When Local Search Flops, Loopriz Plans to Deliver Company Info
August 23, 2011
Loopriz is a new service for businesses now available online for businesses worldwide. As their website describes itself,
(Loopriz) has been founded in mid July 2009 as an experiment for businesses around the world, may it be a retailer, an NGO, Corporation etc. to get engaged in the world of information. The idea is for small entrepreneurs and rising businesses to gain faster connections and partners via this platform thus avoiding high advertisement costs.
Although there are several directories available for companies to list themselves on, Loopriz offers free listing, a ‘business card’ type listing, and is not tied to one industry or geographical location.
Information available about companies included in the directory is company name, all contact info, Web site address, industry, and services offered. Those wishing to search for companies can search via company name, region, industry, service, or keyword.
There is also the option to share a ‘business card’ with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumbir, and other sites.
Although the website is still in growth mode, the possibilities for its success are quite large. As far as networking goes, it doesn’t get any better than free. This site seems similar to Facebook and LinkedIn except that it eliminates all the inane social schmoozing, allowing users to utilize the important info.
The challenges of building a global database of businesses is a formidable one. We noticed some instability in access, so you made to refresh your query.
Catherine Lamsfuss, August 23, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Scaling in the Cloud
August 23, 2011
When everyone got on board with cloud computing, did scalability programs follow? The April 2011 meltdown at Amazon affected “only” certain customers.
With all the hype about moving to the cloud a year ago, it was easy for everyone to jump on the bandwagon without really realizing how they’d be able to allocate resources. IT World Canada reported on a cloud scalability technology in the 2010 article, “Montreal Firm Updates Database Management System.”
Almost a year ago, in September 2010, Sand Technology Inc. released Sand CDBMS 6. This column-oriented database management system is the one experts said would be beneficial for cloud computing customers who need workload scalability.
We learned the following about Sand CDBMS 6’s features from the IT World Canada article:
[It] also includes mobile computing support so IT admins can deploy the Sand technology on a laptop and manage data flow to and from the cloud by creating local personal data marts on portable devices…[T]he ability to manage data flow in incremental updates is important given bandwidth can be unreliable.
Additionally, towards the end of the article George Goodall, senior research analyst with Info-Tech Research Group Ltd. offered insight about the current trend of alternatively structured databases given data growth. The clouds are gathering. Get ready for some additional engineering analyses.
Megan Feil, August 23, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Tips for Installing SharePoint with Least Privilege Service Accounts
August 23, 2011
We want to pass along a useful resource and highlight one example of the type of information in SharePoint George’s blog.
Let’s assume that you just licensed SharePoint 2010 for your business and now it is time to install and integrate it into your server. There are many how-to guides out there with FAQs and tips, but we managed to find the best guide at SharePoint George’s blog: “Installing SharePoint 2010 Beta on a Windows 2008 R2 Server.” The article is broken down into three parts that explain how to install, configure service applications and user profile synchronization, and configure web applications and site collection. Everything is all-inclusive in this article, so you won’t need to scour the Web for any other guide.
What’s that?
You want service accounts for your SharePoint users as well? We know exactly how to help you with that. SharePoint George has another article titled, “Installing SharePoint 2010 Using Least Privilege Service Accounts” complete with all the tips you need. The Least Privilege model has not changed much since the 2007 version. The service account types are SQL server service, SharePoint setup user, and server farm/database access. George writes:
It’s imperative that these accounts are created and provisioned before attempting any installation of the SharePoint 2010 bits. This article is assuming that SQL 2008 R2 has already been installed in your environment using the SQL server service account.
Follow the tips in the articles exactly and you won’t have any installation worries.
Once your SharePoint installation is up and running, you will want to add more robust and flexible search and retrieval to the system. Navigate to www.surfray.com and take a look at the company’s Ontolica system.
Stephen E Arnold, August 23, 2011
Sponsored by SurfRay, developers of Ontolica, the next generation search and content processing system
Inteltrax: Top Stories, August 15 to August 19
August 22, 2011
Inteltrax, the data fusion and business intelligence information service, captured three key stories germane to search this week, two from the healthcare world and one simply an enlightening profile.
