Possible Changes Ahead for eDiscovery Rules
September 8, 2011
E-discovery 2.0 asks, “New eDiscovery Rules on the Horizon?” Potential amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are to be discussed at a mini-conference scheduled for September 9, 2011 by the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules. Writer Matthew Nelson explains the significance of this meeting:
The mini-conference is important because it is part of a seven step process that could ultimately lead to new rule amendments affecting all litigators and the organizations they represent. Any new rule proposals developed by the subcommittee at the September mini-conference will be considered by the Advisory Committee this November in Washington D.C. The proposals, in one form or another, could ultimately become law. Both Supreme Court and Congressional approval are ultimately required.
One area that cries to be addressed is the controversial question, at what point does the duty to preserve evidence kick in? If the answer is when a complaint is served, that may leave too much leeway for evidence destruction at the first sign of a potential complaint.
Many feel that the current rules are too murky, making companies anxious about what they must do to avoid future sanctions. Further complicating the picture are questions about the impact of cloud computing on civil litigation.
We’re just at the beginning of the long process of amending these rules. If your business is concerned with eDiscovery, though, you’ll want to keep up on the progress.
Cynthia Murrell, September 8, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
IBM Acquires i2 Ltd.
September 1, 2011
IBM purchased i2 Group. Founded in 1990 by Mike Hunter, i2 is a widely used content processing and case management system for law enforcement and intelligence professionals. The company received the EuroIntel Golden Candle Award, for its contribution to the global intelligence community. On several occasions, the ArnoldIT team worked on some i2 products several years. The company has moved outside the somewhat narrow market for sophisticated intelligence analysis systems.
“IBM Acquiring I2 for Criminal Mastermind Software” reported:
IBM plans to fuse i2’s products with its own data collection, analysis and warehousing software. It will then offer packages based on this combinations to organizations looking to spot suspicious behavior within vast collections of data.
Not surprisingly, there has been considerable confusion about the company. Part of the reason is that the name “i2” was used by a back office and supply chain company. The firm benefited from its acquisition from the low profile Silver Lake Sununu. Silver Lake purchased i2 from Choicepoint in 2008 for about $185 million. “IBM Bolsters Big Data Security Credentials with i2 Buy” opines that the deal was worth more than $500 million, a fraction of what UK vendor Autonomy commanded from Hewlett Packard in August 2011.
i2’s technology is not well understood by those without direct experience using the firm’s pace setting products. One example in the Analyst’s Notebook, a system which allows multiple case details to be processed, analyzed, and displayed in a manner immediately familiar to law enforcement and intelligence professionals. i2 acquired Coplink, developed at an academic institution in Arizona.
The core technology continues to be enhanced. i2 now provides its system to organizations with an interest in analyzing data across time, via relationships, and with specialized numerical recipes.
My position is that I am not going to dive into the specific features and functions of the i2 system. If you want to know more about i2’s technology, you can visit the firm’s Web site at http://www.i2group.com/us. The Wikipedia page and many of the news and trade write ups about i2 are either incorrect or off by 20 degrees or more.
What will IBM “do” with the i2 technology? My hunch is that IBM will maintain the present market trajectory of i2 and expose the firm’s technology to IBM clients and prospects with specific security needs. Please, appreciate that the nature of the i2 technology is essentially the opposite of software available for more general purpose applications. My view is that IBM will probably continue to support the integration of i2 Clairty component with the Microsoft SharePoint platform. Like the descriptions of Autonomy’s technology, some of the write ups about i2 may require further verfication.
We have reported on the legal dust up about the i2 ANB file format and some friction between Palantir and i2 in Inteltrax. Most of the legal hassles appear to be worked out, but contention is certainly possible going forward.
I have been a fan of i2’s technology for many years. However, some firms have moved into different analytical approaches. In most cases, these new developments enhance the functionality of an i2 system. Today we are featuring an editorial by Tim Estes, founder of Digital Reasoning, a company that has moved “beyond i2.” You can read his views about the Autonomy deal in “Summer of Big Deals”. More information about Digital Reasoning is available at www.digitalreasoning.com. Digital Reasoning is a client of ArnoldIT, the publisher of this information service.
