Germany, WiFi, and Google
May 19, 2010
A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to a write up by Peter Schaar, whom I believe is the German Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Information. You can read the original “Google erfasst „versehentlich“ Inhalte der WLAN-Kommunikation” at this link. If you prefer your German courtesy of the Google, Google Translate will happily oblige.
Amidst the festivities for Google I/O, the pesky bleatings of the Old Country are not likely to be heard by most of the Google fanatics. I listened, and I wanted to highlight three of the points made by Mr. Schaar, who does have his own fans in a region that befuddled some of the Roman emperors long ago.
First, he makes clear that Google is using a method of explanation that echoes what a parent says about an errant teen. Doesn’t work too well for the parent, and if I understand Mr. Schaar, the “shoot, it was a goof” doesn’t work to well in Germany.
Second, inspection revealed that some of the gizmos used to Hoover data during a Google drive around geospatial photo session were missing. Routine procedure. Coincidental? Some folks have lots of luck. Not the German’s day apparently.
Finally, what other surprises may yet be discovered if German authorities can get the information required to conduct an investigation.
Bottom line: I/O is a happy event. The shadow of a giant smiley face may not reach to Germany and Mr. Schaar. Just my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, May 19, 2010
Freebie.
IBM, Business Intelligence, and Competitive Pressure
May 18, 2010
I find the antics of a $100 billion company quite amusing. For example, IBM is jumping from business to business without getting its Web site in synch. Need search engine optimization? IBM is there for you? Need a mainframe in Africa? You know whom to call. Need a wheelbarrow full of software Lego blocks? Just email your local IBM rep.
What is shaping up to be an interesting market battle is IBM and “business intelligence.” IBM has considerable home grown technology. Are you familiar with Web Fountain? Thought not. IBM owns Cognos, which provides business intelligence solutions to big companies. Like the aging business intelligence systems, licensees need to have a wizard or two on premises to make sure that reports work with valid data. What happens if you have lousy data and a complex coding problem, the outputs can be—ah, shall we say—misleading.
To add spice to the IBM business intelligence line up, IBM bought SPSS. If you took advanced statistics, chances are you dipped your nose into the methods of “real” quantitative analysis. If you are a text processing maven, you know that SPSS bought some text analytics and processing technology from Leximancer.
IBM is throwing its weight around. Image Source: http://tinapaparone.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/big-guy-vs-little-guy-299×300.png
Why is this important? For me, these items provide some background for the story “We Are Going 20 percent Cheaper than Oracle.” Among the points in the write up (actually an interview with Edward B Orange, VP-Information Management and Business Analytics, Software Group, Asia Pacific, IBM) were:
- IBM has spent $12 billion in “business analytics”. The money? Buying companies.
- IBM is selling a business analytics appliance called IBM Smart Analytics Systems.
- Parts get an “extra commission” when DB2 is slammed into the solution sale.
- IBM is hip to social networking analytics. I did not know this.
- IBM has another $3 to $5 billion for additional business intelligence acquisitions.
Sharper Than the Tooth of a Serpent, A Xoogler Analysis of Google
May 17, 2010
Read the original to get the full scoop: “Will Facebook Be Tomorrow’s Google, and Google Tomorrow’s Microsoft?” This is an old premise for me, but there were several points in the write up that a nails into Googzilla’s tail. Here are the weaknesses of Google identified by a former Google professional:
- As smart as the math club is, the math club struggles to understand brand advertising
- Google gets a C in products
- Google does baby steps, not big jumps
There are other weaknesses as well, but this summary by a Xoogler is a rare moment of candor.
Stephen E Arnold, May 17, 2010
Freebie.
Shocker: Business Intelligence Frustrates Some Users
May 12, 2010
Ah, consider the business intelligence analyst from 1990. Most of these folks received healthy injections of statistics in college and most underwent special treatments in SPSS or other specialized tools to crunch data.
Drag the slide in Sony Vegas to the video segment shot earlier this week. Business intelligence has become dashboards and digested reports. The analysts are still around but building protective walls with their stats books, slide rules, and pocket protectors.
The reason is that middle managers want user friendly business intelligence systems. Even more important, these new and improved business intelligence systems should be delivered without pesky analysts. What MBA wants to be told that she has to wait one day for the analyst/programmer to set up her report.? I can hear the comment, “I need it now. I mean one minute.”
