Poobah Tilts at Azure Windmill
January 11, 2011
Before reading my comments, point your browser thingy at “Gartner Gets It Wrong With Cloud Quadrant.” Read it. Note this set up paragraph, worded to avoid litigation but worded to make the azure chip outfit “pundits” steam:
The Gartner Magic Quadrant isn’t an entirely accurate, or even objective, measure of who’s who in any given IT field. If you haven’t heard, the analyst firm’s ranking system has been called out as being everything from merely subjective (as opposed, I guess, to being only partially subjective like every other list of industry leaders) to rewarding vendors that have paid Gartner the most money for its services. I can’t comment on these allegations, nor do I care to. What I can say is that with its latest Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Web Hosting, Gartner just flat got it wrong.
So what’s the subject?
Cloud computing, one of the many, many next big things in computing. Never mind that timesharing and online services have become part of the furniture for living. Cloud computing is a big deal. Gartner sees the cloud revolution one way and the author of the “Gets It Wrong” write up another. I am not sure either is correct. The one true way is a tough path to discern.
Where did Gartner allegedly slip off the gravel path and tumble in the muck? Here’s the passage I noted:
Initially, it seems inconceivable that anybody could rank IaaS providers and not list Amazon Web Services among the leaders.
Yeah, mon. Gartner excludes outfits who don’t match their criteria. Don’t like it. Well, there are some options, which I will leave to your imagination.
What outfits are leaders in cloud ystuff? My view is just check out the vendors in lists like this one. You can get some color on this Y Combinator list here.
🙂
What happens when poobahs fight? Clarity gets trampled. Loss of clarity, just another way to say marketing.
Stephen E Arnold, January 11, 2011
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Attensity’s New Year’s Resolution
January 11, 2011
Attensity, now a multi-faceted technology management firm, has set a new course for itself this year in Making it Work in 2011!. In the past it seems as though the company’s focus was increasingly on government contracts, as illustrated by the formation of the subsidiary Attensity Government Systems. Well oh how “the times they are a changing.” In a blog post on the company’s website in late December, buried beneath references to both classical music and reality television, the new direction is laid out.
Currently, a massive amount of data is generated by the surging wave of social networking sites and the new breed of citizen journalists. Per Attensity: “These days, competitors often have access to the same source material of customer conversations from Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums, and review sites. However, where the battle is truly won or lost is in how companies are able to harness and arrange that material, embellishing it with insights from their own internal survey and call center data, and transforming it into a symphony of action.” So, Attensity’s new focus for the coming year is to improve their current menu, giving companies the option to act on multi-channel conversations.
It appears that like many companies, Attensity sees an opportunity in repackaging their services for broader consumption in an effort to cash in on the public’s embracing of these fresh and exciting technologies. The same blog post gives a quick nod to the outgoing year’s poor economic makeup, though one is still left speculating if its main motive for the shift from its government affiliations to those of private consumers is to have a bountiful 2011. No problem with that.
Sarah Rogers, January 11, 2011
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What’s new with dtSearch?
January 11, 2011
Content processing vendors are constantly vying for a larger slice of the market they inhabit. New versions of existing software, the updating of specific features as well as the ability to remain agile as companies merge or are aggressively consumed remain vital to any firm or product’s survival. dtSearch, the Maryland based tech merchant is no exception.
Their brand boasts fifteen search options in a new rundown posted to the site. These include the Natural language type, which allows users to enter an unstructured search request in any international language, or Phrase and Phonic search choices. Other alternatives are multiple Proximity, Numeric and Wildcard, which allows “?” to hold a single letter place, and “*” to hold multiple letter places. In my opinion one of the most interesting capabilities was an aspect called Fuzzy Searching, an option that uses a proprietary algorithm to successfully execute the command despite misspelled terms. Fuzzy Searching also “adjusts from 0 to 10 so you can fine-tune fuzziness to the level of OCR or typographical errors in your files.”
The end of the summer saw the release of two versions of dtSearch 7.65 (Builds 7906 and 7907) which resolved minor bugs with the indexing facets of the software as well as reducing memory requirements for parsing large XLS files. The dtSearch line of products fill many consumer needs and continue to hone said line to offer high quality at competitive pricing.
Stephen E Arnold, January 11, 2011
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Semantics: Hot Again?
January 11, 2011
We hear this each year: Semantics will be hot in [fill in the year].
