Attensity Europe Wins Innovation Award
March 25, 2011
In a news release, “Attensity Wins IT Innovation Award“, Attensity announced that its European unit (Attensity Europe GmbH) received recognition from Initiative Mittelstand. This group is focused on the advancement of pioneering information technologies and the firms responsible for their production.
The product singled out was Attensity Analyze for German. The application mines and organizes data from a broad selection of sources including media outlets, telecommunication records, and social content. One use of the system is to identify upsides and downsides of products or a company’s marketing programs. Glückwünsche Attensity!
Micheal Cory, March 25, 2011
OpenText Joins Semantic Web Race
March 25, 2011
Nstein, the Quebec based content administration merchant recently acquired by Open Text, announced the release of a new version of the popular Semantic Navigation software. In a notice on the company’s blog, “Open Text Semantic Navigation Now Available.” The write up presented a lengthy laundry list of features and functions.
Boiling the article down to a sentence or two proved difficult. We believe that OpenText now offers a crawling and indexing system that supports faceted navigation. But there is an important twist. The semantic tool has a search engine optimization and sentiment analysis component as well. The article asserts:
[A licensee can] enrich content–including huge volumes of uncategorized content–by automatically analyzing and tagging it with metadata to help discern relevant and insightful keywords, topics, summaries, and sentiments.
The list of features and functions is lengthy. There is additional information available. Public information is available at this link, but you will need an OpenText user name and password to access the content at this link.
If the product performs according to the descriptions in the source article, a number of OpenText’s competitors will be faced with significant competition.
Stephen E Arnold, March 25, 2011
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How to for Oracle Text Search
March 25, 2011
“Using Oracle Text Search” provides some quite useful information for Oracle licensees using Oracle’s text search system. The write up provides, in our opinion, a distillation of two years of hands on work with Oracle Text Search. The write up includes a number quite useful code snippets. These are quite useful and include brief descriptions of the snippet functions. We found the script for index creation among the most useful in the write up. There is a ready-to-edit script to create an index over more than one column in an Oracle database. The author has delivered on his promised to make it easy to adjust certain search criteria, including score values for sorting. If you are an Oracle database and Text user, this is worth tucking in your “hints” folder. Good work.
Stephen E Arnold, March 25, 2011
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People and Big Data: Analytics for Mr and Ms Couch Potato
March 24, 2011
I have to admit that the idea of big data and the “people” was a concatenation new to me. I just read “Data Science Tookit Brings Big Data Analysis to the People.” Let’s look at this snippet:
Data Science Toolkit offers OCR functionality to convert PDFs or scanned image files to text files, filter geographic locations from news articles and other types of unstructured data or find political district and neighborhood information for any given location. Data Science Toolkit is available as a web service online, but it can also be downloaded and run on an Amazon EC2 or VM virtual machine.
I live in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky. The “people” in this metropolis of a couple of thousand people consists of folks who use the Internet to look at pictures, send email, and maybe check out some online information about the local basketball scene. The sophisticated data consumers mostly work in my office. I know from my good morning chats at the local filling station cum junk food outlet that I am skewing the demographics with my generalization about Internet usage. Close enough for horse shoes as my grandfather used to say.
I think the idea of “big data” is interesting. We publish a curated blog called Inteltrax that covers some of the interesting companies in the data fusion market. But if you think interest in a $1.0 million enterprise search system appeals to a narrow readership, data fusion has the same magnetism. There are not any “people.” There are college graduates with mathematical expertise and an compelling need to process information. Here in Harrod’s Creek, the “people” are more likely to check email and then fire up the flat screen to watch hoops.
Maybe the observation about “people” is a variant of Potomac Fever; that is, those exposed to the craziness of power and money in Washington, DC, think that “everyone” has the same visceral reaction to political push ups. I once heard a person who worked in a think tank describe the firm’s discussions about client engagements as “drinking our own Kool-Aid.” Tastes great, but the Kool-Aid is not enjoyed with the same lip smacking elsewhere. When was the last time you guzzled pumpkin or red bean Kool-Aid?
My view:
- A useful service such as the one described in the write up looks a heck of a lot more magnetic than it may be. That’s the unsupported assertion about “people” when the reality is that a tiny percentage of savvy folks will get with the big data program as a Web service.
- The notion that “people” can manipulate big data and find a pot of gold at the end of the analytics rainbow is charming, but essentially incorrect. There are quiet a few considerations to evaluate in the big data game. A shortcut can save time but also put the rental car in the ditch.
- Big data are the norm in many online operations. What is helpful to me is to explain that a tiny percentage of those with big data know what to do to squeeze nuggets from the log files.
Quite a story for me: I thought it was one of those PR, promo, search engine optimization type write ups. I then realized it was a Kool-Aid break after a lunch break in Silicon Valley where there is no Internet bubble. Absolutely not.
Stephen E Arnold, March 25, 2011
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Protected: E-Mail Woes Solved?
March 24, 2011
Enterprise Search Vendor Web Site Traffic
March 24, 2011
I did some poking around on Compete.com. You plug in the url of a major search vendor and you get a traffic report. There’s no charge. Here’s the traffic report for the Autonomy.com Web site. The company has a high profile and revenues that match its market size. You can see that Autonomy, based on Compete.com data, is in the 10,000 to 20,000 unique range. This type of traffic is pretty good in my opinion.
