Quote to Note: Big Data from a Xoogler Angle
March 24, 2014
Tucked deep into the Wall Street Journal’s stunning analysis of Big Data was a gem. Here’s the quote, allegedly made by Zest Finance’s big data dog, Douglas Merrill. This Xoogler is quoted in “Big Data Weird Data” as stating:
Machine learning isn’t replacing people.
Interesting. Many professionals at the Dubai intelligence conference in March 2014 were asserting that whizzy new systems worked without having to depend on humans.
Read the entire article in the Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2014, page R 5. It’s online but you may have to pay. Humans can be expensive when asked to do work like report on the underbelly of Big Data.
One question: I thought Google had figured out the automatic thinking thing. Is a disenchanted Googler not getting with the smart data program?
Stephen E Arnold, March 24, 2014
US Government Content Processing: A Case Study
March 24, 2014
I know that the article “Sinkhole of Bureaucracy” is an example of a single case example. Nevertheless, the write up tickled my funny bone. With fancy technology, USA.gov, and the hyper modern content processing systems used in many Federal agencies, reality is stranger than science fiction.
This passage snagged my attention:
inside the caverns of an old Pennsylvania limestone mine, there are 600 employees of the Office of Personnel Management. Their task is nothing top-secret. It is to process the retirement papers of the government’s own workers. But that system has a spectacular flaw. It still must be done entirely by hand, and almost entirely on paper.
One of President Obama’s advisors is quote as describing the manual operation as “that crazy cave.”
And the fix? The article asserts:
That failure imposes costs on federal retirees, who have to wait months for their full benefit checks. And it has imposed costs on the taxpayer: The Obama administration has now made the mine run faster, but mainly by paying for more fingers and feet. The staff working in the mine has increased by at least 200 people in the past five years. And the cost of processing each claim has increased from $82 to $108, as total spending on the retirement system reached $55.8 million.
One of the contractors operating the system is Iron Mountain. You may recall that this outfit has a search system and caught my attention when Iron Mountain sold the quite old Stratify (formerly Purple Yogi automatic indexing system to Autonomy).
My observations:
- Many systems have a human component that managers ignore, do not know about, or lack the management horsepower to address. When search systems or content processing systems generate floods of red ink, human processes are often the culprit
- The notion that modern technology has permeated organizations is false. The cost friction in many companies is directly related to small decisions that grow like a snowball rolling down a hill. When these processes reach the bottom, the mess is no longer amusing.
- Moving significant information from paper to a digital form and then using those data in a meaningful way to answer questions is quite difficult.
Do managers want to tackle these problems? In my experience, keeping up appearances and cost cutting are more important than old fashioned problem solving. In a recent LinkedIn post I pointed out that automatic indexing systems often require human input. Forgetting about those costs produces problems that are expensive to fix. Simple indexing won’t bail out the folks in the cave.
Stephen E Arnold, March 24, 2014
Stephen E Arnold, March 24, 2014
GitHub Search: Handy for Some Amazon Sportiness
March 24, 2014
GitHub, an open sourcey operation, is in the news again. Navigate to “AWS Urges Developers to Scrub GitHub of Secret Keys.” ITNews reports that some math club members—sorry, open source folks—have “inadvertently exposed their log-in credentials.”
The write up points out that a search of GitHub “for AWS keys returns almost 10,000 results.” The article notes:
GitHub is a community site where developers post their code and allow collaboration from other interested devs. The problem is developers aren’t taking enough care to ensure their credentials are properly protected.
With the management issues at GitHub, perhaps open source evidences some of the fissures in the open source approach to life, business practices, and, of course, search?
Stephen E Arnold, March 24, 2014
Facebook Takes Out The People
March 24, 2014
Facebook is a network for people to communicate and connect. Forbes.com’s article, “The Approaching Demise Of Organic Reach In Facebook” says that organic connections for brands. are dropping faster than page counts on Justin Bieber’s fan page. The information comes from Social@Oglivy study. Facebook’s response is that will go to zero in the future.
“The free ride for brands on Facebook is coming to an end, and Mark Zuckerberg’s network should now be moved into the ‘paid channel’ in the marketing budget. The end game here is that a message posted on a brand page will not be shown to anyone unless it gathers a notable number of likes from a user’s friends. If their friends like a post, if there is a visible adoption of the post by the community, only then the post has earned the right to be shown organically.”
Brands will have to fork over money to breathe life into a post and it means that they have will have to rethink their Facebook marketing strategies. Facebook is using basic economics to create a scarcity. Brands will have to pay more, but over time they will stop. It is all about the almighty dollar sign for Facebook. What happened to the people?
