Woopra Live Chat Aims for New Surfing Experience
June 5, 2012
We’ve all experienced websites that were impossible to navigate, but a simple customer service chat feature, as discussed in the article, Real-Time Analytics and Live Chat: “Breaking the Virtual Wall” can literally turn your navigation nightmare into a sweet site surfing dream.
Woopra provides a very good example of how real time analytics can help in a live chat customer support environment as:
“Live Chat is significantly more powerful when backed up by real-time customer data that enables you to identify the appropriate moments when a chat request would be welcomed by your website visitor.”
“In addition to the ability to identify the correct moments to initiate a chat, real-time analytics will also give you a good understanding of who you’re chatting with. You’ll have information such as the visitor’s location, history with your website, account information and much more.”
Having a bad experience on a website can ultimately compel you to seek out another site. If there was someone familiar to provide help and answers, then consumers would be less likely to look elsewhere. The use case may be skewed to the larger company, not the smaller outfits, but the point is the same. Woopra’s Live chat, by utilizing analytics can easily end a navigation nightmare and coordinate ease of access for the user. Just imagine if all customer oriented sites provided live chat, we’d all have sweet site surfing dreams.
Jennifer Shockley, June 6, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Wand Taxonomy Asserts Sentiment Analysis on Structured and Unstructured Content
June 5, 2012
We are continuing to see sentiment analysis play an integral role in business intelligence and enterprise search. The news release, ”Information Builders Adds Sophisticated Sentiment Analysis Capabilities to Its Strategic Business Intelligence Platform” explains the addition to Information Builders’ WebFOCUS Magnify platform.
While much attention has been placed on sentiment analysis of unstructured content from Facebook and Twitter, this solution offers these same capabilities on structured data. As Magnify indexes content, the Wand Taxonomy server analyzes and determines the content’s overall mood as positive, negative, or neutral, and returns a score to Magnify.
Gerald Cohen, president and CEO of Information Builders was quoted stating the following:
“The information hidden within the nuances of human speech has historically been very difficult to extract in an automated fashion. By integrating the Wand Taxonomy server into WebFOCUS Magnify, we’ve created an incredibly powerful tool, which enables our customers to uncover the tone of their enterprise content. With WebFOCUS Magnify, the financial impact of emotion is now measurable.”
This top-notch tool from the taxonomy company Wand is the next-generation technology behind what Information Builders now offers. Without it, sentiment analysis on both structured unstructured data would not be possible—or more importantly, searchable.
Megan Feil, June 5, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Google Researchers Share Insights
June 5, 2012
More explanations of how Google’s smart system becomes so intelligent; not too much illumination on precision and recall however. Research Blog hosts a post from a Google research team titled “From Words to Concepts and Back: Dictionaries for Linking Text, Entities and Ideas.” They begin by laying out the primary Google challenge:
“Human language is both rich and ambiguous. When we hear or read words, we resolve meanings to mental representations, for example recognizing and linking names to the intended persons, locations or organizations. Bridging words and meaning — from turning search queries into relevant results to suggesting targeted keywords for advertisers — is also Google’s core competency, and important for many other tasks in information retrieval and natural language processing.”
Researchers Valentin Spitkovsky and Peter Norvig go on to detail some of the techniques they have used, including building on the traditional encyclopedia model, much like Wikipedia. They then get into some technical particulars like language strings and inverted indexes; see the article for more. Or for in-depth detail, see the teams paper, “A Cross-Lingual Dictionary for English Wikipedia Concepts.”
Cynthia Murrell, June 5, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
No Shirking Unsolicited Inputs about Traditional Publishing
June 4, 2012
Straight away I am not a “real” journalist. I am not a college professor. I am not a pundit. I am an old guy who is greatly amused with the antics of Warren Buffet, a budding newspaper magnate. I am an old guy who finds the business high jumps of traditional publishers a modern day Kabuki. The story is well known, and I like seeing how the actors deliver the script. I am an old guy who chuckles as online successes which are attracting more legal hassles than a high school physics teacher’s magnet and iron filings demonstration.
You will want to read “The Washington Post Co.’s Self Destructive Course,” “Responding to Shirky on the Washington Post” and “WaPo Must Transform to Survive.” Both write ups adopt the “we know better” approach to providing business advice. I am assuming that both authors are ace executives, have a good mastery of finance and management, and can run big organizations in a way that would cause Jack Welch to take notes.
A tip of the sombrero to Cervantes and Picasso. Get those windmills.
The fact of life in traditional publishing is, for me, easy to summarize:
There are fewer people who read books, magazines, and newspapers than there were in 1970. For the readers, there are many choices. For those who don’t read, the easiest path between their need for information and information is medieval, maybe preliterate Bronze Age. And Google? Instead of white papers Google shoots videos. I sat and watched two camera people and one guy with a sound boom. The focal point was a Googler “running the game plan” about Google enterprise search. The Googler left out some information which I had heard circulating in mid May 2012 at the search conference in New York; namely, the US government was not renewing some Google Search Appliances due to cost, there are too few engineers devoted to the Google Search Appliance, and that any of the nifty integration requires custom code. Yep, a video. The truth for the non readers who don’t have time for the old fashioned approach to information.
