Big Data: Gartner Writes about Gartner Predictions
February 15, 2015
I want to make sure that you are sitting down. Take a deep breath. Okay, now you are ready to enter the twilight zone of predictions generated by a mid tier consulting firm. You can read the modern Michel de Nostradamus’ prophecies in “Gartner Predicts Three Big Data Trends for Business Intelligence.”
The heir to Nostradamus may don a more stylish type of garb when making predictions.
Here we go.
Prophecy I. Big Data will goose reinvention of business processes and products. I, for one, am looking forward to a new type of air travel. My recollection is that it has been unchanged for decades.
Prophecy II. Data brokers will thrive. Okay, intermediaries. Sounds good in except that disintermediation seems to be the trend if the research for CyberOSINT is on the beam.
Prophecy III. I am not sure what this means. Here’s the sentence which caused my personal Yugo’s wheels to spin.”By 2017, more than 20% of customer facing analytic deployments will provide product tracking information leveraging IoT [the Internet of Things].”
Here in Harrod’s Creek, we don’t think too much about prophesies. The future is a slippery fish. For Gartner, their “experts” wear Glacier Glove Ice Bay Fishing Gloves. I wonder if this prophecy was left on the floor of the fish prep room:
Volcanic fire from the center of the earth
will cause trembling around the new city:
Two great rocks will make war for a long time.
Then Arethusa will redden a new river. Source.
Stephen E Arnold, February 15, 2015
Short Honk: Impressive WiFi Signal Analysis
February 15, 2015
Navigate to this Imgur link. There are visualizations of a WiFi signal. Fascinating. I had no idea that the best signals were found on tops of wave “clouds.”
Excellent idea and work.
Stephen E Arnold, February 15, 2015
Will Google Be Forced to Downsize?
February 15, 2015
With the founders cashing in some of their shares, I am sensitive to allegedly accurate information about the future of the GOOG. I read “Google Layoffs Inevitable.” The write up references a third party, so the info may not be spot on. I noted this passage:
With ad revenues leveling off and expenses skyrocketing (G&A has quadrupled in 5 years), Google is headed for a financial meltdown, and when it happens, the company will need to shave $2 billion a year off its $16 billion/yr in R&D and G&A costs, which means, if we count the fully burdened cost of a Google employee at $200K per year, it needs to On a percent-of-income basis, Google outspends Apple on R&D six-to-one. Where is that money going? Driverless cars, Google Glass, body odor patents. Stuff that doesn’t have a chance in hell of generating revenue any time soon. On the one hand, Google is to be credited with thinking long-term, something American companies don’t tend to do very well, but on the other hand, Google needs to execute well on the revenue side. Right now, most of its revenue is tied to search ads, which are receding in relevance. It competes, in the cloud space, with Amazon (which no one should have to do). Will that save the company? No. It would have, already, if it were going to shave 10,000 jobs.
Then there was some information about the fuzzywuzzy research investments. I highlighted:
On a percent-of-income basis, Google outspends Apple on R&D six-to-one. Where is that money going? Driverless cars, Google Glass, body odor patents. Stuff that doesn’t have a chance in hell of generating revenue any time soon. On the one hand, Google is to be credited with thinking long-term, something American companies don’t tend to do very well, but on the other hand, Google needs to execute well on the revenue side. Right now, most of its revenue is tied to search ads, which are receding in relevance. It competes, in the cloud space, with Amazon (which no one should have to do). Will that save the company? No. It would have, already, if it were going to.
I find these negative Google analyses interesting. Keep in mind that I don’t have a dog in this fight. I find the Yandex, iSite, and Ixquick search systems increasingly useful. I do love the strapping teenager with the dinosaur on its campus. Even though Apple is allegedly developing a vehicle, it seems that Apple may hit a financial high water mark which Google cannot achieve as the mobile revolution spawns new, competitive life forms. Is that frost on the Google dinosaur’s snout this morning?
Stephen E Arnold, February 15, 2015
Automated Collection Keynote Preview
February 14, 2015
On February 19, 2015, I will do the keynote at an invitation only intelligence conference in Washington, DC. A preview of my formal remarks is available in an eight minute video at this link. The preview has been edited. I have inserted an example of providing access to content not requiring a Web site.
A comment about the speed with which information and data change and become available. Humans cannot keep up with external and most internal-to-the-organization information.
