cXense: Context Understanding
September 13, 2012
I received a heads up from a reader about a company founded in 2010. The firm is cXense, which can be pronounced in several ways. My source called the company “sea sense”. The spelling of the company’s name is wisely tuned to the findability challenges which less distinctive company names fall victim; for example, Expert System and Sinequa, to cite two company names which can introduce ambiguity to a user’s query.
The firm is under the able management of John Lervik, who was one of the founders of Fast Search & Transfer. I have written extensively about Fast Search, so I won’t go back over well-trodden ground.
cXense delivers to its customers: more control, improved relevance, and more revenue. For companies struggling to generate more income from their online activities, cXense appears to be just what the doctor ordered.
cXense provides several services. These include cX::Ad, cX::Analytics, cX::Recs, and cX::Search. Each of these “promises” to online businesses real time information, complete audience analysis, and a search engine. The search engine is described as “the first contextual search engine.” The assertion about the first caught my attention. I recall that a number of other companies have developed search systems which could figure out the context of content; for example, the DR LINK developed in the late 1990s by a venture firm, consultants, and engineers from Syracuse University.
The cXense search system is described this way:
Imagine a search solution that quickly and easily allows you to implement a customized, state-of-the-art search feature with all the fancy matching and navigation features your visitors expect, but without the costs and hassles of having to invest in, deploy and operate a complex on-premises enterprise search engine. Now, stop imagining and take a look at cX::search: A simple-to-use search solution securely hosted in the cloud. Search on a website shouldn’t be static. It needs to be highly dynamic and continuously adaptable to work well. Searchable documents and their popularity change, but also what people search for and what they consider to be relevant changes over time. In addition, people searching your site move from place to place and often use different devices to interact with your web content. When you think about it, managing all this continuous change in content, content relevance, access locations, time and user devices really boils down to being able to properly understand and manage the context of any user interaction. Source: http://www.cxense.com/cXsearch.html
cXense is offering an alternative to hosted site search which is available from Blossom Software, Google, and a number of other companies.
If you are looking for hosted solution which offers site search, recommendations, analytics, and customizable ad modules, cXense warrants a close look.
Stephen E Arnold, September 13, 2012
Sponsored by Augmentext
IBM and Its Predictive Analytics Push
September 12, 2012
I prefer to examine the plumbing of search and content processing systems. What is becoming increasingly obvious to me is that many of the “new” business intelligence and eDiscovery vendors are licensing technology and putting a different user interface on what is a collection of components.
Slap on visualization and some game-like controls and you have “big data analytics.” Swizzle around the decades-old technology from Oracle, and you still find the Oracle database system. Probe the Hadoop vendors, and you find fancy dancing away from the batch orientation of the NoSQL data management framework. Check out the indexing subsystems and you find third parties which a handful of customers who license their technology to a “wrapper company.”
The phrase “wrapper company” and the product approach of “wrapper bundles” is now described in some clever marketing lingo. The notion of federation, real time, and distributed data are woven into systems which predict, permit discovery, and allow users to find answers to questions the user did not know to ask.
Everything sounds so “beyond search.” I think many of the licensees and prospects react to the visualizations in the demos and the promise that a business professional can use these systems without knowing about the underlying data, programming, or statistical methods is what sells. Who wants to pay for a person to babysit a system and write custom reports? Chop that headcount because the modern systems are “smart.”
Next generation analytics systems are, like enterprise search, comprised of many moving parts. For most professionals, the “moving parts” are of little interest and even less frequently scrutinized. Users want answers or information without having to do much more than glance at a visual display. The ideal system says, “Hello, Dave, here’s what you need to know right now.”
The IBM Ad
I noted an advertisement in the Wall Street Journal, on September 10, 2012 on page A20. The advertiser was IBM. The full page ad featured the headline, “We Used to Schedule Repairs.” The idea is that smart software monitors complex systems and proactively find, repairs, and notifies before a system fails.
Sounds fantastic.
The ad asserts:
Fixing what will break next, first. Managing [the client’s] infrastructure proactively rather than reactively has helped the utility reduce its customer calls by 36 percent.”
The argument concludes:
Replacing intuition with analytics. No one knows your organization’s millions of moving parts better than you. But now with IBM predictive maintenance, you can spend less time and fewer resources repairing things either too early to too late, and more time focusing your attention on what happens next.”
The ad points me to this IBM page:
Snappy visualizations, the phrase “smarter analytics,” and a video round out the supplemental information.
Observations
Three observations:
- IBM has the resources to launch a major promotion of its predictive analytics capabilities. The footprint of IBM in this concept space may boost interest in analytics. However, smaller firms will have to be able to differentiate themselves and offer the type of benefits and customer references IBM employs.
- The approach of the copy in the ad is to make predictive analytics synonymous with smart management and cost effective systems. Many of the analytics companies struggle to articulate a clear value proposition like this.