Amazon is pushing short books, 3,000 words to maybe three times that length. Why? There are lots of well heeled Amazonians who do not have time for a weighty tome. Magazines cost quite a bit, even for those with six or seven figure incomes. Future Publishing turned me off with its hefty price in the UK last week and an even heftier price at the lone remaining book store in my area of rural Kentucky.
The fix is not “hamsterized nonsense.” (The phrase is cute but I don’t know what it means.) The nonsense, I believe, is share buy backs. Okay, but if one is in the right part of the financial food chain, those buy backs can deliver a new BMW or a condo in Nice, France. That is the marvel of point of view.
My view is that these three pundits are advocating actions which are similar to a non playing, couch potato who shouts at the TV during a professional football game, “I could do a better job calling plays that you.” If that person were better, wouldn’t that person be working for a professional team. The fact that a person has not won such a job suggests that either the person is unqualified or had a shot and flubbed it. It is easier to criticize instead of do. When the do amounts to telling senior managers what they should do, I enjoy the exercise immensely.
My view of traditional publishing is:
- Demographics have changed so some of the old assumptions held by traditional publishing companies either don’t work or lead to unexpected consequences. One should learn from mistakes, but if most publishing Web sites are cost centers, not revenue pumps, then the problem is deeper than doing some digital stuff and adapting.
- Paying for content works when the information is must have. The fact is that most information is nice to have. Trying to charge for nice to have just does not work. A quick look at the history of Dialcom, the Source, or Gannett’s online local newspaper plays provide some interesting case examples.
- Small start ups cannot be replicated at most companies. The reason is that the people who do start up often approach tasks with a different mind set than an employee. Until the mind set shifts, arguing that a major publishing company work like a two person start up is silly. Never worked. Won’t work. Even digital outfits like Google cannot approach innovation the way it did in 1996 to 1998. When Googlers can’t find alternative revenue streams after 13 years of trying, what does one expect of traditional publishing companies?
The fact is that traditional publishing companies are in the buggy whip manufacturers’ position when automobiles appeared. The fact that non executives without profit and loss responsibility offer advice is just funny. The professional managers are often aware of what must be altered. Those managers and their blue chip advisors cannot implement meaningful change.
Academic inputs are not likely to induce change. Real journalists are not the answer to traditional publishing company woes. Verbiage is quite entertaining, however.
Stephen E Arnold, June 4, 2012
Sponsored by HighGainBlog
Inteltrax: Top Stories, May 28 to June 1
June 4, 2012
Inteltrax, the data fusion and business intelligence information service, captured three key stories germane to search this week, specifically, what is hot and trending in big data these days.
The first answer came from our story, “Dashboard Data Analytics Hot” which showcases the many ways in which increased usability is increasing big data’s popularity.
Also, “The Next Great Data Gold Mine” looks a little deeper into what we already know, social media is going to be huge for analytics.
Finally, “Analytic Healthcare Contests Boom” showed that many of the health field’s biggest problems are being solved by analytic contests.
The rapidly evolving world of big data is always in flux. What’s hot today might be cold next week. But know we’ll be taking the industry’s temperature every day to stay atop all the exciting changes.
Follow the Inteltrax news stream by visiting www.inteltrax.com
Patrick Roland, Editor, Inteltrax.
June 4, 2012
Get a Comprehensive Search Solution for SharePoint from Fabasoft Mindbreeze
June 4, 2012
In “SharePoint Log: When Databases Rebel,” Robert Schifreen looks at how one user can generate 16 gigabytes of logs in just three months. The article is the ninth part of a larger SharePoint 2010 series chronicling a SharePoint deployment at the ZDNet Blog.
Schifreen has this to say about navigating the growing amounts of data:
Microsoft markets a separate SharePoint add-on product called FAST Search, and likes to imply that no successful SharePoint installation is complete without it. In practice, from what I have read, it seems that FAST is unnecessary unless you have tens of millions of documents to index. Otherwise, SharePoint’s out-of-the-box indexing system will crawl the full text of all your documents (you’ll need to download a free ifilter, as it’s called, to crawl PDF files) perfectly well.
But he goes on to add:
There’s a handful of things missing from the standard search, such as having the number of hits displayed in brackets within the search results page, and there are no thumbnail previews of search results, but nothing that is sufficiently must-have to warrant the added expense or complication of learning yet another Microsoft technology.
We know SharePoint is a complex and beneficial system for content management, but we also know there are gaps in the out-of-the-box search feature. But you don’t have to learn a new Microsoft technology or settle for less. Consider a third party solution developed and devoted specifically to search, like Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Their Web Parts based information pairing capabilities give you powerful searches and a complete picture of your business information, allowing you to get the most out of your enterprise search investments. And your end users will benefit from the fast and intuitive search with clearly displayed results and simple navigation.
