Is Kantar Clueless: Online Ad Spending Going Down?
December 21, 2011
Data about ad spending is tricky for me. Those collecting the data can make decisions which may have a significant impact on how the numbers flow. I am suspicious of information from the “real” research firms and well as from outfits which are less familiar to me. Hey, we do data analysis too, and some data are slippery fish.
Against this disclaimer, check out “Kantar Media Reports Paid Search Spend Tumbled in 2011.” I found this passage interesting:
Kantar first observed the drop in spending from financial, legal and medical marketers around the end of the first quarter – and the drop continued right through Q3. Swallen said, “I don’t know if it reflects a variance in ad impressions vs. variance in keyword pricing. I can’t comment which of those two factors is more responsible for the declines, but the decline is primarily coming off those financial services.” Overall, Internet ad spending rose narrowly by 2.8 percent for the first nine months of 2011. Total advertising spending in the U.S. grew modestly from January to September, then slowed to a crawl in the third quarter. Third quarter ad spending was up just .4 percent compared to last year, capping a nine-month period that saw growth of just 1.5 percent. The total amount of ad sending for the first three quarters of 2011 was $104.7 billion.
So no big deal, right?
Wrong. If Google sucks in the easy money, the competition has to up its game. If Google plays hard ball and cuts its prices, there will be some new burger flippers practicing their wrist motion at Burger King.
Assume the numbers are off base. Google gets bigger, and it is quite plausible that it will spend its way to an even stronger market position. Worth watching. Ad spending up or down? We will know more in 2012.
Stephen E Arnold, December 23, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Continued Growth Expectations for Text-Analytics Markets
December 21, 2011
It is no doubt text-analytics demand is skyrocketing. From brand management to competitive intelligence, businesses recognize the numerous and valuable applications for the software and services that turn business data into information gold. Seth Grimes breaks down the market outlook and a variety of text analytics components in, “Text-Analytics Demand Approaches $1 Billion.”
Grimes reports software and service text-analytics revenues at $835 million globally. While Grimes’ analysis comes to us from his 2010 market study, it is good to know the historical growth as we look at 2012 predictions. From the 2010 market study findings:
Growth is steepest for applications that seek business insight in social networks, online media, and surveys. Applications include brand-reputation management, market research, competitive intelligence, and customer service and support. For these applications and others, text analytics brings automated, natural-language processing techniques to bear to identify and extract names, facts, relationships, sentiment, and other information in blogs, forums, news, social updates, e-mail, and a range of enterprise sources.
Grimes predicts text-analytics markets will sustain healthy annual growth rates between 25 and 40 percent in each of the coming years with a continued shift from on-premise software to Web services. He also suggests the benefits of a third-party solution to plug into your existing system to lower initial costs, ease start-ups, and to access the service provider’s repository of social and online information.
A third party solution we like is Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Staying ahead of the curve, they have solutions for Enterprise search, information pairing, searching the cloud, and mobility. Daniel Fallmann, founder and managing director of Mindbreeze Solutions GmbH, comments on the product in “Fabasoft Mindbreeze Appliance is Trend-Setting Product 2011”:
“Our focus on agility, quality, usability and style in the monthly shipments of our latest product innovations enables us to integrate and implement client requests into our product development rapidly and sustainably. In addition to our on-premise offering, everyone can now try out our product in the Cloud, immediately. This is a possibility much appreciated by our clients and partners alike.”
Check out Fabasoft Mindbreeze’s suite of solutions to see what works for you.
Philip West, December 21, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Protected: Can The David Huddle Slay The Microsoft Goliath?
December 21, 2011
Talend Pitches Holistic Integration
December 21, 2011
Connectors get some new lingo; holistic integration is a term we learned from Talend’s press release, “Talend V5: Democratizing Holistic Integration.” The company defends its coinage of the term:
Frankly, IT often uses loosely some terms from the general corpus. But in this case, holistic does the trick. . . . The promise of Talend v5 is to enable IT organizations to converge traditionally disparate integration efforts and practices through a common set of products, tools and best practices. When an organization deploys Talend v5, it will deploy essentially one platform, regardless of the integration need: data integration, application integration, process integration.
