Another Publisher Put Under the Scope
March 20, 2013
The publishing industry has taken a big hit over the last several years as self-publishing has become a more profitable and easily obtainable way to publish material. It is however, a double-edged sword.
Evidently “O’Reilly Media Has Lost Its Soul.”
“O’Reilly Media—the publishing wing at least—appears to have lost its soul. I have no doubt that Tim O’Reilly founded the company with a great vision and high respect for authors. I don’t know when things changed, but it’s obvious that they have. It’s hard to value anything that O’Reilly Media is doing today, including its conferences, when its publishing wing is this dysfunctional.”
A reputable publishing company doesn’t just publish your book, but their reputation as well. It is a perk you can’t get with self-publishing, but things can often go wrong and this is I feel an overly harsh criticism of a publishing company as a whole based upon one undesirable experience.
Anyone can self-publish these days (anyone can write a book of nonsense and throw it up on the internet), which is why reputable publishing companies are more important than ever.
Leslie Radcliff, March 20, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
On The Road Again: Watson Heads to USC
March 20, 2013
“IBM’s Watson Cognitive Computing System Spurs Competition at USC” and is helping to tap into new, innovative ideas based upon the supercomputer’s capabilities.
Two years ago, Watson beat out its human competitors on the popular game show “Jeopardy.” The company is now putting the computer to work in the healthcare field to help solve some of the industries problems until they can develop a more commercial application for the network.
“UCS students imagined a Watson-powered system that could uncover data-driven insights to help medical professionals identify those who may be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) provide lawyers with faster research capabilities to improve their cases and help businesses hire the best talent in the job market.”
More than 100 USC students participated in the IBM Watson Academic Case Competition, but the question is this: Why has it taken so long for Watson to be utilized in a commercial setting? Where are the customers and what is going to drive consumer interest in order to make Watson profitable?
It is a big cognitive computing system, why hasn’t it been turned into something more user friendly and widely available if the potential is there for widespread use and immediate impact?
Leslie Radcliff, March 20, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Bitext: Moving Forward with Enterprise Semantics
March 20, 2013
Antonio S. Valderrábanos, founder of Bitext, recently granted an exclusive interview to the Arnold Information Technology Search Wizards Speak series. Bitext provides multilingual semantic technologies, with probably the highest accuracy in the market, for companies that use text analytics and natural language interfaces. The full text of the interview is available at http://www.arnoldit.com/search-wizards-speak/bitext-2.html.
Bitext provides B2B multilingual semantic technologies with probably the highest accuracy in the market. Bitext works for companies in two main markets: Text Analytics (Concept and Entity Extraction, Sentiment Analysis) for Social CRM, Enterprise Feedback Management or Voice of the Customer; and Natural Language Interfaces for Search Engines and Virtual Assistants. Visit Bitext at http://www.bitext.com. Contact information is available at http://www.bitext.com/contact.html.
Bitext is seeing rapidly growth, including recent deals with Salesforce and the Spanish government. The company has added significant and important technology to its multilingual content processing system.
In addition to support for more languages, the company is getting significant attention for its flexible sentiment analysis system. Valderrábanos gave this example: “flies” may be a noun, but also a verb. We say “time flies like an arrow” versus “fruit flies like bananas.” Bitext believes computers should be able to parse both sentences and get the right meaning. With that goal in mind, they started the development of an NLP (natural language processing) platform flexible enough to perform multilingual analysis just by exchanging grammars, not modifying the core engine.
He told ArnoldIT’s Search Wizards Speak:
Our system and method give us a competitive advantage with regards to quick development and deployment,” Valderrábanos said. “Currently, our NLP platform can handle 10 languages. Unlike most linguistic platforms, the Bitext API ‘snaps in’ to existing software.
Bitext’s main area of research is focused on deep language analysis, which captures the semantics of text. “Our work involves dealing with word meanings and truly understanding what they mean, interpreting wishes, intentions, moods or desires,” Valderrábanos explained. “We just need to know what type of content, according to our client, is useful for her business purposes, and then we program the relevant linguistic structures.” He added:
Many vendors advocate a ‘rip and replace’. Bitext does not. Its architecture allows our system to integrate with almost any enterprise application.”
Bitext already delivers accuracy, reliability and flexibility. In the future, the company will be focusing on bringing those capabilities to mobile applications. “IPads, tablet devices in general, and mobile phones are becoming the main computing devices in a world where almost everybody will be always online. This opens a new whole arena for mobile applications which will have to cater for any single need mobile users may have,” Valderrábanos said.
Donald C. Anderson, March 20, 2013
Google Dabbles in Big Data and Works Toward Disambiguation
March 20, 2013
The ambiguous nature of language is a subtlety that is really only grasped by the human mind. Computers aren’t able to disambiguate the mumbo jumbo that is the human language. Mercury is mercury to a computer; it doesn’t matter whether it is Freddie, the planet, the car, an element or any of the other plethora of possibilities.
In “Learning From Big Data: 40 Million Entities in Context” Google (go figure, the company is becoming the proverbial duct tape of the technology world) is hoping to change all of that.
