Autonomy Scores in Brazil
July 8, 2010
The Autonomy Corporation has long been recognized as a leader in infrastructure software for enterprise in the modern world and they’ve recently expanded their already 20,000 strong client base by bringing a bank that’s over 100 years old on board.
The Bank of Brazil will be implementing the Meaning Based Computing platform, IDOL from Autonomy as part of their push to afford employees access to the bank’s abundant data resources. If efficiency and transparency is the motto of the financial world post the recent recession, this largest financial institution in Brazil which was founded in 1808 will benefit from a new found ability to index different information sources that are global in nature.
What’s old will be new for the respected financial institution that has millions of clients in more than 3,000 cities. I can hear the cheers in Cambridge now: Goal, goal, goal!
Rob Starr, July 8, 2010
Revelation? Disconnect in Support Organizations?
July 8, 2010
I received a snail mail promotion from T Mobile about the company’s HSPA and 3G mobile broadband service. I called the T Mobile 800 number three times. Each time, the person did not know about the service described on my flier. The third time I was disconnected and someone called me back and left the T Mobile 800 number and urged me to call and ask for a specific number. Nope. I drove to the local T Mobile store on July 3, 2010, and learned that no one in the store, including the manager, knew about the HSPA 3G service or the promotion. I showed my T Mobile snail mail card and the manager called T Mobile. No one knew about the HSPA 3 G service.
I read “Chasing the Wrong Carrot: The Big Disconnect in Support Organizations.” I hoped to find some information about why companies like T Mobile cannot inform its various units that a new product is available and that customers like the addled goose will be asked to sign up. The write up did not do much for the goose. I don’t think it is http://www.inquira.comInQuira’s fault. I think that the financial pressure and the wacky belief that firing people will make a company stronger.
For me, the most interesting point in the write up by “inquiring minds” was:
Companies continue to spend approximately 80% of their support budgets and focus all of their support metrics on agent-assisted support. However, the growing reality is 90% of their inquiries are being initiated online today without any agent intervention—and that figure is only increasing as Gen Y makes up a bigger percentage of the buying population.
Well, I looked for the information I wanted about the HSPA 3G service. I was able via Google to locate a coverage map. It was illegible and there was no single list of areas or zip codes in which the service was available. Then I looked for information about the modem’s surcharges when the modem is used in another country like Germany, allegedly where the T Mobile brain trust resides. Nope. At least I couldn’t find what I wanted.
The notion that the Web and clueless humans in a telephone holding pen will provide useful information is baloney.
The larger issue is the focus of executives on cutting costs and doing whatever is required to deflect inquiries. Within the organizations, many executives are too busy running from Outlook scheduled meeting to Outlook scheduled meeting to take responsibility for getting information where it is needed.
T Mobile is not alone in its seemingly clueless thrashing. Same problem in many businesses. Search is not going to fix the problem of flawed management. When each customer support avenue fails, what’s that tell me?
Stephen E Arnold, July 8, 2010
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YouTube Plays Nice with Music Copyrights
July 8, 2010
Must read despite the wooden shoes title: “Add Licensed Legal Copyright Music to YouTube Videos for Free with AudioSwap”. The write explains a new service from Google. Here’s the key passage:
AudioSwap is an initiative from YouTube, owned by Google, that allows video uploaders to automatically and easily add music to YouTube videos, for free, without cost nor payment. AudioSwap, as its name implied, also allows users to swap and change the existing copyright infringed music on the video with all rights cleared audio tracks. AudioSwap contains extensive list of songs which are provided by Friendly Music. AudioSwap is probably an effort by Google to avoid many video clips been removed due to audio tracks that violate copyright. As the royalty fees for a mainstream commercial and popular songs are astronomical, so don’t expect to find your many favorite classic love songs or hits on the free catalog.
If you want to know the nitty gritty, navigate to the original.
Stephen E Arnold, July 8, 2010
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Gizmos and Concentration: The Odd Couple
July 8, 2010
So I am in a convenient store near Harrods’s Creek. There are two people in line in front of me. One of my neighbors is paying the stupidity tax by snagging a fist full of lottery chances. The other person in full yuppie boating regalia is buying a 24 can carton of beer from the giant beer cooler. I have a lousy bottle of chocolate milk. The clerk. A high school junior. Tomorrow’s leader here today.
The clerk is talking on the phone, yapping at motorists trying to get the 1950 vintage gasoline pumps to work, thumbing through the mind boggling number of lottery tickets, and casting furtive glances at the front door. Robbers who dropped out of grade school think that Harrods Creek convenient stores have bags of cash ready to hand out on demand.
