Reed Elsevier Lexis Nexis Embraces Legal Analytics: No, Not an Oxymoron
November 27, 2015
Lawyers and legal search and content processing systems do words. The analytics part of life, based on my limited experience of watching attorneys do mathy stuff, is not these folks’ core competency. Words. Oh, and billing. I can’t overlook billing.
I read “Now It’s Official: Lexis Nexis Acquires Lex Machina.” This is good news for the stakeholders of Lex Machina. Reed Elsevier certainly expects Lex Machina’s business processes to deliver an avalanche of high margin revenue. One can only raise prices so far before the old chestnut from Economics 101 kicks in: Price elasticity. Once something is too expensive, the customers kick the habit, find an alternative, or innovate in remarkable ways.
According to the write up:
LexisNexis today announced the acquisition of Silicon Valley-based Lex Machina, creators of the award-winning Legal Analytics platform that helps law firms and companies excel in the business and practice of law.
So what does legal analytics do? Here’s the official explanation, which is in, gentle reader, words:
- A look into the near future. The integration of Lex Machina Legal Analytics with the deep collection of LexisNexis content and technology will unleash the creation of new, innovative solutions to help predict the results of legal strategies for all areas of the law.
- Industry narrative. The acquisition is a prominent and fresh example of how a major player in legal technology and publishing is investing in analytics capabilities.
I don’t exactly know what Lex Machina delivers. The company’s Web page states:
We mine litigation data, revealing insights never before available about judges, lawyers, parties, and patents, culled from millions of pages of IP litigation information. We call these insights Legal Analytics, because analytics involves the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data. Our customers use to win in the highly competitive business and practice of law. Corporate counsel use Lex Machina to select and manage outside counsel, increase IP value and income, protect company assets, and compare performance with competitors. Law firm attorneys and their staff use Lex Machina to pitch and land new clients, win IP lawsuits, close transactions, and prosecute new patents.
I think I understand. Lex Machina applies the systems and methods used for decades by companies like BAE Systems (Detica/ NetReveal) and similar firms to provide tools which identify important items. (BAE was one of Autonomy’s early customers back in the late 1990s.) Algorithms, not humans reading documents in banker boxes, find the good stuff. Costs go down because software is less expensive than real legal eagles. Partners can review outputs and even visualizations. Revolutionary.
IBM Cognos 2015 Pricing
November 27, 2015
IBM offers many products and services. Getting a firm, fixed cost for some of these can be tough. Asking Watson may not result in too many useful IBM cost outputs. A company’s IBM representative may be able to deliver the goods.
Imagine my delight when I read a semi content marketing item called “IBM Cognos business intelligence offers Self-Service BI.”
Here are the data I found interesting:
Cognos BI on Cloud offers three levels of user pricing and four levels of administrator pricing. User pricing is as follows:
- A workgroup license is $75 per user, per month, with a minimum subscription of 50 users and a minimum six-month term. It is renewed semi-annually with monthly billing.
- A standard license is $95 per user, per month, with a minimum subscription of 100 users and a minimum one-year term. It is billed monthly and renewed annually.
- An enterprise license is $125 per user, per month, with a minimum subscription of 150 users and a minimum one-year term. It is billed monthly and renewed annually.
Administrator pricing is as follows:
- Analytics Administrator (authorized user [AU]): List price is $15,100 per AU; typical discount is 30% and annual support percentage is 20%.
- Analytics Explorer (authorized user and processor [PVU]): $2,500 per AU; typical discount is 30% and annual support percentage is 20%.
- Analytics User Authorized (user and processor [PVU]): $1,350 per AU; typical discount is 30% and annual support percentage 20%.
- Information Distribution (processor [PVU]): $500 per PVU; typical discount is 30% and annual support percentage is 20%.
The “menu” includes the variable pricing elements which IBM has used for decades. When we licensed ABI/INFORM document delivery to IBM, I happily implemented the same pricing scheme. Wow, does that approach yield revenue? Yep, it does.
I would point out that the write up does not beat the Watson drum. I find this amusing because Watson is marketed by the Watson as an analytics champion. See, for example, “It’s Come to This for IBM: Watson Is Now a Gimmick App on the iPhone.” But never fear, Big Blue fans, IBM said in October 2015 that it was tweaking Cognos. How? According to eWeek, “IBM Redesigns Cognos Analytics to Resemble Watson Analytics.”
IBM has a bit of a revenue and profits hill to climb. IBM has the analytics tools to track its financial progress. Tools, however, do not equal sustainable, organic revenues.
Storm clouds remain even with the Weather Channel data.