Stephen E Arnold, September 1, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
EasyAsk Sweetens Sugar CRM
August 31, 2011
The world of customer relationship management (CRM) just got a lot sweeter a few months ago with the announcement that Sugar CRM is partnering with EasyAsk. SugarCRM is a leader in the world of customer relationship management. SugarCRM said:
SugarCRM helps your business communicate with prospects, share sales information, close deals and keep customers happy. SugarCRM is an affordable web-based CRM solution for small- and medium-sized businesses. Offered in the Cloud or on-site, it is easy to customize and adapt to the way you do business.
“EasyAsk and SugarCRM to Provide Natural Language Search and Analysis,” covers the news of this exciting joint venture. We learned:
EasyAsk and SugarCRM announced . . . at SugarCon 2011 that they will team up to offer EasyAsk for SugarCRM, a new version of EasyAsk with natural search and analysis software integrated with SugarCRM. The integrated product will deliver SugarCRM information through EasyAsk’s language interface and tools. With EasyAsk for SugarCRM, users can ask questions in English and get immediate answers FROM THEIR SugarCRM system.
The natural language processing (NLP) offered by EasyAsk allows users to query and communicate in English, smoothing the language barrier between man and machine. EasyAsk’s NLP technology and engineering really move the SugarCRM cloud offerings to the next level.
We are glad to see such a natural partnership taking place between two innovators. Other businesses, especially those in eCommerce and mobile apps, would do well to incorporate the EasyAsk language interface and tools into their offerings. Doing so would most certainly increase user satisfaction and reduce their own engineering and design stress.
Other independent software vendors have embedded the EasyAsk natural language interface into their offerings with considerable success. Among the companies using EasyAsk’s NLP technology are Siemens, Personnel Data Systems, Ceridian, and Gensource.
Although IBM has been intent on wowing the consumer with the Jeopardy game show demonstration, EasyAsk has been building a market for real-world natural language solutions. In addition, EasyAsk has also delivered a version of its NLP tools on NetSuite, one of the leaders in software as a service enterprise resource planning solution providers.
The EasyAsk-SugarCRM partnership came together smoothly, with both firms able to sweeten their product offerings while solving problems for licensees. We will continue to cover EasyAsk. We think the search firm will continue to prove itself a market and technology leader.
Stephen E Arnold, August 31, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Social Media: Making the Personal Impersonal
August 25, 2011
Search engines are now using social media data to rank query results. As crazy as it sounds, your Tweets could now alter the way Google gives you information on such benign things as “George Washington” or “grilled cheese sandwiches.” eSchool News takes a look at how “New Web-Search Formulas Have Huge Implications for Students and Society.”
Search results now differ from person to person based on algorithms have been altered to include social media data. Knowing that most people don’t go past the second page of results, they have tailored their ranking system to consider links you have clicked on and create a filter system based on those previous links. This isn’t something ground breaking since Amazon and Netflix have been using it for years to recommend books and movies, but is new to the major search engines.
At the 2011 Technology, Entertainment, and Design talk, Eli Pariser, the author of The Filter Bubble, shared his reservations with the “invisible algorithmic editing of the web.” He believes it only shows us what it thinks we want and not what we need to see.
[I]t was believed that the web would widen our connections with the world and expose us to new perspectives, Pariser said: Instead of being limited to the newspapers, books, and other writings available in our local communities, we would have access to information from all over the globe. But thanks to these new search-engine formulas, he said, the internet instead is coming to represent ‘a passing of the torch from human gatekeepers [of information] to algorithmic ones.’ Yet, algorithms don’t have the kind of embedded ethics that human editors have, he noted. If algorithms are going to curate the world for us, then ‘we need to make sure they’re not just keyed to [personal] relevance—they also should show us things that are important, or challenging, or uncomfortable.’
It seems that search engines may be focusing on personal factors, but are not personalizing the process. The user has no control over results. That customization is left to a rigid algorithm. If a restaurant says that they make burgers “made-to-order,” then I expect to be able to pick mustard and onions on one visit, and pick cheese and ketchup on the next visit. The server should not just look at my past orders and make an educated guess. There is nothing “personal” about that.
