs Brin and Page, Jeff Dean, and 198 others is Dr. Henzinger. She and the Google were awarded a patent for Loadbalancing Multiple Files across Computing Devices.” You can read this document US7,631,310 (granted on December 8, 2009) on Google’s own patent service (sometime soon) or brave the USPTO system. How clever is this invention, filed in September 2004? Read the abstract:
A load balancer evenly distributes processing loads to multiple computing devices. A data structure may be divided into multiple files, each of which corresponds to an estimated load value. The files are assigned to the computing devices in such a way that the processing load at each of the computing devices and the number of files assigned to each of the computing devices is generally balanced.
We have upwards of a million servers, lots of processes, some users, and petascale flows of data. I love that “generally balanced”. This is arguably more complicated than snapping together a couple of Google services. A comparison would be building a kit airplane compared to discovering and producing carbon fiber aircraft components. Mojo, pundits and poobahs, mojo.
Stephen Arnold, December 10, 2009
I wish to disclose to NASA that my reference to carbon fiber is uncompensated. If I even know Dr. Henzinger, I don’t think she would buy me fries with mayonnaise for explaining that she is an algorithmic satrap.
Silobreaker Applies Intelligence Technology to Consumer Topics
December 9, 2009
Silobreaker, http://www.silobreaker.com, started out as a intelligence service for government agencies and competitive intelligence professionals. Its search function targets news and current events in Global Issues, Technology, Science, Business, Energy, and World topics. But it doesn’t just return a list of results, it aggregates a collection of information around the key words entered and presents it in a visual interface. Now Silobreaker is expanding into a more consumer-targeted market and offering its search aggregator’s services in the highly popular fields of sports and entertainment. http://sports.silobreaker.com/ and http://entertainment.silobreaker.com/ offer fans the chance to create their own targeted Silobreaker page with widgets to keep track of top stories, news, blogs, reports and research, audio and visual material, trends, quotes, and even material at YouTube.com. You can start with the standard generated page and filter results, or the customized user page can be shared with others. I think sports and entertainment fanatics who are willing to spend the time to set up the widgets would really enjoy this search service. Silobreaker likes the new services as well. Ads on the sites are generating “real money”, the managing director told Beyond Search.
Jessica Bratcher, December 9, 2009
I paid Ms. Bratcher to write this article. Silobreaker did not pay me one red cent, but I was assured of herring 12 ways when I am in Stockholm in May 2010. Yummy!
Forrester and Enterprise Content Management
December 9, 2009
I remember working at a company paying $55,000 per year for technology information from Forrester. The outfit changed direction, and I wandered off. That number sticks with me because certain consulting firms are in several different businesses. That’s fine with me. I steer clear of the azure chip crowd. Follow through, timely action, and nitty gritty research attract me. The absence of these qualities cause the addled goose to flap away.
I read “Forrester report names four leading vendors in ECM space” and quacked happily. First, none of the four vendors hit doubles or even triples for me. In fact, EMC, IBM, Open Text, and Oracle face some serious challenges in my opinion. Here is my take, and I don’t sell anything to these outfits and i don’t have much, if any, interaction with their employees or PR mavens.
EMC is a storage company that bought software to perform content tricks. So far these software tools are not tightly integrated with one another and the company had been kicking the tires of Lucene and other search systems. before buying a low profile eDiscovery outfit. Lots of work ahead for this company.
IBM has more technologies, products, and partners than any other company I follow. The firm owns iPhrase, which was a content processing company. IBM owns FileNet and IBM offers myriad Omnifind products. The search system does not work too well. I have documented this issue in this Web log. Just search for IBM, the company that wrote me a letter saying that IBM knows all about the Google. Yep, righto.
Open Text is not one cohesive software product. The company has many different content processing systems, and it is working to convince some people that Vignette is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Okay, what about RedDot’s stability or juicing up that mainframe standard, BRS search?
And Oracle. Rumors about Oracle are thicker than bats in the caves near Shanghai in the spring. Oracle SES 10g is not exactly a speedster. The company is attacking Mark Logic by asserting Oracle’s aging data management system is a better XML repository. Yawn.
These are the four companies, according to the article by Veronica Silva are:
The four leaders in the ECM market offer a mix of solutions to help information and knowledge management professionals manage, secure, and retain content, the Forrester report stated. “Their offerings include a mix of data management, business intelligence, content integration support, and content-centric application support. All four offer the promise of end-to-end ECM functionality from a single vendor,” the report added.
A mix or hash?
Stephen Arnold, December 9, 2009
Oyez, oyez. I want to report to the GSA kitchen that i was not paid to make this reference to a hash. I would not each has in a GSA commissary either.
Axel Springer Plans to Rewrite 30 Years of Online Revenue Evidence
December 9, 2009
Want a memorable passage to tattoo on your tummy? Now I think only the hip traditional journalists and publishers will embrace the needle. Here is the segment from the Gray Lady’s “Publisher Lays Out Plan to Save Newspapers”:
What kind of content would come at a cost? Any “noncommodity journalism,” Mr. Keese said, citing pictures of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy cavorting poolside with models at his villa in Sardinia — published this year by the Spanish daily El País — as an example. “How much would people pay for that? Surely €5,” he said.
The phrase “non commodity” is not applicable to online information. I would suggest “must have” content. Furthermore, motes of info trivia won’t generate much money. What makes money online is aggregation, scale, and data that answer even the most poorly formed query.
Axel will burn rubber trying to make progress. I think the springs will break under the pressure. Note: the Guardian, recycled the New York Times’s story here. That’s what bloggers do. Don’t tell Mr. Murdoch. He believes in “real” journalism. Fox-y business mogul.
Stephen Arnold, December 9, 2009
Oyez, oyez, the goose wrote this for nothing. I am not sure what US government agency is providing oversight for free articles about big companies about to enroll in the school of hard knocks. Maybe the National Science Foundation?
Coveo Tallies $8.2 Million in Funding
December 9, 2009
Updated: December 10, 2009: The addled goose is trying to figure out what search vendors are alive and kicking, which are in hibernation, and which are turning out the lights. More information about who is on first in the days ahead.
I saw the Washington Post’s recycling of the TechCrunch story “Enterprise Search Provider Coveo Adds $8.2 Million In Funding” a few hours ago. I thought only faux bloggers recycled stories. Guess not. Anyway, the main idea is that in a lousy economy, Coveo had sufficient market magnetism to land a big chunk of cash—more than $8 million. With some search vendors gasping for oxygen, Coveo is ready for the search Olympics. For me, the most interesting comment in the write up was:
The company plans to use the extra capital to expand aggressively: it intends to hire an additional 60 employees over the next two years, nearly doubling its current workforce (80+ people around the world).
I just wrote about the apparent crumbling of Mondo, a Danish software vendor and low profile of some other content processing companies. Coveo seems to be managed effectively, confident of its rapport with prospects and customers, and adept in technology. A happy honk to the Coveo team.
Stephen Arnold, December 9, 2009
Oyez, oyez, Coveo promised me a taco next time I am in northern Canada. Not for this goose in hunting season. Ergo, the article is a freebie. Sad honk.
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