Rumor or Fact: Hewlett Packard to Buy Autonomy plc
August 18, 2011
Just documenting a rumor. My source is “HP to Spin Off PCs, Eyes Software Purchase.” Sketchy info but I noted the purchase price, $10 billion—allegedly.
Autonomy provides search and content processing software to more than 20,000 customers. I covered the firm’s IDOL technology in my The New Landscape of Enterprise Search, published in June 2011. Rumors about big outfits’ interest in purchasing Autonomy have swirled the trees here in Harrod’s Creek for several years. If the deal rumor is true, the shrinking world of enterprise search vendors is moving to snow globe status. Dassault purchased industry leader Exalead last year. Microsoft paid $1.2 billion for the quite interesting Fast Search & Technology “solution”. Oracle picked up InQuira, a vendor of natural language processing systems for the customer support sector. IBM buys quite a few content centric companies but is using Lucene for its enterprise search solution. The vendors still in play may be looking for a white knight as well. Our question is, “Why hasn’t Endeca or Vivisimo been snapped up?” Endeca is quite interesting because SAP along with Intel took some interest in the company a couple of years ago. More info as it flows to Harrod’s Creek.
Stephen E Arnold, August 18,2011
Freebie
X1 Rolls Out iPad Search Application
August 18, 2011
With more and more people using tablets instead of personal computers, companies are racing to make their technologies, previously only available on PCs, ready for the tablet. The article, New iPad Release | X1 Technologies Announces New Release Of X1 Mobile Search Enhanced For IPad And IPad 2, on iPad Touch Blog, explains how X1 Technologies have scored big by offering their search services to iPad users.
Based in Pasadena, California, X1 emerged onto the techie seen in the early 2000s with a solution to a growing problem. It seemed that people were utilizing more and more networks of data without any way of connecting the data for easy searching. X1’s answer was to create a powerful search service that allows users to search across “emails, files, attachments, or information scattered across networked servers and document management systems.”
Search has changed since X1’s début in 2003. Today people live and work from their smartphones and tablets. Because of this, service providers are racing to get technology into those tiny little pads. X1 has succeeded and now can proudly say, “We have an app for that.”
As the article explains,
Helping with the passing from one to another to the Post Personal Computer era, the X1 Mobile Search app turns an iPad in to an prolongation of a user’s P.C. by bringing the award-winning and law X1 finding experience to mobile devices. The app enables present and secure remote finding of desktop-bound email, attachments, papers and more.”
With people demanding faster, more accessible modes of information-getting, X1 has responded quickly to this opportunity.
Catherine Lamsfuss, August 18, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
IBM May Need a More Robust Classification Solution
August 18, 2011
According to talk around the water cooler, some IBM content and search units are poking around for a classification “solution”. We think the rumor is mostly big company confusion since IBM already has software available to assess and address an organization’s content classification needs through the use of several components. According to the IBM website:
Most unstructured content is either trapped in silos across the organization or entirely unmanaged “content in the wild.” A majority of that unstructured content can be deemed unnecessary – over-retained, irrelevant, or duplicate – and should be either decommissioned or deleted.
As we understand it, one licenses the Classification Module and/or Content Analytics software to prevent the previously stated problem and to provide content classification.
Sounds great like the ads for IBM mainframes and the promotional information about
But a disturbing question to the ArnoldIT goslings who wear blue IBM logos: What if this stuff costs too much and does not deliver on the fly classification for real time processing of tweets and Google Plus public content?
Maybe an IBM box of parts with an expensive IBM engineering team is not exactly what some outfits require? Perhaps IBM should look around and maybe snap up one of the hot players in the space. IBM has been announcing partnerships with a number of interesting companies. We track Digital Reasoning and and think its technology looks very promising? IBM is in a good position to have an impact in the data analysis space, but it needs tools that go beyond its in house code and Cognos and SPSS methods in our opinion.
Jasmine Ashton, August 19, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
Facebook Groups News Feeds by Topic
August 18, 2011
LifeHackers highlights the new trends and developments in IT in, “Remains of the Day: Facebook’s Grouped News Feed Highlights What’s Popular with Your Friends.”
“Facebook users may soon notice a change in their newsfeeds. The social networking site has begun grouping News Feed stories by topic, allowing users to easily see what stories are popular.”
ZDNet provides more details about the natural language processing that supports the grouped feeds.
It turns out Facebook is using natural language processing on status updates as well as the headlines of posted links to figure out if a topic mentioned has a corresponding Page, and then searches to see if your other friends have done so as well. This helps users quickly see which topics are popular (in Twitter terms, that would be trending topics) amongst their Facebook friends (as opposed to across all of Twitter). It also obviously gives a boost to Pages.
