Yahoo, Flubs, and an Azure Chip Consulting Firm
May 12, 2012
The addled goose steers clear of icebergs. But Yahoo, flubs, and an azure chip consulting firm keep appearing in my Overflight system. The most recent item to catch my attention was “Heidrick & Struggles Slaps Back at Thompson’s Yahoo in Blame Game Over ResuMess.” In terms of Web indexing, this headline is a keeper. I am not sure how many hits “resumess” had prior to this article, but it will be a zingy word going forward.
The point of this write up is that an azure chip consulting firm in the business of recruiting blue-chip or maybe azure chip executives defended itself and its professionalism. Here’s the passage in the “real” news story I noted:
[Scott] Thompson [the CEO with the flub on his bio] did not name the firm, but he was clearly referring to Heidrick & Struggles, which handled that placement. It was also working on the Yahoo CEO search, after the Silicon Valley Internet giant fired its former CEO Carol Bartz last fall. But, because it had originally placed Thompson at eBay, the firm did not work on his hiring at Yahoo.
Ah, the same firm—Heidrick & Struggles–was involved with eBay and Yahoo. Some questions:
- What did the headhunting firm have in its files about Mr. Thompson? Perhaps an “old” version of Mr. Thomson’s curriculum vitae?
- Did anyone request a transcript from Mr. Thompson’s college? If so, who and when? What did the transcript reveal?
- Why did the azure chip consulting firm write a letter without some hard data. I have been in meetings in which highly paid consultants armed with stacks of “facts”, clippings, data, and interview notes. Why not present some of this information?
A mistake happened somewhere along the line. As a curious type of person, I was hoping for some more substance to what is a most interesting affair. Oh, I graduated from Bradley University with a major in poetry. Now I am an addled goose floating in a pond filled with mine run off. Iambic pentameter or perhaps something with a Catullus dactylic Hexameter. I should have applied for a job at eBay or Yahoo in my youth. Engineers, MBAs, accountants, and movie moguls have not fared particularly well. A spondee to you, gentle reader. A struggle one might say.
Stephen E Arnold, May 12, 2012
Sponsored by HighGainBlog
Publishers Sour on Apps
May 12, 2012
Have you noticed a slowdown in attempts to app-ify traditional publications? Technology Review describes "Why Publishers Don’t Like Apps." Writer Jason Pontin describes early attempts of publishers to cure their Internet woes with apps. They seem to have expected tablet and smartphone users to relate to the written word more like, well, the written word than like a Web site. Sure, most of the projects supported some limited interactability, but publishers also expected people to be happy viewing simple replicas of print materials. And, they expected to be able to charge for this paltry access.
Problems abounded from the beginning, including grossly underestimating costs (an age-old problem), and technical difficulties converting print matter into apps. The write up emphasizes:
"But the real problem with apps was more profound. When people read news and features on electronic media, they expect stories to possess the linky-ness of the Web, but stories in apps didn’t really link. The apps were, in the jargon of information technology, ‘walled gardens,’ and although sometimes beautiful, they were small, stifling gardens. For readers, none of that beauty overcame the weirdness and frustration of reading digital media closed off from other digital media.
"Without subscribers or many single-copy buyers, and with no audiences to sell to advertisers, there were no revenues to offset the incremental costs of app development. With a couple of exceptions, publishers therefore soured on apps."
Ah, so publishers don’t like apps because the golden goose is a sparrow and lays small monetary eggs. Got it.
Cynthia Murrell, May 12, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
German Mathematicians: A Harbinger of Big Trouble for Sci-Tech Publishing
May 11, 2012
If you pay attention to scientific and technical publishing, you may know that there are significant financial pressures on sci tech publishers like Elsevier, Springer, and their compatriots. But the customers face financial pressures as well. Universities have taken steps to reduce their costs. Libraries have had their budgets cut. Tenure windows have been shut. Even the composition of a university’s faculty has undergone major changes. Some adjunct professors have to moonlight to cover their basic necessities.
I noted a short news item from the technical institute in Munich known as TUM or Technische Universität München. Without a University of Kentucky grade basketball team, most of my neighbors in Harrod’s Creek ignore this outfit. If you are into math, you pay attention to what the institution does.
Navigate to this news item and you will read:
Because of unsustainable subscription prices and conditions, the board of directors of the mathematics department has voted to cancel all of its subscriptions to Elsevier journals by 2013.
Negotiations are underway to work out a deal. The Elsevier organization is meeting to figure out how to prevent an “occupy Wall Street” type of activity among other German universities. If Elsevier does not come up with a solution and quickly, the company would have to cope with push back from authors who are annoyed with the Elsevier publishing policies and fees and cancellation of subscriptions from its best and most prestigious customers.