When I read “BI Tools Struggle to Keep Up,” I chuckled. The write up references an azure chip outfit which I routinely find the equivalent of a medieval believer buying a relic from a vendor on a muddy side street near the cathedral. Even better, the article reports that most people need to improve their business intelligence software. No surprise there. Most businesses are desperate to find a way to generate sustainable revenue. Finally, about half of those in the survey find business intelligence systems to difficult to use. No surprise. Most MBAs want to get info, make money, and dodge the food for free line.
The fix? Buy a content processing system that delivers answers. I am not sure how the business intelligence analysts respond to disintermediation or marginalization. Interesting write up and a signal of a new direction in search and content processing. Make everything simple. The data might be inappropriate or wrong, but easy is good for some folks in the survey sample.
Stephen E Arnold, May 12, 2010
A frebie.
A New Term for Search: Enterprise Mashup
May 12, 2010
I received a copy of “Mashups in the Enterprise IT Environment: The Impact of Enterprise Mashup Platforms on Application Development and Evolving IT Relationships with Business End Users”, written by BizTechReports.com. The white paper is about JackBe.com’s software platform.
Here is the company’s description of its product and services:
Enterprise Mashups solve the quintessential information sharing problem: accessing and combining data from disparate internal and external data sources and software systems for timely decision-making. JackBe delivers trusted mashup software that empowers organizations to create, customize and collaborate through enterprise mashups for faster decisions and better business results. Our innovative Enterprise Mashup platform, Presto®, provides dynamic mashups that leverage internal and external data while meeting the toughest enterprise security and governance requirements. Presto provides enterprise mashups delivered to the user in 3 clicks versus 3 months.
You can get more information from the firm’s Web site at www.jackbe.com. If you want a short cut to demonstrations of the firm’s technology, click here.
The company provides a platform and services to convert disparate data into meaningful information assets. What I find interesting is that the phrase “enterprise mashup” is used to reference a range of content processing activities, including content acquisition and processing, indexing, and information outputting. In short, “enterprise mashup” is a useful way to position functions that some vendors describe as search or findability.
The JackBe’s interface reminds me of other business intelligence data presentations.
I want to focus on the white paper because it provides important hints about the direction in which some types of content processing is moving.
First, the argument of in the white paper hinges on an assertion that there is a “hyper dynamic environment.” How does an organization deal with this environment, a different approach to information is required. What is interesting is that the JackBe audience is a blend of developers and business professionals. Some search vendors are trying to get to the senior management of a company. JackBe is interested in two audiences.
Second, the white paper explains the concept of “mashup”. The term compresses a range of information activities into one term. To implement a mashup, JackBe provide widgets to help reduce the time and hassle for building “situation specific” implementations. Some search vendors talk about customization and personalization. The JackBe approach sidesteps these fuzzy notions and focuses on the idea of a “snap in”, lightweight method.
Finally, the JackBe approach uses an interesting metaphor. The phrase I noted was the “Home Depot model of enterprise IT.” Instead of taking disparate components of a typical search engine, JackBe suggests that a licensee can select what’s needed to do a particular information job.
You will want to read the white paper and glean more detailed information. I want to focus on the differences in the JackBe approach. These include:
- Avoiding the overused and little understood terms such as search, taxonomies, business intelligence, and semantic technology. I am not sure JackBe’s approach is going to eliminate confusion, but it is clear to me that JackBe.com is trying to steer clear of the traditional jargon.
- The JackBe approach is more trendy than IBM’s explanation of OmniFind. Examples of the JackBe approach include the notion of a mashup itself and the references to the “long tail” concept are examples.
- To some enterprise procurement teams, JackBe’s approach may be perceived as quite different from the services of larger, higher profile vendors. In my view, this may be a positive step. Search vendors who follow in the footsteps of STAIRS III or Verity are not likely to have the sales success a more creative positioning permits.
To sum up, I think that companies with search and content processing technology will be working hard to distance themselves from the traditional vendors’ methods. The reason is that search as a stand alone service is increasingly perceived as an island. Organizations need systems that connect the islands of information into something larger.
