Bing Can Now Converse
September 15, 2014
Microsoft’s Bing is spinning, I mean, sporting a nifty new feature; The Next Web reveals, “Microsoft Updates Bing’s Conversational Understanding to Let You Ask Follow-up Questions, Just Like Cortana.” “Conversational understanding”, huh? I suppose that’s one way to put it. Cortana, you may know, is the Windows Phone’s effort to surpass the iPhone’s Siri.
As you might expect, this “follow up question” feature follows a chain of questions, letting users rely on pronouns instead of being forced to repeat keywords. For example, as the article illustrates, after receiving the proper answer to “who is the president of the United States?” a user can type “who is his wife?” and receive the answer, “Michelle Obama.” One could go on like that all afternoon: “How tall is she?” the First Lady stands 5 feet, 11 inches tall. “Who is her brother?” It’s Craig Robinson. And so on. Writer Emil Protalinski notes:
“This is a feature that is borrowed directly from Cortana. This shouldn’t surprise anyone given that Cortana is largely powered by Bing, so it makes sense that Microsoft would want to pull the other way as well. Since Cortana now handles search on Windows Phone, this feature won’t need to come to Bing for Windows Phone, but Microsoft may want to offer it on Android and iOS.
“Google Search on mobile has similar conversational abilities, which were arguably popularized with demos and commercials showing off the Moto X, when you are asking questions via voice. It’s worth noting, however, that Google Search itself does not offer the same functionality on the Web nor on mobile while typing.”
Protalinski observes that Microsoft makes a habit of outstripping Google to market. This time, it is doubtful this one feature will swing many Android users Windows’ way. Still, Microsoft says more advances are around the corner. We’ll stay tuned.
Cynthia Murrell, September 15, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Feds Warned to Sweat the Small Stuff When Considering Big Data Solutions
September 15, 2014
Say, here’s a thought: After spending billions for big-data software, federal managers are being advised to do their research before investing in solutions. We learn about this nugget of wisdom from Executive Gov in their piece, “Report: Fed Managers Should Ask Data Questions, Determine Quality/Impact Before Investing in Tech.” Writer Abba Forrester sums up the Federal Times report:
“Rutrell Yasin writes that the above managers should follow three steps as they seek to compress the high volume of data their agencies encounter in daily tasks and to derive value from them. According to Shawn Kingsberry, chief information officer for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, federal managers should first determine the questions they need to ask of data then create a profile for the customer or target audience.
“Next, they should locate the data and their sources then correspond with those sources to determine quality of data, the report said. ‘Managers need to know if the data is in a federal system of records that gives the agency terms of use or is it public data,’ writes Yasin.
“Finally, they should consider the potential impact of the data, the insights and resulting technology investments on the agency.”
For any managers new to data management, the article notes they should choose a platform that includes data analysis tools and compiles data from multiple sources into one repository. It also advises agencies to employ a dedicated chief data officer and data scientists/ architects. Good suggestions, all. Apparently, agencies need to be told that a cursory or haphazard approach to data is almost certain to require more time, effort, and expense down the line.
Cynthia Murrell, September 15, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
HP, Bribes, and an Autonomy Flip
September 13, 2014
Try as I might, I cannot avoid learning about Hewlett Packard. For a $100 billion outfit, the flow of information is not overwhelmingly positive.
Earlier today, I worked through several stories. Perhaps you have absorbed their contents? If not, here’s my take.
First, several years ago I saw a document describing Autonomy’s business. The link to the “Autonomy Overview,” dated January 2011 is at http://bit.ly/1tNtn5H. The link to a second document is at http://bit.ly/1uMLmKg. (A happy quack to Oracle for keeping these useful documents online and available.) One of the most important factoids in the two documents is that there appeared with the Qatalyst Partners logo. Quatalyst is associated in my mind with Frank Quattrone, a person of interest for his financial wizardry.
The write up “Exclusive: HP Exploring Sale of Photo Sharing Service Snapfish – Source” may be off center. I did note this this statement in the write up:
Shutterfly hired Frank Quattrone’s Qatalyst Partners over the summer to find a buyer, and is expected wrap up its process in the next several weeks, people familiar with the matter have said previously.
Perhaps HP’s sale of Snapfish will demonstrate that Mr. Quattrone will be bested in this minor joust. HP’s encounter with Mr. Quattrone’s analysis of Autonomy seems to have dazzled the printer ink company to some degree.