Kazeon’s The Future eDiscovery Arms Race: It is all about the Semantics investigates where the eDiscovery market must go in order to handle the growing volume of ESI while progressing the efficiency, accuracy and reliability of the search result process. After posing this question, where does Kazeon end up? At the doorstep of Semantics Future Institute.
Those who only speak English may not realize what a complicated language we really have. Words used regularly often carry several meanings, at times even four or more definitions to a single word. This is known as polysemy, and it throws a huge wrench in the search method.
We are beginning to see some workarounds to this issue finally realized. One of the major players is Latent Semantic Analysis, which plainly “searches documents for themes within the language usage and extracts the concepts, which are common to the documents”, helping to alleviate false positive results. Other aides include Word Search Disambiguation, which focuses on word meaning rather than merely matching character strings and Local Co-Occurrence Statistics, which counts how often sets of terms appear together within a predetermined period.
These tools will no doubt be helpful in refining search techniques, but our main question is, where was Kazeon five years ago when the semantic buzz began?
Sarah Rogers, January 11, 2011
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Some Entertaining 2011 eDiscovery Predictions
January 11, 2011
Falling in line with similar sites and their crystal balls, the legal web entity JD Supra has posted up 10.5 punchy e-Discovery predictions for 2011. Though not stated explicitly, the crux of nearly every point revolves around who can steal what or dupe who, while wringing out an extra cent during the process. Take numbers 4 and 7 for example:
4. Not to be outdone by Recommind’s “Predictive Coding” and FTI Consulting’s “Suggestive Coding”, vendors clamor to provide “Inferred Coding” and “Looks-Related” coding.
7. Sensing a (monetization) opportunity, Facebook launches “They Said It, We Got It” which allows legal enforcement officers, attorneys, ex-spouses, potential employers, etc. to buy anything ever said by anybody on Facebook. Facebook amends its privacy policy to read “None”.
Regardless, with a number of companies racing to the top of the e-Discovery empire, we believe they could not have picked a better time. The lousy economy seems to spike a demand for legal tools. We felt it odd that the financial gain element was a bit glossed over considering the involvement of lawyers, but nonetheless an interesting list worth checking out.
Sarah Rogers, January 11, 2011
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MarkLogic and Change
January 10, 2011
Short honk: I read “You Say Goodbye, I Say Hello.” The write up by Dave Kellogg reported that he will be leaving MarkLogic. MarkLogic Corp. has gained considerable traction in publishing and a couple of other business sectors with the MarkLogic Server product. You can get more information about that product at this link. MarkLogic server is a database built for unstructured information. Depending on the licensee’s use of the MarkLogic server, the resulting implementation can “look like” search, business intelligence, a custom-publishing system, or other information application.
In his blog post, Mr. Kellogg said:
I am proud of what we accomplished during my six years at the MarkLogic: acquiring over 200 enterprise customers, growing annual revenues at a 75% CAGR, raising $27.5M in venture capital, and growing the company from 40 to over 230 employees. I am particularly happy to say that I will be leaving the company in a position of strength, having exceeded the 2010 revenue plan targets and with nearly $20M cash in the bank.
What’s next for MarkLogic? We have been impressed with the MarkLogic technology for years. We will keep you posted.
Stephen E Arnold, January 10, 2011
Mastering the Android OS Universe
January 10, 2011
Google’s quest for world domination of the smartphone operating systems’ universe may be thwarted says the ZDNet article, “Android’s Biggest Worry: Fragmentation,” . Despite growing market share and popular applications, the Android is fragmented by many complex issues including OEMs software, carrier applications, and multiple operating system versions.
“Android is growing, but it’s also growing complexity at the same time. Device fragmentation is not the issue, but rather the fragmentation of the ecosystem. So many different shops, so many different models. The carriers messing with the experience again. Open but not really open, a very Google-centric ecosystem,” says Peter Vesterbacka, one of Rovio’s founders and an Angry Bird developer, in a Tech N’ Marketing interview.
My money’s on Google. They’ve managed to conquer (or at least be a top contender) in the vast and complex information world, making search easy and effortless. Perhaps they can do the same for the Android? Is Google confident that Android fragmentation is a trivial problem?
Christina Sheley, January 10, 2011
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Nuggets: Real or Fake Gold?
January 10, 2011
Xoogler Daniel Tunkelang wrote a short item back linking to his earlier write up about information nuggets. You may want to take a look at “Exploring Nuggetize”. The illustration shows how the “nugget” method converts Noisy Channel articles into what are digital Post It notes with the key points extracted from the source. In the “Exploring Nuggetize” article there are references to facets, snippets, and search.