Could this lead some well meaning people down an unintended and risky path to censorship-by-computer. Users must gain more control over these search formulas. There are certainly times when social media parameters are acceptable, but sometimes you want and need to see the other side. It depends if you are settling an argument between your friends over song lyrics or writing a thesis on communism. Until users are offered more liberal control, I think this “personal” ranking system will actually suppress and limit a lot of important information that users are seeking. The social impact on a search comes at a pretty high price.
Jennifer Wensink, August 25, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Screen Scraping: Boon or Bane?
August 22, 2011
Everyone who has ever thought about information extraction has considered screen-scraping software. Marco Albanico Inbound MLM does the legwork by explaining, “What You Need To Know Regarding Lead Screen Scraping Software.”
Clever folks can take content from a Web site which some of those original publishers assume will be “safe” from content predators.
We learned the following from this article:
[In addition] to streamlining content, these businesses gather ingenious information, [w]hich happens to be an important resource for just about any company or private group’s use. [It’s] not just for collecting and refining content, you may also take advantage of collected information within an organized form for reasons of intelligence, study, and storage for future use.
Mozenda is the leading software, as proclaimed by users on websites like theeasybee.com. For anyone completely new to Web extraction, they offer to setup the first project for free. They also convert your web data into a myriad of different formats.
Kapow Technologies offers the ability to extract without any coding, using a point and click technology. Their partnership with IBM has enabled them to produce a Web 2.0 Expo application for the iPhone in less than three hours.
The best suggestion Marco Albanico offers is to take advantage of the free trials that these two services and others advertise on their websites. Why limit yourself before exploring all of your options if they’re free?
Megan Feil, August 22, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Alerts When Search Is Hit and Miss
August 21, 2011
Search seems like the answer to Every Man’s information needs. It is not. Not by a long shot.
If organizations cannot search by individual as to who needs information, they will invariably push content onto a whole group of people. AFV-News reported “U.S. Army Deploys AtHoc IWSAlerts Emergency Mass Notification System.”
Businesses, schools, universities, and military groups all employ the usage of emergency alerts, providing mass notifications to everyone in their system. Fort Jackson brags that their AtHoc alerts span 25,000 personnel and dependents.
AtHoc IWS Alerts offer control from a unified Web-based console, which allows Fort Jackson to send alerts to cell phones, landlines, smart phones, SMS text and email. It’s not just Fort Jackson—AtHoc services more than 1.5 million Department of Defense, more than any other provider.
We learned about AtHoc’s capabilities and infrastructure from the AFV-News article:
[The] system integrates with the post’s existing Internet Protocol network services, which means reduced infrastructure and maintenance costs. Personnel accountability is accomplished through the bi-directional capability, allowing responses to notifications in real-time. Network alert delivery and response can be tracked, ensuring that targeted recipients have received and responded to alerts.
While alerts for dangerous situations and testing can save lives and are obviously a necessity, mass alert systems also unfortunately end up in too many unnecessary inboxes.
Megan Feil, August 21, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
ZyLAB eDiscovery Goes to Extremes
August 19, 2011
The field of eDiscovery is growing, with ZyLAB and Brainware both leading the pack in terms of the marketing buzz that flows through our Overflight intelligence service. Chris Dale reports on evaluating eDiscovery services in the most extreme circumstances in, “ZyLAB eDiscovery tools as a Prototype for Removing Discovery Bottlenecks.” He writes:
The . . . extreme in eDiscovery terms, apart from the ability to handle very large volumes, is a war crimes investigation and tribunal. The data sources are often far removed from the neat corporate environment of servers and laptops; the events took place in circumstances where data preservation was the last priority; the required standard of proof is a criminal one.
Underscoring this argument is the idea that if eDiscovery tools can handle the disorganization and intense pressure of a war crimes tribunal, the same tool can perform beautifully in the more predictable and ordered environment of the corporate and financial world. This logic seems sound. If the product is effective for firms in the context of war crimes tribunals, the same product is likely to increase the speed and productivity of firms operating in a much more controlled environment.
Our view. Work flow is a hot sector, and it seems to be paying dividends for ZyLAB and for Brainware, a firm pushing into this sector with what looks like increasing determination.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 19, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
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