Google Wants Video Money
February 10, 2013
While this is kind of surprising, it also is not: “YouTube Set To Introduce Paid Subscriptions This Spring” comes from Adage. Rumors have been flying for years about users having to start paying for their Web content and it may happen with YouTube. This spring Google wants to make a little more cash from its video sharing service with paid subscriptions. Google is also trying to hook content producers, users’ attention spans, and advertisers away from the television. TV wars anyone?
YouTube has already asked some of its channel producers to create new channels where users paid a small monthly fee for access. The fee will range from $1-5 and it will not just be for a Web series, but also content libraries and live events.
“YouTube has been talking about the possibility of paid subscriptions for some time now. A year ago, at AllThingsD media conference, YouTube CEO Salar Kamangar talked on stage about the potential to poach second- or third-tier cable networks that were having trouble building big enough audiences on cable TV to command subscription fees from distributors. Internet distribution, the thinking goes, would give some of these networks a more direct line to their passionate base with lower costs.”
Right now, Google and YouTube are treating this like experiment. The profits will be split 45-55, similar to how ads are already set up. Users do want different content and are willing to pay for it. But is it cheaper to pay a flat cable/dish fee for television, than individual channels on the Internet? The small data fees add up, trust me.
Whitney Grace, February 10, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Professional Publishing: The Britannica Method
February 9, 2013
I listened to the Harvard Business Review “ideacast” with Jorge Cruz. You can find this 16 minute “living case study” on iTunes and at this link. Harvard types love euphemisms, so we have audio program morphed into ideacast. You will need to perform a number of mental transformations to interpret what it means to Encyclopaedia Britannica to have killed the print product. Interior decorators will have to find older editions for the dens of the nouveau riche. Libraries with the 11th edition will have another asset to make their Boards salivate with the profit potential of musty old volumes.
The point of Mr. Cruz’s comments is that the CD ROM was a big problem for print publishers like the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Broad Internet access is the next big thing. The “ideacast” omitted some detail. I assume that most “ideacast” listeners are too darned busy to hear a chipper interlocutor ask such questions as:
- What are the cost efficiency measures you have implemented and will be implementing?
- What changes in editorial processes have allowed your firm to produce accurate content without compromising quality?
- What is the technical infrastructure for your publishing operation?
- What are your plans for “pay to play” articles from scholars who need to toot horns now that peer reviewed publications are under attack?
- What are the new products and services you envision for 2013?
- What are your plans for acquisition of properties to accelerate growth?
- Where does your firm’s information fit in today’s content landscape?
Alas, these questions were not asked. What a happy coincidence that as I was listening to the ideacast, I read “The Elsevier Boycott One Year On.” The trigger for this write up was the birthday celebration for the Great Elsevier Boycott. Scholars have been grousing about having to pay to get their content into “real” journals. Once the money has been handed over, the Elsevier-type scholarly publications go slowly in the best tradition of the good old days of clubby publishing. I think of soft lighting in London clubs where careers are made and shattered amidst chuckles, cigars, and conversation.
The write up asserts:
In one respect the boycott has been an unqualified success: it has helped to raise awareness of the concerns we have about academic publishing. This, we believe, will make it easier for new publishing initiatives to succeed, and we strongly encourage further experimentation. We believe that commercial publishers could in principle play a valuable role in the future of mathematical publishing, but we would prefer to see publishers as “service providers”: that is, mathematicians would control journals, publishers would provide services that mathematicians deemed necessary, and prices would be kept competitive since mathematicians would have the option of obtaining these services elsewhere.
Elsevier and I assume other professional publishers have figured out that the Young Guns of academia are capable of pumping out tweets, blog posts, and talks at conferences suggesting that:
- Professional publishers charge a lot for scholars’ work which scholars’ had to pony up some dough to create
- Subscription prices are too high. Libraries cannot afford the gems of wisdom contained in a traditional scholarly journal.
- The time delays in traditional publishing, even when equipped with fancy technology from XML centric publishing systems, are unacceptable in today’s world. Hey, grant money may be available for a short time, and scholars want that citation in Twitter time, not hot metal type time.