The key point in “Exploring Nuggetize” in my opinion was:
The nuggets are full sentences, and thus feel quite different from conventional search-engine snippets. Conventional snippets serve primarily to provide information scent, helping users quickly determine the utility of a search result without the cost of clicking through to it and reading it. In contrast the nuggets are document fragments that are sufficiently self-contained to communicate a coherent thought. The experience suggests passage retrieval rather than document retrieval.
Overall I am okay with the notion of nuggets and the highlighting of Dhiti and its Dive service. You can learn more about both at http://dhiti.com.
What caught my attention was the response by Dhiti in the comments section to the follow on write up “Enabling Exploratory Search with Dhiti”. The question Dhiti answered was related to the user’s behavior when the Dhiti “nuggetizing” widget is implemented on a blog.
Here’s the comment. Please, check the original here because I have trimmed the remarks for this post. Emphasis added by Beyond Search as well:
We [Dhiti] observe the following patterns…:
1) The widget does contribute to increased engagement. We see about 5-10% of readers “interact” with the widget, either to click through on an article… About 60% of the interactions are clicks on articles.
2) We notice that there’s a higher probability of readers reading the articles fully than normal…
3) We observe search referrals interact a lot more with the widget…. So there is more likelihood for exploration.
4) When a search query brings traffic to a page, Users … want to explore the site more for the same query!
5) Through the pivots, the publisher gets to know what their readers [are] … interested to explore around….
6) The pivots also provide cues to the publisher to create reference pages (like Wikipedia) …
Several observations:
First, “nuggets” is probably the wrong metaphor for this type of “informed extraction.”
Second, the approach offers some useful opportunities to metrics about a blog reader’s behavior. My reaction was, “Ah, something more useful than AdSense clicks or traditional log files.”
Third, the company has a good idea, is small with “three co-founders,” and based in Bangalore. Good idea and I have a hunch some of the big outfits in the world of search may be thinking about this function.
Stephen E Arnold, January 10, 2011
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Expedia and Filtered Search Results
January 10, 2011
Expedia must have learned how to throw temper tantrums from infamous JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater. After American Airlines pulled out of online travel booking site Orbitz, competitor Expedia began hiding the airline’s results in their own searches.
Techdirt reports in “Expedia Against ‘Search Discrimination’… Unless It Gets to Do the Discriminating” that this response is rich considering Expedia is a leading member of FairSearch, a group dedicated to fighting search discrimination (mainly that proposed by Google’s acquisition of ITA software.
Here’s a snippet: “So, just as Expedia, in an attempt to complain about Google, claims it’s against search providers discriminating by manipulating results to promote or punish certain players, it’s doing so in a way that’s significantly more noticeable than anything Google is doing…To complain about this exact form of discrimination, while doing it in a way that’s much more noticeable than the one you’re complaining about? That’s pure, unadulterated hypocrisy.”
Is this the end of objective search results as we know it? Maybe but when people run a search on one of today’s big systems, data not in the result set may not be missed? Will consumers know to run a separate query to locate the “missing” information? Whom does filtering “help”?
Christina Sheley, January 10, 2011
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Any.Do for Voice to Device Actions Technology
January 10, 2011
When I was running around Central America a week ago, I received from one of my two or three readers a link to a story in VC Cafe with the title “Stealthy Startup Any.do Raises $1 Million Seed Round for Voice Mobile Commands. There is precious little information about the company available, but the article mentioned two individuals who have pumped some dough into the outfit. One is Google’s Eric Schmidt and the other is Joe Londsdale, a founder of Palantir. There are some other smart money investors, but I find the Schmidt and Londsdale references most interesting.
What’s Any.do do?
Based on what information I have, one talks to a mobile device and the Any.Do technology figures out what one says. With this information, Any.Do makes the instructions happen. Here’s VC Cafe’s summary:
[Any.Do is] developing technology to translate the user’s natural language voice input to the mobile device into actions, using voice recognition and semantic analysis algorithms…. AnyDo is capable of understanding subtle differences, such as the ability to purchase a product offline vs. online, pay bills on the mobile, purchase insurance, etc, using voice commands on the mobile.
The company’s Web site says, “Any.Do helps you do more of the things you love doing.” You can sign up to get information about the company at http://any.do.
I learned that Any.Do has developed an application for Android. Any.Do seems poised to release a product something this year. If it gets magnetic, maybe the Google will buy the company. I heard that at least one Googler works at the company now.
Stephen E Arnold, January 10, 2011
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