Google and China: Getting a Way to Talk to People at the Table
February 7, 2014
I read this allegedly accurate story, “Google to Own $750 Million Lenovo Stake after Motorola Deal Closes: HK Exchange.” I recall Google wanting the nation state of China to follow some of Google’s advice. I am not sure how well that worked out. If this Reuters story is accurate, Google now has a way to talk to people who may have a seat at the table when matters technical in China are discussed. Maybe Google wants to shift Chinese suppliers of its nifty, little servers? Worth watching. I wonder if those with seats at the table may find themselves waiting on line to get into the restaurant where juicy deals are served.
Stephen E Arnold, February 7, 2014
Government Buys into Text Analytics
February 7, 2014
What do you make of this headline from All Analytics: “Text And The City: Municipalities Discover Text Analytics”? Businesses have been using text mining software for awhile and understand the insights it can deliver to business decisions. The same goes for law firms that must wade through piles of litigation. Are governments really only catching onto text mining software now?
The article reports on several examples where municipal governments have employed text mining and analytics. Law enforcement agencies are using it to identify key concepts to deliver quick information to officials. The 311 systems, known as the source of local information and immediate contact with services, is another system that can benefit from text analytics, because it can organize and process the information faster and more consistently.
There are many ways text analytics can be helpful to local governments:
“Identifying root causes is a unique value proposition for text analytics in government. It’s one thing to know something happened — a crime, a missed garbage collection, a school expulsion — and another to understand where the problem started. Conventional data often lacks clues about causes, but text reveals a lot.”
The bigger question is will local governments spend the money on these systems? Perhaps, but analytic software is expensive and governments are pressured to find low-cost solutions. Expertise and money are in short supply on this issue.
Whitney Grace, February 07, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Drink the Sweet KoolAid Cloud
February 7, 2014
The cloud assists businesses with users on the go as well as people who are dealing with the inevitable device crash. Amazon fully embraced the opportunities the cloud presented and debuted Amazon Web Services. Now, according to Maureen O’Gara of Sys-Con Media, “Mark Logic Leverages Amazon” with a new layer of cloud services.
MarkLogic Corporation adds a new level of cloud services, starting with its MarkLogic Server and it will allows customers to use its widgetry on a pay-per-hour basis.
Users will have the chance to take advantage of the features MarkLogic offers:
“The patented server, also certified on VMware’s virtualization platform, which lets users implement clouds on self-managed hardware, is generally used for custom publishing, search-based applications, content analytics, unified information access, metadata catalogs and threat intelligence systems.
It provides state-of-the-art features such as location awareness, real-time search and a shared-nothing cluster architecture that supports high performance against petabyte-scale databases.”
After uploading the cloud services, what will both Amazon and Mark Logic learn from the new cloud offerings? How will the clients learn to adapt the software for new uses? The sky is the limit and the clouds have hundreds of new experiences to try out.
Whitney Grace, February 07, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Discover the Open Source Alternative to the Autonomy Crawler
February 7, 2014
Whether Autonomy’s product success is true or false, as proprietary software it comes with a large price tag. The average small business or user cannot afford to purchase HP Autonomy’s IDOL Crawler. Open source is the best alternative, but for the longest time you could not get software comparable to IDOL Crawler. Norconex says that has changed in the article, “An Open Source Crawler For Autonomy IDOL.” Norconex released an HP Autonomy IDOL Committer for its open source Web crawler Norconex HTTP Collector.
The HTTP Collector is available for Github. The developer encourages people to download it and contribute to the project. Its features are mostly the same as those from HP Autonomy HTTP Connector.
The article states:
“Most key features of HP Autonomy HTTP Connector are available in Norconex HTTP Collector, including document changes detection on incremental crawls and purging documents from IDOL for deleted web pages. New ones are introduced, such as having different hit interval at different time of the day and the ability to overwrite pretty much every part of the web crawling flow with your own implementation logic. The IDOL Committer has been tested on diverse public and internal web sites with great performance.”
We can learn from the open source community that if there is not a piece of software you want, all you have to do is wait until a developer makes it or you can take the initiative to do it yourself.
Whitney Grace, February 07, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
SharePoint Collaborative Features Enhance Decision Making
February 7, 2014
Some of the newest SharePoint collaborative features are getting mixed reviews. However, the ultimate aim is noble, or so says Search Content Management in their article, “SharePoint 2013 Collaboration Features Enhance Enterprise Decision Making.”
The article says:
“SharePoint 2013 includes new collaboration features such as Community Sites and microblogging, which enable formerly siloed workers to interact with one another based on shared interest rather than just because they work in the same department or on the same project — and in ways that mimic familiar social networking sites like Facebook. SharePoint brings together the sites, documents and other information that users care about and helps them share what they know easily.”
Stephen E. Arnold is a longtime leader in search and devotes a good bit of his attention on ArnoldIT.com to social or collaborative features of SharePoint. And while the technology may be playing catch-up, the need and the idea behind social integration is growing strong.
Emily Rae Aldridge, February 7, 2014
Quote to Note: Big Data Skill and Value Linked
February 6, 2014
Tucked in “The Morning Ledger: Companies Seek Help Putting Big Data to Work” was a quote attributed to SAS, a vendor of statistical solutions and software. The quote:
David Ginsberg, chief data scientist at SAP, said communication skills are critically important in the field, and that a key player on his big-data team is a “guy who can translate Ph.D. to English. Those are the hardest people to find.”