In short, we may have the first blinking of a yellow caution light for the professional publishing sector. Most consumers don’t know how much it costs to get four or more issues of a technical publication for one year. Some of the articles have been in the editorial and peer review oven for months. Online content is getting better and may be “good enough” for most researchers and students. In the case of math, online delivers more timely results and broad access to a technical write up can yield quicker, higher value commentary.
Will the loss of a single math department’s subscriptions have a significant impact on Elsevier’s financials this month? No. If the cancellation fever spreads and hybridizes with push back from authors, Elsevier could be in trouble, probably within a quarter or two.
Don’t agree? That’s okay. Just post your views in the comments section of this blog.
Stephen E Arnold, May 10, 2012
Sponsored by Ikanow
Google Strategy Questioned
May 9, 2012
Blogger Dustin Curtis presents his take on Google’s business strategy in “Google’s Coherent Bouquet.” Riffing off of Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin’s line, “We’ve let a thousand flowers bloom; now we want to put together a coherent bouquet,” Curtis questions whether such flower arranging is within the company’s abilities. At issue is the importance of social media and, naturally, the threat of competition from Facebook that continually dogs the search giant. The write up asserts:
“Google has about 150 legacy core products which have slowly evolved into great tools over the past decade, but which were designed and built with the complete absence of consideration for any social interaction. Google+ is an attempt to shoe-horn Google’s legacy products into things that are compatible with a new set of social interaction paradigms.
“My point here is that ‘social’ is a point of view from which to design products and not a ‘layer’ that can be easily draped over existing, non-social products.”
Hmmm. Interesting logic. Curtis insists that a shift like the one Google needs is not going to happen without the impetus of “new and unexpected outside ideas.” Is the self-described “villain” blogger correct? Is Google too set in its ways to achieve social success?
Cynthia Murrell, May 9, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Swiftype: A Challenge Google, SearchBlox, and Blossom
May 9, 2012
The SEO crowd and the newly minted open source search experts are usually insensitive to the challenge of site search. Now an outfit called Swiftype wants to displace Google and its site search / custom search, SearchBlox (an open source Web site indexing service), and Blossom (one of the leaders in hosted search for Web sites and organizations).
Background
“Site search” means indexing a public facing Web site and making the content findable. For the Beyond Search information service, we have two systems at work so we can point out the differences to those who ask us for our professional opinion. The search box visible at the top of the page runs a visitor’s query against an index of the content in the ArnoldIT.com domain. When you entire a query for “mysteries of online”, this is the results list:
When you scroll below the picture of our engineers in action, you will see a second search box labeled “Google Customer Search.” This is a variant of Google’s site search service. When you run the query “mysteries of online”, you get this results list:
The Google index follows the links within the content of Beyond Search so you get a broader results set.
Which is better? There is no better in site search. One can find the answer to one’s question or not. We use two systems to show that in some cases a narrow result set will have higher precision and recall. In other situations, one trades off precision for a broader recall.
Swiftype’s Play
The company has rolled out a Web site search service and an application programming interface for developers. You can view a demonstration of the service at www.swiftype.com. Set up is easy and features:
- Auto complete
- Generates a code snippet to put the search system in a Web page
- Indexing is performed “immediately”
- Analytics to show most popular queries
The company offers a quick start guide, information about the REST API, and information about crawler meta tags. The meta tags allow the developer to direct the crawler to index a site in a specific manner.
The company has been funded by YCombinator and is located in San Francisco. The service is now in public beta and is free. The fee for the service, when it exits beta, will be based on the amount of API traffic it generates.
“Y Combinator-Backed Swiftype Builds Site Search That Doesn’t Suck” provides a positive review of the beta service. The article asserts:
Among other things, Swiftype is supposedly easy to integrate with Tumblr — our own MG Siegler has added it to his blog ParisLemon. In other words, there’s virtually no technical work required from the publisher — something else that distinguishes Swiftype from the various other search products and open source libraries out there. At same time, companies who want a little more control can access Swiftype through its APIs.
Our view is that search in general presents a number of challenges. Site search is one subset of a broader information retrieval issue. For site search, we think that Swiftype deserves a look and a head-to-head comparison with other services. Unfortunately, after 50 years of innovation in search and retrieval, there is room for improvement in findability. Give the Swiftype system a whirl.
Stephen E Arnold, May 9, 2012
Sponsored by Ikanow
Stunning Statistics about Amazon Cloud Reach
May 9, 2012
Wired’s Robert McMillan recently reported on an oddly scary statistic in the article “Amazon’s Secretive Cloud Carries 1 Percent of the Internet.”