The first story was called, “Australian Healthcare Embraces Data Warehousing,” showcased how the Land Down Under was hot-rodding its healthcare with the aid of analytics.
The next story, “Heritage Health Prize and Other Contests Boost Analytic Profiles,” showed how winning this prestigious prize has been the gateway to big things for analytics providers.
Another provider up to big things, Microstrategy, we discovered in our story, “Microstrategy Not Hitting Financial Bottom,” as we detailed how this company lost money because of some big hires last quarter. This story, though, applauded this loss, because it will pay off in the long run.
Whether a nation’s healthcare is improving itself now, a contest winner is about to see big things happen, or a scrappy analytics provider is tightening its belt to become better in the future, the world of business intelligence and big data is never short on drama. We’re going to bring you the inside scoop on all the happenings as this industry evolves.
Follow the Inteltrax news stream by visiting www.inteltrax.com
Patrick Roland, Editor, Inteltrax, August 22, 2011
Sponsored by Digital Reasoning, the developers of Synthesys, the next generation content processing and analytics system
Recorded Future and Predicting Investments
August 22, 2011
Recorded Future’s analytic trading signal now has the ability to allow customers to access data from the API in time to trade before the equity markets close. Their current blog post serves as a self-reporting report card.
In March 2011, Recorded Future announced their success in building a whole-market factor model that uses media analytic data to predict excess returns.
Since then, the firm has allowed others to benefit from this service. The company asserts the following in their August 9, 2011 post:
Taking the same strategy we presented earlier, and using the live data as it was available to our customers at 3:30, we have rolled our backtest forward, and looked at the performance of this strategy over the last few tumultuous months. Between May 13, and August 5, this strategy returned 10.4%, while the market lost 9.9% of its value.
Hakia has pushed into similar territory. No one knows how many investment firms are using similar technology to maximize their returns.
Megan Feil, August 22, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
SkylineGlobe Nudges Google
August 22, 2011
It’s surprising how many people will simply go for the big name geospatial visualization services like Google Earth and rave about how far our technology has come, without even realizing there are bigger fish in the sea. Directions Magazine, at least, recognizes one of the leading products out there with their article, “Skyline Software Announces the Release of New TerraBuilder and TerraGate v6 Products.”
SkylineGlobe Enterprise’s TerraBuilder and TerraGate programs boast features that enhance the performance and usability, following suit after the recent TerraExplorer upgrade to v6.
Notably, Skyline introduced the TerraCatalog as a supplement to Terrabuilder, allowing users to store and organize data sources.
In the article, Directions Magazine revealed the following:
With the…new MPT v3.0 terrain format, data production time [has] been decreased significantly (from prior versions) allowing faster handling of large imagery and elevation data sets and the new architecture allows users to better utilize distributing computing capabilities to share the processing load across multiple servers and processor cores.
The potential for using Skyline products even extends to enterprise level management and scalability with the newest TerraGate v6.
This suite of geospatial visualization, data fusion, and dissemination products offers far more than the average person even knows exists. Our population’s knowledge needs to keep up with our increasingly digitized world’s services. We think when one of the giants falls behind, the quickest way to regain technical initiative is to write a big check. That’s how Googarola came into being. Wait. That was about patents, lots of patents, some of which are of a certain age.
Megan Feil, August 22, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Screen Scraping: Boon or Bane?
August 22, 2011
Everyone who has ever thought about information extraction has considered screen-scraping software. Marco Albanico Inbound MLM does the legwork by explaining, “What You Need To Know Regarding Lead Screen Scraping Software.”
Clever folks can take content from a Web site which some of those original publishers assume will be “safe” from content predators.
We learned the following from this article:
[In addition] to streamlining content, these businesses gather ingenious information, [w]hich happens to be an important resource for just about any company or private group’s use. [It’s] not just for collecting and refining content, you may also take advantage of collected information within an organized form for reasons of intelligence, study, and storage for future use.
