Bottlenose: Not a Dolphin, Another Intelligence Vendor
December 15, 2014
Last week, maybe two weeks ago, I learned that KPMG invested in Bottlenose. The company say that the cash will “take trend intelligence global.” The company asserts here:
We organize the world’s attention and emotion.
I am, as you may know, am interested in what I call NGIA systems. These are next generation information access systems. Instead of dumping a list of Google-style search results in front of me, NGIA systems provide a range of tools to use information in ways that do not require me to formulate a query, open and browse possibly relevant documents, and either output a report or pipe the results into another system. For example, in one application of NGIA system functions, the data from a predictive system can be fed directly into the autonomous component of a drone. The purpose is to eliminate the time delay between an action that triggers a flag in a smart system and taking immediate action to neutralize a threat. NGIA is not your mother’s search engine, although I suppose one could use this type of output input operation to identify a pizza joint.
I scanned the Bottlenose Web site, trying to determine if the claims of global intelligence and organizing the world’s attention and emotion was an NGIA technology or another social media monitoring service. The company asserts that it monitors “the stream.” The idea is that real-time information is flowing through the firm’s monitoring nodes. The content is obviously processed. The outputs are made available to those interested in the marketing.
The company states:
Our Trend Intelligence solutions will take in all forms of stream data, internal and external, for a master, cross-correlated view of actionable trends in all the real-time forces affecting your business.
The key phrase for me is “all forms” of data, “internal and external.” The result will be “a master, cross-correlated view of actionable trends in all the real time forces affecting your business.” Will Bottlenose deliver this type of output to its customers? See “Leaked Emails Reveal MPAA Plans to Pay Elected Officials to Attack Google.” Sure, but only after the fact. If the information is available via a service like Bottlenose there may be some legal consequences in my view.
By my count, there are a couple of “alls” in this description. A bit of reflection reveals that if Bottlenose is to deliver, the company has to have collection methods that work like those associated with law enforcement and intelligence agencies. A number of analysts have noted that the UK’s efforts to intercept data flowing through a Belgian telecommunications company’s servers is interesting.
Is it possible that a commercial operation, with or without KPMG’s investment, is about to deliver this type of comprehensive collection to marketers? Based on what the company’s Web site asserts, I come away with the impression that Bottlenose is similar to the governmental services that are leading to political inquiries and aggressive filtering of information on networks. China is one country which is not shy about its efforts to prevent certain information from reaching its citizens.
Bottlenose says:
Bottlenose Nerve Center™ spots real-time trends, tracks interests, measures conversations, analyzes keywords and identifies influencers. As we expand our library of data sources and aggregate the content, people, thinking and emotion of humanity’s connected communications, Bottlenose will map, reflect and explore the evolving global mind. We aim to continuously show what humanity is thinking and feeling, now.
I can interpret this passage as suggesting that a commercial company will deliver “all” information to a customer via its “nerve center.” Relationships between and among entities can be discerned; for example:
This is the type of diagram that some of the specialized law enforcement and intelligence systems generate for authorized users. The idea is that a connection can be spotted without having to do any of the Google-style querying-scanning-copying-thinking type work.
My view of Bottlenose and other company’s rushing to emulate the features and functio0ns of the highly specialized and reasonably tightly controlled systems in use by law enforcement and intelligence agencies may be creating some unrealistically high expectations.
The reality of many commercial services, which may or may not apply to Bottlenose, is that:
- The systems use information on RSS feeds, the public information available from Twitter and Facebook, and changes to Web pages. These systems do not and cannot due to the cost perform comprehensive collection of high-interest data. The impression is that something is being done which is probably not actually taking place.
- The consequence of processing a subset of information is that the outputs may be dead wrong at worst and misleading at best. Numerical processes can identify that Lady Gaga’s popularity is declining relative to Taylor Swift’s. But this is a function that has been widely available from dozens of vendors for many years. Are the users of these systems aware of the potential flaws in the outputs? In my experience, nope.
- The same marketing tendencies that have contributed to the implosion of the commercial enterprise search sector are now evident in the explanation of what can be done with historical and predictive math. The hype may attract a great deal of money. But it appears that generating and sustaining revenue is a challenge few companies in this sector have been able to achieve.
My suggestion is that Bottlenose may not be a “first mover.” Bottlenose is a company that is following in the more than 15 year old footsteps of companies like Autonomy, developers of the DRE, and i2 Ltd. Both of these are Cambridge University alumni innovations. Some researchers push the origins of this type of information analysis back to the early 1970s. For me, the commercialization of the Bayesian and graph methods in the late 1990s is a useful take off point.
What is happening is that lower computing costs and cheaper storage have blended with mathematical procedures taught in most universities. Add in the Silicon Valley sauce, and we have a number of start ups that want to ride the growing interest in systems that are not forcing Google style interactions on users.
The problem is that it is far easier to paint a word picture than come to grips with the inherent difficulties in using the word “all.” That kills credibility in my book. For a company to deliver an NGIA solution, a number of software functions must be integrated into a functioning solution. The flame out of Fast Search & Transfer teaches a useful lesson. Will the lessons of Fast Search apply to Bottlenose? It will be interesting to watch the story unfold.
Stephen E Arnold, December 15, 2014
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