USA Today Calls Google Gutsy
March 27, 2010
I read Al Neuharth’s “Google Is Gutsy to Spit in China’s Eye.” Not once. Twice. Mr. Neuharth is the author of the tome Confessions of an S.O.B., the visionary behind USA Today (which one of my colleagues at a major publishing company once described as McPaper), and the genius behind the big building that violated the once-sacrosanct limits on skyscrapers in Washington, DC. Some antiquated notion that no building could be taller than an old guy’s monument.
The write up contain a word with which I was not familiar in the headline “gutsy”. According to the Free Dictionary, “gutsy” means either gluttonous, greedy or “full of courage, determination, or boldness.” One of the context examples offers this: “a gusty red wine.”
The idea is that Google “spit in China’s eye.” I get it. A company with $25 billion or so in revenues and millions of users is taking a stance against the largest nation in the world. China is also one of the largest economies too even if the currency is subject to some manipulations by the Chinese government.
For me the key passage in the write up which I urge you to read was:
But the Google test may become as important as these two other memorable China-U.S. relationships:
- President Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China, the first U.S. president to do so.
- Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s visit to the U.S. in 1979, when he toured the country and haughtily wore a cowboy hat at a rodeo in Texas.
In both cases, the two leaders made clear they were open to some of the other country’s practices with out sacrificing any of their own principles.
I think this means that a single company’s actions are as important as the actions of leaders of countries. That’s the type of analysis that makes USA Today such a great read: A company is the equivalent of a country.
I don’t agree.
A country is a nation state. It makes laws. It has an army. It has a police force. It has a way of behaving that is different from a company that is supposed to generate a return for its stakeholders. A country generates tangibles and intangibles for its law abiding citizens and allies. Selling to China is my goal. Spitting at China is not my goal. Mr. Neurhart sees the benefits of “gutsy” spitting I suppose. I don’t.
After I finished the second reading, I recalled this quote from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War:
Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance.
The questions are, of course, who is pretending and who is encouraging? A correct answer may be helpful, particularly with regard to China.
Stephen E Arnold, March 27, 2010
No one paid me to write this. I will report non payment to USA Today because my copy was not delivered with my Courier Journal, New York Times, or Wall Street Journal. Think anyone cares at Gannett?
Hakia Enterprise Search
March 27, 2010
A happy quack to the Hakia’s executive who confirmed the firm’s new enterprise search solution. Hakia added a page to its Web site identified as “Semantic Booster”. When I examined it, the page was about Hakia’s brand new enterprise search appliance. (Yikes, Beyond Search has a news scoop!)
The Hakia SemanticBooster appliance. Source: http://company.hakia.com/new/semanticbooster.html
According to the write up, Hakia offers “the lowest cost and the best performance.” The write up continues:
The main utility is to provide internal search function within organization’s document repository. Options include other vital functions like powering a consumer facing search, providing targeted Web search to the workers inside the corporation, external news monitoring and alerting, harvesting quality content from the Web to enrich organizations’ information repository, and categorization of documents for better management.
The options for the system include news monitoring (which seems to hook into Hakia’s invitation only service SenseNews), “automated content acquisition”, and semantic categorization.
Source: Hakia.com
The solution is available as a fixed price solution “delivered in a box”. The document limit on the box is pegged at 30 million. When you need more capacity, just add another appliance. Hakia provides a 20 page description of its enterprise search solution here.
I chased down a Hakia wizard,Dr. Riza Berkan, CEO and Founder of hakia, who told me:
Semantic technology in enterprise search is now becoming such a competitive advantage that the corporations using it are making it part of their trade secret and remaining silent about it. We help corporations in this transition with our complete semantic solution with unprecedented performance.
Prices begin in the $20,000 range but you will want to deal directly with the company.You can contact the company by emailing bdev@hakia.com.
Stephen E Arnold, March 27, 2010
No one paid me to write this. I would report non payment to the GSA, but Hakia’s appliance is not listed on the GSA schedule. Maybe I was not running the correct search because the GSA search system is pretty darned good.
Dr. Riza Berkan, CEO & Founder of hakia, you can use in your article: "Semantic technology in enterprise search is now becoming such a competitive advantage that the corporations using it are making it part of their trade secret and remaining silent about it. We help corporations in this transition with our complete semantic solution with unprecedented performance."
Making Money from Open Source
March 26, 2010
The interest in open source search continues to power walk forward. If you want to know how one open source vendor makes money, you will want to read “How Red Hat Made Money in 2010.” Although the write up focuses on Red Hat, the big momma of open source money makers, the lessons may influence the way some open source search vendors shape their revenue models. The angle is to offer a range of for fee services. Who buys? The answer to this question is:
Another key area targeted by Red Hat over the last year has been going after free Linux users in a free-to-paid conversion program. Moving users from free to paid is an initiative that Whitehurst [Red Hat executive] first discussed in Red Hat’s third-quarter fiscal 2009 earnings call as a key initiative for growth in Linux. Over the course of fiscal 2010, Whitehurst said that Red Hat saw good results from its conversion program during every quarter.
and
“In general, the key for us is to catch people as they are moving from Unix to Linux rather than having them move to Windows,” Whitehurst said. “So while certainly actual migrations are important, the bigger strategic field of battle and part of our mainstream adoption effort is to make sure when people move mainstream customers from Unix they are moving to Linux and not to Windows.”
