Rah, Rah, Sis Boom Analytics. No, Wait. Boo, Boo, Hiss, Hiss Analytics
October 16, 2020
One of the DarkCyber researchers alerted me to “Most CMOs Disappointed with Analytics Results.” We are wrapping up an interview with one of the senior technologists at Datawalk, and the topic of complexity in easy-to-use analytics systems was a topic of discussion. Watch for this revealing interview in an upcoming issue of DarkCyber.
The article about disappointed CMOs is not surprising. What is surprising is that individuals with expectations that smart software will generate just the answer one needs to generate bigly sales are so widespread.
The write up reports citing a study by the mid-tier consulting firm Gartner Group:
“Though CMOs understand the importance of applying analytics throughout the marketing organization, many struggle to quantify the relationship between insights gathered and their company’s bottom line. In fact, nearly half of respondents in this year’s survey say they’re unable to measure marketing ROI,” says Lizzy Foo Kune, senior director analyst in the Gartner Marketing practice. “This inability to measure ROI tarnishes the perceived value of the analytics team.”
Other findings from the study of 415 marketing “leaders” are:
- Training staff is not a priority
- Data science and campaigns are behind other analytic use cases
- Most organizations will spend more for analytics.
These types of surveys deliver results that gild the available lilies.
For those without numerical skills and training, many of today’s analytic tools are like to disappoint. The digital oracle of Delphi is not working particularly well for many users. Even individuals with a couple of statistics courses on their record have to spend time familiarizing themselves with the analytic tools and their options. Plus if bad data go in, not even a super smart system can produce silk purses from chubby data pigs. Nevertheless, MBAs believe in analytics and, of course, magic.
Stephen E Arnold, October 16, 2020
Facebook: Interesting Data If Accurate
October 16, 2020
DarkCyber spotted a factoid of interest to law enforcement professionals in “Facebook Responsible for 94% of 69 Million Child Sex Abuse Images Reported by US Tech Firms.”
Facebook has previously announced plans to fully encrypt communications in its Messenger app, as well as its Instagram Direct service – on top of WhatsApp, which is already encrypted – meaning no one apart from the sender and recipient can read or modify messages.
Now about Facebook’s content curation procedures? End-to-end encryption of ad supported private messaging services appears to benefit bad actors.
Stephen E Arnold, October 16, 2020
Nanodrone Fluid Propulsion
October 16, 2020
DarkCyber has been nosing around the technologies used in drones. Most attention seems to be directed at unmanned aerial systems. However, drones which operate in water are an important research area for a number of use cases; for example, targeted delivery of pathogens.
“What Tiny Surfing Robots Teach Us About Surface Tension” contains a number of interesting factoids. However, the passage which captured the attention of a DarkCyber researcher was:
That knowledge has led Masoud [the Michigan professor] to continue analyzing the propulsion behavior of diminutive robots — only several microns in size — and the Marangoni effect, which is the transfer of mass and momentum due to a gradient of surface tension at the interface between two fluids. In addition to serving as an explanation for tears of wine, the Marangoni effect helps circuit manufacturers dry silicon wafers and can be applied to grow nanotubes in ordered arrays.
The research also suggests was to use swarms of micro-sized drones to operate in swarms. Maybe targeted pathogen delivery?
Stephen E Arnold, October 16, 2020
Text Analytics: Are These Really the Companies to Watch in the Next 12 Weeks?
October 16, 2020
DarkCyber spotted “Top 10 Text Analytics Companies to Watch in 2020.” Let’s take a quick look at some basic details about each firm:
Alkymi, founded in 2017, makes an email indexing system. The system, according to the company’s Web site, “understands documents using deep learning and visual analysis paired with your human in-the-loop expertise.” Interesting but text analytics appears to be a component of a much larger system. What’s interesting is that the business relies in some degree upon Amazon Web Services. The company’s Web site is https://alkymi.io/.