Creating relevant knowledge means processing data in a comprehensible form and utilizing relations between information objects. Data is sorted according to type and relevance. The enterprise search for professionals.
Mindbreeze’s intuitiveness also means less training required. They have tutorials and wikis that are easy to use and more efficient. Here you can browse Mindbreeze’s support tools for users, including videos, FAQs, wikis, and other training options. Check out the full suite of solutions at Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
Philip West, June 4, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Clustify 3.0, A Flexible New Way to Analyze and Organize
June 4, 2012
Hot Neuron just introduced a hot new integration tool that’s giving clusters a good name. In some cases people assume a cluster is something jumbled together. Clustify 3.0 has redefined cluster with Clustify into a well-organized, easily accessible group, according to the article, Clustify 3.0 Adds Integration with a Broad Range of Databases and e-Discovery Tools.
According to Bill Dimm, the CEO of Hot Neuron:
“We aim to make Clustify an extremely flexible tool that clients can use in many different ways, rather than a closed system. Version 3.0 furthers that goal by working with a variety of database management systems and data architectures on both Microsoft Windows and Linux. Working directly with the database is not only convenient and powerful, it is also very fast.”
Hot Neuron was founded in February 2000 by Bill Dimm, who has a Ph.D. in theoretical elementary particle physics from Cornell University. Dr. Dimm did mathematical modeling and computer programming before specializing in retrieval software and services.
Clustify will organize documents into labeled clusters and provide an overview. It will allow for user review and categorize related documents for ease of access. This system will make it simple to perform basic calculations with just a point and click format. What a great new way to analyze and organize, as Clustify 3.0 is flexible enough to work with a wide range of document review platforms and e-discovery tools.
Jennifer Shockley, June 4, 2012
CAXA Partners with ModuleWorks
June 4, 2012
CAXA, China’s largest provider of software for computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided manufacturing (CAM), and product lifecycle management (PLM), will partner with ModuleWorks, a software component provider for the CAD/CAM industry, to incorporate simulation technology for 5-Axis machining in its 2013 release.
In a press release entitled “CAXA Partners with ModuleWorks for 5-Axis Machining and Simulation” that recently appeared on the website MCAD Café, the features of this software update are described:
“The new CAXA 2013 release will offer ModuleWorks toolpath generation and simulation technology to provide customers with state-of-the-art 5-Axis machining and simulation. A wide range of 5-Axis strategies include multi-pass roughing, swarf, contouring, flowline, and 3-5-Axis toolpath conversion. Combined with full kinematic machine simulation and material removal, CAXA 2013 provides a complete set of tools for advanced machining applications.”
Endeavors such as the CAXA/ModuleWorks partnership resulting in customized, comprehensive, and scalable CAD/CAM and PLM solutions such as CAXA 2013 that enable manufacturers to enhance their efficiency and to easily find, reuse, and share their product data are valuable assets that can maximize the competitive position of an enterprise.
Tonya Weikel, June 4, 2012
How to Make Oracle Text into a Text Friendly Search System
June 4, 2012
Swiss-Army Development blog recently reported on recently posted a how to guide on making Oracle Text a more friendly search system in the article, “Oracle Text and Friendly Search Expressions.”
The article shows users how to provide a sub-set of Oracle Text features (specifically using the context index and contains clause) that mimic the major features of most online search tools. This allows users to use Oracle Text in their application without forcing them into a new set of search expressions.
After showing several code snippits, the article states:
“Once we have the test data setup, we can get down to business. Oracle Text has a ton of complex search options and operators that you can exploit (see the documentation for the full list). To keep it simple for my users, I’m going to stick with the basics. My search will allow the user of “AND”, “OR”, “NOT”, “()” and expressions in double quotes or surrounded by braces “{}” will be evaluated as a single word. Finally spaces will translate to “AND” in my algorithm.”
This post utilizes both text and code to show users how to make an ordinarily difficult problem easily digestible for Oracle Text novices and experts.
Jasmine Ashton, June 4, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Free Book Available Online Discusses Linked Data
June 4, 2012
How refreshing it was to see a free book available on linked data. Linked Data: Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space is being offered at no cost as an HTML document. PDF and hard copy versions are also available for a cost.
Linked Data involves using the Web to connect related data that wasn’t previously linked. Sometimes it is also about using the Web to eliminate the roadblocks to linking data that was previously linked using other methods.
The first chapter of the book discusses how structure can either enable or prohibit sophisticated processing. As a general rule of thumb, the more well-defined the structure of the data the easier it is for people to process it.
The article continues this discussion:
“While most Web sites have some degree of structure, the language in which they are created, HTML, is oriented towards structuring textual documents rather than data. As data is intermingled into the surrounding text, it is hard for software applications to extract snippets of structured data from HTML pages.To address this issue, a variety of microformats5 have been invented.”
Those interested in best practices for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data should definitely check out this free information.
Megan Feil, June 4, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