The write up adds this point:
We acknowledge that there are differing opinions about what an ideal publishing system would be like. In particular, the issue of article processing charges is a divisive one: some mathematicians are strongly opposed to them, while others think that there is no realistic alternative. We do not take a collective position on this, but we would point out that the debate is by no means confined to mathematicians: it has been going on in the Open Access community for many years. We note also that the advantages and disadvantages of article processing charges depend very much on the policies that journals have towards fee waivers: we strongly believe that editorial decisions should be independent of an author’s access to appropriate funds, and that fee-waiver policies should be designed to ensure this. To summarize, we believe that the boycott has been a success and should be continued. Further success will take time and effort, but there are simple steps that we can all take: making our papers freely available, and supporting new and better publication models when they are set up.
My question, “Will Encyclopaedia Britannica’s new business model emerge as a beacon for professional publishing?” My hunch. Nah. The Harvard Business Review will, however, explain how management did the buggy whip thing. That old chestnut should be tossed in la poubelle. The hip scholars either look information up via Google or follow in the footsteps of Emilio Delgado Lopez Cozar et al.
Stephen E Arnold, February 9, 2013
ChaCha Reels In Another $14 Million in Series G Funding
February 9, 2013
ChaCha keeps on getting money. We learn about the outfit’s latest round of funding in All Things D’s piece, “ChaCha, Still Grinding Away at This Online Q&A Thing, Raises Another $14M.” Like Coveo ,it appears that ChaCha’s intake of investment is not yet generating an output of profit. Is its big pay day just around the corner?
Writer Liz Gannes sees the pattern, too, noting that the firm has now collected $82 million in funding. She reports that CEO Scott Jones believes his company has almost, after a history of ups and downs, conquered the Q&A conundrum. The key points: transitioning from the use of paid answerers to “passionate” (volunteer), identifiable sources; emphasizing social distribution over search; and offering brand-names the chance to share their wisdom, for a fee of course. Gannes writes:
“So: After clashing with Google by gaming its search results, ChaCha wants to take the even harder path of competing with Google head on, by trying to better answer the sort of quick questions Google now surfaces on results pages through its ‘Knowledge Graph.’
“But Jones said ChaCha can go further than Google because it has spent years focusing on how to answer ‘out and about’ questions about surroundings, make judgment calls and recommendations, and process phrasings that evade natural linguistic processing.
“And, in the meantime, ChaCha has built up an audience of 45 million uniques per month and two billion questions answered.”
Not too shabby, especially considering the setback the company experienced when it tangled with Google’s Panda in 2011. ChaCha has also found success with its “sponsored tweet scheme” Social Reactor, which pays out up to $100,000 per month to contracted tweeters. The distribution power associated with that program, says Jones, will help when the company pushes more forcefully into the mobile-app realm later this year. Let us hope ChaCha finds success soon; I’m sure their investors do.
ChaCha‘s free “ask-a-smart-friend” answer service can be accessed at chacha.com or through their mobile app. The company was formed in 2005, and currently employs 70 individuals. ChaCha is headquartered in Carmel, Indiana, just north of Indianapolis.
Cynthia Murrell, February 09, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Commercial Professional Publishers: Aced Again?
February 8, 2013
In June 2012, an insular commercial database and professional publishing operation paid me to show up and share the trends my team had identified in online information. We were deep in the open source search study, which will be available to registered attendees of the Lucene Revolution in May 2013. I showed up, ran down a list of five areas which looked like potential investment areas. The group said, “We have these on our list already. What the heck did we hire you for anyway?”
Flash forward eight months. The insular outfit is still insular. And one of the opportunities I highlighted just became much more expensive. Navigate to “LinkedIn Eyes Future as Professional Publishing Hub.” The story points out that LinkedIn is profitable and growing organically. Here’s the passage I noted:
LinkedIn plans to hook you with business content you can’t get elsewhere — whitepapers, news articles, educated discussion threads, and so forth. When you come back more often and stick around longer — LinkedIn likes to use the term “engagement” to describe your attention — the professional social network can get clients to list more jobs and spend more on ads.
Oh, oh. Content marketing. I think the approach is a variation on Augmentext type content.
Most professional publishing and database companies do not grow organically because after years of trying to move into new markets and channels, the outfits just raise fees to lawyers, accountants, librarians, and financial analysts. When that stops working, the companies buy stuff and try to make the investments work. Whether it is medical fraud or crazy online encyclopedias, the path to the good old days of commercial professional and database publishing are harder and harder to recapture.
LinkedIn, like a couple of other outfits, is now heading into professional publishing land. If one of the big guys like Thomson Reuters or Ebsco try to hop on the train, the price of ticket has gone up a lot.