Aylien Ltd., based in Ireland, appears to be a company with text analysis technology. However, the company’s system is used to create intelligence reports for analysts; for example, government intelligence officers, business analysts, and media outlets. Founded in 2010, the company’s Web site is https://aylien.com.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The inclusion of HPE was a bit of a surprise. This outfit once owned the Autonomy technology, but divested itself of the software and services. To replace Autonomy, the company developed “Advanced Text Analysis” which appears to be an enterprise search centric system. The service is available as a Microsoft Azure function and offers 60 APIs (which seems particularly generous) “that deliver deep learning analytics on a wide range of data.” The company’s Web site is https://www.hpe.com/in/en/home.html. One product name jumped out: Ezmeral which maybe a made up word.
InData Labs lists data science, AI, AI driven mobile app development, computer vision, machine learning, data capture and optical character recognition, and big data solutions as its services. Its products include face recognition and natural language processing. Perhaps it is the NLP product which equates to text analytics? The firm’s Web site is https://indatalabs.com/ The company was founded in 2014 and operates from Belarus and has a San Francisco presence.
Kapiche, founded in 2016, focuses on “customer insights”. Customer feedback yields insight with “no set up, no manual coding, and results you can trust,” according to the company. The text analytics snaps into services like Survey Monkey and Google Forms, among others. Clients include Target and Toyota. The company is based in Australia with an office in Denver, Colorado. The firm’s Web site is https://www.kapiche.com. The firm offers applied text analytics.
Lexalytics, founded in 2003, was one of the first standalone text analytics vendors. The company’s system allows customers to “tell powerful stories from complex text data.” DarkCyber prefers to learn “stories” from the data, however. In the last 17 years, the company has not gone public nor been acquired. The firm’s Web site is https://www.lexalytics.com/.
MindGap. The MindGap identified in the article is in the business of providing “AI for business.” the company appears to be a mash up of artificial intelligence and “top tier strategy consulting:. That may be true, but we did not spot text analytics among the core competencies. The firm’s clients include Mail.ru, Gazprom, Yandex, and Huawei. The firm’s Web site is https://www.mindgap.dev/. The firm lists two employees on LinkedIn.
Primer has ingested about $60 million in venture funding since it was founded in 2015. The company ingests text and outputs reports. The company was founded by the individual who set up Quid, another analytics company. Government and business analysts consume the outputs of the Primer system. The company’s Web site is https://primer.ai.
Semeon Analytics, now a unit of Datametrex, provides “custom language and sentiment ontology” services. Indexing and entity extraction, among other NLP modules, allows the system to deliver “insight analysis, rapid insights, and sentiment of the highest precision on the market today.” The Semeon Web site is still online at https://semeon.com.
ThoughtTrace appears to focus on analysis of text in contracts. The firm’s Web site says that its software can “find critical contract facts and opportunities.” Text analytics? Possibly, but the wording suggests search and retrieval. The company has a focus on oil and gas and other verticals. The firm’s Web site is https://www.thoughttrace.com/. (Note that the design of the Web site creates some challenges for a person looking for information.) The company, according to Crunchbase, was founded in 1999, and has three employees.
Three companies are what DarkCyber would consider text analytics firms: Aylien, Lexalytics, and Primer. The other firms mash up artificial intelligence, machine learning, and text analytics to deliver solutions which are essentially indexing and workflow tools.
Other observations include:
- The list is not a reliable place to locate flagship vendors; specifically, only three of the 10 companies cited in the article could be considered contenders in this sector.
- The text analytics capabilities and applications are scattered. A person looking for a system which is designed to handle email would have to examine the 10 listings and work from a single pointer, Alkymi.
- The selection of vendors confuses technical disciplines; for example, AI, machine learning, NLP, etc.
The list appears to have been generated in a short Zoom meeting, not via a rigorous selection and analysis process. Perhaps one of the vendors’ text analytics systems could have been used. Primer’s system comes to mind as one possibility. But that, of course, is work for a real journalist today.
Stephen E Arnold, October 16, 2020
Matroid: Not Just Math, a Reminder That Google Is Not Search
October 15, 2020
For many people Google is search. Need a pizza? Google it. But for rick media in contexts like streaming video, Google has pizza cheese on its chin.
A venture funding information service called Finsmes published “Matroid Raises $20 Million in Series B Funding.” Add to the firm’s earlier funding, the company has tallied about $33 million to fuel its innovation engine.