That does fit the definition of the term, but it is a little grand, don’t you think? Hmm, maybe not in a field titled “Big Data.”
Talend positions this release as the result of the changes its products have undergone since it bought the German Sopera this time last year. The company is quick to point out that this comprehensive approach does not result in bloatware. Each product included in the platform works independently; customers must only deploy the parts they need.
The write up emphasizes that Talend’s products are still based on the open source underpinnings on which they were founded. The company boasts of being a leader in the open source data management market.
Cynthia Murrell, December 21, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
SearchBlox 6.4: Just in Time for the Holidays
December 21, 2011
SearchBlox announces, “SearchBlox Version 6.4 Released.” Important bug fixes make this a must-download for current users. For example, basic search will now work with foreign characters, and the problem indexing some MS Office docs has been overcome. However, the new features are more interesting. We learned from the write up:
SearchBlox can now automatically detect text files on the files system and index them irrespective of their file extensions. . . . You will now be able to use SearchBlox to search across repositories of text files such as source code files and log files.
The filename of the indexed document is now available as a separate tag <filename></filename> in the XML search results
Both additions are helpful, indeed.
SearchBlox is a provider of enterprise search solutions based on Apache Lucene. Over 300 customers in 30 countries use SearchBlox to power their Web site, Intranet and custom search. SearchBlox Software, Inc. was founded in 2003 with the aim to develop commercial search products based on Apache Lucene, which is turning up in solutions from Lucid Imagination to PolySpot.
Cynthia Murrell, December 21, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Google and British Telecom
December 21, 2011
I remember when British Telecom was gaga over Google. Now, not so much. I don’t have a dog in this hunt, but I want to document “BT Sues Google in U.S. over Patent Infringement.” Here’s the quote I noted:
Florian Mueller, an IP analyst who has closely followed the twists and turns of patent litigation, said on his website that BT had become the fifth large publicly traded company to bring patent infringement litigation against Android. “With so many major patent holders asserting their rights, obligations to pay royalties may force Google to change its Android licensing model and pass royalties on to device makers,” he said.
Android business model? Hmmm.
Stephen E Arnold, December 20, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
You Remember UIMA: LanugageWare and Translation Support
December 21, 2011
IBM has recently deployed a new natural language processing technology, as described on its “Content Analytics” page. LanguageWare is available only as a feature of IBM Content Analytics. The write up describes the addition:
“LanguageWare is used to develop Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) compliant custom information annotators. It also provides a highly optimized rules engine to help reduce development time. In combination with IBM Content Analytics version 2.2, LanguageWare may be used to:
- Develop and deploy custom text analytics for IBM Content Analytics that address industry-specific requirements.
- Easily create and add new facets into IBM Content Analytics rapid insight search and exploration user interface
- Develop lexical analysis for both deeper and new language support.”
Unstructured Information Management Architecture refers to an open and scalable platform for working with unstructured data. Though the concept began at IBM, it has since moved into the open source realm; Apache’s page on the project can be found here. IBM seems to be enthusiastic about open source. Is open source better, faster, cheaper than IBM’s own technologies?
It is almost the New Year. We wish the company would put these products online as robust demonstrations. We are disinclined to believe big company public relations, but we do believe our test queries and our hands on experiences. How about a New Year’s resolution from IBM to put these asserted technologies on display? Perhaps that “exposes” technology is a way that undermines public relations? PR may be safer than live demos in the real, wild 2012 world.
Cynthia Murrell, December 21, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Search Engine White Papers
December 20, 2011
Anyone looking for guidance in advance of starting a new search engine project, might want to take a look at these search engine white papers which I came across by chance the other day. Search Technologies is probably the most experienced company out there when it comes to implementing search engines, and these white papers, collectively, provide a pragmatic perspective on the search engine world. Titles include the provocative “Glass Box Approach to Enterprise Search” and “Making the Most of Search Navigators.” Worth a read if you’re into search engines. Recommended resource at this link.