“To provide that help, we are releasing the Wikilinks Corpus: 40 million total disambiguated mentions within over 10 million web pages…The mentions are found by looking for links to Wikipedia pages where the anchor text of the link closely matches the title of the target Wikipedia page. If we think of each page on Wikipedia as an entity (an idea we’ve discussed before), then the anchor text can be thought of as a mention of the corresponding entity.”
It will allow searchers to co-reference search terms and search across documents that are similar in nature and work on subsets of data. Let’s face it, if it works…there will be a lot of time and money saved and a lot of headaches will go away. If it doesn’t, Google may want to rethink its foray into the Big Data arena.
Leslie Radcliff, March 20, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Are There Lessons for Enterprise Search in the Pew Publishing Study 2013?
March 19, 2013
If you have not looked at the Pew report, you will want to check out the basic information in “The State of the News Media 2013.” The principal surprise in the report is that the situation seems to be less positive than I assumed.
Here’s the snippet which I tucked in my notebook:
Estimates for newspaper newsroom cutbacks in 2012 put the industry down 30% since its peak in 2000 and below 40,000 full-time professional employees for the first time since 1978. In local TV, our special content report reveals, sports, weather and traffic now account on average for 40% of the content produced on the newscasts studied while story lengths shrink. On CNN, the cable channel that has branded itself around deep reporting, produced story packages were cut nearly in half from 2007 to 2012. Across the three cable channels, coverage of live events during the day, which often require a crew and correspondent, fell 30% from 2007 to 2012 while interview segments, which tend to take fewer resources and can be scheduled in advance, were up 31%. Time magazine, the only major print news weekly left standing, cut roughly 5% of its staff in early 2013 as a part of broader company layoffs. And in African-American news media, the Chicago Defender has winnowed its editorial staff to just four while The Afro cut back the number of pages in its papers from 28-32 in 2008 to 16-20 in 2012. A growing list of media outlets, such as Forbes magazine, use technology by a company called Narrative Science to produce content by way of algorithm, no human reporting necessary. And some of the newer nonprofit entrants into the industry, such as the Chicago News Cooperative, have, after launching with much fanfare, shut their doors.
Professional publishing companies like Ebsco, Elsevier, ProQuest, Thomson Reuters, and Wolters Kluwer are going to affected too. If the content streams on which these companies “go away,” the firms will have to demonstrate that they too can act in an agile manner. Since the database centric crowd has crowed about its technical acumen for years, I think the agility trick might be a tough one to pull off.
But what about specialist software vendors of search, content processing, and indexing? Are there lessons in the Pew report which provide some hints about the search of these information centric businesses?
My view is that there are three signals in the Pew data which seem to be germane to search and related service vendors.
First, the drop off which the Pew report documents has been quicker than I and probably some of the senior publishing executives expected. These folks were cruising along with belt tightening and minor adjustments. Now the collision between revenue and expenses are coming together quickly. How will these companies react as the time for figuring out a course correction slips away? My view is that there will be some wild and crazy decisions coming down the runway and soon. Search and content processing sector vendors are facing a similar situation. A run though my Overflight service reveals quite a few vendors who have gone quiet or simply turned out the lights.
Second, the lack of information is not unique to publishing. Organizations have quite a lot of data. The problem is that making use of the data in a way that enhances revenue seems to be difficult. There are quite a few companies pitching fancy analytics, but the vendors are facing long buying cycles and price pressure. Sure there are billions of bits but there is neither the money, expertise, or time to cope with the winnowing and selecting work. In short, there are some big hopes but little evidence that the marketing hyperbole translates into revenue and profits.
Third, traditional publishing is on the outside looking in when it comes to new business models. Google and a handful of other companies seem to be in a commanding position for online advertising. Enterprise search and content processing vendors have not been able to find a business model beyond license fees and consulting. Just like the traditional publishing sector, the statement “We can’t do that” seems to be a self fulfilling prophecy. In search, I think there will be some business model innovation and it will take place at the expense of the vendors who are sticking to the “tried and true” approach to revenue generation.
My take is that the decline of traditional publishing may be a glimpse of the future for search and content processing vendors.
Stephen E Arnold, March 20, 2013
Big Data Search Made Better with LucidWorks
March 19, 2013
LucidWorks has caught the attention of Mark Smith at Ventana Research. He takes a deeper looks at the LucidWorks search and Big Data offerings in his open letter, “Big Data Search is Getting Better with LucidWorks.”
Smith sums up the LucidWorks’ offerings:
“LucidWorks has two product offerings in the search market. LucidWorks Search provides the ability to rapidly set up search and index content using Apache Solr. The company not only provides full commercial-grade support and services and a security framework, but has also improved on Solr’s usability for developers and business users. Solr, built on top of Lucene, is an enterprise platform that provides full-text search, dynamic clustering, geospatial search and other enterprise-class capabilities . . . LucidWorks is definitely a vendor to examine if you are looking to bring enterprise-class search to your organization and big data deployments.”