According to the start-up DeepField Networks, Amazon has one of the fastest growing cloud infrastructures. Apparently, one-third of the several million users in the study visited a website that uses Amazon’s infrastructure each day. It is also very popular with many big name companies like Netflix. However, no one really knows exactly how big Amazon’s cloud is.
McMillan states:
“Gartner researcher Lydia Leong estimates that Amazon’s cloud business was $1 billion in 2011, more than five times the size of its closest competitor, Rackspace. Last week Rackspace Chief Technology Officer John Engates was happy to tell us how many servers he has in his data centers: 80,000. But only 23 percent ($189 million) of Rackspace’s 2011 business was in the cloud. That implies that Rackspace could do the same amount of cloud business as Amazon with maybe 100,000 servers.”
It appears that Amazon’s business as slowly been growing faster than we ever realized. Maybe Google and Facebook should stop fighting each other and start paying attention to other threats.
Jasmine Ashton, May 9, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Zuckerberg Grip Should Be Choke Hold
May 8, 2012
In 2012, Facebook seems to be shaping up as the “new” Google. I know that apps for Facebook are not behaving the way some would like. The privacy thing is an issue. Facebook pretty much does what it wants, or, perhaps I should say, “Mr. Zuckerberg does what he wants.”
I spotted an important “real” journalistic position in “Zuckerberg Grip Becomes New Normal in Silicon Valley.” The “old” normal was Google. Hewlett Packard, Oracle, and Yahoo seem oddly out of step in the social analytics, big data, and big upside environment created by Facebook. The concept of the “new normal” is an important one, and I think that other Bloomberg and “real” journalists will hop on the bandwagon and cling until the next big thing rolls along.
Here’s the passage I noted:
Companies that have three or fewer outside board members include Pinterest, an online bulletin board; Dropbox, a provider of Web-based storage; question-and-answer site Quora Inc.; Flipboard Inc., the maker of a magazine-like application for the iPad; and Nest Labs, the creator of a technology-powered thermostat. Zuckerberg adopted a dual-class structure in 2009. He has 10 votes for every other shareholder’s single ballot. Facebook plans to raise as much as $11.8 billion in the IPO, the biggest offering on record for an Internet company. The Menlo Park, California-based company would be valued at as much as $96 billion in the deal. “People look at Facebook and see what they have done,” said Stephen Venuto, a partner at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP in Menlo Park, who helped Facebook set up its initial corporate-governance structure. “It’s become a much more common thing to implement dual-class capital structures in Silicon Valley companies.”
Several observations:
First, Zuckerberg is likely to keep control going forward. As a one-man band, the new normal is more power to the technologist executive. Good for the executive, perhaps no so good for some other constituencies.
Second, the lousy financial climate has shifted the financial firmament. The beneficiaries of the “new normal” may not be financial institutions which, despite protestations to the contrary, prefer to have control. The “new normal” is that power is divided differently.
Third, the implosion of the social media shock wave is likely to take out people, partners, and users. Facebook is a different type of outfit; that is, it is member based and chock full of content with a significant specific gravity. Explode high mass content out of Facebook. Interesting repercussions are likely.
The “new normal” may be fresh and innovative, particularly from a financial vantage point. Stable? I am no so sure.
Stephen E Arnold, May 8, 2012
Inktomi and Fast Search: Two Troubled Search Companies, One Lesson
May 8, 2012
I found the write up by Diego Basch interesting and thought provoking. I have a little experience with Inktomi. For the original FirstGov.gov system, the US government used Inktomi for the public facing index of US government unclassified information. (FirstGov.gov is now www.usa.gov)
Inktomi had in 2000 a “ready to go” index of content from Dot Gov Web sites. The firm’s business model matched the needs of the US government. There were the normal contracting and technical hurdles for a modestly sized US government project with a fairly tight timeline. No big deal. Job done. Inktomi worked.
When I read “A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi,” I thought the write up had some useful information. However, I don’t think Google killed Inktomi or any other search system. Google did not kill Fast Search & Transfer, Excite, HotBot, or any other search system in its rise to its alleged 65 percent share of the search market. (Google share is actually much higher, based on my analyses.)
Excite’s early 1997 attempt at portalization. Can you spot the search box? Does this look like the current version of Google? Say, “No.” Now log into Google and run a query for rental car. Now do you see the similarity between the early portal craziness and the modern Google? I do.
What killed off these outfits was their business models. Let me explain using Inktomi and Fast Search as examples. I could cite other cases, but these two are okay for a free blog post for the two or three readers I have.
