Google Reworks Its Approach to Innovation
November 15, 2011
In the aftermath of Steve Jobs’ death, innovation is a hot topic. Even consumer television programs stick in a reference to Mr. Jobs’ attention to detail, his brush with oriental philosophy, and his mental processes which would get him deleted from the interview pool at General Motors. Since Mr. Jobs’ death, Apple has made some mistakes which suggests that the loss may have generated some negative karma for Apple.
Apple may have innovation challenges going forward. I now hypothesize that Google has here and now innovation problems, and I think the firm’s most recent actions underscore that innovation is a concern to Google’s senior management.
As you may know, Google’s not-so-quiet shift from “we do it all in the Googleplex” to a more traditional approach to finding great ideas turned out the lights in the “old” Google Labs. Now many of the “real” consultants and journalists will point out that Google is an innovation machine. Examples range from the upgrade to Google+ Facebook type service to the tweaks to maps, Gmail, and Google Apps. Point taken, but let me summarize the thought that was triggered by three apparently unrelated announcements. Some of the azure chip crowd will assert that I, once again, am off base, living in rural Kentucky, and past my prime.
No problem. But consider:
First, last week Google bought two companies. Google has been acquiring companies quickly, and I thought it was a combination of getting people and technology. You can read about the deals in “Google Acquires Apture and Katango”. Apture developed an in-browser search gizmo described as a “glossary for the Web,” and Katango offers an automatic friend manager. (The Katango url was dark, but the eWeek story to which I linked explains what Katango did or does.) Net net: Buying ideas.
Google is throwing money, people, and public relations at its innovation problem. Is this is warning light that the engines of creativity at Google are ill-suited to breakthroughs that neutralize challenges from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and other firms which are gaining momentum in lucrative new markets.
Second, my dead tree copy of the New York Times ran a front page story about Google’s “new” and presumably “real” Google Labs. You can find it in the November 13, 2011 production copy which arrives in Louisville with a November 14, 2011, date. “Google’s Lab of Wildest Dreams” is one of those big company public relations coups that make smaller outfits turn green with envy. I learned in the carefully shaped story that Google has a “new” Google Labs, Google X. It is a “clandestine lab where Google is tackling 100 shoot-for-the-stars ideas.” So the demise of the “old” Google Labs was not the “termination with extreme prejudice” of “labs.” Google just trimmed the fat and narrowed its focus to 100 “shoot-for-the-stars” ideas. I understand gentle pruning of innovative deadwood, reassignment of bright folks without hurting too many egos, and the focus thing. Net net: Focusing the best of the best on 100 problems to get a home run.
Third, ITProPortal recycle ad story from Globes, an Israeli newspaper, that Google was “planning to establish an incubator for startups in Israel” in 2012. “Google to Incubate Startups in Israel” said:
The company said that it plans to host 20 pre-seed start-ups or 80 people in the incubator program. Google plans to give the start-up training for a minimum of three months. Google said that it was interested in companies developing projects based on open source technologies similar to Android and Chrome web browser.
Israel has some innovative folks. My Overflight service is chock-a-block with references to Google’s activities in Israel, but this is another public relations or marketing nudge related to innovation. Net net: Fund smart people in Israel and presumably elsewhere like Beijing, Moscow, etc.
Protected: SharePoint Has a Content Rating Feature
November 14, 2011
McKinsey Measure’s The Economic Impact of the Internet
November 14, 2011
The global system of interconnected computer networks that we know as the Internet serves billions of users worldwide. But few people realize the financial impact it has on the world. I came across a fascinating article this week that sites a recent McKinsey report explaining the different facets of the Internet as a global economy in three sections.
According to the Atlantic article, “The $8 Trillion Internet: McKinsey’s Bold Attempt to Measure the E-conomy,” with an $8 trillion global economy, the Internet accounted for 21 percent of GDP growth in the world’s largest economies over the last 5 years. That makes it larger than the economies of many countries.
The article states:
“As an industry, the Internet contributes more to the typical developed economy than mining, utilities, agriculture, or education. In Sweden, fully one-third of economic growth in the five years leading up to the recession came from Internet activities. For the entire G-8, the average was 21 percent. In an analysis of France since the mid-1990s, McKinsey found that the Internet created more than twice the number of jobs it destroyed.”
While it is difficult to measure the impact that the Internet has on our daily lives, I think McKinsey did an excellent job of visually and numerically presenting this data. Kudos to you!
Jasmine Ashton, November 14, 2011
Common Crawl Makes Baby Steps Towards Google’s Index Numbers
November 14, 2011
Read Write Web published an interesting article recently called “New 5 Billion Page Web Index With Page Rank Now Available.” Not only their page index and page ranks are openly accessible, but also their link graphs and other metadata. Hosted on Amazon EC2, this feat was announced by the Common Crawl Foundation.
Unfortunately for Common Crawl Foundation, we heard Google indexes 32 billion web pages. They remain optimistic because of their cloud computing infrastructure that theoretically provides unlimited storage room in addition to localized access to an elastic compute cloud.