It is no surprise that LucidWorks is catching the eye of a global research organization. Enterprise search, and Big Data specifically, is on the lips of all developers these days. It is good to know that research is available to steer buyers in the right direction. LucidWorks seems to be well-supported, and a great value.
Emily Rae Aldridge, March 19, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Facebook Not Planning On Launching External Search
March 19, 2013
Despite numerous rumors and requests pleading for the contrary, it appears Facebook will not be pursuing external search. The intentions are laid out in the article on Search Engine Land titled “Facebook: No Plans For An External Search Engine.”
The article reveals comments from Grady Burnett, Vice President of Global Marketing Solutions for Facebook, who stated that the social media giant has no plans or intentions to launch an external search engine, such as that run by Google or Bing.
The article includes an excerpt from the live blog coverage of the SMX West keynote address from Burnett:
“DS: Do you ever see Facebook wanting a dedicated search product outside of Facebook? Mentions the past rumors that Facebook might buy Bing from MSFT.
GB: I don’t see that happening. We called it ‘Graph Search’ because we’re focused on letting people search the Facebook graph. So my answer would be no.”
The James Bond Film “Never Say Never” comes to mind when we hear these kinds of statements. We think that given some time, this is not the last we will hear from Facebook on this topic. As the company explores the possibilities of graph search, the improved search capabilities discovered in the process could just be the nudge that is needed to jump into external search.
Andrea Hayden, March 19, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Semantria Adds Value to Unstructured Data With Sentiment Analysis
March 19, 2013
We are constantly on the lookout for movers and shakers in the area of text analysis and sentiment analysis. So, I was intrigued when I came across Semantria’s Web site recently, a company claiming text and sentiment analysis is made fast and easy with their software. With claims to simplify costs and high-value capturing, I had to research further.
The company was founded in 2011 as a software-as-a-service and services company, specializing in cloud-based text and sentiment analysis.The team boasts a foundation from text analytics provider Lexalytics, software development Postindustria, and demand generation consultancy DemandGen.
The company page shares about how its software can give insight into unstructured content:
“Semantria’s API helps organizations to extract meaning from large amounts of unstructured text. The value of the content can only be accessed if you see the trends and sentiments that are hidden within. Add sophisticated text analytics and sentiment analysis to your application: turn your unstructured content into actionable data.”
Semantria API is powered by the Lexalytics Salience 5 analytics engine and is fully REST compliant. A processing demo is available at at https://semantria.com/demo. We think it is well worth a look.
Andrea Hayden, March 19, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
SLI Steps up to Fill Google Commerce Gap
March 19, 2013
Google Commerce has opened a wide gap in the online market since it pulled up its stakes and left town. While this has some worried, we think it’s going to make for an interesting frontier. In fact, it is already getting that way as we discovered from a recent Virtual Strategy story, “SLI Systems Offers and Easy Migration Path for Retailers Using Google Commerce Search to SLI’s Full Service Learning Center.”
According to the story:
“SLI Systems (www.sli-systems.com) today announced that it is offering special terms for its full-service site search solution for retail and eCommerce sites currently using Google Commerce Search, which Google recently announced will be discontinued. To help companies continue to offer uninterrupted site search capabilities, SLI is giving them a fast, simple way to implement its industry-leading Learning Search solution, a highly robust and customizable site search that is shown to increase conversions and improve the online experience on retail sites like Jelly Belly, ULTA, Vermont Teddy Bear, and hundreds more.”
Let the games begin. In the aftermath of Google Commerce’s disappearance, we have read a few stories like this. The marketplace is wide open for companies like SLI and EasyTask who have begun making attempts to shepherd in wayward users of Google’s. We think the winner will be the company with the best customer service. Who that will be is anyone’s guess right now.
Patrick Roland , March 19, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Sinequa Hosts Big Data Roundtable
March 18, 2013
Sinequa will participate in Documentation 2013 at La Défense in Paris, France. This conference is a nexus for professionals and senior managers who are looking for ways to improve their information systems. The focus is on Big Data. Sinequa is located in Booth G12.
At the show, Sinequa will be demonstrating its unified information access platform. The co9mpany’s solution is based on a powerful search engine. The system is designed to handle larger volumes of data from various sources.
Participating in the Big Data Roundtable in the Thematic Conference room on Wednesday 20 March at 11h30 pm for a debate on the subject of “Enterprises facing Big Data: How to deal with vast volumes of heterogeneous data and extract useful information from it?”
Participants will be Hans-Josef Jeanrond, Marketing Director, Sinequa; Frédéric Brajon, Digital Information Strategy Director, CGI Business Consulting; and Mountaha Ndiaye, Regional Channel Sales & Alliances manager, EMC².
Sinequa is one of the leaders in the market of Enterprise Search and Unified Information Access, one of the technologies included the emerging Big Data market. The company provides large enterprises and administrations with the means to tame the complexity of their structured and unstructured data and to extract value from large volumes of very heterogeneous data. More information about Sinequa is available at www.sinequa.com.
Stephen E Arnold, March 18, 2013
Sponsored by HighGainBlog
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