More Information Mounting in Anti-Trust Cases to Take Google Down
November 15, 2011
Tech Eye News reports on a piece to the ongoing antitrust cases jigsaw puzzle in their article, “Search Outfit Argues Panda Key to Google Antitrust Case.” Foundem, a product search site has asserted that Google directly targets household name search sites through the Panda algorithm.
Foundem initiated the European Commission antitrust investigation after witnessing their site drop down the page rankings upon the introduction of Universal Search in 2007.
We learned about the following perspective from the article:
Foundem does have some compelling data, which aims to show that Google has abused its position when it moved into product search. Google boss Schmidt was called before the Senate in September to discuss antitrust allegations, and it is Foundem’s research that was used to illustrate the dominance of Google’s product search.
Foundem believes they have support for stopping Google in their attempts to monopolize every technology market possible. Microsoft-owned Ciao and French search site Twenga have approached the European Commission in regards to Google as well.
Our opinion is that Google, as a search giant trying to integrate other services and applications has been forward thinking enough to stay on top thus far. We don’t see them weakening any time in the near future unless there is enough brute force to take them down.
Megan Feil, November 15, 2011
Up the Value Chain: Open Source Plus Commercial Know How
November 15, 2011
Along with open source applications comes a certain amount of risk. A recent article on Network World, titled “Advocating Open Source Management Can Be a Disaster,” explores how to balance praising the new technology and warning of the possible risks inherent.
Comparing open source technology to a four year old running free in a parking lot the article recommends combining praise for the gift of open source while keeping just the right amount of responsibility by reminding users of the risks.
The article provides several recommendations including some typical ones: be an expert in the area in which you are preaching and have buddies to back you up. They also suggest the following:
Associate with the mainstream- Communicate that having policies and procedures for managing risk are a normal part of doing business. (That’s what Sarbanes Oxley is about.) Managing how open source is used in software development is just another process like managing requirements, quality, security or issue tracking.
With so much at risk with this revolutionizing technology it pays to make sure the risk is managed right the first time. Companies which specialize in information management can offers its clients open source content connectors. Licensees can use these to handle many content acquisition needs.
After reading this information, I realized that the Paris-based Polyspot offers tools and know how which can deliver open source plus commercial know how. Whether infrastructure, search, or management processes in work flow, Polyspot is delivering.
Stephen E Arnold, November 15, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Business Process Is Not Information Management
November 15, 2011
We continue to run across some interesting stories about Enterprise Data. This one from Catherine Lamsfuss caused quite a debate at lunch. Here’s what we read:
As the amount of data within a business or industry grows the question of what to do with it arises. The article, “Business Process Management and Mastering Data in the Enterprise“, on Capgemini’s website explains how Business Process Management (BPM) is not the ideal means for managing data.
According the article as more and more operations are used to store data the process of synchronizing the data becomes increasingly difficult.
As for using BPM to do the job, the article explains,
While BPM tools have the infrastructure to do hold a data model and integrate to multiple core systems, the process of mastering the data can become complex and, as the program expands across ever more systems, the challenges can become unmanageable. In my view, BPMS solutions with a few exceptions are not the right place to be managing core data[i]. At the enterprise level MDM solutions are for more elegant solutions designed specifically for this purpose.
The answer to this ever-growing problem was happened upon by combining knowledge from both a data perspective and a process perspective. The article suggests that a Target Operating Model (TOM) would act as a rudder for the projects aimed at synchronizing data. After that was in place a common information model be created with enterprise definitions of the data entities which then would be populated by general attributes fed by a single process project.
While this is just one man’s answer to the problem of data, it is a start. Regardless of how businesses approach the problem it remains constant–process management alone is not efficient enough to meet the demands of data management.
“It’s not the process its the people that implement and use the process that matter” stated Jasmine Ashton in a final summary of the lunch debate. We had to agree. However, as we looked through the Polyspot data management description that Ms. Lamsfuss’ article pointed us to we had to agree that starting with a good technology implementation could go a long way towards helping the people follow the processes.
Constance Ard November 15, 2011
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.
SharePoint Has a Content Rating Feature
November 14, 2011
It seems whatever web site you visit there is a tool that allows you to rate the content. In SharePoint, however, you may want to express your opinion on content’s value, but the only way you can communicate is through e-mail or tweets. That isn’t very instantaneous. Wes Hackett discovered in his article that “Ratings and SharePoint Search Better Together.”
SharePoint how has a new feature where users can rate content! It uses everyone’s favorite rating interface: stars. The setting can be configured on lists, libraries, and added to pages. Hackett, though, found something lacking in the new ratings feature: it doesn’t work with search.
“So I got thinking having seen some articles about additional search managed properties. Seeing as the average rating and rating count are both columns added to the list/library I decided to investigate whether it was possible to index and therefore present the rating within the search results.”
Through an investigation, Hackett figured out how to configure the ratings system so that it would be displayed within the results. The code to make the change is n the article. This brings up another thought, it’s not just search that needs to see ratings displayed there are many other features within SharePoint where a document’s value should be given prime real estate on the dashboard. The problem is keeping ratings consistent and reliable. There is good news, however, Surfray’s Ontolica can be configured quite easily to display ratings systems.
Whitney Grace, 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
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