The three-year old organization has just started releasing information about themselves publicly. They made the following statement:
“Common Crawl is a Web Scale crawl, and as such, each version of our crawl contains billions of documents from the various sites that we are successfully able to crawl. This dataset can be tens of terabytes in size, making transfer of the crawl to interested third parties costly and impractical. In addition to this, performing data processing operations on a dataset this large requires parallel processing techniques, and a potentially large computer cluster.”
While they plan on this project lending itself towards a new wave of “innovation, education and research,” they will need to ramp up their numbers before they can really claim that they provide access.
Megan Feil, November 14, 2011
Free Web Search Share, October 2011
November 14, 2011
Short honk: Navigate to “Google Grabs Search Share from Microsoft.”
Here’s the quote which I assume directly supports Google’s assertion that it is not a monopoly:
The report with comScore’s October 2011 Explicit Core Search results show that in the United States, Google has moved up from 65.3 percent market share in September to 65.6 percent in October. At the same time, Yahoo sites dipped from 15.5 percent to 15.2 percent and Microsoft sites improved slightly from 14.7 percent to 14.8 percent. When you combine the two, Microsoft-driven searches fell from 30.2 percent to 30.0 percent.
Microsoft, to its credit, continues to displace Google in search. Persistent outfit.
Stephen E Arnold, November 14, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Mindbreeze Offers Standalone Enterprise Solution
November 14, 2011
CMS Wire follows the latest trends in enterprise CMS in “Forrester Wave Q4 2011: Bye-Bye Enterprise CMS Suites, Content-Centric Apps Are King.” Content needs are becoming more complex and organizations are turning to multiple solutions and away from a single CMS suite.
“The first dynamic that the Forrester report identifies shows that companies are no longer looking to a single enterprise CMS suite to solve all their content needs. There are a number of reasons for this, but looming over them all is the fact that changing content-types and greater use of, and need to manage, unstructured content is pushing many companies to use whatever application suits, from whatever vendors are providing those applications, to solve specific business problems. And then, of course, information workers have to be able to use all these applications.”
Relying on the variety of vendors might not be the solution to the changing enterprise landscape. Instead, choosing an agile and capable vendor like Mindbreeze seamlessly solves all of your business needs on multiple levels: mobile, web, and enterprise. When multiple vendors are utilized, information workers are forced to train on a variety of platforms and applications. Using one flexible solution like Mindbreeze saves valuable training time.
“SharePoint, and in particular the new release, Forrester argues, which provides ‘ECM for the masses’ has forced many vendors to rethink strategies and move towards more content-centric development. As a result, competing vendors have been obliged to move toward specific content sets to differentiate themselves from it. Consequently, the market is now divided into a number of different types of players.”
Instead of being forced into this trend, and choosing different vendors for different content, choose one reliable vendor like Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Applications are still content-centric, but in a smart and streamlined way, all underneath the banner of one dependable name.
*Disclaimer – Mindbreeze is currently upgrading their website. Links will be checked and if problems arise they will be updated. Thanks for your patience.
Emily Rae Aldridge, November 14, 2011
Selventa and Linguamatics Team Up to Mine Scientific Research Details
November 14, 2011
At the end of last month, Cambridge MA based Selventa, a personalized healthcare company, announced that they were teaming up with text mining UK based software firm Linguamatics to extract complex life science knowledge in a computable, structured, biological expression language (BEL) format that can be used to interpret large-scale experimental data in the context of published literature.
In a November 7, Fierce Biotech post “Selventa and Linguamatics Team on Mining Details in Journals” David de Graaf, president and CEO of Selventa, was quoted saying:
“Collaborating with Linguamatics will enable rapid yet comprehensive investigation of new areas of biology by extracting computable knowledge from unstructured text. This will lead to innovation on many fronts, such as next generation sequencing, where well-structured information for reasoning has been limited.”
The technology created from this unique partnership could save Scientists countless hours that they previously spent poring over scientific texts or doing manual database searches to get to the findings they need for studies. You’ve gotta love technological innovation.
Jasmine Ashton, November 14, 2011
Dr. Jerry Lucas, Telestrategies
November 14, 2011
An Exclusive Interview from ArnoldIT.com
In October 2011, I had a chance to talk informally with Dr. Jerry Lucas, an expert in telecommunications and the owner of the Telestrategies conference series. I was quite interested in his views about content processing. His interest spans text and the large volumes of information that accrue in modern telecommunications systems. One theme which threaded thought his observations was the large volume of data that is now available in digital form. I don’t want to denigrate the commercial services who chit chat about “big data” for figuring out which soap detergent is perceived as having a “smiley face” on the brand. I do want to point out that the Telestrategies’ conferences are designed for law enforcement agencies, intelligence professionals, and practitioners who either work as advisors to agencies or as product developers. Put that your AtomicPR water balloon, insert XML tags, and spam the connected world.
The full text of the interview with him appears as part of the Search Wizards Speak series, which is the largest, free collection of first person narratives about information retrieval. The full text of my conversation with him is at this link. The master index for the series is available on the Beyond Search Web site at Wizards Index.
I wanted to highlight two points Dr. Lucas made in our discussion.