Whitney Grace, March 24, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Autonomy Deconstructed
March 24, 2014
Autonomy has been broken up! According to InfoWorld article “HP Breaks Autonomy IDOl Into Discrete Services,” developers will be able to add advanced text processing compatibilities to their applications with a new PaaS option. HP Autonomy’s IDOL used to only be a software package, but the company sees it has to adapt.
“ ‘If we want to be successful as a platform today, we have to do more than create a large installable product. We have to enable it so developers can use it,’ said Robert Youngjohns, senior vice president and general manager of HP Autonomy.”
The new discrete services make the IDOL features available to enterprise developers, so they can augment their own applications and programs without writing the base code or using third-party libraries. The IDOL services are divided into two categories: stateless APIs and the ones that remain in the HP Cloud. IDOL 10.5 is the basis for the new offering. Eventually Youngjohns want all of IDOL’s features exposed for developers.
Mike Lynch took a “one product approach”now HP disaggregates IDOL’s applications. Was Dr. Lynch wrong about how to make money from IDOL? We’ll find out at when the next HP quarterly report’s financials become available.
Whitney Grace, March 24, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
An Egyptian eBooks Search Engine
March 24, 2014
Most people think about the Amazon Kindle, iBooks, and other popular mobile book reading platforms when they hear eBooks. In the Middle East there is fierce competition to dominate eBook sales in the region. Wamda posted the article, “Egyptian eBooks Search Engine Al Kutub Ready To Face The Competition” that gives a rundown about a new player.
Al Kutub is a new book search engine and within twelve days has seen over 10,000 people subscribe. The creator Mohammed Nemat Allah designed Al Kutub to be the largest regional database of digital and audio books. Allah does not host any of the content, instead Al Kutub searches through online sources.
Allah only hosts the books’ bibliographic citation and directs the user toward legitimate book sellers, so he does not have to fear legal action:
“The thirty something Nemat Allah seems to believe in spreading knowledge and is confident of his legal stance, according to statements from his counselor. Whoever objects to the presence of any content, the statements say, should remove it from the source where it was originally posted.”
Al Kutub offers four different subscriptions that offer different services and incentives. There is also an internal social network. The eBook application market is booming! The common belief is that people do not read in this digital age, they just do not read paper.
Whitney Grace, March 24, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Partnership with SAP, SharePoint, and Open Text
March 24, 2014
SharePoint is improved by customization. Third-party add-ons are often the backbone of this customization, since SharePoint has become such a complex infrastructure. In the latest news, SharePoint is partnering with other vendors to increase efficiency. Read more in the Fierce Content Management article, “OpenText Brings Governance to SharePoint, SAP.”
The article begins:
“In one of the more odd product announcements in some time, three giants of enterprise software–OpenText, SharePoint and SAP–have come together around a governance, content management and an ERP solution. This three-headed monster is called SAP Content Management for Microsoft SharePoint by OpenText. You can view SAP data inside SharePoint or SharePoint content inside SAP, and OpenText takes care of the governance bits to make sure everything is done within the rules of the organization.”
Stephen E. Arnold has made a career out of reporting and analyzing all things search. His SharePoint coverage also points to the importance of customization, especially through add-ons. Read more on his Web site ArnoldIT.com.
Emily Rae Aldridge, March 24, 2014
Google and Pals: Redefining Hiring along with Search
March 23, 2014
I read “Emails From Google’s Eric Schmidt And Sergey Brin Show A Shady Agreement Not To Hire Apple Workers.” Let’s assume the emails suggesting that certain outfits agreed to adopt certain hiring practices. In the happy land of Silicon Valley, big companies have to have some freedom. In the context of Bernie Madoff, the BearStearns’ misstep, and the actions of vendors responsible for the roll out Healthcare.gov site—what’s the big deal.
The logic of marketing oriented, big buck business operates in a way different from the gas station in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky. I am delighted that some companies can agree to respect some informal guidelines. I admire a search vendor who can have as pals some executives at other giant, with it firms.
Name a person who has been disadvantaged by the present whiz whiz approach to business. I noted this passage in the cited write up, which may be completely off base:
These emails will make you angry if you believe that companies ought to compete instead of fix prices. They’ll make you even angrier if you believe that workers have the right to sell their labor at the maximum price the market will bear — because Jobs, Schmidt and Brin appear to have spent years instructing their recruiters and HR staff to avoid hiring staff from each others’ companies, according to Pando:
… what began as a secret cartel agreement between Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Eric Schmidt to illegally fix the labor market for hi-tech workers, expanded within a few years to include companies ranging from Dell, IBM, eBay and Microsoft, to Comcast, Clear Channel, Dreamworks, and London-based public relations behemoth WPP. All told, the combined workforces of the companies involved totals well over a million employees.