I don’t like to say, “I told you so.” I am more inclined to point to Williams James’ comment about “a certain blindness.” If you don’t see it, you cannot react. This is not Google or Facebook “arrogance” on the part of these traditional publishing companies’ management. The inability to spot an hot opportunity, overcome the friction of the “way it was,” and then act in a purposeful manner is the core problem in this business sector. Mark Logic can run conferences that cheerlead slice and dice as a strategy for growth. Outsell-type consultants can spin reports about innovations in publishing. The failed Web masters and unemployed journalists who bill themselves as mavens and poobahs can explain what’s happening in content created by and for professionals.
The problem is that making money means getting in before the CNet’s of the world report the obvious. So, no I told you so. Just a certain blindness. One can get run over crossing the street when blind. Stakeholders, are you listening? Some of the management in the companies in which you have invested may not be able to see the opportunities on the information superhighway.
Stephen E Arnold
Information Connectivity Enabled Across the Enterprise with PolySpot
February 8, 2013
One of the reasons that big data is so big is because of the large number of devices in which data can be generated. An infographic from Techi popped up recently that describes how “Big Data is Bigger than Most Realize and discusses this and the larger implications. The article references IBM‘s report that says 90 percent of the world’s data has been accumulated in the last two years.
Peer to peer communication and social networking data make up the largest chunk of the zettabytes that are out there. The infographic attempts to relay an overarching perspective on how far technology has come by sharing that one zettabyte book would require 3 times the number of trees in the world for paper.
The infographic was framed in the following context:
On the tail of the release of a report that showed how synthetic DNA could be used to store zettabytes of data in the palm of our hand, it’s important to understand just how much information that really is. The term “big data” is already appearing to be the most overused word of the year in 2013 and it’s only January, so grasping the size of how big it all really is makes for an interesting visualization.
While many organizations will never need to crunch zettabytes this year, they will undoubtedly benefit from storing and analyzing petabytes and exabytes. Solutions like those from PolySpot aid in an organization’s ability to connect data from various sources and churn out meaningful insights from pieces in order to make a whole.
Megan Feil, February 8, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search.
OpenNebula on Infrastructure Management
February 8, 2013
OpenNebula is in the business of infrastructure management, but is seeking to differentiate itself from the pack and hasten enterprise adoption. The full story is provided by GigaOm in its piece, “OpenNebula Open-sources Service Management Layer with Enterprise in Mind.”
The article begins:
“OpenNebula, the European answer to the likes of Eucalyptus and OpenStack that counts CERN and China Mobile among its customers, is moving to differentiate itself from competitors by freely releasing OpenNebulaApps, a suite of cloud application management tools that sit on top of its traditional infrastructure management toolkit. The OpenNebulaApps tools were previously available only to OpenNebulaPro customers but, according to project director Ignacio Llorente, OpenNebula realized there was more value in opening them up.”
OpenNebula is trying to build on their open source base and customize on the boom of cloud apps. They may be able to make a good go of it. But, on the other hand, while they may succeed in their traditional role of infrastructure management, it may be best to leave enterprise to the experts. One we would recommend taking a long hard look at is LucidWorks. LucidWorks can offer the ongoing trust of the industry and a reliance on the most trusted names in open source, Lucene and Solr.
Emily Rae Aldridge, February 8, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Half Our Medical Treatments May or May Not Work
February 8, 2013
It seems like we should be past this point by now. The Washington Post reports, “Surprise! We Don’t Know if Half Our Medical Treatments Work.” Where are the big-data breakthroughs in this, one of humanity’s most crucial subject matters?
The British Medical Journal recently undertook a project called simply Clinical Evidence, which examined some 3,000 treatments that have been studied in controlled, randomized studies. For fully half, the studies are inconclusive. It is important to note that this doesn’t mean that half the time we are using treatments of unknown effectiveness, but rather that we don’t know the worth of half the number of treatments out there, including those rarely used. Still, that is a disturbing gap in our body of knowledge.
The report says the mystery-value treatments are those “for which there is insufficient data or data of inadequate quality.” That’s the part that is hard for me to wrap my head around. I guess the data management pros have some work to do in this area.
The lack of information can impact very concrete decisions. Writer Sarah Kliff reminds us:
“When health policy wonks talk about ending unnecessary care, they usually mean targeting these types of treatments — the ones where we have no idea whether they’re making us any healthier, but still increase spending.
