Penguin and Random House Converge
August 7, 2013
Penguindom House is here, we decided after reading “World Blockbuster in Penguin and Random Merger” at the U.K.’s Express. After the deal, said to create the world’s biggest consumer publishing company, the new entity will employ over 10,000 workers. Regarding the combined talent and titles, the write-up tells us:
“[The merger] brings together Penguin authors including Dawn French and Zadie Smith and Random House writers such as Andy McNab and Dan Brown, while the enlarged business has a back catalogue that takes in the likes of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen.”
John Fallon, head of the education-focused Pearson, Penguin‘s parent company, is optimistic. (For the record, media firm Bertelsmann owns Random House. The two larger companies share ownership of the new entity almost equally.) Fallon states:
“This combination creates a clear world leader with a strong platform for continued creative and commercial success in a rapidly changing consumer publishing industry.”
Rapidly changing, indeed. Will this noteworthy development change the way writers must go about getting their work published, even through traditional, wood-pulp based channels? Will it stimulate interest in the self-publishing platforms available from Amazon, Apple, and others? Stay tuned.
Cynthia Murrell, August 07, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Cuadra Becomes Lucidea
August 1, 2013
Last year, the veteran information management firm Cuadra bid fond retirement wishes to its founders, then-president Carlos Cuadra and then-CFO Gloria Cuadra. Now, the SydneyPLUS affiliate joins several others being wrapped into the rebranded Lucidea, we learn from that company’s post, “Announcing Lucidea. . . We Help You to Think Clearly.” The write-up tells us:
Lucidea is a newly created knowledge management software and solutions company that includes the SydneyPLUS, Inmagic, CuadraSTAR, LawPort,LookUp Precision, ARGUS.net and ISS products. Our solutions empower people to navigate the ever expanding universe of information, resulting in actionable knowledge. We highlight our clients’ brightest people, clearest thinking and best ideas.
Please follow the links below to access more information about this exciting new development, and take a few moments to learn:
- Why we think this is great news for our products, employees and customers.
- How this latest evolution of our corporate structure will affect you.
- What effect this will have on the products you are currently using.
The post includes links for more information: a letter from the CEO (PDF), the consolidated company’s mission statement, the official press release, and a useful FAQ page.
Founded in 1978, Cuadra is headquartered in Los Angeles. CuadraSTAR is an acclaimed software package with the flexibility to manage data collections of all types from multiple environments, including archives, libraries, museums, and publishing houses.
Lucidea began in 1989 as SydneyPLUS, and it bought Cuadra in 2008. That was just one in a series of purchases that gave the firm the resources to launch this current incarnation. The company has blended its valuable acquisitions into the consolidated and rebranded Lucidea that we see now, with offices in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.
Cynthia Murrell, August 01, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Healthcare Analytics Always Changing
July 30, 2013
The medical field is always evolving with new advances. The same can be said about the medical technology field, especially in mobile data analytics. Today’s hot trend is a relic faster than in almost any field, so we try hard to keep tabs, such as an illuminating article in CMS Wire, “Temis Acquires i3 Analytics to Boost Text + Data Mining.”
According to the story:
“While we don’t know how much Temis paid out in this deal, we know doctor’s love iPads. This tells us pretty much all we need to know about this deal. i3 Analytics specializes in what it calls biopharma, what most of us know as pharmaceutical research or biotechnology.”
Advances in biotech and biopharma mean more data for doctors and drug companies to rummage through, something a company like i3 Analytics is more than happy to help them with.
This is an interesting story of healthcare analytics. Frankly, nothing surprises us anymore. Heck, we recently heard that Kansas City is the new boomtown for healthcare analytics. We think if things like this are possible, there’s no way this dynamic industry will stop changing anytime soon.
Patrick Roland, July 30, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Rumored Acquisition May Put Baidu on Defensive
July 24, 2013
Now this is an interesting development. Search Engine Watch‘s Jennifer Slegg points to a rumor about China’s massive search engine market in, “Chinese Search Engine Qihoo to Buy Sogou for $1.4 Billion.” She writes:
“The Chinese search engine space just got a lot more interesting with Qihoo 360 reportedly purchasing Sohu’s Sogou search engine.