Stephen E Arnold, December 21, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Oracle: Search Will Not Reverse the Downturn
December 20, 2011
The financial news about Oracle is typical bad news with the happy bunny hop. Navigate to “Oracle Falls Short on Weak Software Sales” or any of the stories reporting the financial basics. Here’s a taste of the December 2011 financial report:
The company reported a profit of 54 cents per share on $8.8 billion. The results fell short of the consensus view that Oracle would report sales of $9.23 billion and a per-share profit of 57 cents. Oracle shares, which had risen by 56 cents, or 2 percent, during the regular trading session, to close at $29.17, fell sharply in after-hours trading. As of 4:15 pm ET, Oracle shares were trading down $1.72, or 6 percent, on the news. In the plus column, Oracle said its operating margin on a non-GAAP basis improved to 45 percent, and that it expects those margins to keep rising. Operating cash flow grew by 45 percent, as well, to $13.1 billion.
Financial PR speak is tough to figure out. My hunch is that Oracle squeezed out costs to pump up the profit. Going forward Oracle has to do better. Once the downturn takes hold, it costs a lot of money to reverse the slide. Maybe Oracle will work magic with search? The company now owns and has to pump support and research resources into:
- Secure Enterprise Search or SES11g
- Triple Hop, if it still is around
- Endeca, the $1.1 billion bundle of MBA inspired search applied to ecommerce, the enterprise, business intelligence, and just about any other niche the B-School brigade can identify
- RightNow, a content and search service for customer support which, as you know, I interpret as “methods for preventing a customer to communicate with an informed human”
- InQuira, the blend of two search firms which is in the natural language processing game as applied to customer support. See item 4 above
- Oracle’s structured query language which is the database administrators’ favorite method of locating an item within an Oracle table.
The role of search at Oracle is to drive services, customization, opportunities for upselling and cross-selling, and “synergies”.
Will search provide a stream of significant revenue stream for Oracle? No. The deterioration of traditional database revenue, in my opinion, is part of a structural shift in computing. The search acquisitions make it easy for the 1,000 new sales professionals to get appointments, but a meeting is not a sale. Oracle’s hardware business may make Endeca-powered systems run with more speed, but will Endeca’s customers opt for an Oracle server or bite the bullet and look for an alternative like Lucid Imagination, PolySpot, or some other open source centric search solution? Endeca touts its analytics, but based on our work, next generation analytics vendors like Digital Reasoning make Endeca’s methods look a little like a 1998 Buick next to a 2012 Ferrari 458 Italia Spider.
Search will help, just nor deliver a gusher of cash. Search is not the answer to Oracle’s revenue challenges. I hope I am wrong. So do our customers who are dependent on Oracle and looking at options which appear to cost less.
Stephen E Arnold, December 21, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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Harsh Words for SharePoint Server 2010
December 20, 2011
Microsoft SharePoint users could hardly contain their excitement when the company announced they would be releasing SharePoint Server 2010. There were some lofty expectations for this upgrade, but it seems many users were left dissatisfied with the improvements and innovations that they found. Bjorn Furuknap, one of the disgruntled users, took to his blog to discuss where he thinks Microsoft went wrong.
Furuknap says in his post, SharePoint Server 2010 Isn’t Really Ready for Enterprise Applications – And What Microsoft Should Do About It, that SharePoint 2010 is:
“riddled with bugs that prevent it from being a great platform for building enterprise or professional applications.” He blames the “lousy” coding for many of the problems and says that the product “lacks virtually everything that makes it sellable, including the price.”
Furuknap says that Microsoft “isn’t able to move quickly enough to compete with much more agile and nimble companies” and we must add that his analogy of an elderly person wearing hip-hop clothes conjured up some funny images.
So the question is… can a start up company beat Sharepoint? It certainly seems that way. Companies like Box.net and Inforbix are offering the enhancements that users are looking for. These companies are simplifying the process, enhancing the reliability and making their product cost-efficient. Watch out because this time David just make take out Goliath.
Jennifer Wensink, December 20, 2011
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