I have been working through patent documents from some interesting companies involved in Big Data. The math is somewhat repetitive, but the combination of numerical ingredients makes the “invention” it seems.
One common thread runs through the information I have reviewed in preparation for my lectures in Dubai in early March 2014. Fancy software needs humans to:
- Verify the transforms are within acceptable limits
- Configure thresholds
- Specify outputs often using old fashioned methods like SQL and Boolean
- Figure out what the outputs “mean”.
With search and content processing vendors asserting that their systems make it easy for end users to tap the power of Big Data, I have some doubts. With most “analysts” working in Excel, a leap to the types of systems disclosed in open source patent documents will be at the outer edge of end users’ current skills.
Big Data requires much of skilled humans. When there are too few human Big Data experts, Big Data may not deliver much, if any, value to those looking for a silver bullet for their business.
Stephen E Arnold, February 6, 2014
Russian Yandex and Facebook Strike a Deal
February 6, 2014
The article titled Russian Search Engine Yandex Sets Facebook Firehose On Full Blast on redOrbit explains the deal struck by Yandex and Facebook to include Facebook public content from Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Turkey. Private content will remain inaccessible, but Yandex believes that Facebook allowing access to public data will greatly enhance the volume of results.
The article states:
“Yandex will add up-to-date articles and videos, among other things that have had great resonance among Facebook users. In addition, the popularity of materials in the social network will be taken into consideration when ranking search results,” Yandex said.
The agreement is non-cash based, Reuters reports, and stands to benefit both parties. Yandex will improve the quality of its search results while Facebook will get more traffic. Both Yandex and Facebook make a significant portion of revenues from advertising.”
In the scene of Russian social networking, Facebook ranks fourth to such companies as Vkontakte, so while this deal will benefit Facebook’s visibility, Yandex will also show content from other networks. About a year ago, Facebook began protecting its data, which began the conversation leading to the deal. The two organizations worked together previously to build a social search app called Wonder.
Chelsea Kerwin, February 06, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Luxury Journals Pick and Choose What Science Will Sell
February 6, 2014
The article on The Guardian titled How Journals Like Nature, Cell and Science are Damaging Science is written by scientist Randy Shekman explores the difficulties posed by publishers for scientists doing important but less flashy work. The article particularly targets “luxury journals” favoring provocative papers over less fashionable or exciting papers that are occasionally better science.
The article explains:
“In extreme cases, the lure of the luxury journal can encourage the cutting of corners, and contribute to the escalating number of papers that are retracted as flawed or fraudulent. Science alone has recently retracted high-profile papers reporting cloned human embryos, links between littering and violence, and the genetic profiles of centenarians. Perhaps worse, it has not retracted claims that a microbe is able to use arsenic in its DNA instead of phosphorus, despite overwhelming scientific criticism.”
This problem of publishers printing more interesting papers over well made ones is salvageable, the article posits. Open-access journals that will take any papers so long as they meet industry standards can lessen the importance of citations to researchers. Similarly, universities must make changes in their doling out of grants and professorships. If they base their accolades of papers on content and quality instead of what journal published them, the researchers won’t have to scramble to be published in journals with more prestige.
Chelsea Kerwin, February 06, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
More Time Spent Watching Online Videos and Ads in 2013
February 6, 2014
The article titled Online Content Videos Break Record with 52 Billion Monthly Views on SearchEngineWatch reports on the tripling of views of online content videos from Google (mainly through Youtube), Facebook and AOL coming in third place.
Ad views have also skyrocketed, as the article states:
“Time spent watching video ads totaled 13.2 billion minutes in December 2013, with AOL delivering the highest duration of video ads at nearly 1.9 billion minutes. Video ads reached 55.6 percent of the total U.S. population an average of 204 times during the month. In December 2012, time spent watching video ads totaled 4.1 billion minutes, with BrightRoll Video Network delivering the highest duration of video ads at 966 million minutes.”
Youtube channels were also ranked, and VEVO, the video music channel held onto the first place with 38.5 millions viewers for December 2013. Fullscreen came in second and ZEFR third. It is also noted that video ads accounted for almost 6 percent of all all minutes spent watching online videos in December 2013, up from just below 2 percent in December 2012. The most popular ad? Turkish Airline’s Kobe Vs. Messi: The Selfie Shootout. It does not seem to leave much time for book-learning.
Chelsea Kerwin, February 06, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Huddle Offers SharePoint Alternative
February 6, 2014
There are many SharePoint alternatives on the market, but only a few that really meet the mark. Furthermore, while many exist, few do more than a small part of the greater SharePoint functionality. So users would have to find themselves cobbling together bits and pieces into a larger system. Huddle is attempting to share in the game despite the environment. Their effort is discussed in the CMS Wire article, “Is Huddle Still a SharePoint Alternative?”
The article has this to say about Huddle’s viability:
“’Sure, Huddle is legitimate competition to SharePoint,’ says Rob Koplowitz, SharePoint analyst for Forrester Research. ‘It doesn’t do everything SharePoint does, but in the areas where there is overlap, Huddle is very robust.’ Huddle today launched another tool it claims continues to make its offering an alternative to SharePoint . . . Huddle Office, which is designed to enable workers to collaborate in Huddle’s cloud via their Microsoft Office tools.”
Stephen E. Arnold often looks at SharePoint and SharePoint alternatives on his Web service, ArnoldIT.com. He finds that while SharePoint has and will continue to maintain a lion’s share of the market, it is clear that there is room for smart competition.
Emily Rae Aldridge, February 6, 2014
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