The preview also includes a simplified schematic of the principal components of a next generation information access system. The diagram is important because it reveals that keyword search is a supporting utility, not the wonder tool many marketers hawk to unsuspecting customers. The supporting research for the talk and the full day conference appears in CyberOSINT, which is now available as an eBook.
Stephen E Arnold, February 14, 2015
Sci Tech Ripple: Lousy Data, Alleged Cover Ups
February 14, 2015
Short honk: I don’t want to get stuck in this tar pit. Read “Are Your Medications Safe?” A professor and some students dug up information that is somewhat interesting. If you happen to be taking medicine, you may not have the full dosage of facts. What’s up? Would the word “malfeasance” be suitable? It is Friday the 13th too.
Stephen E Arnold, February 14, 2015
Google and Permanence
February 13, 2015
It is Friday the 13th, and I think a black cat has walked across Google’s parking lot. I read “Digital Dark Age could Leave Historians with No Records of the 21st Century.” The write up paints a gloomy picture for the folks who want to learn about the go go life in Silicon Valley a century hence. Digital content is ephemeral.
What about content management? What about the copies of the Web parked on Amazon’s servers? What about the archives of the government entities tucking away every zero and one?
Nope. Unless a person prints out a copy of a document or a picture, that content will be lost. The Dark Age. Scary.
According to the write up:
“In our zeal to get excited about digitizing we digitize photographs thinking it’s going to make them last longer, and we might turn out to be wrong,” he said. “I would say if there are photos you are really concerned about create a physical instance of them. Print them out.”
Who makes this statement? A Googler. The fellow who helped make the Internet come into being. The print out advocate is Vint Cerf.
Trees, are you listening? Millinocket, Maine (the magic city), you have a future. The paper mills will reopen. Humans who are skilled indexers will be back in business. And Googlers are wrong a vanishingly small percentage of the time. Just think about Loon balloons and Google Glass. Consider the relevance of Google search results which make “all the world’s information” findable.
Stephen E Arnold, February 13, 2015
A Newspaper Asserts Content Worthless
February 13, 2015
I recall paying for a copy of the Guardian newspaper when I was in the UK a couple of years ago. My hunch is that the newspaper is still for sale. I encountered a link on a UK headline site to “The iPod Effect: How Near Limitless Storage Made Content Worthless.”
The idea that an MP3 player devalued content was interesting. I thought that newspaper entitles like quality oriented Murdoch operations blamed Google for devaluing content. I have heard speakers at conferences point the finger of blame at education’s failure to produce book readers. A consulting firm expert opined that it was the acceleration of life that nuked magazines and newspapers and reading in general.
According to the Guardian, which embraces some open source (free) technology:
If we continue to cultivate a society where even the most crafted and artisan digital items are throwaway flash sale detritus, how can we expect to continue enjoying the talented minds that create them?
Armageddon arrives and the warriors are Taylor Swift and iPhone toting troops.
I learned:
As a whole, we humans aren’t great at moderating our own consumption. As each scarce resource in human life has become more and more available, we’ve gorged ourselves until popular sentiment realizes it’s time to rebalance. Just as we hit that wall with nutrition and energy consumption, I think we’re getting there with the value of art in ubiquitous digital form. But while we adjust, we’re relying on brave creators to treat us mean and keep us keen so when we return to tough decisions, we know they’re too good to lose.
Oh, maybe this article is only about music and not newspapers. Wow, that had me frightened.
Stephen E Arnold, February 13, 2015
Behind Search Improvements at Pinterest
February 13, 2015
As a Pinterest user myself, I know how important the site’s search function is. Now, as Gigaom informs us, “Pinterest Explains How It’s Making Its Search Work Better.” It sounds like an approach to semantic machine learning inspired by the crowdsourcing phenomenon. Writer Jonathan Vanian tells us:
“Dong Wang, the Pinterest software engineer who wrote the post, explained that even though a user may search for the word ‘turkey,’ it’s unclear what exactly that person may be looking for. Does he want to find turkey recipes, is he planning a trip to Turkey or is he just interested in poultry — it’s hard to say without some context.
“If that person decides to search for ‘turkey recipes’ as part of his next query, Pinterest takes that into account and can assume that the next person who may be searching for ‘turkey’ might also be craving some turkey recipes as well; maybe it’s holiday season and everyone’s hungry. Pinterest learned that ‘the information extracted from previous query log has shown to be effective in understanding the user’s search intent’ and this can be applied to other Pinterest users as well.”