Second, “HP Pleads Guilty to Bribery and Is Fined $108” asserts that HP fought the law and the law won. I learned:
In a statement, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) said HP Russia admitted that its executives paid bribes to officials of the Office of the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation to win a large technology contract in 1999, and continued making illegal payments for more than a decade. “[HP] subsidiaries, co-conspirators or intermediaries created a slush fund for bribe payments, set up an intricate web of shell companies and bank accounts to launder money, employed two sets of books to track bribe recipients, and used anonymous email accounts and prepaid mobile telephones to arrange covert meetings to hand over bags of cash,” said DoJ deputy assistant attorney general Bruce Schwartz.
Fascinating when I put this business approach in the context of HP’s actions related to Autonomy.
Third, I read “Former Autonomy Execs Turning to Unusual Strategy in Fight with Hewlett-Packard.” The article reports that Autonomy asserts that “HP grossly overvalued their firm.” That makes sense to me. HP appears to have been bitten by the Big Data, predictive analytics and search bug. Like Ebola, the infection can lead to some challenging problems.
Also, I read “HP: We Will Eradicate the Color Grey from Our Market.” HP seems to have some folks who are selling HP products around the formal partner procedures. The article reports:
Alex Tatham, MD at HP distributor Westcoast, said he is “delighted” that HP is tackling a market that has the potential to suck profits from the authorised channel. “All vendors need to police the grey market; it is their responsibility to create as level a playing field as possible for resellers,” he told us. Some in the industry will say that the grey market is, at least, partly fuelled by the vendors themselves, whether it be leaky supply chains or the temptation to sell to brokers to make kit disappear amid slow sales.
Net net: HP is a company able to capture headlines. I wonder if Kim Kardashian’s media impact has inspired the $100 billion company?
Stephen E Arnold, September 13, 2014
BA Insight Delves into Connectors
September 12, 2014
I read “BA Insight Adds 10 New Indexing Connectors to Surface Information.” The article reports that it offers connectors for:
- SharePoint Online
- Confluence
- Salesforce.com
- Microsoft Dynamics Online
- CuadraSTAR
- Alfresco
- Scopus
- PharmaCircle
- Jive
- Box
Outside In (now Oracle) and Entropy Soft (now Salesforce) proved that connectors could be more important than the software to which folks want to connect in terms of buy out magnetism.
Is BA Insight embracing connectors as a way to accelerate its attractiveness to a potential acquirer? Will BA Insight’s play provide Microsoft Delve (when it becomes a carrier class product in a couple of years) with an easy way to support more than a handful of content types? Will Microsoft buy BA Insight? (Both companies share a vision that keyword search is not about search but about related information.)
What the move suggests to me is that BA Insight is filling in some gaps in the Delve product offering. I address the Microsoft Delve collection of functions in my forthcoming Information Today column. Connectors may be the least of Delve’s challenges. I think it would be helpful if Delve could process email attachments, a feature I understand is not supported. The packing of components around Yammer is not a revolution in search. The approach reminds me of Microsoft’s creation of SharePoint from acquired and home grown code. Do you remember
My hunch is that other Microsoft dependent services firms will “delve” into this gap as well. Me too is a time honored practice in the pond choked with search fish.
Some folks are nosing around ElasticSearch as a low cost, relatively easy solution to content aggregation. What happens if ElasticSearch community developers focus on SharePoint? Interesting question.
Stephen E Arnold, September 12, 2014
Google and Customer Support
September 12, 2014
I don’t expect anything from an outfit providing customer support. I don’t expect anything from search vendors with customer support systems. The name of the game is no costs. To eliminate costs, customer support operations have some options.
- Ignore the inquiries. I recall that a member of my family used this method for a large search system. He figured that the time required to handle inquiries would bankrupt the company. Ergo: Hit delete.
- Buy an automated system and let it run. This usually requires paying a vendor to set up the system and “maintain” it. This works a bit like winning on a digital slot machine.
- Try to perform customer support. Move the operation to some lower cost location and deal with the revolving door that leads to 20 to 50 percent turnover.
Many companies use these options in combination.
According to Computerworld (yep, it seems to still be in business unlike other units of IDG’s empire), Google has to shift from option one.
