Lucid Imagination Reports Strong Growth
February 8, 2011
Open source search vendor Lucid Imagination is on the move. Marketwire’s “Lucid Imagination Delivers Record Growth on Momentum of Apache Solr/ Lucene Search Adoption” reports on the rapid rise of Solr/Lucene, its sales growth having doubled in 2010. CEO Eric Gries expects continued success:
” ‘I attribute our continued rapid growth to the widespread recognition that we have freed business-critical search from the expensive, rigid cost structure of proprietary commercial search software. . . . As more and more organizations discover they can have enterprise-grade support to quickly and easily integrate, develop, and deploy Solr-based search applications, I fully expect this growth to accelerate.’ “
At 150 customers and growing, Lucid Imagination is one to watch. The company added to its executive ranks Peter Tait, who brings more than 20 years of marketing and management experience to Lucid Imagination. Prior to joining Lucid, he held management and executive management positions at BEA, Citrix, Documentum and EMC.
Check out Lucid Imagination’s Web site here.
Cynthia Murrell February 8, 2011
Freebie
Protected: Managing SharePoint Metadata 1
February 8, 2011
IBM, Jeopardy, and Team Work
February 8, 2011
A reader alerted us to the IBM Jeopardy team. You may find the line up and range of technical expertise interesting. We sure thought it looked expensive. Jeopardy is a popular game show, but IBM either has a keen desire to knock couch potatoes into the fryer or showcase how much dough IBM has to spend on interesting projects.
The Web page for the team is at this IBM Watson page. We counted 10 teams. There were names and photos for 48 people. Yowza. For a company that uses Lucene in the OmniFind search system, our question is, “Why not put this horsepower behind open source search?”
Maybe open source is just a way station on the IBM profit highway?
Stephen E Arnold, February 8, 2011
Is Google Ignoring an Apple Method?
February 7, 2011
Love it or hate it, the Apple iPhone set the yardstick against which smartphones are measured. Microsoft has not slipstreamed fixes to its Windows 7 Phone. Now Google seems to be following the Microsoft path, not the Apple four lane superhighway.
Secure Computing Magazine reports that “Google Fails to Fix Android Flaw” in the newest 2.3 version. Google was aware of the flaw in Android 2.2 last year and promised to fix the defect. When 2.3 was churned out, hackers went to work and easily cracked the patch. Android’s flaw is as follows:
“If a user is tricked into visiting a malicious site, the flaw could let hackers view any files stored on the SDcard, as well as view a list of apps and upload them to a remote server.”
Disabling JavaScript support and/or using a third party browser can avoid the hacking problem. Google has again promised to fix its popular mobile OS in the next version and are already working on a solution, but we’ll see how that goes.
What may be important is that Google has not gotten its chickens in the coop. Another indication of the similarity in management approaches and customer focus between Microsoft and Google? And search? Maybe taking a back seat? Just a thought.
Whitney Grace, February 7, 2011
Freebie
Suggest.io Database
February 7, 2011
Here’s an interesting new idea: self-learning databases. Suggest.io is designed to track information and feedback from visitors to your Web site.
By creating a free account, Suggest.Io will make a database that will track search content on your website. This database will then make suggestions, much like Google, when something is typed into the search box.
“With Suggest.io you can find out more about your visitors. For example, you may figure out what your visitors are more interested in by means of our powerful statistic tool, that allows you to spot the top rated search request…”
This sounds like a good add-in for any website and it allows you to be more like Google. Related information suggestions in search boxes are a handy tool to have. The graphic for the service may catch attention and give others a visual jolt.
Whitney Grace, February 7, 2011
Freebie
Protected: SharePoint Not Enough for Electronic Discovery
February 7, 2011
Kartoo Closes and Opens the Door for Yometa
February 7, 2011
We learned from one of our readers that Kartoo has turned out its lights. According to Wikipedia, the company shut down after a nine year run. Kartoo relied on Flash to display search results. Novel? Yes. Useful. In some types of queries, yes.
If you are interested in visual search, you can check out Yometa.com. This is a federating search system which taps results from Bing, Google, and Yahoo. A query for “Stephen E Arnold” returned this display.
Yometa displays the most relevant search results based on a combination of the three search engines ranking determined by the Yometa algorithm.