Founded in 2016, the company works at the intersection of machine learning (smart software) and image analysis (more smart software). The Finsmes article states:
The company plans to use the new funding to accelerate product development and go-to-market expansion in manufacturing, industrial IOT (IIOT), and video security markets. Led by Reza Zadeh, CEO and Founder, Matroid Matroid is a studio for creating and deploying detectors (computer vision models) to search visual media for people, behavior, objects, and events — no programming required. Once a detector is developed, Matroid can search any live stream or recorded video, providing real time notifications when the object of interest has been detected. Customers use it in construction, manufacturing, security, media, retail and other industries.
Real time analysis of streaming video is a very important search problem. Despite the perception that “Google is search,” the market for a solution is hefty.
Observations:
- The name of the company is borrowed from math wonks
- Law enforcement and intelligence agencies need a solution that works to deal with the video data available to investigators
- Google’s YouTube search illustrates that ad-supported, good enough methods which rely on a creator to index products or tag videos are examples of old-school thinking, maybe Internet dinosaur thinking.
The company will require additional funding. Nailing real time streaming video knowledge generation requires a large hammer.
Stephen E Arnold, October 15, 2020
Selling the Millennial MBA Way
October 15, 2020
How does a company sell in the era of the Rona, social unrest, financial uncertainty, international tension, and misinformation? The answer appears in “Drive Growth by Picking the Right Lane — A Customer Acquisition Playbook for Consumer Startups.” The advice is interesting because it pays scant attention to most of the traditional methods. (Methods are explained as “lanes” and “social media”.)
Here’s an example from the introduction to the free how-to. The focus of the write up is narrowed to:
Performance marketing (e.g. Facebook and Google ads)
Virality (e.g. word-of-mouth, referrals, invites)
Content (e.g. SEO, YouTube)
The essay points out that fuddy duddy techniques are not included. The explanation is:
There are two additional lanes (sales and partnerships) which we won’t cover in this post because they are rarely effective in consumer businesses. And there are other tactics to boost customer acquisition (e.g PR, brand marketing), but the lanes outlined above are the only reliable paths for long-term and sustainable business growth.
The how-to includes screenshots, tables, and graphs.
Need a playbook to sell the millennial way? This may be for you.
Stephen E Arnold, October 15, 2020
Policeware: Three Products Identified But and That Is a Big But
October 15, 2020
DarkCyber’s eager beaver researcher who works from home spotted “3 Best Law Enforcement Software with Buyers Guide.” The market for policeware is a small one compared to the number of customers for pizzas. However, the money invested by a handful of customers makes some marketers believe that making sales to the government and intelligence sectors is easy. It is not; for example, when big project emerge from the labyrinths of statements of work and the applicable procurement machinations, not many companies know about the opportunities or have the right stuff to land the project. Consider the $950 million ID/IQ contract for SRC Inc. Household name, right?
The three outfits identified as the “best” contains one solid recommendation: ESRI. This is a company which provides a must-have product and service called ArcGIS. The company is in the spatial mapping business and some interesting adjacent fields.
However, Nuance is a fence sitter. DarkCyber thinks of this outfit as a vendor generating some revenue from doctors, lawyers, and police who want to dictate notes and have them converted to text. The company provides its speech-to-text and other products to a wide range of customers. There are some alternatives, including Amazon’s solution.
The inclusion of the Tresit Group’s emergency communication solution is interesting. The Disaster Information Reporting system provides real-time, secure, and logged communications for first responders and police. Secure communications remain an application space of interest. The company provides a communications solution.
The “but” is that the selection of solutions is useful, but there are other companies which provide more widely used solutions. Some of these policeware systems and products are sector leaders.
DarkCyber wants to point out that identifying three products as “best” is difficult. For a researcher or analyst looking for a wider pool of policeware vendors, DarkCyber suggests the Mei@4Sec Catalogue of Existing Technologies and Solutions Deliverable 2.2 European Organization for Security (EOS). You can download this helpful 44-page report at this link without charge. (Verified on October 11, 2020, but the document can be removed at any time.)
Stephen E Arnold, October 15, 2020
Chinese Investment: Some Good Points, Some Important Points Left Out
October 15, 2020
China is probably not on the minds of most US LinkedIn users. Based on my scanning of the “Home” page, there are TikTok style videos for consultants, job seekers, and start ups flogging a range of Gen X, Gen Y, and Millennial services.
