Judge Dings Microsoft for Trial Misconduct
August 21, 2009
Short honk: I don’t have much to add to Slashdot’s “Microsoft Trial Misconduct Cost $40 Million.” In my opinion, if the story is accurate and the judge does not reverse himself, the action provides some useful information about how Microsoft approaches certain issues. In the aftermath of Enron and Bernie Madoff, I was hoping that these types of disturbing actions would decrease. The addled goose was incorrect once again.
Stephen Arnold, August 21, 2009
X1 Probes eDiscovery at a $20,000 Price Point
August 17, 2009
The search vendors continue their hunt for markets eager for sophisticated content processing technology. The most recent shift to the legal sector is X1’s probe of the eDiscovery market. When an organization finds litigation the answer to a problem, eDiscovery reduces the cost of figuring out what information is germane to a matter. X1 Technologies, according to SocalTech.com, is rolling out an eDiscovery Search Suite. X1 entered the search market with a desktop search solution. I used this system when I received a download link from the company. “X1 eyes eDiscovery Market” reported that the software for law firms and in house attorneys begins at $20,000. Beyond Search thinks this is an interesting move. Recommind, which cut its teeth in the legal sector, has moved into the enterprise search market. Stratify, which pursued the intelligence community when it was known as Purple Yogi, shifted to the legal market and has expanded to other areas of the enterprise. Stratify is a unit of Iron Mountain. Search vendors continue to follow well worn paths in search of the key that unlocks greater revenue. With open source search systems such as those available from Tesuji.eu and Lemur Consulting and the bundling of search with other enterprise applications, the shifting from market to market is likely to increase for many search and content processing vendors.
Tweets Are Mostly Pointless Babble
August 15, 2009
I enjoy Mashable. The articles come at topics in a way that is youthful, enthusiastic even. I noted Jennifer Van Grove’s “40% of Tweets Are Pointless Babble.” I was surprised that * only * 40 percent of the message traffic was pointless. However, I think Ms. Van Grove reveals that she has not spent much time in monitoring traffic for intelligence and law enforcement entities. With that experience in her bag of tricks, she might reach a different conclusion about the “noise” in the Twitterstream. “Pointless” to one person might be evidence to another. Youth has its advantages but understanding the value of filtering traffic may not be apparent to an avid sender of Tweets.
Stephen Arnold, August 14, 2009
Visualization and Confusion
August 15, 2009
Visualization of search results or other data is a must-have for presentations in the Department of Defense. What’s a good presentation? One that has killer visualizations of complex data. The problem is that sizzle in one colonel’s graphics triggers a graphics escalation. This is a briefing room version of Mixed Martial Arts. The problem, based on my limited experience in this type of content, is that most of the graphics don’t make much sense. In fact, when I see a graphic I usually have zero idea about where the data originated, the mathematical methods used to generate the visual, or what Photoshop wizardry may have been employed to make that data point explode in my perceptual field. Your mileage may differ, but I find that visualization is useful in small doses.
To prove that what I prefer is out of date and that my views are road kill on the information superhighway, you will want to explore “15 Stunning Examples of Data Visualization”. Stunning is an appropriate word. After looking at these examples, I am not sure what is being communicated in some of these graphics. Example: Big fluctuations.
If you want to add zing to your briefings, you will definitely get some ideas from this article. If I am in the audience, expect questions from the addled goose. Know your data thoroughly because I am not sure some of these examples communicate on the addled goose wave length.
Stephen Arnold, August 14, 2009
Google Gets Sentimental
August 10, 2009
I got a briefing from a company called Lexalytics. The firm, as I recall, was explaining its sentiment based content processing technology. I thought it was interesting. I subsequently learned that Lexalytics’ system would be part of the Financial Times’s online service, but my recollection is fuzzy. I thought of this company when I learned about the Google patent application US20090193328, “Aspect Based Sentiment Summarization”. You can find this document at the ever so powerful USPTO via its patent search engine. The abstract for the patent application, which some wizards believe are little more than the equivalent of my mother’s making Christmas tree ornaments for her friends stated:
Reviews express sentiment about one or more entities. Phrases in the reviews that express sentiment about a particular aspect are identified. Reviewable aspects of the entity are also identified. The reviewable aspects include static aspects that are specific to particular types of entities and dynamic aspects that are extracted from the reviews of a specific entity instance. The sentiment phrases are associated with the reviewable aspects to which the phrases pertain. The sentiment expressed by the phrases associated with each aspect is summarized, thereby producing a summary of sentiment associated with each reviewable aspect of the entity. The summarized sentiment and associated phrases can be stored and displayed to a user as a summary description of the entity.
Now Lexalytics and other companies with sentiment sniffers are only part of what this document sparked in my mind. The other low voltage arc was in the Endeca “Guided Navigation” department of my addled goose brain. As I read the exciting patent document and its droll legalese, I realized that the Google is claiming that its performs the same magic that Orange Julius does when it mixes fruits in fruit shake.
Will Lexalytics and Endeca shiver their timbers? Nope. My hunch is that both companies will see their technology as light years ahead of the Google’s. I also assert that both companies will not see Google’s claims as having much impact on their enterprise and ecommerce content processing applications.
In my opinion, this type of “Google does not have what we have” thinking is going to lead to unfortunate circumstances and quickly.