The clerk gave the person paying the stupidity tax the wrong tickets. The guy with the beer put the carton on the floor and left. I stood there waiting with exact change. I have no idea if the guy beating the gas pump with the nozzle was trying to get the pump to work or venting rage because the clerk did not turn on the pump. When my turn came, the guy clerk did not interrupt his conversation, took my $1.45, and turned his attention to the water running in the sink. It was overflowing.
Get the picture. One convenient store guy unable to do one thing at a time and do one thing correctly.
Too much anecdote and not enough data. Point your browser at “Excessive ‘Screen Time’ Said to Affect Children’s Attention Span: Report.” Here is a keeper of a finding:
Researcher Edward Swing, a graduate student at Iowa State University, along with his colleagues assessed 1,323 children in the third, fourth and fifth grades over a 13-month time period. Swing said: “Those who exceeded the AAP recommendation were about 1.6 times to 2.2 times more likely to have greater than average attention problems.” What’s interesting is the study also included a one-time survey of 210 college students. The middle school students, he reported, were a slightly less likely than the college students to have attention problems.
Maybe the real life experiences on a college campus are different from what I witness everyday. It is good to know that the future convenient clerks will exemplify unfocused behavior. Is that not special? No wonder search systems are giving online users what the numerical recipes determine the user wants. Hey, it’s fast and correct because it is from a computer. For sure – UX.
Stephen E Arnold, July 8, 2010
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Free File Conversion in the Cloud
July 8, 2010
It wasn’t long ago converting WAV files to MP3 was the only real stumbling block to juggling all the different downloads available.
Things have changed with Online-Convert.com, and it’s good to find one place where you can find a host of easy and quick conversions covering the gamut from audio to video and even document conversions. Examples range from flipping a Word file into plain ASCII or more exotic,
Online-convert.com makes it easy when you’re looking for the right format with a series of easy to use and read categories and drop down menus in each one that make it simple to get find the exact conversion you need.
Although most of the conversions are topical and quite often necessary, independent contractors and some system administrators may find the site a must-have service. There are some downsides; for example, the conversions for ebooks seem almost redundant with the advent of Kindle and other new ebook options, but that doesn’t mean this site isn’t worth bookmarking for all the other useful conversions there.
Rob Starr, July 8, 2010
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Navgle Lost?
July 7, 2010
Short honk: I liked the Navgle.com service. It was a tie up between South Korea’s Naver.com and Google.com. I saw a 404 a month ago and tried again today. Goner. Too bad. I liked the service. No details. My hunch is that there are some juicy factoids but the goose doesn’t care. In love with Google, out of love with Google does not matter. Google is Google.
Stephen E Arnold, July 7, 2010
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News the Yahoo Way
July 7, 2010
Yahoo will be paying attention to user clicks. These data will influence Yahoo’s news. What would the news look like? Navigate to ClickZ.com and check out the “Top 10 U.S. Search Terms by Category, May 2010.”
I plucked the top two terms from each of the ClickZ.com categories. Is this the news you need to find a job, keep pace with your favorite sports hero, or track business activities?
Here’s the line up of topics for the hypothetical Yahoo News by click for May 2010:
- PayPal
- people search
- Honda
- Toyota
- Netflix
- IMDB
- YouTube
- CNN
- Fox News
- Coupons
- Consumer Reports
- Hotels.com
- Carvinal Cruise
- Pizza Hut
- McDonalds
- Tylenol recall
- Lexapro
No oil spill, economy, health care, or war. Yep, great idea to build traffic. Maybe not so great for being informed about certain issues.
Stephen E Arnold, July 7, 2010
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Fwix and the Local Web
July 7, 2010
I read a tweet about some load balancing problems at Fwix.com today. Before the craziness of my whirlwind trip to Spain and the 4th of July weekend, I received a link to a story in EarthTimes. “Fwix Begins Indexing the Local Web” reported:
SAN FRANCISCO, CA — 06/03/10 — Fwix, the local information company, today launched the first-ever hyper local and local information index. Fwix is the fastest-growing local news network, as well as a top-rated iPhone and iPad news app for more than two hundred markets in the English-speaking world. With today’s launch, Fwix expands its content to include not only real-time local and hyper local news, but crime information, real estate, tweets, check-ins, deals and more.