Inktomi, for whatever reason, concluded that people wanted to offer search, not do the heavy lifting. In the portal fever that was raging from 1998 to 2001, Web sites wanted to be the “front page” of the Internet. The result was that America Online, Excite, Lycos, and Yahoo among others jammed links on the splash page. At one time, I counted more than 60 links on the Excite home page. Once I hit 50 links, I quit counting. My eyes and patience can cope with three to five things. More than that, and I move on.
Inktomi’s analysts did the spreadsheet fever thing, making assumptions about how many Web sites would license Inktomi results, pay Inktomi’s fees, and generate revenue from the front page of the Internet craziness. The reality was that Inktomi did not have enough customers to support the cost of the spidering, bandwidth, investment in performance, research and development for precision and recall, and the other costs that are underestimated or just ignored. The result was the collapse of the company.
Free DataStax Open Source Search Profile Now Available
May 8, 2012
OpenSearchNews.com has posted another open source search engine profile. Like the two previous profiles—Basho Riak and Doculibre Constellio—the discussion of the search system is available for one week. Navigate to the OpenSearchNews.com profile page and click the link for the DataStax report.
OpenSearchNews.com is a service of ArnoldIT, which provides information and analysis of selected open source search solutions. Many proprietary vendors of search are reluctant to admit that open source search is becoming an increasingly disruptive force in the enterprise market.
According to Stephen E Arnold, “This series of profiles is designed to make it easy for an individual to get basic information about open source search. We want to provide these profiles at no cost because access to the information is more important than monetary considerations. Self appointed experts have not stepped forward to cover this important market sector. The team at Beyond Search has taken an important step forward.”
For more information about ArnoldIT, the publisher of these profiles, navigate to www.arnoldit.com and www.augmentext.com.
Don C. Anderson, May 8, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT
Ontology Systems Bests Vivisimo and Information Optimization
May 8, 2012
I read “Ontology Systems Set to Unveil OSS/BSS Intelligence Semantic Search Apps at Management World 2012.” The write up focuses on a forthcoming announcement of technology for “enterprise data alignment.”
When I read this, I thought of IBM Vivisimo’s “information optimization” catchphrase. I am not exactly sure what information optimization means. I think I am unclear about OSS BSS intelligent semantic search apps for enterprise data alignment. The Ontology Systems’ Web site includes detailed information about the company’s method.
My hunch this technology is a search system with semantic functions. The company describes itself this way:
Ontology Systems have caused Communications Service Providers (CSPs) to rethink the way they find and align customer, equipment and service information. CSPs spend vast sums of money attempting to do this via integration but getting usable results is hard. The world’s largest misaligned system is the Internet and you search the Internet. Ontology believes you should search your systems too.
The benefits of the company’s approach are explained in terms of an “ontology” seasoned approach:
Using state-of-the-art semantic search technologies, Ontology quickly finds and aligns business entities in operational, business and infrastructure systems. We provide a single, accurate, enterprise-wide view of customers, services and network assets. An organization using OSS BSS intelligent semantic search apps for enterprise data alignment can, according to the write up, “increase profit and reduce costs by preventing revenue leaks, improving service management, enhancing customer experience, maximizing network assets and improving the speed and accuracy of migration.”
The conclusion which the company suggests for me is “Ontology is semantic search for Enterprise Data Alignment.”
Stepping back, I had several observations:
- Vivisimo’s use of “information optimization” allowed IBM to perceive Vivisimo as a “big data” company. My hunch is that with a phrase which is ambiguous, convincing a cash rich purchaser to buy becomes easier. There are no pesky concrete explanations to block a “pivot” or deft repositioning. The Ontology Systems’ catchphrase is, to me, similar to Vivisimo’s choice of words.
- I am not sure what the undefined acronyms mean. I thought briefly about trying to untangle the “OSS BSS” pair, but if the writer did not explain them, it is not important to an addled goose. A brief explanation to an uninformed reader such as I was obviously unnecessary for the company’s target market.
- The “ontology” buzzword is used without associations to big data, analytics, and social media. Most of the articles I read about enterprise semantics are shifting from the taxonomy/ontology hooks to concepts which are getting more sales traction. There is a notable example of a well known Microsoft centric vendor scrambling to find a market positioning that captures SharePoint licensees’ interest. Ontology Systems seems to have a unique angle to make money with an ontology centric approach.
You can keep up with some of the vendors in the taxonomy and ontology sector with a subset of our Overflight service. Take a look at our free subsite http://www.arnoldit.com/taxonomy/. When you click on a company name, you can determine if the company is active in the market and get an indication of what is being said about the firm. We will add Ontology Systems to the public facing service so you can track this firm with a mouse click.
Stephen E Arnold, May 7, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
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