If you plug in a vendor with a slightly smaller market footprint—for instance, Coveo—here’s the traffic report for that site. Compete data which are certainly not definitive reports this traffic pattern:
The Coveo Web site is pulling about 3,000 uniques over the last quarter of 2010 which appears to be an average of the up and down in the Compete data.
What happens if you search for vendors with even more lower profiles. I plugged in Dieselpoint.com (a vendor which has gone quiet in the last few months), Brainware (a paper to searchable index system) , and Vivisimo (the information optimization company). What I learned was that Vivisimo (the green line) mounted a marketing and public relations push that spiked the company into Autonomy traffic territory. But Vivisimo has dropped below 10,000 uniques.
What do I make of the Compete.com data?
First, the data are useful for broad comparisons. Most of the usage data generated by third parties has quite a margin for error. These outputs make it possible to see that a big outfit like Autonomy can be challenged when a smaller firm mounts a PR push. The problem for the smaller firm, if I understand the data in the Compete outputs, is sustaining a high level of traffic.
Second, it is pretty clear that enterprise search vendors are not in what I would call high traffic territory. My view of this is that enterprise search and the other even less well known buzzwords like customer support and eDiscovery are going to become a big part of search vendor marketing because these terms might have more magnetism. Here’s a Compete chart for Recommind (eDiscovery and enterprise search), Clearwell Systems (the outfit with the “rocket docket” phrase), and Kcura (an eDiscovery company generating some buzz now, according to one of my sources). You can see in the chart below, the spike for Clearwell, which is close to 5,000 uniques according to Compete. The other vendors are in the modest traffic range.
Third, enterprise search vendors are going to have to find a way to generate sales leads beyond a traditional Web site. My hunch is that most of the search vendors are betting that their participation in trade shows, their direct sales efforts, and their partnership relationships will produce leads and then revenue. The Web site is or has become a chunk of brochureware.
Sentiment Analysis, the New Search and Retrieval Tool
March 24, 2011
Computer World has a concept for us to ponder: “Sentiment Analysis Comes of Age.” Sentiment analysis has been around for some time, but with the rapid proliferation of up-to-date social media and semantic-software vendors that offer commentary and relevant components, its benefits are coming to the light. Sentiment analysis has many potential paybacks, including new data sources never before tapped. Many semantic platforms already analyze material from social networking sites.
“Sentiment analysis platforms use two main methodologies. One involves a statistical or model-based approach wherein the system learns to assess sentiment by analyzing large quantities of pre-scored material. The other method utilizes a large dictionary of pre-scored phrases.”
Computerworld discovers sentiment analysis the way a father realizes his 15 year old daughter is ageing quickly. Can sentiment analysis improve search and retrieval? We’re not sure, but it makes advertisers perceive an advantage in explaining why consumers dislike a product or brand.
We anticipate search vendors will pile into this market as well.
Whitney Grace, March 24, 2011
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Endeca Quantifies Results Softly
March 24, 2011
Per a recent post on RFPConnect.com of the same title, Endeca Latitude Generated a ROI of 330% over Three Years According to an Independent Study conducted by Forrester Consulting. We think of Forrester as one of those mid tier consulting firms which have discovered that a blend of marketing, charm, and customers paying for objective reports helps keep the lights on.
And those are some results Forrester’s experts have unearthed!
Gathered from four companies across four different industries, nary a hint of a frown about Endeca’s business intelligence software solution.
Here are some of the highlights:
- Improved labour productivity associated with data analysis.”
- Parts and materials purchases savings.”
- Improved labour productivity associated with data discovery.”
- Engineering change orders avoided due to non-optimal part selection.”
- Cost avoided associated with user training.”
- Cost avoided associated with data preparation and report creation.”
Okay!
Endeca’s VP of product management and marketing notes that this study has successfully defined something that is typically thought of as a “soft benefit”: decision making. We think the reason why this benefit is so often considered “soft” is because it is actually kind of immeasurable.
I am an engineer, mechanical, PE, and the rest of the drill. As an engineer, I like facts, data, and verification. Disappointed in soft analyses? Well, I would not want to engineer a solution on soft data. But that’s just my conservative, non-marketing nature.
The write up reminds me of an infomercial, the as-seen-on-TV Bender Ball and the claim that the Bender Method of Core Training helps provide a workout that is up to 408 percent more effective than the standard crunch.
Really?
Don’t get us wrong, this is an amazing revelation and the results sound great, but somewhat hard to believe given the absence of verifiable data.
Sarah Rogers, March 24, 2011
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eDiscovery Discovered
March 23, 2011
I read in my hard copy version the story “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software.” (The link may go dead as the Gray Lady tries to regain its can of Monster Energy Drink.)
After reading the story, I was not exactly sure if the information was about the cost cutting that law firms must undertake to keep their partners in BMWs and vacation homes, the software that is now making its way from the green corridors of government agencies to the walnut paneled rooms of legal eagles’ nests, or the brainchild of a PR firm.
Source: http://www.challengecamps.com/programs/session.php?view=session1&subsect=morning
Let’s tackle the legal eagle issue first.
The cost of looking at email is high. Not only is email a generally crappy type of document in its native habitat, email is a downright evil invention when one is looking for who said what to whom at a specific point in time. Clever lads and lasses can make email do magic tricks, including disappear. The legal eagles want systems that prevent messing around with email. The law school grads call this spoliation. Hey, that’s why some of the lawyers command $1,200 and hour or more. With clients getting nervous about the costs of legal services, law firms are trying to manage like real businesses, which as you know are not exactly hitting home runs in the fiscal probity game.
Protected: SharePoint Security
March 23, 2011
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