First, I asked him, “What is your view of the challenges flows of digital information pose to government professionals working in law enforcement or the intelligence community?” He told me:
First and foremost are the lack of updated laws creating new lawful interception mandates. In the US the last technical mandate law passed by Congress was the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act. CALEA was passed in 1994 and enacted in 1995. The key players providing today’s communication services used by bad guys—specifically, Apple, Facebook, Google, Second Life, Skype, etc.–are not covered by CALEA mandates nor any other interception assistance laws. These companies have to respond to court orders but these companies don’t have to deploy any infrastructure features to assist law enforcement. I think this is a challenge which must be resolved. A second big challenge law enforcement and intelligence professionals is the lack of educational and budget support by their senior management. As you know, today’s senior management developed professionally in their careers depending on voice calls and e-mail messaging as their prime electronic communications tools. Today many senior managers still make phone calls and send e-mails during working hours and likely watch TV during off hours. So here is my point. To understand what’s needed to police a community you have to live in that community. I call this Policing 101. But Today’s senior managers usually don’t live in the Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Second Life and other cyber space environments as part of their every day activities.
Second, I asked Dr. Lucas, “You have a unique vantage point on some quite interesting technologies. If you were to advise a developer at a large firm specializing in digital information analysis, what would be the three most important features the company should include in their next product release?”
I know you are aware of the phenomenal requirements regarding data privacy or who can access data in a law enforcement agency. Privacy policies and safeguards for open source search in an enterprise can be very lax with regard to a law enforcement agency. Data gathered on a bad guy from a communications service provides under a court order is not fair game for searching over time by law enforcement professional. Those data may have to be erased over time and more. So compliance is an essential characteristic of many products and service. Second, product feature to consider is interoperability with legacy lawful intercept and intelligence gathering products. Interoperability is very important. So called “fork lifts” are rare events in this space and no one in this space wants to see an additional screen introduced in the central monitoring center. I want to emphasize that the user interface must be simple and shouldn’t require the user to be highly computer literate.
I found that the Apple influence is extending beyond the iPhone and iPad crowd. For more of Dr. Lucas’ insights and views, point your browser to the Dr. Jerry Lucas Interview. Information about Telestrategies is located at www.ISSWorldTraining.com.
Stephen E Arnold, November 14, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Softpedia Presents Another All-Encompassing Freeware Clipboard
November 13, 2011
Softpedia now features the Spartan Lite Multi-Clipboard as a free software download. Based on the website’s description, it appears to have some handy features. It reminds me of Evernote minus the graphics editors.
This software sells itself as being more than a clipboard application–it claims to be a complete information center for your computer. Looking at the list it can help you remember a cornucopia of different things: addresses, phone numbers, to-do lists, graphics, recipes, etc. When it boils down to it, basically the program will allow you to see if you’ve typed the same thing before, browse photos and paste them into an email, and other typical clipboard apps functions.
The site description also mentions this version’s shortcomings. It says:
“The Lite version has no time limit and no nags. The only difference between it and the full version is that it can only store 500 permanent clips whereas the full version can store 10,000.”
The purpose of this freeware in theory sounds great, but in reality it is another one of the jack of all trades but master of none applications.
Megan Feil, November 13, 2011
Is Enterprise Search Mission Impossible?
November 13, 2011
Our feeling about enterprise search is that it is difficult, complicated, and nearly impossible. Apparently we are sailing this ocean alone. Emily Rae Aldridge seems to think that the folks over at Polyspot are accomplishing the mission quite effectively. Here’s what we learned: Most people have low expectations for what is considered a usable search engine. Energy and attention in development are often devoted to the “bells and whistles” when that same energy should be put into improving the basics of search itself. Lynda Moulton expounds on the topic in her blog entry, “Why Isn’t Enterprise Search Mission Critical ?”
Why isn’t ‘search’ the logical end-point in any content and information management activity? If we don’t care about being able to find valued and valuable information, why bother with any of the myriad technologies employed to capture, organize, categorize, store, and analyze content. What on earth is the point of having our knowledge workers document the results of their business, science, engineering and marketing endeavors, if we never aspire to having it retrieved, leveraged or re-purposed by others?
Hot trends such as big data analysis and business analytics are just buzzwords if not underpinned by strong search basics. In terms of software, big data analysis and business analytics are enjoying the sharpest current growth. However, are these new approaches tangential? Do they save the user time or energy?
PolySpot thinks information management should turn isolated data into shared information. Through its open search solutions, PolySpot is keeping search mission critical. From their solutions page:
“According to IDC, information system users waste 25% of their time searching for information using multiple applications and spend several hours each week recreating content which, unbeknown to them, already exists.”
In the business world, 25% of any resource is a sizeable investment. Keep search central and invest in software solutions that improve the user’s experience and efficiency.
Information management is a topic near and dear to some of the ArnoldIT members, in particular Constance Ard. She reiterates that “software alone can’t accomplish enterprise search, it requires governance, accountability, processes, and technology.” Even she agreed that Polyspot seems committed to helping organizations accomplish the mission by concentrating on those same factors in their enterprise applications.
Jasmine Ashton, November 13, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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