My hunch is that MBAs are okay with this approach to business. Engineers, although important, are not business people, just cube dwellers. Googlers and Apple fans are just doing what is natural in a Darwinian world where nature may be red in tooth and claw.
Good business is what’s important. Forget such analog notions as fairness, ethical behavior, and integrity. It’s 2014 and search is just fine as long as one does not expect comprehensiveness, precision, and recall. Search for something meaningful and click on those ads or buy a product with questionable provenance. It’s 2014. New rules apply it seems.
Stephen E Arnold, March 23, 2014
Lingway Now Part of Something Bigger
March 23, 2014
What has happened to Lingway, purveyor of vertical semantic solutions for search and analysis? According to a press release on its Web site: “Lingway Chooses Toledo And The Castilla-La Mancha Region As Its Operating Base In Spain.” Lingway has moved to Spain to:
“ ‘The Spanish market is important for Lingway, but the fact that it will give us access to the markets of Latin America makes it even more valuable,” says Bernard Normier, Lingway’s CEO. “One of the main reasons we chose Castilla-La Mancha as our headquarters was that the local authorities were able to put us in touch with the other actors in the region (companies, consultants, universities and government organizations) and provide us with the assistance and support required for our project.”
While Lingway may be brushing up on their Spanish, it was also a foothold for another company. Lingway appears to be part of Eptica, evidenced by a the EpticaLingway blog post,”The Lingway Team Is Pleased To Join Eptica And Will Continue To Serve Its Customers.” Eptica acquired Lingway in 2012 as a way to expand into France, strengthen its research and development investments, and pursuer further international growth.
Eptica has integrated Lingway’s technology to bolster their own products. Eptica has a SaaS to manage online reputation and another software for LEA CV dedicated teams for recruitment companies. Moving and sold, technology companies change constantly.
Whitney Grace, March 23, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
RAVN: SOLR Search and Autonomy Services
March 22, 2014
My Overflight system flagged news about RAVN’s enterprise search and DocAuto, a company that “makes matter-centricity, email management, IDOL management, and other content management operations flexible, seamless, and secure. I must admit I was not sure what DocAuto did. I have a fleeting recollection of learning about RAVN when I was at a very disorganized enterprise search conference in London in 2013. I don’t know if the conference was in a tizzy or whether the speakers were suffering from jet lag.
RAVN’s Web site asserts that the company delivers “the power of understanding.” I’m okay with tag lines. I am not exactly sure what “understanding” means in the RAVN context, but most outfits offering “enterprise search” use words that sound like they are full of freight. I ask questions like “What is understanding?” and chuckle as I listen to the marketer explain “understanding” to me. Most of these folks are not epistemologists, however.
RAVN’s Web site offers solutions for Big Data, the power of understanding, real time understanding, and knowledge management. I am not sure what any of these buzzwords means. I write a column for KMWorld, and, truth be told, I have absolutely no idea about the meaning of “knowledge” or, for that matter, “management.” I worked at Booz, Allen & Hamilton—at one time one of the world’s leading management consulting firms—and I never understood what “management” meant. I think it was a way to bill client for 20 somethings to do outsourced work. Don’t hold me to this idea because at age 70, the past grows more hazy with each passing day.
The capabilities of RAVN include a knowledge graph, enterprise search, an expert locator, sentiment, and core. I clicked on the enterprise search link and and learned:
The words explaining this diagram embraced “connecting to and unifying diverse content repositories.” I think that means “federated search. RAVN “surfaces results in meaningful ways.” I am not sure what this means. RAVN search delivers relevance ranking, “enterprise scale content security,” enterprise search “scalability,” and “performance.”
The firm offers a power of understanding approach and provides a short video explaining how I can “harness the power of understanding.” The video replaces chaos with structure. The system learns the user’s interests. RAVN puts a user ahead of the competition. RAVN handles text, audio, video, and knowledge.
This manual work is not good.
The automatic RAVN system is good.
RAVN offers a core, a knowledge graph, and SharePoint support.
The company’s services include support for Autonomy IDOL, which appears to have influenced the bold assertions about RAVN’s own search system, and SOLR. My hunch is that RAVN will provide an open source solution with some connectors and software wrappers.
I will keep my eye on RAVN search. For now, the company is in buzzword marketing mode.
Stephen E Arnold, March 22, 2014
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