Is JackBe a search and content processing vendor? Yes. Will most people recognize the company’s products and services as basic search? Not likely. Will the positioning confuse some potential licensees? Maybe.
Stephen E Arnold, May 12, 2010
Unsponsored post.
Vic Consult, Nifty Twitter Search
May 11, 2010
I know that Twitter is one of those social networking services that baffle most people over 50. I find Tweets quite interesting and often stuffed full of information. If you want to know what’s behind a Twitter handle, you will want to look at Vic Consulting Twitter User Search. We set up a Twitter account which is a method for outputting tweets when new stories are posted on the Beyond Search blog. So who’s “beyond search”. Navigate to Vic Consulting’s service, plug in a Twitter user name, and the system generates a nifty report. Quite useful.
Stephen E Arnold, May 11, 2010
Freebie.
FirstRain: A Game Changer?
May 11, 2010
Navigate to www.firstrain.com and you will see this headline: “When was the last time search made you money?” Interesting angle. Search is fast becoming a component within other enterprise applications.
You can read the Reuters’ story “FirstRain Announces Game-Changing Intelligent Business Search” and get a sense of the company’s approach to the crowded search and content processing sector. For me the key point was this statement by Penny Herscher, president and CEO of the company:
FirstRain has solved a critical problem for today’s business professionals…For decision-makers, the web represents the most dynamic and current view of companies, markets and management and yet until now, it was not a practical source of useful business intelligence. FirstRain now delivers relevant intelligence like today`s hot trends, emerging market events and unannounced, but visible management moves into the user’s information workflow.
I have been hearing about FirstRain for months. The company obtained an additional $7.3 million earlier this year. The item I saw appeared in Deals & More and stated:
FirstRain, a service that scrapes the Web to deliver relevant research to investors, has brought in $7.3 million of an anticipated $8.8 million round of equity, according to a filing with the SEC. Based in San Mateo, Calif., the company has raised $20.9 million to date and is backed by Oak Investment Partners, DiamondHead Ventures and Ampersand Ventures.
The phrase “scrapes the Web” suggested to me that FirstRain is one of the participants in the business intelligence or competitive intelligence sector.
What I also found interesting is that the Reuters’ story detailed the drawbacks of “traditi0onal search and business information providers”. The weaknesses are quite interesting. Included were these comments which I have extracted or summarized from the news story:
- There’s been a “breakdown of traditional media”, even Web indexes have drawbacks
- Key word systems “are not designed to deliver dynamic intelligence”
- Existing aggregators like Dow Jones or LexisNexis provide access to information “limited in scope and quickly become out of date”
- “Business intelligence applications are usually limited to the documents and databases
related to a company`s own operations, business and resources.”
The FirstRain system, by inference and explicit statement, address these problems. One example is:
Finance professionals can use FirstRain to research and track their vendors and customers directly or through FirstRain integrated into the Dun and Bradstreet DnBI platform. And investor-relations professionals can stay current on market forces impacting their company and its ecosystem as well as events and changes impacting their lead investors.
The value of near real time content processing is recognized by a number of business sectors. However, there are a number of firms nosing into this potentially lucrative market. One can argue that Fetch Technologies and Kapow Technologies are pushing the edge of the open intelligence envelope. Established companies like Alacra have been enhancing their open intelligence content coverage as well.
You can check out the FirstRain Facebook page or you can snag John Blossom’s Content Nation book. The company is profiled in Chapter 4. Among the firm’s customers are Capital IQ. FirstRain mentions other customers on its Web site.
FirstRain is blending some interesting functions and making some strong assertions about its technologies and services. Worth monitoring.
Stephen E Arnold, May 11, 2010
Freebie!
Kindle Tracks User Highlights
May 7, 2010
I am not sure how I like this tracking of what I highlight. I read “Amazon Tracking Most Highlighted Kindle Passage.” I do quite a bit of open source work. I mark up documents anyone can read. What my method yields is a passage, maybe a phrase, that yields a nugget of information. Many public sources contain substantive information. In my experience, some authors are not aware that their seemingly innocuous remarks reveal actionable intelligence. Knowing what I “mark” is taking my specialized type of analysis and having access to that quite valuable meta component. You may not care about this type of tracking. I do.