Clearly trying to capitalize on the Twitter concept of trending, grouped news feeds have potential implications to boost ad revenue. Lastly, the feature enables research into a particular individual or topic. Post something on your own page about a politician, for instance, and any subsequent postings by friends will not only group around the original post, but also point to that politician’s personal page as well. In this way, a user could easily follow developments on individuals or organizations of personal or professional interest.
Emily Rae Aldridge, Augsut 18, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
Some Reverse Engineering Baloney about Google
August 18, 2011
This search engine optimization baloney is really getting on my nerves. The idea behind an index is to point to content about something. I don’t want a book index to point me to a page with information that does not match the index. In the free Web search world, the online services depending on advertising have created a mess, and now that mess has undermined the notion of relevance. Now I know what’s relevant. Relevance means those who paid to make a connection between a word or concept and the link. Precision? Recall? Works perfectly when you think about how money delivers eyeballs.
Now that I have explained my disdain for ad-supported services, let me defend one of the outfits which has driven a Hummer over the tidy algorithms for measuring precision and recall. I saw in one of my newsfeeds the spider bait title “How to Reverse Engineer Google Algorithms.”
I knew a trick when I saw.
Here’s a memorable comment:
These web crawlers are trying to get smarter at natural language processing, a sibling of computational linguistics, and they do get smarter, every day – and not just when Google or another search engine company makes major announcements on things like the Panda algorithm. Perhaps in the real world these web crawler ”smarts” are increasingly dumb and blind to global business-to-business (B2B) companies’ online marketing efforts, but that’s another story. If your company is presented with a static list of target ”phrase depth” or ”title counts” or other on-page or off-page factors as a to-do list for search engine optimization that are purported to affect every site on the web the same way, you need to know that this list is pure fiction.
Yep, search engine optimization experts are going to generate traffic with insights like these. Cut to the chase. Fire the PR firm. Just buy Adwords.
Stephen E Arnold, August 18, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
PowerGUI: When You Must Write Scripts
August 18, 2011
One of our goals at Beyond Search is finding tools to make your IT experience easier.
We continue to expand our coverage of SharePoint because it continues to capture the attention of organizations in search of ways to cope with the digital content produced in the course of everyday work tasks.
Our most recent third party discovery is PowerGUI, a great addition to SharePoint. It is a, “an extensible graphical administrative console and IDE for managing systems based on Windows PowerShell. The PowerGUI is a graphical interface to Microsoft PowerShell intended to make SharePoint scripting more rapid.
You can use PowerGUI for your scripts. The developer is confident that the tool can be used to maintain an entire SharePoint installation. For example, the software can monitor running commands and display the code behind with a click.
PowerGUI includes a setting filter feature. You can search through code and create nodes based on your requirements. The software includes what the developer calls PowerPacks for social media, security, script editors, and remote computer management.
PowerGui is available for free download from the web site and there is also a commercial version available for purchase: PowerGUI Pro.
As you work to streamline your work with Microsoft SharePoint, take a look at the powerful Ontolica line up which consists of
- Ontolica Enterprise Search vastly improves search functionality, customizability and leverages actual user behavior to improve relevance and knowledge sharing.
- Ontolica Search Preview supports over 500 formats, provides first page preview directly in your result list, and allows you to dive into documents and preview them page by page straight from the result list.
- Ontolica Library Preview enables full content preview for your document libraries, and lets you explore and navigate your content like never before.
Stephen E Arnold, August 18, 2011
Sponsored by SurfRay
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Access Innovations Expands, Supports Medical Coding
August 17, 2011
We learned from one of our readers that Access Innovations that the company has expanded into an exciting new area—medical coding and analysis. In our opinion, the company is one of the leaders in taxonomy and controlled-term related systems and services delivering solutions that reduce errors and costs.
According to our reader:
Access Innovations, Inc., a leader in data integrity and content creation, has announced the Access Innovations Integrity Initiative (AI³), a suite of tools and services for quality assurance and validation of medical coding. Access Innovations Integrity Initiative is not just for physicians, hospitals, and their data service providers. It also includes tools that give auditors and insurers the information management tools they need to quickly identify areas of noncompliance or suspicious activity.
Margie Hlava, whom we interviewed a few weeks ago, told us:
We are dedicated to productivity and cost savings as a company. This new application of our long-standing tool set enables a radical departure from other less consistent and accurate tools. These are the tools used in scholarly publishing and other information activities for many years. Applying ANSI standard-compliant Data Harmony tools to the health arena, coupled with our support of automated coding accuracy, means cost savings as well as increased precision.