Nevertheless, I want to highlight “The Shadow War Between Alibaba and Tencent: Conducting Warfare Through Startups.”
The essay begins with this assertion:
In the West, corporate VCs are often labeled with ‘dumb money’ or being the M&A department in disguise. In China, at least for Alibaba and Tencent, they are kingmakers that can outcompete most financial VCs. They have longer time horizons and deeper pockets than institutional VCs, and bring actual value-adds like consumer traffic and supporting product ecosystems such as payment infrastructure. The battle between every startup and incumbent comes down to whether the startup gets distribution before the incumbent gets innovation. In the West, startups can buy consumer distribution as social networks all monetize through advertising. In China, since Alibaba nor Tencent rely on advertising revenue, distribution can’t be brought as easily, it has to be earned. It’s not a surprise that among the waves of startup contenders, Alibaba and Tencent’s picks (and for a time, Baidu) are always among the favorites to win.
We noted two important points tucked deep in the essay.’
The first makes this observation:
For starters, the user-centric approach of Chinese tech means that every battle for consumer’s attention is a relevant one. For both, strategic investments allow increased usage of their respective product ecosystems.
The second offers:
The shadow war has become global, as both Alibaba and Tencent have their sights set increasingly on South East Asia and India. We are probably going to see a similar pattern play out in these regions too…
Several points seemed irrelevant to the author; for example:
- The linkages between certain successful Chinese companies and the Chinese government
- The “competition” between and among high profile, government-allied Chinese firms is a less-than-subtle way to explain the “competition” that exists in the quasi-market driven country. Who is fooled?
- The data generated by these systems can be available to the Chinese government. Data can act like virtual puppet strings, just more difficult to see and disengage.
Nevertheless, the write up reminds me about a belief about the US investment set up: “Dumb money.” Gentle, but evidence about the author’s attitude.
Stephen E Arnold, October 15, 2020
Google: Handwaving before the Regulators Arrive
October 15, 2020
Google News Makes a Show of Playing Fair
Well this is an interesting attempt to buy off an industry. Fast Company reports, “Google Will Pay Publishers $1 Billion to Quell Claims of Unfairly Profiting from their Content.” Google recently unveiled Google News Showcase, an initiative that will pay some publishers for content it already swiped. I mean, published. The company’s announcement on its blog calls this Google’s biggest financial commitment to publishers to date—all to avoid a much larger, legally mandated payout later, we’d warrant. Writer Michael Grothaus observes:
“But the Showcase initiative isn’t an altruistic move on Google’s part. The search giant has come under increasing pressure from publishers and regulators in recent years about the way it profits from the work publishers do. In short, Google’s News service currently works by pulling story headlines and descriptions from the publishers’ websites, populating the News service with their content. Google has always maintained its News service is good for publishers, as it sends traffic to their sites. However, publishers say Google gets the far better end of the deal since their content drives clicks to the Google News platform and because Google keeps most of the profits from the ads served on its platform. Given the profits Google generates, $1 billion over three years doesn’t seem like a whole lot of money. But for now, some publishers, at least, seem willing to take any handouts. Google says over 200 publishers have already signed up, including Germany’s Der Spiegel. As for the News Showcase itself, the new platform will first launch on Google News on Android devices, followed by iOS devices later this year.”
Just how different will this “Showcase” be from the existing Google News? The platform will probably highlight content from publishers that agreed to play ball. Otherwise, we expect the differences to be minor.
Cynthia Murrell, October 15, 2020
Web Scraping Made Easier
October 14, 2020
If one has a list of Web sites of interest, how can a person suck down the content? In the consumerized world of business intelligence, the answer is, “Every day.” Crawling Web sites is getting easier. Scrape Owl wants to make the process ever simpler. For as little as $30 per month you can chug along with 250,000 API calls and 10 concurrent requests. If you need more scraping horsepower, sign up for the $100 per month service. You use Scrape Owl’s API and can custom headers, cookies, and inject JavaScript. The more expensive service also allows proxies. These can be helpful under certain circumstances because some site operators are not keen on slurping. For more information, navigate to Scrape Owl’s FAQ page and take your first steps to becoming the new Google.
Stephen E Arnold, October 14, 2020
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