Here is the passage that annoyed me:
Amazon is now tracking passages and books most highlighted on the Kindle and displaying them on its website. While the Kindle allows its customers to highlight book passages that are meaningful to them, Amazon does display them anonymously.
Your mileage may vary.
Stephen E Arnold, May 7, 2010
Unsponsored post.
Milward from Linguamatics Wins 2010 Evvie Award
April 28, 2010
The Search Engine Meeting, held this year in Boston, is one of the few events that focuses on the substance of information retrieval, not the marketing hyperbole of the sector. Entering its second decade, the conference speakers tackle challenging subjects. This year speakers addressed such topics as “Universal Composable Indexing” by Chris Biow, Mark Logic Corporation, “Innovations in Social Search” by Jeff Fried, Microsoft, and “From Structured to Unstructured and Back Again: Database Offloading”, by Gregory Grefenstette, Exalead, and a dozen other important topics.
From left to right: Sue Feldman, Vice President, IDC, Dr. David Milward, Liz Diamond, Stephen E. Arnold, and Eric Rogge, Exalead.
Each year, the best paper is recognized with the Evvie Award. The “Evvie” was created in honor of Ev Brenner, one of the pioneers in machine-readable content. After a distinguished career at the American Petroleum Institute, Ev served on the planning committee for the Search Engine Meeting and contributed his insights to many search and content processing companies. One of the questions I asked after each presentation was, “What did Ev think?”. I valued Ev Brenner’s viewpoint as did many others in the field.
The winner of this year’s Evvie award is David R. Milward, Linguamatics, for his paper “From Document Search to Knowledge Discovery: Changing the Paradigm.” Dr. Milward said:
Business success is often dependent on making timely decisions based on the best information available. Typically, for text information, this has meant using document search. However, the process can be accelerated by using agile text mining to provide decision-makers directly with answers rather than sets of documents. This presentation will review the challenges faced in bringing together diverse and extensive information resources to answer business-critical R&D questions in the pharmaceutical domain. In particular, it will outline how an agile NLPbased approach for discovering facts and relationships from free text can be used to leverage scientific knowledge and move beyond search to automated profiling and hypothesis generation from millions of documents in real time.
Dr. Milward has 20 years’ experience of product development, consultancy and research in natural language processing. He is a co-founder of Linguamatics, and designed the I2E text mining system which uses a novel interactive approach to information extraction. He has been involved in applying text mining to applications in the life sciences for the last 10 years, initially as a Senior Computer Scientist at SRI International. David has a PhD from the University of Cambridge, and was a researcher and lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. He is widely published in the areas of information extraction, spoken dialogue, parsing, syntax and semantics.
Presenting this year’s award was Eric Rogge, Exalead, and Liz Diamond, niece of Ev Brenner. The award winner received a recognition award and a check for $500. A special thanks to Exalead for sponsoring this year’s Evvie.
The judges for the 2010 Evvie were Dr. David Evans (Evans Research), Sue Feldman (IDC), and Jill O’Neill, NFAIS.
Congratulations, Dr. Milward.
Stuart Schram IV, April 28, 2010
Sponsored post.
Columba Global and Its Search System
April 27, 2010
I received an email about a company called Columba Global Systems associated with “naked objects”. A news story with the title “US Analysts Single Out Irish Firm’s Software Package.” became available on April 25, 2010. The document reports a new search system from CGS. I did a quick check of my Overflight repository and located some information. You can get a PowerPoint that provides an overview of the company’s approach at http://www.columba.com/downloads/Columba%20Brief%20Overview.ppt. The company uses components from several vendors to provide its customers with access to the processed content. It is not clear to me if the analyst’s report is an objective summary of the open source intelligence community’s software systems or a sponsored “white paper” / report. There are a number of firms offering “data fusion” products or “mash up systems”. These include Exalead, Fetch Technologies, and Kapow Tech, among others. These systems deliver the type of “one view” of content objects that has been associated with the type of information access in favor among intelligence and law enforcement professionals. In my experience, the key is optimizing the performance of the system. Purpose built systems such as Exalead’s often have an advantage in terms of performance and scalability over systems constructed on toolkits and systems acquired from different vendors. The positioning of the company in the Irish Times’s new story is one more indicator that traditional search is losing ground in some sectors.
Stephen E Arnold, April 27, 2010
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
