LTU: Challenging the Thomson Reuters Trademark Fortress
May 16, 2008
LTU Technologies in France is putting its well-regarded image search technology to work in a proprietary trademark database. The LTU system compare a submitted digital image against the database to confirm an already extant trademark or industrial design. You can read about that here. Click quickly. Some of news stories disappear without warning.
LTU’s image search has been among the most accurate available. Military and intelligence entities have been among LTU’s most eager customers. Now LTU is moving into a service where Thomson Reuters has a strong, if not dominant, position. You can read about Thomson’s Trademarkscan service here.
Thomson also operates Derwent, a patent information service, and the company has dozens of complimentary information services for intellectual property.
What are LTU’s chances of running with the big dog? We think that LTU will have to move quickly and be prepared for some Thomson Reuters push back.
If LTU puts out a quality product and focuses its effort, LTU may be able to offer an alternative to Thomson Derwent customers looking for options. But speed and quality are important. Oh, LTU has to be prepared for Thomson Reuters-style competition.
Jessica Bratcher, May 16, 2008
Google Mini Signals Maxi Change
May 16, 2008
In San Francisco earlier this week, I spent some time with one of my tech pals. In the course of the conversation, we talked about the lousy margins on hardware, even the flashiest gear from HP, IBM, and Sun. He said, “Too much cost, not enough fast cash.” He also told me that Google was going to trim its line of Google Search Appliances.
Yesterday, TechCrunch–an information life support device for my aging self in rural Kentucky–said much the same thing. Mark Henderson’s “Rumor: Google to Launch Hosted Site Search, Ditch Mini” appeared on May 15, 2008. One point that jumped out at me was:
It’s not exactly clear what this decision means for the enterprise search industry, but it won’t be surprising if Google does indeed come out with a cloud-based solution.
The comments from my friend and Mr. Henderson’s blockbuster mesh with what I have learned from people using Google’s custom search. Custom search is a no-charge way to get Google search for your Web site. We use it as one search option for ArnoldIT.com’s Web log, “Beyond Search”. We’ve tested the function and found that it works with near-zero latency and spiders tirelessly, often picking up changes to test custom search pages in less than 15 minutes.
Why do we think this “mini” change signals a “maxi” shift? There are three reasons:
Google isn’t in the hardware business. Google’s wizards love hardware, and the company has patent applications that are stuffed with fans, racks, and other gizmos. Hardware equals support, and if there’s one thing less exciting to a Googler than attending a lecture on ancient Greek pottery, it’s dealing with a a flesh-and-blood customer
Google moves in surprisingly small, incremental steps for a giant company. Any shift to a cloud-based service is no casual decision. Folks, we have a signal.
The Google Search Appliance is a beast of burden. To get the most out of the OneBox API and deliver the functionality that customers are discovering is possible, more robust devices are needed. The “blue” Mini was a black sheep compared to the “yellow” GB (Google Box) siblings.
Companies that dismiss Google’s enterprise ambitions are certainly free to continue emulating ostrich. The more strategically-minded may want to increase their fly-bys of the Googleplex. The enterprise market with its billions appeals to Google’s financial officer.
Stephen Arnold, May 15, 2008
Data Harmony Update a Suite Release
May 16, 2008
Access Innovations Inc., a data management systems company, is releasing version 3.4 of its Data Harmony software suite, and it sounds like a sweet deal.
The five-component software is used to make and maintain taxonomies, thesaurus, and indexing systems. Data Harmony focuses on accuracy, precision, and repeatability in its search results, an emphasis that receives a happy quack from the Arnold IT mascot.
The major updates include more than 30 new features and revised documentation (to keep you in tune). The company says current users will recognize the same look and feel of the program and appreciate “friendlier and more functional features.”