No wonder Oracle is returning the the Dark Ages of enterprise software. Lock those customers in and brutalize them with surcharges for going off the reservation. Contentious times ahead I believe.
Stephen E Arnold, March 26, 2010
No one paid me to write this. The last time I visited with an open source executive, I had to pay for the iced tea. I will report this to the Department of Commerce where free tea does not exist.
Real Journalism Takes Root in the UK
March 26, 2010
Short honk: I enjoyed reading “Independent Titles Sold to Lebedev Family Company”. I am looking forward to the new owner’s approach to outfits like Google and how the new owner will relate to fellow moguls. Some of the big dogs in “real” journalism have quite interesting work backgrounds. For example, if you navigate to www.cluuz.com and run the query with the quotes “Alexander Lebedev”, you can see some of the connections he has.
The passage from the write up that I slipped into my Quotes folder was:
In addition to the London Evening Standard, The Lebedevs also co-own, with President Mikhail Gorbachev, Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia’s few pro-democracy newspapers. The paper has a reputation for independence and high-quality journalism. Anna Politkovskaya, whose fearless reports from Chechnya resulted in her assassination in 2006, worked for Novaya Gazeta.
I can’t recall if a Courier Journal & Louisville Times reporter was killed. Journalism has its upsides and its downsides. One plus for Mr. Lebedev will be getting memberships in exclusive clubs. Who is going to object?
Stephen E Arnold, March 26, 2010
No one paid me to write this. Notice that I don’t offer any clever insights. I will report writing for nothing to Companies House when I am next in London.
Google Beyond Text Video Available
March 26, 2010
Stephen E Arnold’s fourth Google monograph Google Beyond Text will be available in May 2010. ArnoldIT.com released a three minute video highlighting the themes of the groundbreaking study. Google Beyond Text focuses on firm’s technical innovations in the field of rich media. One of the findings from the research conducted by the ArnoldIT.com team is that Google may have the systems and methods in place to allow motion picture and television production companies to reinvent themselves. You can access the video on YouTube.com. A free, sample chapter draft from the forthcoming study is available via Seed2020. The first three monographs are available from Infonortics Ltd. in Tetbury, Glos. The fourth study will be published by the Intellas Press.
Stuart Schram IV, March 26, 2010
This is a promotional message paid for by Stephen E Arnold.
Mindbreeze Desktop Search
March 26, 2010
A reader in Europe alerted me to the Mindbreeze Desktop Search download on Netswelt.de. According to the Netzwelt write up:
The free Mindbreeze Desktop Search software makes it easy for you to to find files and folders. Mindbreeze With the Desktop Search software is it possible to search for individual files and folders and access them. The user-friendly interface of the software with your search and user-input screen also allows you to search beyond the traditional concepts in a range of file types, including Adobe PDF files. Similarly, the search includes all Microsoft Outlook emails, attachments, and calendar entries.
To download the program click here.
Mindbreeze, a unit of Fabasoft, offers an enterprise search system that can reduce the time and costs associated with some search systems. For more information about the company and its software, navigate to www.mindbreeze.com.
Stephen E Arnold, March 26, 2010
A freebie. No one paid me to write about this free software. I am not sure to whom in Washington, DC to report writing for free about a company based in a city for which a Mozart symphony has been associated. Does the Marine Corp. do Mozart music. Sousa? Yes. Mozart? No clue.
Exalead Tightens NewspaperArchive Tie Up
March 26, 2010
A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to a Marketwire story about Exalead’s deal with NewspaperArchive.com. Exalead is one of the most interesting search applications and content processing companies we monitor. The story I read was “NewspaperArchive.com Scales With Exalead”.
The story reported:
NewspaperArchive.com is the largest historical newspaper database online. It contains tens of millions of newspaper pages from 1753 to present. Every newspaper in the archive is fully searchable by keyword and date, making it easy for people to quickly explore historical content. NewspaperArchive.com had bumped up against limitations of having nearly 100 million records. After the switch to Exalead in December 2009, NewspaperArchive.com has been able to scale again, increasing the number of records by 20%; while at same time reducing the amount of hardware by 75%.