The company developed its approach based on research that showed that 97 percent of search results by the three search engines(Google, Yahoo and Bing) are different and there is only three percent overlap. The visual interface allows users to see results of Google, Bing and Yahoo individually and in various combinations. Users can see any combination of search results from Bing, Yahoo and Google in one screen and is displayed in a visual interface. The search results are displayed in a Venn Diagram, the results closer to the middle are more relevant.
For more information navigate to www.yometa.com/about/ .
Stephen E Arnold, February 7, 2011
Freebie
Expert System and Esri Tie Up
February 7, 2011
On their site’s news page, Expert System Announces Its Partnership with Esri Italia. The partnership combines semantic technology with geospatial analysis to effectively support richer, improved decision making.
Expert System, a leader in semantic software, and Esri, at the forefront of worldwide geospatial intelligence, should make for a good team:
“The integration of Esri geo-analysis technology and Expert System’s knowledge management and text mining solutions renders geographic search and analysis activities more efficient. As a result, search results discovered through semantic analysis can be visualized in geographic maps derived from the geo-analysis, providing analysts with a deeper level of detail.”
Read more about Expert System here. If you can read Italian, learn about Esri Italia here.
Cynthia Murrell February 7, 2011
Synthesys Platform Beta Available
February 7, 2011
Digital Reasoning alerted us last week that a new beta program for the Synthesys Platform is available. Digital Reasoning has emerged as one of “the leader in complex, large scale unstructured data analytics.” The Synthesys platform is one of the “leaders in complex, large scale unstructured data analytics.” We have interviewed the founder of Digital Reasoning in our Search Wizards Speak series. These interviews are available on ArnoldIT.com’s Search Wizards Speak series here and here. Digital Reasoning is one of the leaders in making next-generation analytics available via the cloud, on premises, and hybrid methods.
© Digital Reasoning, 2011
This platform version of Digital Reasoning’s software will provide beta users immediate API-level access to the firm’s analytics software and access to tools that will be added through the beta program.
Matthew Russell, vice president of engineering at Digital Reasoning said:
We are excited to introduce Synthesys Platform to the market. By allowing users to upload their data into the cloud for analysis, many more users will get the opportunity to experience next generation data analytics while exploring their own data.
Digital Reasoning Systems (www.digitalreasoning.com) solves the problem of information overload by providing the tools people need to understand relationships between entities in vast amounts of unstructured and structured data.
Digital Reasoning builds data analytic solutions based on a distinctive mathematical approach to understanding natural language. The value of Digital Reasoning is not only the ability to leverage an organization’s existing knowledge base, but also to reveal critical hidden information and relationships that may not have been apparent during manual or other automated analytic efforts. Synthesys is a registered trademark of Digital Reasoning Systems, Inc.
Digital Reasoning will be exhibiting at the upcoming Strata Conference on February 28 and March 1, 2011. For more information about Digital Reasoning, navigate to the company’s Web site at www.digitalreasoning.com.
Stephen E Arnold, February 7, 2011
Data Deluge Extends to Wireless. No Kidding?
February 6, 2011
CNET News brought to our attention that, “Cisco Sees 26-fold Wireless Data Increase in 5 Years.” Not much of a surprise, but we enjoy prognostications from companies that sell gear to manage high volumes of digital traffic. Wireless carriers are already gaining more capacity with radio and back-haul networks. The big increase is due to mobile data traffic, especially iPhones and Android phones. Users and commercial enterprises are working like beavers to shift from tethered access to the 21st century’s equivalent of a digital Woodstock. The write up suggested:
“This is why the Federal Communications Commission is working to get an additional 500MHz of wireless on the market in the next decade with a plan for 300MHz spectrum to be freed up in the next five years. But adding more spectrum takes time and it will not be enough to solve the capacity crunch that wireless operators will likely face in the next few years.”
Networks will need to learn how to operate more efficiently. Business models, such as unlimited data plans, will probably disappear. Another problem will be tablet PCs, because they need more capacity than a phone. Cisco is now prognosticating with the best of the mid tier consulting firms. One hopes the methodology is better than “let’s guess.”
Whitney Grace, February 6, 2011
Freebie
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
