Thetus Talks UX Over Beer
October 7, 2011
A press release from Thetus, “Have A Beer, Talk UX/UI,” invites anyone in
Silicon Forest of the Pacific Northwest to talk shop over a beer. Advertising for what they hope will be a reoccurring event, Thetus has decided to host a user group called PDX-UX.
Details for the inaugural meeting are as follows:
Our presenters are: Dino Citraro from Periscopic, demoing a project that will be released in November for The Economist, Paul Wagner, demoing Forkfly 4.0, Brian Reavis, demoing Seamless Studio, Object Prism’s Jim Klein, talking usage analytics and customer engagement optimization tools available for designers, and Kelly White, demoing a Windows 8 Tablet.
It’s an interesting marketing tool to say the least. The offer of beer is likely enough to draw a crowd. Sorry, we don’t drink and we are not sure beer and search are a felicitous combination. But if you find yourself in Portland, head to Thetus headquarters – hey, free beer.
Emily Rae Aldridge, October 07, 2011
Study Sets Stage for Vapor Niches
October 7, 2011
The global market intelligence firm International Data Corporation (IDC) has published a new vendor assessment profiling the leading providers in the worldwide standalone early case assessment (ECA) applications market which is currently an undeveloped niche. This report rigorously scores current search software providers and predicts their market capabilities and strategies.
The Sept 19 news release IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Standalone Early Case Assessment Applications 2011 Vendor Analysis reveals leaders in a hitherto unknown niche. The release states:
DC sized the revenue for the standalone ECA applications market at $281 million in 2010. The top 5 vendors, by revenue, accounted for 71% of total revenue during this period. Given the reported revenue growth of the market leaders in the first half of 2011, IDC forecasts revenue for the standalone ECA applications market will total $400.8 million in 2011 and will reach $857.0 million in 2015,” said Vivian Tero, program director, Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) Infrastructure at IDC.
Consultants and advisors continue to struggle to get their arms around vendors who are changing direction without logic, notice or much reason. Consultants who fail to recognize this run the risk of creating “vapor niches”.
Jasmine Ashton, Sept 24, 2011
Improve Your SharePoint My Sites Usability
October 7, 2011
Navigation is not effective in My Sites. The definition of navigation is finding a target location based on one’s current location using at least one reference point. This reference point can be a visual landmark or a point in previous location.
Q-Sensei: Multi-Dimensional Information Management
October 6, 2011
I found the MarketWatch story or news release “Frost & Sullivan Recognizes Q-Sensei’s Innovative Enterprise Search Platform for Providing Relevant Search Results across Information Sources” a buzzword bonanza. The system seems more versatile than Autonomy’s, Exalead’s, and Apache Lucene combined if I believe the story or news release. I am confident some of the azure chip crowd and the former librarians laboring away as search experts will gobble the hook and its plastic worm. Geese eat bread crumbs and trash, by the way.
Before getting to the meat of the story or news release, I noted this sub head:
Q-Sensei Leverages Its Proprietary Search and Indexing Engine to Offer High-Performance, Multi-Dimensional Information Management Capabilities to Deliver Quick ROI for Enterprises.
The story or news release explains that the system:
- Won an award for innovation
- provides a “holistic, multi-dimensional, real time view of enterprise data. (Repetition of the word does not help my understanding, however.)
- Unified access to structure, semi structured and unstructured data
- A simple interface
- Offers the user an ability to collate data available in varied formats across different resources.
I will be talking about the meanings of “real time” and some of the weaknesses these systems hide under a pile of marketing brochures. I find the notion of “data dimensions” interesting, but I am not sure what that means. One of the challenges many systems have is proper time identification. A file stamp is one time, but when the document was written to a storage device is another. There is also the interesting challenge of a document changed offline and then a week later written to the device monitored by a system. Presumably Q-Sensei can handles these different time issues.
The write up also tosses in the MBA tattoo, ROI. Search is being embedded, morphed, and marginalized. I am not sure how one calculates ROI in an organization today, particularly if the company is losing money or disappointing investors who have watched their cash disappear. I suppose there is a negative ROI, but that is not mentioned in the story or news release.