- The notion of making a smarter information technology department fits into IBM’s broader message of a smarter planet, city, government, etc. Big ideas like this are certainly easier to grasp than the nitty gritty, weaknesses, and costs of computationally canned methods.
For smaller analytics vendors, it is game on.
Stephen E Arnold, September 12, 2012
Sponsored by Augmentext
Craigslist Alters Its Licensing
August 7, 2012
There is a new twist in free classified ads, and this one may cause a few posters’ to pull a muscle. Baligu’s article “Craigslist Now Asks for Exclusive License When Posting” advises us to take a look at the small print when posting on Craigslist in the future.
The popular post up anything site has changed the way users submit content and it looks like they took lessons from some unlikely sources.
In order to complete the process one clicks on the ‘continue’, but now that simple gesture confirms that craigslist is the exclusive licensee of your content. You have officially given them the exclusive right to enforce copyrights against anyone copying, republishing, distributing or preparing derivative works without Craigslist’s consent.
Sound familiar? For comparison, here is Yelp, Facebook and Google’s language, in that order:
“As such, you hereby irrevocably grant us world-wide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sub licensable, transferable rights to use Your Content for any purpose.”
“You grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook.”
“When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.”
See the similarities? Once you click that button, your content is no longer ‘your’ content. One could almost say the sites we utilize, actually utilize us more. Ya gotta love that community spirit of the internet. For some reason…I am not cheering.
Jennifer Shockley, August 7, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
AOL to Redirect Patch from Local News to Local Ads
August 3, 2012
The light bulb has gone on at AOL regarding troubled property Patch: forget local news and do ads instead. Digital Trends ponders, “Patch Restructuring to Turn Into a Craigslist Competitor?”
The planned overhaul of Patch promises to mirror Craigslist. CEO Tim Armstrong spun the changes this way—he says the new version of Patch “is really about unlocking the vitality in towns… groups, commerce, and the social aspects of towns for a much deeper, richer engagement level.” A nice turn of phrase, that.
Writer Molly McHugh notes some possible consequences of the shift. She observes:
“Realigning its product from hyper-local news to hyper-local commerce is a pretty big pivot, and one that would affect the many, many freelance writers Patch employs. Not to mention the fact that taking on Craigslist is a formidable task: despite any of the collective Internet’s problems with Craigslist and its refusal to massively update its interface and become even incrementally more user-friendly, Craigslist has time on its side. When it comes to a crowd-sourced platform, that’s a major investment.”
Indeed, AOL is wise to capitalize on the local connections it has built through local advertising. Still, the loss of local news blogs is a shame.
Cynthia Murrell, August 3, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Facebook Advertising and Business Model Flawed
August 2, 2012
It seems there is more bad news for social networking king, Facebook. In addition to new lows in its share price and rough second-quarter earnings, a newly released study suggests that Facebook’s business model may be broken.
EyeTrackShop, a firm that measures audience attention, released a study that tracked user attention to ads on Facebook’s website and apps. Users had a particularly bad recall for ads that had been seen on the iPhone and generally neglected the ads overall. The article on ReadWriteWeb, “Facebook’s Mobile Strategy is Flawed, Eye-Tracking Study Indicates,” shares more on the study’s results:
“During yesterday’s call, Facebook executives revealed that more than half of its users regularly access Facebook through mobile sites. That raised concerns among analysts and investors, as nearly 85% of Facebook revenue comes from advertising, which the company has been struggling to implement on mobile platforms. The executives stressed that while their mobile strategy is in its early stages, early tests suggest that the limited number of mobile ads that have rolled out have performed well and delivered a return on investment to advertisers.”
For a company that relies so heavily upon paid advertising, this is certainly bad, as well as surprising, news. We think that a problem of this magnitude could have been noted earlier on and are left to wonder: Perhaps Facebook has other flaws as well?
Andrea Hayden, August 2, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Bad News: Online Advertising Declines in Value
August 1, 2012
Is there trouble ahead for Google revenue? Slate prompts that question with its post, “The Decline of Google’s (and Everybody’s) Ad Business.” Writer Hugh Pickens notes that, unlike print ads, online advertising loses value over time. Google’s reported cost-per-click revenue has been dropping more each quarter—by 16% most recently, 12% last quarter, and 8% the quarter before that. The write up observes:
“The daily and stubborn reality for everybody building businesses on the strength of Web advertising is that the value of digital ads decreases every quarter, a consequence of their simultaneous ineffectiveness and efficiency, writes Michael Wolff. ‘The nature of people’s behavior on the Web and of how they interact with advertising, as well as the character of those ads themselves and their inability to command attention, has meant a marked decline in advertising’s impact.’ This isn’t just Google’s problem. Overall, Internet advertising has decreased in value over the years as online advertising continues its race to the bottom.”
Google is actually in a good position to weather this storm, since it has widened its revenue stream well beyond AdWords. Many other companies, however, must be scrambling for another way to keep the coffers full.
Cynthia Murrell, July 31, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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