“German Court Requires Google to Stop Ignoring Customer Emails” reports:
Google users who email the address “support-de@google.com” receive an automatic reply notifying the emailer that Google will neither read nor reply due to the large number of requests sent to the address. After that sentence, the automatic reply directs Google users to various online self-help guides and contact forms. This form of communication is incompatible with the German Telemedia Act, which says that companies must provide a way to ensure fast electronic communications with them, the VZBV had argued. The organization described Google’s support address as a black box in which messages disappear into a void. The court agreed with the VZBV and ruled that an automatically generated email does not meet the requirements of the law.
There you go. Google may shift to another option. Perhaps a search engine vendor will land the contract. Will the German court like that approach? I will wait with German pointer like fixation.
Stephen E Arnold, September 12, 2014
Note that IDC is the outfit that sold my content on Amazon without my permission. The “expert” who is surfing on my name is Dave Schubmehl. The German court does not seem to pay much attention to this, however.
Facial Recognition Tech Pinpoints Suspect in Cold Case
September 12, 2014
A criminal hiding in a foreign land for over a decade may begin to feel sure he has escaped the long arm of U.S. law. Today’s technology, however, has rendered that sense of security false for at least one wanted suspect. We learn from NakedSecurity that “Facial Recognition Software Leads to Arrest After 14-Year Manhunt.”
Neil Stammer, of New Mexico, was charged with some very serious offenses back in 1999, but escaped while out on bond. Writer Lisa Vaas reports:
“The case went cold until January 2014, when FBI Special Agent Russ Wilson was assigned the job of fugitive coordinator in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Wilson created a new wanted poster for Stammer and posted it onto FBI.gov in hopes of generating tips.
“A special agent with the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) – a branch of the US Department of State whose mission includes protecting US Embassies and maintaining the integrity of US visa and passport travel documents – was testing new facial recognition software designed to uncover passport fraud when he decided, ‘on a whim,’ to use the software on FBI wanted posters.
“A match showed up between Stammer’s wanted poster and a passport photo issued under a different name. Suspecting fraud, the DSS agent contacted the FBI. The tip soon led Wilson to Nepal, where Stammer was living under the name Kevin Hodges and regularly visiting the US Embassy there to renew his tourist visa.”
Apparently, Stammer/Hodges had gotten comfortable in Nepal, teaching English. An FBI agent observed that the suspect seemed quite surprised when a joint operation with the Nepalese government led to his location and arrest.
Though the facial-recognition search that produced this arrest was performed “on a whim,” local and federal law-enforcement agencies across the country are using or considering such software. Vaas emphasizes that these implementations are being made in the absence of any standardized best practices, though some are currently being crafted by the National Telecommunications & Information Administration.
Cynthia Murrell, September 12, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Limit Results to a Specific Library in SharePoint
September 12, 2014
This honk goes out to SharePoint users in the crowd. In a post titled “SharePoint Search *Quirks: Query Variables,” the MSDN SharePoint Strategy blog addresses a common question: How can one limit results to a specific library in a specific site collection? The write-up points us to the MS resource page, “Query Variables in SharePoint Server.” We think the examples really underscore the user-friendliness of
SharePoint search. Here’s the first example:
“To scope to this site collection: {searchTerms} SPSiteURL:{SiteCollection.Url}
*By using the {SiteCollection.Url} variable, you could define, say a [result source, query rule, result type or whatever] at an SSA level and it would be applicable to the Site Collection from which the query is made.
*In other words, say I have two site collections http://foo/sites/abc and http://foo/sites/xyz, and wanted to create a rule (or whatever) at the SSA level. For this example, hard coding the URL path would mean I have to create two rules (or whatever) …one for each site collection, which clearly doesn’t scale for large environments.
*Instead, I can create just one rule and use the variable instead that would be correct and in the proper context for all site collections.”
See the write-up for a little more, or click through to the “Query Variables” page it points out. We are advised that there are probably other ways to do this, but this is how this blogger and MS employee (writing as “bspender”) has uncovered. It is nice to know there are multiple options for approaching this task. Simplicity may be overrated.
Cynthia Murrell, September 12, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Machine Vision Solved (Almost)
September 11, 2014
I read “The Revolutionary Technique That Quietly Changed Machine Vision Forever.” The main idea is that having software figure out what an image “is” has become a slam dunk. Well, most of the time.