Stephen E Arnold, November 27, 2015
IBM and Digital Piracy: Just Three Ways?
November 27, 2015
I read “Preventing Digital Piracy: 3 Ways to Use Big Data to Protect Content.” I love making complicated issues really easy. Remember the first version of the spreadsheet? Easy. Just get a terminal, wrangle the team to install LANPAR, and have at it. Easy as 1-2-3, which came after VisiCalc.
Ah, LANPAR. You remember that, right. I have fond memories of Language for Programming Arrays at Random, don’t you? I still think the approach embodied in that software was a heck of a lot more user friendly than filling in tiny rectangular areas with a No. 4 pencil and adding and subtracting columns using an adding machine.
IBM has cracked digital piracy by preventing it. Now I find that notion fascinating. On a recent trip, I noted that stolen software and movies were more difficult to find. However, a question or two of the helpful folks at a computer store in Cape Town revealed a number of tips for snagging digital content. One involved a visit to a storefront in a township. Magic. Downloaded stuff on a USB stick. Cheap, fast, unmonitored.
IBM’s solution involve streaming data. Okay, but maybe streaming for some content is not available; for example, a list of firms identified by an intelligence agency as “up and comers.”
IBM also wants me to build a real time feedback loop. That sounds great, but the angle is not rules. The IBM approach is social media. This fix also involves live streaming. Not too useful when the content is not designed to entertain.
The third step wants me to perform due diligence. I am okay with this, but then what? When I worked at a blue chip consulting firm, the teams provided specific recommendations. The due diligence is useless without informed, affordable options and the resources to implement, maintain, and tune the monitoring activity.
I am not sure what IBM expects me to do with these three steps. My initial reaction is that I would do what charm school at Booz, Allen taught decades ago; that is, figure out the problem, identify the options, and implement the approach that had the highest probability of resolving the issue. The job is not to generalize. Proper scope helps ensure success.
If I wanted to prevent digital privacy, I would look to companies which have sophisticated, automatable methods to identify and remediate issues.
IBM, for example, does not possess the functionality of a company like Terbium Labs. There are other innovators dealing with leaking data. I could use LANPAR to do certain types of spreadsheet work. But why? Forward looking solutions do more than offer trivial 1-2-3.
Stephen E Arnold, November 27, 2015
Individualized Facebook Search
November 27, 2015
Facebook search is a puzzle. If you want to find a specific post that you remember seeing on a person’s profile, you cannot find it unless it is posted to their timeline. It is a consistent headache, especially if you become obsessed with finding that post. Mashable alerts us to a new Facebook pilot program, “Facebook May Soon Let You Search Individual Profile Pages.” Facebook’s new pilot program allows users to search for posts within a profile.
The new search feature is only available to pilot program participants. Based on how the feedback, Facebook will evaluate the search function and announce a potential release date.
“Facebook says it’s a small pilot program going around the U.S. for iPhone and desktop and that users have requested an easier way to search for posts within a person’s profile. The feature is limited in nature and only showing up for a select group of people who are part of the pilot program. The social network will be evaluating feedback based on the pilot. No plans for an official rollout have been announced at this time.?”
The search feature shows up on user profiles as a basic search box with the description “search this profile” with the standard magnifying glass graphic. It is a simple addition to a profile’s dashboard and it does not take up much space, but it does present a powerful tool.
Facebook is a social media platform that has ingrained itself into the function of business intelligence to regular socialization. As we rely more on it for daily functions, information needs to be easy to recall and access. The profile search feature will probably be a standard Facebook dashboard function by 2016.
Whitney Grace, November 27, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
How Semantic Technology Will Revolutionize Education
November 27, 2015
Will advanced semantic technology return us to an age of Socratic education? In a guest post at Forbes, Declara’s Nelson González suggests that’s exactly where we’re heading; the headline declares, “The Revolution Will Be Semantic: Web3.0 and the Emergence of Collaborative Intelligence.” In today’s world, stuffing a lot of facts into each of our heads is much less important than the ability to find and share information effectively. González writes:
“Most importantly, Web3.0 is opening paths to collaborative intelligence. Isolated individual learning is increasingly irrelevant to organizational health, which is measured largely through group metrics. Today, public and private institutions live or die based on the efficiency, innovation, and impact of corporate efforts.”
The post points to content curators like Flipboard and Pinterest as examples of such collective adaptive capacity, then looks at effects this shift is already beginning to have on education. González gives a couple of examples he’s seen around the world, and discusses ways collaboration software like his company’s can facilitate new ways of learning. See the article for details. He writes:
“Web 3.0 is unleashing a kind of ‘back to the future’ innovation, the digital democratization of what élites have always practiced: deep learning through imitative apprenticeship, humanistic personalization via real-time observation, and mastery through crowdsourced validation. Silicon Valley is thus enabling us all to become the sons and daughters of Socrates.”