Why the expansion at a time when dozens of search and content processing companies are struggling to find shelter in the financial hail storms which buffet many vendors? According to Ms. Hlava,
Coding mistakes or improper coding adds to the cost of health care through out the service chain. AI³ can lower those administrative costs. An initial consultation leads to the development of an automated audit-trigger analysis, identifying inefficiencies and inaccuracies based on records, notes, or other supplied data. A rules-based approach allows for the analysis of dynamic data sets, unlike a purely statistical approach, which quickly becomes suboptimal as more data is entered. The system can be used to quickly and accurately validate medical coding or to locate errors in existing documentation. Our technology delivers cost savings without compromise.
For more information about Access Innovations’ services, navigate to Access Innovations Integrity Initiative. For more information about the firm’s landmark technology, navigate to this product catalog.
How do I know the company’s approach works? We used this system when I was working at the commercial database company producing ABI/INFORM, Business Dateline, and other high value, profitable databases.
Stephen E Arnold, August 1, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Lexalytics Tries a Modified Freemium Promotion
August 17, 2011
Anyone interested in trying out a new and improved search service should consider Lexalytics freemium offer. Available for download on their website is a trial version of their software, as explained in the article, Lexalytics, Inc. Offers No-Hassle Trial of Text Analytics Solution, on Musicsalls.
With more and more companies losing precious man-hours sorting through troves of useless data, a new industry of uber-search software has emerged. Every company has a different spin on how they extrapolate legitimate and useful data, and Lexalytics is no different. As explained in the article,
Lexalytics’ Text Analytics Trial supports the ability for users to gather up to 50 documents of various types, including html, word, PowerPoint, PDF and text. In addition, users may select from a list of full-text RSS feeds for analysis. The application processes these documents or feeds to extract pertinent metadata including people, places, and companies. It then applies tone and sentiment results to those entities.
For companies not quite ready to sign on the dotted line, this might be a good option. The free trial includes the same software capabilities offered to clients. They tout themselves as offering, “Tailored fit, off the rack ease, and designer results.” We admire the wording, and with sentiment analysis becoming more fashionable, we think you will want to take a closer look at the firm’s technology.
Text data mining is a field exploding in popularity and those fortunate enough (or smart enough) to get in at the beginning are hanging on for a wild and profitable ride. Since so many companies are providing basically the same service, new angles and spins are necessary to catch the consumer eye. Lexalytics’ freemium is a proven winner and wise choice.
We want to note the use of more aggressive marketing methods in the search and content processing sector.
Catherine Lamsfuss, September 7, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Insight into News Corp.: If True, Amazing Method for Creating Content
August 17, 2011
I don’t know if the information in “Phone Hacking Letter Spells More Trouble for Murdoch and News Corp.” is accurate. Since I don’t “do” news, I look at most of the content available via the Web with some skepticism. Since I am not a “real” anything, I am not qualified to determine what is right and wrong in the rough and tumble world of newspaper publishing. With pressures on publishing companies increasing, the line between marketing and research seems to be fuzzy. In the quest for eyeballs, I am beginning to think that anything goes.
Here is the passage that caught my attention:
Dated March 2, 2007, Mr. Goodman’s letter was sent as a protest against his firing from NotW [News of the World] following his arrest for phone hacking. Goodman, the former royals correspondent, asserts dismay over his dismissal since hacking was “widely discussed” and supported by senior NotW [News of the World] management. At the parliamentary hearing last month, the Murdochs asserted that they did not know the scale of the hacking practice until recently, and said they thought it was restricted to Goodman. Yet immediately after the hearing, two former News International executives contested the younger Murdoch’s claim of ignorance.
Fascinating. Next time I read a “real news” story about publishing, I will make a note to consider the likelihood that some drift may be inserted into what’s stated. I wonder how News Corp. will present the trajectory of MySpace.com or how other “real” information distribution channels will describe certain events. I am certain there is an explanation for the apparent discontinuity.
Stephen E Arnold, August 17, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Google Continues Its Push to Diversification
August 17, 2011
“Google Parcel Service? Search Company Patents Electronic Shipping Notifications,” reports Geek Wire. That’s right. Google, itself a victim of the absurd patent wars, has claimed an absurd patent. Writer Todd Bishop comments,
Google’s battle against Microsoft and Apple over their use of ‘bogus’ patents promises to result in greater scrutiny of its own intellectual property holdings. And we have a hunch that Amazon.com, UPS, the U.S. Postal Service and pretty much everyone else in the shipping business will be highly interested in this new addition to Google’s portfolio. The search giant this week was awarded a patent on electronic shipping notifications, of all things.
It really is as basic as it sounds. The patent abstract describes the process of sending notifications via text messages or email about the progress of a package and its expected arrival time. Patents are supposed to be awarded for novel ideas, ones we wouldn’t expect most people in an industry to conceive of. This one is just a piece of common sense.
Patent controversy aside, though, we have another observation: Google is getting farther and farther away from its roots. This may turn out okay, but maybe not. Remember Google TV?
Cynthia Murrell, August 17, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
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