The write up from the tech cheerleaders at Technology Review says, “Machines are now almost as good as human at object recognition.”
A couple of niggling points. There is that phrase “almost as good”. Then there is the phrase “object recognition.”
Read the write up and then answer these questions:
- Is the method ready to analyze imagery fed by a drone to a warfighter during a live fire engagement?
- Is the system able to classify a weapon in a manner meaningful to field commander?
- Can the system discern a cancerous tissue from a non cancerous tissue with an image output from a medical imaging system?
- Does the method recognize objects in a image like the one shown below?
Image by Stephen E Arnold, 2013
If you pass this query to Google’s image recognition system, you get street scenes, not a person watching activities through an area cordoned off by government workers.
Google thinks the surveillance image is just like the scenes shown above. Note Google does not include observers or the all important police tape.
The write up states:
In other words, it is not going to be long before machines significantly outperform humans in image recognition tasks. The best machine vision algorithms still struggle with objects that are small or thin such as a small ant on a stem of a flower or a person holding a quill in their hand. They also have trouble with images that have been distorted with filters, an increasingly common phenomenon with modern digital cameras.
This stuff works in science fiction stories, however. Lab progress is not real world application progress.
Stephen E Arnold, September 11, 2014
IDG Nukes Macworld Magazine
September 11, 2014
I love IDG, the publishing / services company founded by Pat McGovern in 1964. Mr. McGovern spoke to me about joining the company. I was an executive at Ziff Communications Co. He seemed like a nice guy. I recall he had on a plain blue suit, white shirt, and red tie. I think that every time I saw him at a conference or in a snapshot, he had on that attire.
I decided to deflect his interest in me. I did not get happy vibes from him. Bill Ziff, on the other hand, emitted a presence and triggered singing and dancing vibes. So what da ya think? Culture maybe? Integrity radar beep?
IDG owns IDC, an outfit that has used my content over the years. Most recently, one of the IDG/IDC “experts” surfed on my name, selling a heavily modified version of a report I wrote about Attivio. Did I get paid? Nah. Did the expert, Dave Schubmehl, I believe sign a contract with me? Nah.
Does this provide some insight into the pressure on IDG / IDC to make money without thinking too much about the methods? Hmmm.
When I read “IDG Shutters Macworld Magazine, Much of the Editorial Staff Let Go,” I had three thoughts race through my admittedly small mind:
- There will be more cost reducing measures. This is not the dropping of a single shoe. It may signal a semi carrying print titles that is losing its load.
- Too bad for the IDGers who have to look for work elsewhere. Leaving a company that seems to be starting a slim down plan to deal with cost issues is not the blue ribbon it was in the triage years after the crash in 2008. There’s a recovery, right?
- Are there other examples of rising pressure causing interesting business decisions? Surfing on my name by selling a report that puts some sparkle on the Las Vegas dancer’s costume is different from blue chip consulting methods. See this story for some color.
The article points out that the Macworld Web site will not be killed off. Some staff have been sent packing.
Not too surprising.
Stephen E Arnold, September 11, 2014
Bilingual Search Engine YaSabe Sees Growth through Word of Mouth and Media Partnerships
September 11, 2014
The article on Elevation DC titled Herndon-Based Bilingual Search Engine Expands Reach covers the growth of YaSabe, the Spanish and English search engine helping Spanish-speaking Americans find the information they need. The search engine actually finds data that is English and translates it into Spanish before tagging it. The article states,
“Its categories are geared toward the information Spanish speakers might need: bilingual service providers, jobs for people fluent in more than one language, 18 different types of Latin cuisine. Azim Tejani, the company’s executive vice president, says that 20 percent of YaSabe’s traffic comes directly to the site, 50 percent comes from search engines where users search for terms like “pedicura” instead of “pedicure” and the remaining traffic comes from its partnerships with media companies serving Spanish-speaking Ameri[cans].”
Tejani is also quoted in the article as saying that YaSabe is mobile-centered as opposed to web-centered. According to Tejani, some 30% of YaSabe users rely mainly on their mobile phones to access the internet. He credits the growth of YaSabe both with community guides as well as strengthened relationships with Spanish-language media partners such as Univision and Mundo Hispanico. Univision in particular has seen great success since YaSabe began running the TV network’s search engines in 2013.
Chelsea Kerwin, September 11, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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