“If the report from DoNews (via The Next Web) is accurate, this deal will effectively combine the second and third largest search engines in China, which could have a significant impact on Baidu’s huge market share. . . .
“Qihoo 360 launched its own search engine in August of last year, and is second only to Baidu in terms of market share in China. Purchasing Sogou would mean the company would have nearly 25 percent of the search market share compared to Baidu’s eroding market share, which is now slightly under 70 percent.”
Is Baidu worried? Qihoo 360 launched its own engine just last year, and acquisition of the popular Sohu would mean a merger of China’s second- and third-largest search engines. Some expect the deal, rumored to be in the neighborhood of $1.4 billion, will soon be officially announced.
Cynthia Murrell, July 24, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Acquisition of Gigablast by Yippy Leaves Some Questions Unanswered
July 19, 2013
An article on Yahoo titled Yippy, Inc. (YIPI) to Acquire Gigablast, Inc. And Web Research Properties, LLC to Expand Consumer Search, Enterprise, and eDiscovery Products reported on the important acquisition by the young company. Yippy, Inc. is a search clustering tech company based in Florida with some innovative eDiscovery resources. Matt Wells, the founder of Gigablast states in the article,
“Gigablast and its related properties can provide advanced technologies for consumer, eDiscovery, and enterprise big data customers. Gigabits, a related program, is the first operational enterprise class clustering program which I put into service in 2004. Yippy’s Velocity platform was essentially based off of my original work which will allow Yippy to sell behind the firewall installations for all types of search based applications for enterprise and eDiscovery customers.”
Yippy’s Chief Executive Rich Granville claims that the acquisition will not only benefit customers through technological innovation but by low costs. He directed interested parties to a demo that might illustrate the massive potential in the merger of these companies. The demo shows that the combined indexing of billions of pages of data has already begun, although not when it will be complete. What is less clear is who is indexing what in this tie-up?
Chelsea Kerwin, July 19, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Embedded Security Noted As Additional Benefit of API
July 18, 2013
News of Intel’s acquisition of Mashery is still popping up on our radar. The ReadWrite article “Intel’s Buying Mashery To Get Deeper Inside The Data Center” offers an insightful perspective on why the chip giant went after a seven year old company that specializes in linking together Web-based software and services. In other words, Mashery is an API management service.
The focal point of the article reference circles around the idea that Intel no longer sees the computer as a silicon chip — now, they recognize the CPU as a network.
The article discusses the implications:
The same techniques that connect consumer apps, it turns out, also work well within large businesses. Comcast, for example, uses Mashery’s API management service to allow programmers to access internal systems. That’s a far more sensible way to create internal software than the alternative, which involves doing a lot of one-off integrations at considerable time and expense.
In addition to efficiency, a prime use case for APIs are eliminating any security risks a corporation has. We are seeing smart companies develop solutions such as Cogito API, which offers businesses concerned with avoiding risks the confidence in using a solution already embedded with corporate security measures.
Megan Feil, July 18, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
HP Still Facing Troubled Times
June 24, 2013
The TV show The Office appears as a motif for being constantly plagued in Yahoo Finance’s recent article on Hewlett-Packard. Appropriately, the article is titled “’The Office’ of CEO: HP’s Revolving Door.” The focus of the article lies on what the author of this piece calls the historic waste and dysfunction. Needless to say, this is an area where comparisons to the popular NBC sitcom are brought up.
HP has has six CEOs since 2005, and that is not counting interim CEOs. However, the article credits the current CEO, Meg Whitman, as bringing more stability to the company.