“There are specific bodies dedicated to figuring out whether these 1,500 treatments actually work. That includes the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute, or PCORI, which was created by the health-care law to study comparative effectiveness research. . . . This Clinical Evidence research suggests they’ll have no shortage of medical treatments to study.”
Indeed. Let us hope our lack of intel does not send any hidden medical miracles into the dustbin of time.
Cynthia Murrell, February 08, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Catalyst Touts its Insight Predict eDiscovery Platform
February 8, 2013
Another eDiscovery company purports to bring efficiency to data with software that can sort the crucial from the disposable. Catalyst promotes their Insight Predict predictive ranking tool:
“Predictive Ranking uses artificial intelligence to enhance human review. By enabling your review team to start with the most relevant documents first, your entire workflow is more focused and efficient. That translates to greater speed, lower risk and reduced discovery costs–and a lot fewer documents to review.”
Sounds familiar. Catalyst also offers yet another predictive solutions white paper, “Predictive Ranking: Technology Assisted Review Designed for the Real World.” The description explains:
“Most articles about technology assisted review (TAR) start with dire warnings about the explosion in electronic data. In most legal matters, however, the reality is that the quantity of data is big, but it is no explosion. The fact of the matter is that even a half million documents—a relatively small number in comparison to the ‘big data’ of the web—pose a significant and serious challenge to a review team. That is a lot of documents and can cost a lot of money to review.”
It goes on to insist that Catalyst’s solutions, of course, will save you much of that money. Our question– can we use this system to predict which company in the predictive analytics game is the best? It can be really difficult to tell. We’re still waiting for the shooting star in this field.
Catalyst began in the mid-90s as part of a major law firm, building their own secure, web-based document repositories. In 2000, the company launched as an independent contender in the eDiscovery field. The company is headquartered in Denver, Colorado.
Cynthia Murrell, February 08, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Andreessen Predicts Trouble for Traditional Workers
February 8, 2013
Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has some strong, educated opinions about the ups and downs of technology-related businesses and where the industry is headed. TechCrunch shares an interview with the professional prognosticator in, “Marc Andreessen on the Future of Enterprise.”
Journalist Alexia Tsotsis spoke to Andreessen for her piece, “The Enterprise Cool Kids” (also at TechCrunch), but thought the interview insightful enough to share in its entirety. The piece retains the casual, conversational tone of their chat.
The two cover a lot of ground: an industry focus that continually swings between enterprise and consumer markets; a decrease in hardware investments in favor of a shift to the cloud; the nimbleness of new businesses run by millennials compared to the comparatively bogged-down state of larger companies. The piece as a whole is a valuable read.
What caught our eye most, though, was Andreessen’s predictions for the worker bees among us. He states:
“It feels a lot like in the new economy you will have a lot more contractors. You will have a lot more people with sort of fluid careers contracting on a project basis, and then all this technology is going to be an enabling layer for that. . . .
“For some people it feels great to never be tied to a specific employer and to always be doing contract work and be changing jobs every two years, and it feels like it’s fun and exciting and exhilarating. For a lot of people that’s really scary. And so the lifetime employment promise that the big companies used to be able to make was very compelling for a lot of people because it felt safe.
“So now you are in a world where the big companies can’t deliver — even if they wanted to deliver on lifetime employment, they can’t.”
You have been warned.
Cynthia Murrell, February 08, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Salesforce Acquires Entropy Soft
February 7, 2013
Connectors are important. If a system cannot acquire content from a system, the fanciest text processing system cannot do its work. Years ago Oracle acquired Stellent which had snapped up Outside In. Now Salesforce has followed in Oracle’s footsteps with its acquisition of Entropy Soft. (I assume the story “Salesforce.com Has Acquired French Startup EntropySoft.”) Entropy Soft is not a start up in my opinion. The company was set up in 2005 or so. According to the write up, Entropy Soft had about $3.5 million in funding. Details are limited. The question which the deal raises is, “What services will Salesforce introduce which acquires software to acquire diverse enterprise content?”
A list of Entropy Soft connectors is no longer available online. According to my files, Entropy Soft has more than 40 connectors. These include:
- Microsoft SharePoint
- IBM Lotus Quickplace
- Hummingbird DM
- Alfresco
- FileNet
- Interwoven
- EMC Documentum
Update: A list of Oracle connectors is at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/search/oses/ses-connectors-178226.pdf
Stephen E Arnold, February 7, 2013
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