Stephen Arnold, August 11, 2009
IBM and Social Graphs of Mobile Callers
August 2, 2009
Slashdot’s article “IBM Uses Call-Detail Records To Identify “Friends” tickled my memory. First, you will want to read the technical paper “Social Ties and Their Relevance to Churn in Mobile Telecom Networks” which is a Portable Document Format file. Next navigate to i2, now a unit of Silver Lake Sumeru I recall hearing. As you browse through the i2 site, do you see indications that the Analyst’s Notebook permits similar “friend identification.” I have also seen other tools that can process a range of data and generate relationship maps and graphs. The comment that interested me in the Slashdot item was:
IBM claims its patent-pending snooping software can now identify circles of ‘friends’ who tend to exhibit the same profit-threatening behavior. ‘We believe that our analysis is a first of its kind that exploits the underlying social network in a telecom call graph,’ boasted a team of IBM researchers and a UMD prof.
It will be interesting to see if IBM’s approach conflicts with other patents. I wonder if i2 and the other companies in the i2 market sector will push back on IBM’s claims for its technology. i2 has been around for a number of years, and in its early days was the bright eyed lad for some UK intelligence operations.
Stephen Arnold, August 2, 2009
Microsoft Business Intelligence on the Horizon
July 31, 2009
Coming “someday” from Microsoft: Business intelligence. Computerworld reports that BI and analytics will be included in Windows Azure, internet-scale cloud services platform, but it’ll be a wait. Microsoft won’t have it ready until 2013 or later. See the Computer World story “Microsoft to Bring BI to the Cloud.”
Microsoft already has three major corporations set to use PerformancePoint, a business performance management software, and the company’s “self-service” BI component is set to release in Word and Excel next year. Generally common functions of business intelligence technologies are data mining and analytics, performance management, benchmarking, etc. If Microsoft is working these functions into MS Office for the enterprise organizations, I can see that being an important tool. They’re working on it, but it’s not here yet.
Jessica Bratcher, July 31, 2009
Autonomy Keeps Growing
July 23, 2009
The growth may not be organic, but Autonomy’s combination of acquisitions and upselling existing customers is making it possible for Autonomy to make its stakeholders smile. Trading Markets’ headline tells the tale: “Autonomy Corporation plc Records Increased Profit of US$50.9m in Q2 2009”. Autonomy has morphed into an enterprise software vendor of broad scope. In addition to search, the company has video asset management, eDiscovery, and content management systems on offer. “Pure” search vendors may have to face the music and follow in Autonomy’s footsteps. What the company has proved to me is that trying to hit a billion in revenue with “pure” search is probably next to impossible. What will happen to “pure” search vendors? Interesting question to ponder as attendance at search-related shows continues to soften Microsoft Fast and Google may bundle basic search with other products. Creative thinking is needed. Failing that, some vendors may walk the same path that Autonomy has followed.
Stephen Arnold, July 23, 2009
Kapow Technologies
July 17, 2009
With the rise of free real time search systems such as Scoopler, Connecta, and ITPints, established players may find themselves in shadows. Most of the industrial strength real time content processing companies like Connotate and Relegence prefer to be out of the spotlight. The reason is that their customers are often publicity shy. When you are monitoring information to make a billion on Wall Street or to snag some bad guys before those folks can create a disruption, you want to be far from the Twitters.
A news release came to me about an outfit called Kapow Technologies. The company described itself this way:
Kapow Technologies provides Fortune 1000 companies with industry-leading technology for accessing, enriching, and serving real-time enterprise and public Web data. The company’s flagship Kapow Web Data Server powers solutions in Web and business intelligence, portal generation, SOA/WOA enablement, and CMS content migration. The visual programming and integrated development environment (IDE) technology enables business and technical decision-makers to create innovative business applications with no coding required. Kapow currently has more than 300 customers, including AT&T, Wells Fargo, Intel, DHL, Vodafone and Audi. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif. with additional offices in Denmark, Germany and the U.K
I navigated to the company’s Web site out of curiosity and learned several interesting factoids:
First, the company is a “market leader” in open source intelligence. It has technology to create Web crawling “robots”. The technology can, according to the company, “deliver new Web data sources from inside and outside the agency that can’t be reached with traditional BI and ETL tools.” More information is here. Kapow’s system can perform screen scraping; that is, extracting information from a Web page via software robots.
Second, the company offers what it calls a “portal generation” product. The idea is to build new portals or portlets without coding. The company said:
With Kapow’s technology, IT developers [can]: Avoid the burden of managing different security domains; eliminate the need to code new transaction; and bypass the need to create or access SOA interfaces, event-based bus architectures or proprietary application APIs.
Third, provide a system that handles content migration and transformation. With transformation an expensive line item in the information technology budget, managing these costs becomes more important each month in today’s economic environment. Kapow says here:
The module [shown below] acts much as an ETL tool, but performs the entire data extraction and transformation at the web GUI level. Kapow can load content directly into a destination application or into standard XML files for import by standard content importing tools. Therefore, any content can be migrated and synchronized to and between any web based CMS, CRM, Project Management or ERP system.
Kapow offers connections for a number of widely used content management systems, including Interwoven, Documentum, Vignette, and Oracle Stellent, among others.
Kapow includes a search function along with application programming interfaces, and a range of tools and utilities, including RoboSuite (a block diagram appears below):
Source: http://abss2.fiit.stuba.sk/TeamProject/2006/team05/doc/KapowTech.ppt
OECD Data Diving
July 3, 2009
Short honk: Want to explore OECD country data. First, read the BBC story “Exploring the OECD Web Site” then navigate to OECD Explorer. Ideal for those who want short cuts to data analysis.
Stephen Arnold, July 3, 2009
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