Launched in 2012, Declara set out to build better bridges between online sources of knowledge. The company is based in Palo Alto, California.
Cynthia Murrell, November 27, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Turkey, Watson. Turkey Meatballs Now
November 26, 2015
I read an article which is not a sketch for Saturday Night Live.
The juxtaposition of Watson and turkey strikes me as something a comedy writing team would craft on a pressure packed Wednesday afternoon for a demanding Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert type entertainer.
I now believe “This Is IBM Watson’s Favorite Turkey Recipe” is an honest, down home, authentic effort from IBM’s tireless Watson researchers. It is difficult to get open source code, home brew scripts, and acquired technology to put Julia Childs’ recipe for turkey back in the drawer.
I asked, “Wow, Watson does turkey recipes?” Who knew?
The write up explains:
In honor of the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, Fortune reached out to IBM to find out Watson’s perfect turkey recipe. What came back wasn’t exactly a Thanksgiving classic: meatballs.
Well, the savvy editors at Fortune were not happy with plain old meatballs. Watson ran another string of zeros and ones through its magical system and generated a hard cider sauce for those IBM meatballs. Inspiration may have come from Bob Dylan, the Watson icon, and the Dylan song Copper Kettle:
Get you a copper kettle, get you a copper coil
Fill it with new made corn mash and never more you’ll toil
You’ll just lay there by the juniper while the moon is bright
Watch them just a-filling in the pale moonlight.
The alcoholic touch adds zest to the bacon infused mix on an American holiday. I am not sure how this bacon and booze thing works for some religious groups, people with dependency problems, and health nuts who associate bacon with cancer and liquor with liver issues. Well, trivial issues I assume from the point of view of the Watson kitchen wizards.
Thanks to Fortune and IBM Watson for a delightful alternative to deep fried turkey on “a day of giving thanks for the blessing of the harvest and of the preceding year.” (Wikipedia)
Stream a Dylan tune and dig in, gentle reader. (Aren’t meatballs Swedish?) Ask Watson.
Stephen E Arnold, November 26, 2015
Alphabet Google: The Quest to Diversify Its Revenue
November 26, 2015
Google has been around 15 years, more if you count Backrub. In that time, Google has managed to generate about 95 percent of its revenue from online advertising. I am not to fond of projections, but if one plots the percentage of revenue Google receives from ads and from other sources, the “other sources” are consistently modest. In short, Google has been and remains a one trick revenue pony. I recall that Steve Ballmer, now an owner of an NBA team and veteran of the wonderful Microsoft management training program. Usually I am skeptical of MBAs who jump from high tech to professional sports, but in this case, Mr. Ballmer seems to be correct.
Nevertheless, I read in “Google Aims to Be ‘Cloud Company’ by 2020, Predicts More Revenue from Cloud Platform Than Ads”:
Urs Hölze, Google’s senior vice president of technical infrastructure, predicts that within the next five years, Google’s Cloud Platform revenues could surpass its advertising revenue. “The goal is for us to talk about Google as a cloud company by 2020,” Holze said.
Let’s see. It is Monday. What companies this week have informed me directly or indirectly that each will generate lots of revenue from the cloud? Answer: Amazon, IBM, and a handful of other outfits. Oh, right Microsoft.
When it comes to revenue diversification, the proof is in the numbers. When I examine a company’s financials, I take a look at what the company has done over the previous years. For example, when a search vendor like Endeca gets stuck in the $150 million range for several years, I think it is unlikely that Endeca will jump to be a $1.0 billion dollar outfit. Google has a history of being unable to diversify its revenue. Maybe one can interpret a subscription to YouTube as a new revenue stream. I am willing to go along with that, but quite a few outfits want to do the cloud thing.
Google wants to do science projects, solve death, launch Loon balloons, and make Glass into a fashionable product. Talk is easy. Revenue from non ad sources may be a little more difficult.
Stephen E Arnold, November 26, 2015
Crazy Numbers Department: Big Data Spending in 2019
November 26, 2015
It is almost 2016. IDC, an outfit owned by an optimistic outfit, has taken a tiny step forward. The IDC wizards answered this question, “How big will Big Data spending be in 2019?” Yep, that is 36 months in the future. There might be more money in predicting Super Bowl winners, what stock to pick, and the steps to take to minimize risk at a restaurant. But no.
According to the true believers in the Content Loop, “IDC Days Big Data Spending to Hit 48.6 Billion in 2019.” I like that point six, which seems to suggest that real data were analyzed exhaustively.