The service operates in near real time. The content consists of blog content and other news from various sources. In June 2010 PaidContent.org said that Fwix was moving beyond news. For me, the key passage in the write up “Fwix Moves Beyond News, Indexing Everything Local” was:
In addition to Twitter and Foursquare, Fwix’s local index will come from a variety of sites, such as Flickr, Yelp, Gowalla, Trulia, Groupon, Citysearch, Oodle and other sources, including local governments and police blotters with information tied to 30,000-plus neighborhoods.
What’s interesting is that one of the founders worked at Xoom.com, where the chief gosling labored along with the chief goose’s partner, Chris Kitze worked.
In a browser, the service sniffs the user’s location and displays news for that city. You can select from ore than 120 cities in the US and a growing number of cities in Canada and the UK. The service is expanding to Australia and New Zealand as well.
The ads on Fwix on July 6, 2010, were provided by Oneriot. Ads were not obtrusive.
The basic Louisville splash page provides search box, ads, and hot links to recent stories, top stories, the weather, and stories by category. A user can register. When we tried to sign up today, we received a “server unavailable” message.
The service is available on the iPad. If you are running around a city with your iPad connected to the network, the service provides a swipeable display. Here’s what that listing in the App Store shows for the interface:
The service has more than 130 US cities and some major cities in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland. Canada listings include the major metro areas.
The company has raised more than $6.0 million in two rounds of financing. Worth a look because the New York Times has signed on to syndicate some of its content via Fwix.
Worth a look.
Stephen E Arnold, July 7, 2010
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XML Tangled in Its Knickers?
July 7, 2010
eHow’s “Disadvantages of an XML Database” is going to toss some tinder into the XML campers’ summer outing. The goslings and I love XML. We find that it is sufficiently complex to make some clients weep for joy when we perform some scripting magic. However, some organizations find XML to much hassle, preferring to deal with the oddities of Codd databases and the familiar costs of scaling technology with four decades strapped around its ample waist. What are the weaknesses the eHow write up spells out? Let me highlight three and you can navigate to the original write up for the full scoop.
The author, Tamara Wilhite, an eHow Contributing Writer, asserts that XML is a quasi loser due to:
- Performance issues. Hmmm. Interesting because I think Codd databases have some performance challenges as well. Perhaps some head to head performance metrics would bolster eHow’s argument. The assertion is offered without much foundation in my opinion.
- XML Database Conversion. Yep, extract, transform, and load is tough. The problem is that ETL and file conversion headaches are not limited to XML implementations. Like performance, there are a number of links in the conversion chain, and the write up does not tell me enough to feel comfortable with this assertion.
- Security. I am not sure if XML itself is a security problem. Perhaps some color would help me understand this point.
In short, eHow has generated a write up that will get clicks, but it won’t change my view of XML. Not enough meat for this spider food to be filling. Now who owns eHow? Is it Demand Media? Thoughts?
Stephen E Arnold, July 7, 2010
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EMC Snags Greenplum
July 7, 2010
Short honk: In “EMC To Acquire Greenplum In Data Warehousing, Cloud Play,” I learned that a quite interesting information technology nestles in the grasp of a really big outfit. EMC is making moves to keep revenues flowing. According to the write up:
Pat Gelsinger, president and COO for EMC Information Infrastructure Products, said in a statement that Greenplum’s massively-parallel, scale-out architecture, along with its self-service consumption model, has made it a leader in the data warehouse industry’s shift toward ‘big data’ analytics. “Greenplum’s market-leading technology combined with EMC’s virtualized Private Cloud infrastructure provides customers, today, with a best-of-breed solution for tomorrow’s ‘big-data’ challenges,” Gelsinger said.
What’s a Greenplum?
Greenplum is the pioneer of Enterprise Data Cloud™ solutions for large-scale data warehousing and analytics, providing customer with flexible access to all their data for business intelligence and analytics. Greenplum offers industry-leading performance at a low cost for companies managing terabytes to petabytes of data. Data-driven businesses around the world, including NASDAQ OMX, NYSE Euronext, Reliance Communications, Skype and Fox Interactive Media/MySpace, have adopted the Greenplum Database to support their mission-critical business functions.
The Beyond Search view: Good idea. The challenge will be to cope with other outfits with the same idea. In the last six months, Amazon has begun to have an impact in cloud services. Others are firing up their hot air balloons in a race through the clouds. Can EMC make this acquisition a key differentiator? Understanding of the cloud in some businesses is growing but the buzzwords may add friction to some procurements.
Stephen E Arnold, July 7, 2010
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