The Autonomy acquisition did not escape the wrath of this commentary:
“Most recently the company was embarrassed to reveal an estimated $8.8 billion write-down for a botched acquisition for British software company Autonomy, a deal that took place in 2011. Unlike any other company over the past decade, Hewlett-Packard has not been able to get out of its own way. Accordingly, the office of the CEO has had a revolving door. “
While it seems like just yesterday that many in the media were “Making Sense of HP’s Autonomy Acquisition,” the jury seems to have called it now and “HP’s Autonomy Blunder Might Be One for the Record Books.”
Megan Feil, June 24, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Wavii: Technology or People
April 24, 2013
I just read “Google Buys Wavii for North of $30 Million.” According to the write up:
Both Apple and Google were competing for the Seattle-based startup, and Google eventually won. Apple wanted the company, which developed its own aggregation technology and natural summarization algorithms, for its Siri division. The 25-person-strong team, including founder Adrian Aoun, will be moving down from Seattle to join Google’s Knowledge Graph division.
Interesting move. Is it for technology or people or both. My hunch is that it is people first, then technology. If the $2 million in funding is accurate, the money behind some older search and content processing outfits is going to be demanding sales sooner than later. For outfits six or more years old, generating a hefty return is likely to be a tough job.
Stephen E Arnold, April 24, 2013
Sponsored by Augmentext
HP Shares Some of Its 2013 Autonomy Positioning
April 17, 2013
Readers of this information service, which I use to keep track of information I find useful for my columns and speeches, know that I have held Autonomy’s marketing in high regard. There are some azure chip consultants and failed webmasters who pointed out that the phrase “meaning based computing” was not particularly useful. I disagreed. Autonomy—the pre acquisition version of the company—was a darned good marketing and sales organization.
What is easily forgotten in today’s “did I get more traffic on my Facebook page” world is that Autonomy excelled in three areas:
- The company was able to enter new markets such as video indexing and fraud detection when other search vendors were running around pitching, “We can index all an organization’s information in one interface.” Autonomy picked a sector and figured out how to paint a compelling story around the IDOL black box, the notion of autonomous operation to reduce some costs, and “meaning based computing.” Competitors responded with a flood of buzz words, which made sense at an off site strategy meeting, but did not translate to simple propositions like “automatic,” reduce costs, and process content in more than 400 different formats.” As a sales pitch, Autonomy did a good job and managed to stay at the top of the search vendor stack in terms of closing deals.
- The company used a combination of buying firms which would permit upsells of IDOL related products and very capable management methods to help make the deals pay off. Examples range from the Zantaz buy and the subsequent leveraging of that firm’s technology into cloud service. Autonomy bought Interwoven and pulled together its marketing services into a reasonably compelling bundle of analytics with IDOL sauce.
- Autonomy developed what I thought were clever products and services which caught the eye of certain customers and helped the firm enter new markets. Examples range from the now mostly forgotten Kenjin (a smart desktop service) to Aurasma, a virtual reality service for print advertisers.
HP’s management and advisors paid a lot of money to own Autonomy. Like most search and content processing acquisitions, the realties of running a company in this very tough sector became apparent after a few months. I am not interested in the financial and legal battles underway. What’s important is that HP purchased a company, and HP now has to make it work.
A very interesting pair of articles or semi-marketing type articles appeared in eWeek on April 16, 2013. The first is “HP’s Autonomy: 10 Ways It’s Contributing to HP’s Hardware Story.” These slideshows are ways to get page views. Please, flip through the images in the slideshow. Here’s what I noted:
First, HP seems to acknowledge that turnover and management of the HP version of Autonomy has been a problem. The slideshow calls this a “rebirth”. But the big news from a marketing historian’s point of view is that “meaning based computing” is gone and replaced by “the OS for human information.” I find this fascinating. On one hand, competitors can now carp at the scope of the IDOL technology. On the other, in this social buzzword era, “human information” is actually quite a nice turn of phrase. I won’t make a big deal of the fact that when IDOL’s fraud detection algorithms are working on content, the data does not have to be “human” at all. It can be based on a person’s credit transaction, but algorithms for fraud work on machine and human generated information. No big deal because such distinctions are not of interest in today’s here and now environment.