If you want more information about this “easy to implement” system, navigate to the firm’s Web site. You can get more lingo like “haystacks”, multi-dimensional, and ROI. Q-Sensei’s Search and Presentation Engine is protected by U.S. Patents 7,080,059 and 7,680,777. More information can be found at www.qsensei.com.
Stephen E Arnold, October 6, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
New York Times and About: Layoffs
October 6, 2011
Is it possible that Google’s search algorithm changes are hurting more than just the average search user?
About.com posted weak revenues in the most recent quarter and attributed the lag to changes in Google search and slow ad sales. The site’s revenues dropped 10.2 percent in the last quarter. In hopes for some stability, The New York Times’-owned company recently laid off 15 editorial staffers and will be hiring 10 replacements as they reconstruct the site’s mission.
Yahoo News’ article, “About.com lays off staffers; hires replacements” shared more about the changes. We learned:
[Kristin Mason, a spokeswoman for the internet company, said] 10 new full-time positions will be created, with outgoing staff members to be given “first-priority” to apply for the new posts. She said many are expected to be rehired. The organization will be broken into four groups: Guide Operations & Recruitment, About Editorial & Quality Review, Site Review and Community Tools. This is intended to improve the site’s focus and quality.
Even with promises of “first-priority” for outgoing staff members, there will still be five positions completely cut from the company. To me, this doesn’t look like simple reconstruction with hopes for stability. This looks like brute force cost reduction in its purest form.
Publishers who hope for stable ad revenues going forward may want to consider the plight of the Gray Lady. If the New York Times can’t sell ad, how will lesser publications’ ad sales teams do in the last quarter of 2011 and the first six months of 2012?
Andrea Hayden, October 6, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Do Some Search Vendors Have Name Issues?
October 6, 2011
Long conference call after I returned from the land of beets and goulashes. The problem which the client wished to discuss was traffic to the firm’s Web site. My view of search engine optimization is that it is pretty much a waste of time. Buy Adwords and skip the silliness of have home economics majors “index” content and coders looking for ways to fool Father Google and Mother Bing.
I won’t mention the client’s company, but I can use a handful of examples to illustrate the what I call the “findability” problem. Here are a few examples of vendors selected from the Overflight service:
Brainware. Clever name, but when you run the query on YouTube.com, I get academic institutions, an outfit in India sharing the same company name, and some “interesting” videos which I won’t describe.
Connotate. Connotate does well in Google search results. When looking for the company in blogs, the word “connotate” predominates. Run a Twitter query to see what I mean.
Mark Logic or MarkLogic. There seem to be two spellings floating around. I am not sure if the name is an issue or if there is simply zero content when running queries in services like Moreover.
Solr. Although not a company, the name is a problem. A publicly traded company uses the string “solr” as a ticker/trading code. To see the consequences of this naming choice, set up an alert on Google or another service. You will see that the “solr” links pumps mostly the stock, not the search system.
Thunderstone. This company has been in the search business a long time. When I run a query for Thunderstone, most of the hits are to a game. Google does show the company on the first page of the search results, but the game company seems to be in a commanding position in a query.
What’s my take?
I think that search vendors have quite a bit of work to do to protect their existing product or company names. I think that Brainware and Thunderstone are examples of vendors not putting enough horses on the wagon to keep their firms visible. For Connotate, the word is a good one, but in today’s free text world, work must be done to keep the company semantically hooked to the terms. Clearly, that’s not happening for Connotate, the vendor of agent software. For MarkLogic, I think the dual spellings are a possible factor, but maybe the company is just not outputting enough information to have traction.
Is there a fix? Yep, www.augmentext.com. Will SEO do the job? Probably not.
When I mentioned this on the call, my client wanted SEO. I said, “So buy SEO services.” Then I said, “Supplement that investment with Adwords.” Traffic is the name of the Bing and Google game, not traffic because one has a clever name.
Stephen E Arnold, October 6, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Google Plus and Kumbaya
October 6, 2011
We think Google Plus or Google+ is quite interesting. We are convinced that Google Plus is the “new” Google. Our view is that search is being de-emphasized just as it is in the Windows 8 user experience.