Pinterest’s data-collection workflow is called QueryJoin, and engineers use it to draw conclusions like the one about turkey recipes, above. Factors analyzed also include data like pins’ image signatures and “engagement stats” like the number of clicks and re-pins it has received. For more information, see Dong Wang’s original post.
Cynthia Murrell, February 13, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Chilling Effects Censors Its Own Database
February 13, 2015
In the struggle between privacy and transparency, score one for the privacy advocates. Or, at least, for those looking to protect intellectual property. TorrentFreak tells us that “Chilling Effects DMCA Archive Censors Itself.” Chilling Effects is a site/ database set up in response to takedown requests; their homepage describes their goal:
“The Chilling Effects database collects and analyzes legal complaints and requests for removal of online materials, helping Internet users to know their rights and understand the law. These data enable us to study the prevalence of legal threats and let Internet users see the source of content removals.”
Now, though, the site has decided to conceal the non-linked URLs that could be used to find material that has been removed due to copyright infringement complaints. The TorrentFreak (TF) article explains:
“The Chilling Effects DMCA clearing house is one of the few tools that helps to keep copyright holders accountable. Founded by Harvard’s Berkman Center, it offers an invaluable database for researchers and the public in general. At TF we use the website on a weekly basis to spot inaccurate takedown notices and other wrongdoings. Since the native search engine doesn’t always return the best results, we mostly use Google to spot newsworthy notices on the site. This week, however, we were no longer able to do so. The Chilling Effects team decided to remove its entire domain from all search engines, including its homepage and other informational and educational resources.”
Yes, information is tough to find if it is not indexed. For their part, the folks at Chilling Effects feel this step is necessary, at least for the time being; they “continue to think things through” as they walk the line between legally protected privacy and freedom of information.
Cynthia Murrell, February 13, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Coveo Asserts Record Growth and Improved Relevance
February 12, 2015
Proprietary enterprise search is one reason DARPA has made noise about a new threat center. The idea is that cyber intelligence is a hot issue. Without repeating the information in CyberOSINT, suffice it to say that keyword search is not up to the findability tasks in today’s world. For more on the threat center integration, you may want to review “New Threat Center to Integrate Cyber Intelligence.”
In this context, I read “Coveo Announces Record Growth in 2014.” The company was founded in 2005 in Canada. The the last nine years, according to Crunchbase, the company has ingested $34.7 million from eight investors. The most recent funding round was in December 2012 when the company obtained an additional $18 million. Let’s assume the data are accurate.
In the “record growth” announcement, the company states:
Coveo today announced accelerated growth in 2014 via strong demand for its enterprise search-based applications that help employees upskill as they work, and driven in large part by its continued strategic partnerships with leading organizations such as Salesforce. The year was also marked by the best quarter in the history of the company and the 1,000th enterprise activation of its software, with new customer Sonus Networks.
The “record growth” news story omits an important data point: Financial results with numbers. Coveo is a privately held company and under no obligation to provide any hard numbers. In lieu of metrics, the story provides this interesting item: Enhanced relevance tuning. After nearly nine years in the enterprise market, I had assumed that Coveo had figured out relevance.
Coveo, like its fellow travelers in the keyword search sector Attivio and BA Insight, is recognized in different “expert” advisory firms’ lists of important companies. Also, each of these three keyword search companies are working overtime to generate revenues that enable them to generate Autonomy or Endeca scale revenues. The three keyword search vendors have to differentiate themselves as the US Department of Defense are actively seeks next generation approaches. The sunny days of Autonomy and Endeca have been hit by climate change even as they recline in the shelter of Hewlett Packard and Oracle, their new owners.
My hunch is that if the financials back up the assertions in the “record growth” story, stakeholders will be happy campers. On the other hand, if those funding traditional search systems relying on proprietary code do not see a solid payback, dreary days may be ahead.
For functional information retrieval, many large companies—including the firms developing next generation information access systems—ignore proprietary search solutions. The open source software deliver a lower cost, license fee free commodity function.
Did anyone bring umbrellas? In the hay days of enterprise search, vendors gave away bumbershoots with logos affixed. These may be needed because the search climate has changed with heavier rainfall predicted.
Stephen E Arnold, February 12, 2015
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