Second, I did not notice much emphasis on search and retrieval. For someone familiar with Autonomy IDOL, I suppose that search is self evident. Autonomy, however, is mostly an information access system. The add ons were, as I noted above, were extensions or wrappers of the IDOL core, based on Bayesian methods and enhanced in many ways since the mid 1990s. Yep, Autonomy’s technology may seem magical to HP management, but it has been around a while and does not perform some of the functions which Google backed Recorded Future performs or which a skilled SAP programmer can crank out. To me, this is a big deal because it underscores the futility of HP’s trying to make big money deals based on plain old search. Companies chasing search deals are not landing huge deals like those HP needs to make its top line grow.
Third, the “10 ways” are focused almost exclusively on Autonomy capabilities which have been available for a long time. I think that the notion of putting Autonomy functions in a printer interesting, but that idea has been floating around for years. I heard presentations from Intel and Xerox which talked about putting content processing in hardware. Interesting stuff, but the “10 ways” are useful because each makes clear to competitors where HP’s marketing and sales will be going. Examples include using Autonomy for customer support, content management.
Great stuff.
The second write up is “HP’s Autonomy Focused on Big Data, Cloud, Mobile, Security: GM”.
This write up contains a number of quite useful insights into HP Autonomy. The “voice” of the article is Robert Youngjohns, the HP manager for the Autonomy unit. I found a number of passages which warrant quoting. I want to highlight three snippets from the three page article. You can get the complete picture in the original article which is worth reading carefully.
First, the story contains the reference to “magical”. Autonomy is math, not magic. The use of the word “magical” is fascinating. It suggests that Autonomy goes well beyond what “normal” content processing can deliver.
Second, the interview lays out the markets which Autonomy will focus upon. These are, as I understand the lingo, big data, information governance, and digital marketing. I am not sure what these phrases encompass, but it is clear that “search” is not playing a front and center role.
Third, there is acknowledgment that the content archiving market is important. The pairing of Autonomy and various HP products is significant. Autonomy will be, to some degree, baked into other HP products and services. This is, in my opinion, an extension of the formula which made Autonomy a revenue producer prior to its sale to HP.
Net net: The Autonomy for 2013 will be fascinating to monitor.
Stephen E Arnold, April 17, 2013
Elsevier Acquires Mendeley
April 15, 2013
Color us pleasantly surprised; a traditional publisher is embracing open content. I fact, it has sunk a hefty sum into it, we learn from “Confirmed: Elsevier Has Bought Mendeley for $69M-$100M to Expand Its Open, Social Education Data Efforts” at TechCrunch. Major global science and health publisher Excelvier has long been seen as an opponent of the open license. Mendeley, on the other hand, is founded on sharing and collaboration. Does this acquisition signal a shift in the publishing industry?
Writer Ingrid Lunden delves into the details:
“Mendeley is both a technology/platform acquisition as well as an acqui-hire for Elsevier. CEO Victor Henning, one of the three PhD co-founders of Mendeley, tells us in an interview that all of Mendeley’s 50 staff are coming over to Elsevier, and Henning will become VP of strategy for the company — a sign that Elsevier may be gearing up for more activity and possibly acquisitions in this space.”
Elsevier has actually been working with Mendeley for several years, indicating it may long ago have seen the inevitability of a more open publishing model. For its part, Mendeley will continue to run its main platform and its academic edition while expanding its free services. Lunden emphasizes:
“It will also keep its API free and open to use: that API today is used by some 300 apps, up from 260 in January. Henning says Mendeley will continue to source data from different places — not just focus on what’s published or owned by Elsevier.”
That is a very important pledge. Henning also says the deal will allow Mendeley to take a longer view, as opposed to stressing over short-term revenue, as they would have done had they remained independent. That means the opportunity to proceed with projects that have been on the back burner, like the hoped-for launch of an Android app later in the year. For more information see the article and/or see the Q&A page Mendeley has created about the agreement.
Cynthia Murrell, April 15, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