Frankly we were surprised with the assertions, allegations, or revelations in “Google’s Management Doesn’t Use Google+.” The write up has a nifty chart which lists quite a few Googlers. The chart contains data about these individuals’ use of Google Plus. The idea is that the most prolific Googler is Vic Gundotra, the former Microsoft executive, and now Google senior vice president of social. (We hope this is not the “Welcome to the Social” usage of the word “social” that we noted with the Zune.)
Image source: http://i672.photobucket.com/albums/vv83/col1mjn/Weekly/anti-kumbaya.png
Here’s the passage we noted along with the table:
In total, of the 18 most senior people charged with overseeing Google, 11 have either not joined or have never made a single public post, and 5 have barely used it at all. Only Senior VP of Social / head of Google+ Vic Gundotra and SVP of Chrome Sundar Pichai have made any effort to seriously adopt Google+.
Several observations:
First, perhaps the data are incomplete?
Second, we find that social services exhibit a usage pattern among most users of drifting away due to the time commitment versus the pay back calculation users run once the novelty of a service wears off.
Third, Googlers are busy. There are investments in alternative energy, facilities in Norway, legal hassles, internal meetings to make the interaction of the advertising and search teams increasingly harmonious and effective. If I were smart enough to be a Googler, I might not have the time to invest in Google Plus.
The bottom line is that the “new” Google is more about creating a massive, integrated operating experience. Google Plus is the tip of the iceberg. My hunch is that Google Plus will become a much used service when bonuses are hooked to posts. Until then, I am not sure of the uptake.
Google Plus posts can become issues in a legal matter, and I think that until the litigation storms blow over, getting lots of outputs may be difficult.
Stephen E Arnold, October 6, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Who Is Using SharePoint? The Fortune 500 That Is Who
October 6, 2011
Oh boy! Our content wranglers found another great list and we are excited about it. Once more TopSharePoint.com pools its sources to gather twenty-five “Fortune 500 Companies Using SharePoint.” We noted the list and this passage:
Microsoft is still claiming SharePoint Server as the fastest growing product in company history, which is very impressive coming from such a diversified software maker powerhouse. According to Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) one in two corporations are now using SharePoint Server and in 22% of the companies, every employee uses this popular Microsoft collaboration tool. SharePoint usage is widely spread due to its complex collaboration structure and its flexibility.
Microsoft has the right to brag about this client list. Among the top SharePoint users are Kroger, Viacom, Kraft, Procter and Gamble (Tampax, Pantenem, and Pringles), Dell, and Dollar General. Each company takes advantage of the many services that SharePoint offers such as enterprise content management, business intelligence, archiving, file sharing, and public web sites. Despite these great services, how many of these firms have search under control?
What makes the list useful is that it is a prospect list for vendors who have certified add ons or subsystems which enhance and extend SharePoint. If we were working at a Fortune 500 company, we would first check out the search system. If it were lacking timely index updates and similar “must have” features, we would license a product like SurfRay Ontolica. This Danish firm has a solution that makes most SharePoint installations, regardless of size and scale, serve the users, not fight them.
Whitney Grace, October 6, 2011
SurfRay
Steve Jobs: An Era Ends
October 5, 2011
When beggars die, there are no comets seen;
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.—Julius Caesar, Act II, Sc. II
Stephen E Arnold, October 5, 2011
Text Analytics Summit Freight Train Arrives in November 2011
October 5, 2011
We wanted to remind you that the Text Analytics Summit West is November 10th and 11th in San Jose, California. The conference venue is the Convention Plaza Hotel. Among the speakers are:
- Tom H. C. Anderson, Managing Partner of Anderson Analytics
- Cliff Figallo, Senior Site Curator and Editor at Smart Data Collective and Social Media Today
- Vincent Granville, Chief Architect, Executive Director of AnalyticBridge and many other analytics visionaries and practitioners.
You can read an informative transcript of a discussion among these three experts at http://www.textanalyticsnews.com/text-mining-conference-west/summit-news.shtml.
The conference program is available on the Text Analytics News Web site. The conference offers special student discounts.
Stephen E Arnold, October 5, 2011
Sponsored by Text Analytics News
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