The write up reports:
The market for big data technology and services will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23 percent through 2019, according to a forecast issued by research firm International Data Corp. (IDC) on Monday. IDC predicts annual spending will reach $48.6 billion in 2019. IDC divides the big data market into three major submarkets: infrastructure, software and services. The research firm expects all three submarkets to grow over the next five years, with software — information management, discovery and analytics and applications software — leading the charge with a CAGR of 26 percent.
I will go out on a limb. I predict that IDC will offer for sale three reports, maybe more. I hope the company communicates with its researchers to avoid the mess created when IDC wizard Dave Schubmehl tried to pitch eight pages of wonderfulness based on my research for a mere $3,500 without my permission. Ooops. Those IDC folks are too busy to do the contract thing I assumed.
A Schubmehl-type IDC wizard offered this observation with only a soupçon of jargon:
The ever-increasing appetite of businesses to embrace emerging big data-related software and infrastructure technologies while keeping the implementation costs low has led to the creation of a rich ecosystem of new and incumbent suppliers…. At the same time, the market opportunity is spurring new investments and M&A activity as incumbent suppliers seek to maintain their relevance by developing comprehensive solutions and new go-to-market paths.– Ashish Nadkarni, program director, Enterprise Servers and Storage, IDC
Yes, ever increasing and go to spirit. Will the concept apply to IDC’s revenues? Those thrilled with the Big Numbers are the venture folks pumping money into Big Data companies with the type of enthusiastic good cheer as Russian ground support troops are sending with the Backfires, Bears, and Blackjacks bound for Syria.
Thinking about international tension, my hunch is that the global economy seems a bit dicey, maybe unstable, at this time. I am not too excited at the notion of predicting what will happen in all things digital in the next few days. Years. No way, gentle reader.
Thinking about three years in the future strikes me as a little too bold. I wonder if the IDC predictive methods have been applied to DraftKings and FanDuel games?
Stephen E Arnold, November 26, 2015
Interview with Informatica CEO
November 26, 2015
Blogger and Datameer CEO Stefan Groschupf interviews Anil Chakravarthy, acting CEO of Informatica, in a series of posts on his blog, Big Data & Brews. The two executives discuss security in the cloud, data infrastructure, schemas, and the future of data. There are four installments as of this writing, but it was an exchange in the second iteration, “Big Data Brews: Part II on Data Security with Informatica,” that captured our attention. Here’s Chakravarthy’s summary of the challenge now facing his company:
Stefan: From your perspective, where’s the biggest growth opportunity for your company?
Anil: We look at it as the intersection of what’s happening with the cloud and big data. Not only the movement of data between our premise and cloud and within cloud to cloud but also just the sheer growth of data in the cloud. This is a big opportunity. And if you look at the big data world, I think a lot of what happens in the big data world from our perspective, the value, especially for enterprise customers, the value of big data comes from when they can derive insights by combining data that they have from their own systems, etc., with either third-party data, customer-generated data, machine data that they can put together. So, that intersection is good for, and we are a data infrastructure provider, so those are the two big areas where we see opportunity.
It looks like Informatica is poised to make the most of the changes prompted by cloud technology. To check out the interview from the beginning, navigate to the first installment, “Big Data & Brews: Informatica Talks Security.”
Informatica offers a range of data-management and integration tools. Though the company has offices around the world, they maintain their headquarters in Redwood City, California. They are also hiring as of this writing.
Cynthia Murrell, November 26, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Do Not Go Gently into That Dark Web
November 26, 2015
The article titled Don’t Toy With The Dark Web, Harness It on Infoworld’s DarkReading delves into some of the misconceptions about the Dark Web. The first point the article makes is that a great deal of threats to security occur on the surface web on such well-known sites as Reddit and social media platforms like Instagram. Not only are these areas of the web easier to search without Tor or I2P, but they are often more relevant, particularly for certain industries and organizations. The article also points out the harm in even “poking around” the Dark Web,
“It can take considerable time, expertise and manual effort to glean useful information. More importantly, impromptu Dark Web reconnaissance can inadvertently expose an organization to greater security risks because of unknown malicious files that can infiltrate the corporate network. Additionally, several criminal forums on the Dark Web utilize a “vouching” system, similar to a private members club, that might require an investigator to commit a crime or at least stray into significantly unethical territory to gain access to the content.”
A novice could easily get into more trouble than they bargained for, especially when taking receipt of stolen goods is considered a felony. Leave the security work to professionals, and make sure the professionals you employ have checked out this Dark Web reading series.
Chelsea Kerwin, November 26, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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