Mid Tier Consultant Evokes a Small Search Chuckle
December 22, 2010
Short honk: Mark Harrison’s blog has an interesting post about the “Gartner MarketScope for Enterprise Search.” Take a look at the search ranking charts. Does it appear funny to anyone else? Harrison makes an interesting observation that Gartner claims Microsoft has “surged to a leadership position by offering both effective basic search and more sophisticated search for inward- and outward-facing applications.” We think the rankings are amusing, but even more interesting is the fact that procurement teams believe the rankings.
Whitney Grace, December 22, 2010
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iPad vs. Print Media: iPad’s Unintended Consequences
December 22, 2010
I saw this coming, did you? Network World has a “Survey: iPad news-reading eating away at print media.” It’s not a surprise that iPad users are canceling their printed newspaper subscriptions, in favor of low-cost apps. A survey taken of 1600 middle-aged, educated men showed that they use their iPads to read about current events.
“Here’s where print media gets the bad news, if you’ll pardon the expression: 58 percent of respondents who subscribe to print newspapers and spend more than an hour a day reading news on their iPad said they were very likely to cancel those print subscriptions in the next six months. In fact, around 10 percent of respondents reported they had already canceled printed newspaper subscriptions.”
Older readers are the ones maintaining their printed subscriptions, but no one can deny that digital media is faster and cheaper. Newspapers aren’t going to disappear anytime soon, but it’s kind of like what’s happening with DVDs and Blue Ray discs. Some formats get obsolete.
Whitney Grace, December 22, 2010
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Can CRM Predict the Future?
December 22, 2010
Nah, but it is fun to look at their view of information access. For me, CRM is a code word for cutting costs and keeping customers away from humans who are really big cost black holes. Customer support is for the upscale customers. Serfs get to do Web self service or spend time in telephone loops listening to a person’s recorded voice saying, “Your call is important to us.” Yeah, right.
So what’s the future from the CRM crowd?
“CRM 2011 – What’s Up Wit’ That – Part I” and Part II are Paul Greenberg’s CRM predictions for the coming year with a quick year in review. Greenberg’s “big Kahuna” is analytics / customer insight apps. Greenberg says:
“Being able to capture [social data], granularly interpret it, decide how to use it and then make decisions on the basis of that use is perhaps the most fundamental of needs for now and several years ahead. Couple that with the interest that key corporate execs have in ‘getting closer to the customer’ and we are talking about what is probably the most important trend for you to pay attention to in 2011.”
Another prediction is that knowledge management will replace content management:
“Knowledge management, unlike enterprise content management, isn’t only the collection, storage and organization of documents but is the accessibility of information that answers questions. What it also involves is the delivery of that information and the timeliness of that information. That means it can be via FAQ, Web self service knowledgebases that are accessible by both employees and customers; it can involve the delivery of dynamic knowledge based on ongoing wikis and threaded forums; it most certainly involves a highly effective search mechanism.”
Both knowledge and management are both difficult to define, so when he asserts that research reveals the importance of KM over CM, one has to question the results.
We find it interesting that some mid tier content processing vendors are now “experts” in customer support. Well, it is less onerous than trying to add substance to a fuzzy notion like “business intelligence.” My prediction is that fuzzy marketing will be popular in 2011. Who wants reality to limit the use of an ageing software system?
Alice Wasielewski, December 22, 2010
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Comparing Apples to Androids
December 22, 2010
“Google: We’re Activating 300,000 Android Phones Each Day” proclaims . . . well, just like it says. To sum up: “Need help wrapping your head around the significance here? Consider that Apple claims it activates 270,000 iPhones each day, 30,000 less than Google for each 24 hour period, 210,000 less per week, and more than 10.9 million less per year (again assuming the rate of activations doesn’t change for either company).”
Sounds impressive, right?
HotHardware.com seems ready to declare Apple TKO’d. Well, I’d say not quite so fast. First of all, these numbers are about activations, not profits. Who is really making big money here? Apple, hand over fist, in the midst of a tanked economy. Google is hanging their hopes on ad revenue, while Apple dominates with sales of all iOS devices: iPhone, iPads, iPod Touch. To date, no one has made money on Android apps who hasn’t made it first on iPhone apps. In my opinion, the real fight here is not Google vs. Apple, it’s Google vs. Blackberry, with RIM on the mat and down for the count.
Alice Wasielewski, December 22, 2010
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Scientific Abbreviations Look Up
December 22, 2010
For some terms abbreviations and acronyms or the long form (LF) Federal Bureau of Investigation and the short form (SF) FBI are immediately recognized.
However, the exact understanding of some abbreviations is not always so cut and paste. According to the Science Base article “Searching For Scientific Abbreviations” there are no clear cut abbreviation rules for the science world. Researchers have sought to lay out specific rules for scientific abbreviations.
One new technique “known as LFXtractor, uses noun chunking together with a distance metric to detect SF- LF pairs regardless of the presence of parenthetical expressions.” However with no exact rules, the verdict is still out on how to use and understand scientific abbreviations.
Google helps when it comes to searching for the abbreviations but surprisingly even the search giant can’t do it all. The specific area or niche must be known because the same abbreviation can mean two different things depending on the subject area. Researchers may have to go back to the drawing board.
April Holmes, December 22, 2010
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Scientists Map the News
December 22, 2010
People have been trying to figure out what makes good news stories and a team of European computer scientists might have found the answer. Red Orbit points us to the article, “Scientists Map What Factors Influence The News Agenda.” The team discovered that if you study a wide range of media outlets for a long period of time, patterns start to emerge. Most of the content that makes it on the news concerns national biases, cultural, geographical, and economic ties between countries.