The performance angle is important based on our research. There are very few companies with the engineering and architecture to deal with the types of data flows found in many organizations today. One of the founders of Exalead worked on the AltaVista.com search system. I have identified a number of Exalead innovations that moved beyond the Digital Equipment approach to search. One of the most important is scaling and a design that permits enterprise applications to break free of their lock step methods of making data available to users. Exalead can give today’s iPod savvy user a way to access business information with the fluidity of downloading a tune from Apple’s system. In the enterprise, this type of functionality is a rare animal in my experience.
Exalead, founded in 2000,
…is the leading search-based application platform provider to business and government. Exalead’s worldwide client base includes leading companies such as PricewaterhouseCooper, ViaMichelin, GEFCO, American Greetings and Sanofi Pasteur, and more than 100 million unique users a month use Exalead’s technology for search. Today, Exalead is reshaping the digital content landscape with its platform, Exalead CloudView™, which uses advanced semantic technologies to bring structure, meaning and accessibility to previously unused or under-used data in the new hybrid enterprise and Web information cloud. Cloudview collects data from virtually any source, in any format, and transforms it into structured, pervasive, contextualized building blocks of business information that can be directly searched and queried, or used as the foundation for a new breed of lean, innovative information access applications. Exalead is an operating unit of Qualis, an international holding company, with offices in Paris, San Francisco, Glasgow, Milan and Darmstadt.
I want to let you know that the last time I was in Paris I got a preview of Exalead’s forthcoming search application technology. I am not at liberty to let le chat out of the bag, but I will be describing the system when Exalead makes a formal announcement.
You can get more information about Exalead at www.exalead.com. Additional information about NewspaperArchive is available at
Data Phase Change: Mobile Outpaces Voice Traffic
March 25, 2010
Short honk: “Mobile Data Overtakes Voice Traffic” documents what I had heard at a conference on March 22, 2010. The key point for me was the subtitle: “Facebook is more popular than talking.” The actual factoids are useful for supporting an argument with those who think that computing is a tethered affair. Example:
he data, which was collected during December 2009, showed that data traffic has ballooned by 280 per cent within the past two years. The tipping point for data traffic was 140,000 Terabytes or, if you prefer the marketeers, conversion, 140 Petabytes per month. Although that figure sounds vast, doing some back of the envelope calculations it works out to around 8 bits per second, not exactly broadband speeds. We got that figure by using last year’s UN mobile subscription figures, which put the number at 4.1 billion mobile subscribers and coupled that to a nominal 30-day month.
So the trend is clear. Now what?
Stephen E Arnold, March 25, 2010
A free write up. I will report this to whomever I see when I am next in Washington. Maybe a Verizon employee? Maybe the cookie vendor in Union Station? Probably not a person with a wireless device.
Open Source Users
March 25, 2010
With Red Hat ringing the cash register, interest in open source continues to chug forward. If you are tracking Linux users for competitive intelligence or sales leads, you will want to snag a copy of “50 Places Linux is Running That You Might Not Expect”. Well, I did expect quite a few of these outfits, but there were some interesting open source adopters. One was IBM. I wonder why that outfit doesn’t use its own mainframes and zOS? Oh, I know. Cost. Darn good list. I did not know that Spain ran Linux. There’s the Bitext outfit which has some government clients, and some of its software supports the Microsoft Windows ethos.
Stephen E Arnold, March 25, 2010
Yep, freebie. I will report this to the Department of Defense. I thought that outfit was into Microsoft technology. Well, the DoD does not work for free as I do.
RDBMS Trounces NoSQL Technology
March 25, 2010
I enjoyed “Fighting The NoSQL Mindset.” The article takes the arguments advanced by the group of data management upstarts who want to use No SQL databases. These range from Cassandra to MongoDB and almost any article listed on the NoSQL Web site. The arguments are anchored in some real world testing and the approach reminded me of some of the Googley talks I have heard in the last couple of years. The article is a long one. For me, the key passage was:
They do this because looking up data that can’t be cached in memory is an expensive operation. Yet as has been shown, SSDs, which are getting faster and cheaper regularly, completely flip the I/O equation. SSDs change everything.
My recommendation is to read this NoSQL article and then try to answer these questions which the goslings and I worked up at our social networking event this evening:
- If the SQL database model were the bird in the hand, what was the reason for Google’s investment in its data management systems?
- With hardware prices declining, why would Oracle focus on providing high end and quite expensive database appliances to address certain SQL licensees’ performance problems? Clever engineers should be able to knock down performance problems with off the shelf hardware and a good grasp of database basics.
- With SQL solutions readily available, what’s with the proliferation of the NoSQL alternatives? The number of products and the interest in them suggest that there is some magnetic effect.
My view is that I am delighted to be an addled goose. I don’t have to sit in front of a CFO and explain why the data management systems are expensive and generally a drain on information users. Something is amiss. If not technology, then what? Maybe management? Maybe database expertise?
Stephen E Arnold, March 25, 2010
A freebie. I will report not getting paid to TSA, where Oracle databases are not quite as zippy in certain applications. But TSA does pay for work. Just not the goose.
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