Mozenda is the leading software, as proclaimed by users on websites like theeasybee.com. For anyone completely new to Web extraction, they offer to setup the first project for free. They also convert your web data into a myriad of different formats.
Kapow Technologies offers the ability to extract without any coding, using a point and click technology. Their partnership with IBM has enabled them to produce a Web 2.0 Expo application for the iPhone in less than three hours.
The best suggestion Marco Albanico offers is to take advantage of the free trials that these two services and others advertise on their websites. Why limit yourself before exploring all of your options if they’re free?
Megan Feil, August 22, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Ontoprise Updates Its Product Suite
August 22, 2011
Summer is always a good time for new releases and refurbishing the house and enterprise software products.
Ontoprise–a company offering solutions and services in semantic technologies–has rolled out its newest versions of their product suite, OntoBroker 6.1 and OntoStudio 3.1.
Ontroprise’s suite is the only one in the world that supports all of the major W3C Semantic Web recommendations including OWL, RDF(s), RIF and ObjectLogic. We learned that the independent “OpenRuleBench” benchmark recognizes OntoBroker as providing excellent performance and scalability, which allows large and complicated ontologies to be used.
The press release clued us in to some of the key aspects of OntoStudio 3.1; for example:
The two main features…are the harmonization of the ontology language editing perspective and an integrated versioning component based on WebDAV. In [the past], there were separate modeling perspectives for each modeling language. With only one…for all languages, it’s much easier for users to create and maintain ontologies.
Another feature of the updated OntoBroker lies in its support for linked open data (LOD). In addition to being used as a server for LOD, OntoBroker can integrate LOD sources with SPARQL connectors.
For more information, navigate to http://www.ontoprise.de/en/.
Megan Feil, August 22, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of the New Landscape of Enterprise Search
More on Case Sensitivity in SharePoint 2010
August 22, 2011
There’s nothing worse than typing in your password and having an error message bounce back at you. In frustration, you type the password again and again with the same error message displayed on the screen.
The cause?
You forgot which letters were capital or which symbols you used to make it fit the system requirements. Believe it or not, SharePoint has the same problem when it works with case sensitive repositories. The Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog addresses this issue in their article, “Crawling Case Sensitive Repositories Using SharePoint Server 2010.” When crawlers are searching through these repositories they must preserve the links to keep them valid. Otherwise the mixed content is skipped and it creates indexing problems. Usually SharePoint normalizes all links and converts them to lower case, but the 2010 version solved that issue. We learned:
SharePoint Server 2010 extends this functionality by giving more flexibility to the admins so that they can explicitly specify patterns of repositories/hosts/links that they want to crawl while preserving case of links. This is achieved by creating case sensitive crawl rules. The global case preservation flag is set-able via OM and PowerShell.
The crawl rules add two useful features: regular expressions and case preservation. How to use these features with UI, OM, and PowerShell are discussed in great detail with coding examples and screenshots. This article will eliminate the worry about preserving case sensitive links in SharePoint 2010. It’s a simple registry edit, but if you didn’t know how to fix it the error messages would annoy you to no end.
You can improve your users’ search experience in SharePoint with SurfRay’s Ontolica. The system makes it easy to deliver an experience that will sidestep some of the issues about crafting well formed queries.
Whitney Grace, August 22, 2011
Sponsored by SurfRay, developers of the next generation content processing system Ontolica
Quote to Note: Ecosystem Is Where It Is At
August 21, 2011
Quote to note: I was flipping through posts in one of my Overflight files today and read “HTC Pledges Support for Google.”
Here is the passage I noted. Mark the date, August 20, 2011. In the next six to 12 months, this quote may be a touch stone:
Chou [HTC boss] says “it’s not the operating system, it’s the ecosystem,” adding “we think we can find a way to differentiate to add value, but at the same time leverage our partners, Google and Microsoft, since we have such a great relationship with them.”
My view? Watch and wait. I think I will check out my copy of The Art of War. I remember reading something along these lines:
All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near. Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder, and crush him.
Nah, not relevant.
Stephen E Arnold, August 21, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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