“The analysis the researchers have conducted could not have been done in the past, due to the sheer scale of the data, but is now possible using automated methods from artificial intelligence because of recent advances in machine translation and text analysis.”
An analysis of the new agenda could prove to have many applications, especially in understanding how people view and use information. It also has the potential to allow scientists to study how media affects the entire globe and discover discernable patterns they normally would never have found.
Whitney Grace, December 22, 2009
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Search Wizards Speak: 2010 Wrap Up
December 21, 2010
In 2010, we published 10 exclusive interviews with “Search Wizards”. In the event you missed one of the 2010 interviews, the table below provides one-click access to the interviews. Each interview covers a vendor’s technical approach, key functions their system includes, and insights into future search trends. We have talked with a handful of search wizards twice. Each interview contains different information about search. We try to choose vendors with interesting approaches to content processing and finding information.
The series now contains 50 interviews since January 2008. The information in the full text interviews may prove useful when trying to figure out what different systems deliver. The content collection represents one of the most comprehensive sets of first-person information about search and retrieval available.
The information is available with charge, and you are welcome to use it for library and academic purposes without contacting me. If you are a consulting firm (blue, azure, or colorless), you need to obtain permission in writing prior to your using the information for commercial purposes. I learned in June 2010 that one of the money grubbing mid tier outfits was asking newly hired consultants to “read the information on the ArnoldIT.com Web site” as part of their acculturation process. Imagine how excited I was to have one of the firm’s real live, mid tier professionals tell me about this use of my information. And guess what? The person told me this at a reception for a vendor’s user group meeting. What makes the mid-tier consultants so darned special? Great situational judgment.
| Company | Wizard | Focus |
| Alta Plana | Seth Grimes | Smart content |
| Aster Data | Quentin Gallivan | Big data |
| Autonomy | Fernando Lucini | Health and meaning based computing |
| Digital Reasoning | Tim Estes | Synthesys Version 3 |
| Digital Reasoning | Time Estes | Data fusion and analytics |
| Easy Ask | Craig Bassin | NLP |
| Hot Neuron | Bill Dimm | Clustering |
| Inforbix | Oleg Shilovitsky | Manufacturing & components search |
| Lucid Imagination | Brian Pinkerton | Enterprise open source search |
| Sematext | Otis Gospodnetic | Open source search |
The other companies participating in the interview series are listed on the ArnoldIT.com subsite index page. If you are looking for in-depth information about these vendors and the 250 other search and content processing companies I follow, write me at seaky2000 at yahoo dot com. There are mid tier and lower level consulting firms offering information about search vendors. Where does some of that information originate? If you said, ArnoldIT.com, you might be more correct than you believe.
Oh, I don’t cover firms that are on the edge of the knife. Some of these companies are exiting enterprise information retrieval and others lack the oomph to warrant inclusion in my Overflight service.
Stephen E Arnold, December 21, 2010
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InteliWISE and Predictive Search
December 21, 2010
Online PR Media alerts us to “InteliWISE’s Intuitive Search Starts Thinking As You Start Typing.” InteliWISE has come up with new feature that will anticipate users’ requests based on what they type. This new feature is called Contextual Search and may fuel the next generation of search engines. Contextual Search works by intelligent search engine optimization powered by semantic intelligent search software.
“Then next generation of Intelligent Site Search must interpret more than the words given, it must understand the meaning of a customer inquiry. InteliWISE recognizes what people want from site search agents and have developed an intelligent search algorithm and intelligent search software with auto-complete features.”
Contextual Search is already used in InteliWISE’s Virtual Agents, a combination of the feature avatars that respond to users’ queries instantly and intelligently. InteliWiSE creates interactive video employees with multimedia rich avatars that can communicate with customers and answer questions based on the customer’s own words. The company’s executive managers have over fifty years of software industry experience. They are based in Silicon Valley and are supported by Intel Capital and funded by Asseco Group and Founders. One annoying note about their website, they have a virtual agent that talks when one lands on certain pages. An off button, please.
Whitney Grace, December 21, 2010
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Business Intelligence and Small Businesses
December 21, 2010
The Italian Datamanager has an article titled “The Intelligence and the Conquest of SMEs” that explains how business intelligence (BI) is growing in medium-sized enterprises in Italy’s social market economy (SME).
“The European market is expected to grow Bi in 2010 than in 2009. According to IDC, this increase will be 5.4 percent for both Query & Reporting Tools for the Advanced Analytics, compared to a growth in the previous year respectively by 2.5 percent and 4.9 percent. This increase is due to three main factors: first, the economic situation, which forces companies to look where to optimize for best effect on the bottom line, increased marketing leading provider of BI solutions and the maturity of the market.”
When companies gather business intelligence data, they apply it in a manner that best serves them. The article describes how companies use the data for management control, customer/product analysis, data integration and analysis, and simulated scenarios. The most interesting company profiled is Passepartout. It is developing an internal information access system. This is expensive and time consuming, but will be overall beneficial for Passepartout.
Whiney Grace, December 21, 2010
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Search Analyst Evaluation
December 21, 2010
“Analytics, Schmanalytics! How to Evaluate an Analyst” reminds us that analysts, unlike lawyers or accountants, are not professionally licensed and gives advice on how to know you are getting your money’s worth. The conclusion: “If you need analytics help, make the effort to assure yourself that the analyst is technically competent, understands your business and has the communications skills that you need.” Some things to look for are formal education or experience in the specific area to be analyzed, familiarity with businesses similar to yours, and a communication style that will suit the situation in which the presentation will be made, whether it be to your boss or in court. Then again, if a search consultant promises to get you sales leads or sales, you might want to ignore this advice all together.
Alice Wasielewski, December 21, 2010
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