President and Chairman Marjorie M.K. Hlava said the upgrade comes courtesy user requests and suggestions. It’s refreshing to find a tech company making such efforts to rework a good product and actually making it better. We like Ms. Hlava’s old-fashioned, hands-on, we-care approach most refreshing at a time when software vendors do better PR than coding. The full list of the Data Harmony enhancements for 3.4 can be found here.
Jessica Bratcher, May 16, 2008
Google Translate
May 15, 2008
The Google Search Appliance is a pretty nifty gizmo when you know how to “pimp” your GSA with the One Box API. On May 15, 2008, the GOOG confirmed what I heard at the Where 2.0 conference yesterday afternoon: Google Translate now handles another 10 languages. You can read the Googlers’ official announcement here.
Why mention this on Beyond Search with its narrow editorial scope. Well, in addition to cross language searchers, you get to play with the AJAX language API. For the clever kids at Adhere Solutions, you can use some of this translation goodness to allow a language-challenged person to read a document written in another language by a colleague half way across the world.
These baby step announcements can be overlooked unless you keep your ears attuned to the sound of big Googzilla paws advancing toward the enterprise. What will Google tell me about this “interesting” expansion of Google Translate. I’m a persona non grata, so my queries fall on deaf but wealthy ears. I can hear those claws scraping across the pavement of Shoreline Drive.
Stephen Arnold, May 15, 2008
New Contract for Clarabridge
May 15, 2008
Clarabridge, a “customer experience management vendor,” recently scored a posh client in Gaylord Hotels, who wants to utilize text analysis to review customer satisfaction surveys. Keeping millionaires happy requires technology.
The Clarabridge contract will install its content mining platform at Gaylord properties. The goal: to relate textual commentary to a satisfaction scale. Clarabridge’s product dumps extracted, unstructured data into a star schema to make associated fact tables, just like progenitor-once-removed MicroStrategy, the business intelligence company that passed on its reporting, analysis, and monitoring solutions DNA.
Clarabridge has a client list that includes big names Marriott, The Gap, H&R Block and more – making it quite unlikely that it will suffer a stock crash like Microstrategy did ($333 to $1 – ouch!) in 2001. Some pundits assert that Clarabridge is a company that will challenge Attensity www.attensity.com, a low-profile, fast-growing text analytics company headed by David Bean.
Gaylord, owner and operator of four vast and lavish resort hotel properties, receives tens of thousands of guest commentaries through its Opryland (Nashville, Tenn.), Palms (Orlando, Fla.), Texan (Dallas/Fort Worth), and National (Washington, D.C./Maryland) properties in a Web-based survey. While polled information is fairly straightforward, the information gained in the “other comments” box at the end of a survey is expensive, difficult to quantify, and make useful using humans. Clarabridge’s platform will change all that.
At Clarabridge’s web site, you can download their white papers, case studies, industry resources and more.
Jessica Bratcher, May 15, 2008
Semantra and Conversational Analytics
May 15, 2008
Semantra asserts that it is a “pioneering developer of conversational analystics software”, or so it says in the news release a helpful person sent me.
The companies “conversational analytics” application pushes “beyond key word search” because a user can use “common language commands to retrieve specific information from back end databases”. You can read the Semantra announcement here: www.semantra.com/library/Semantra%202.0%20GA%20FINAL.pdf
The lingo “common language commands” means natural language processing or NLP. A number of vendors have embraced this approach in order to [a] eliminate the need for a specialist to intermediate between an enduser with a question and the database with the answers and [b] allow faster interaction with a database. After all, in business intelligence, the idea is to get the information quickly. Calling up an SAS or SPSS analyst, having that person understand what’s needed, creating the queries, pulling down the data cube, and providing that chunk of info to a manager on a deadline is generally viewed as a problem.
What’s interesting about the Semantra approach is that its tool is designed for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Microsoft’s push into CRM or customer relationship management has been erratic. To make the situation more interesting, Microsoft is working to move Dynamics (an unhappy amalgam of several products) into the Live.com or “cloud” environment. Semantra is hoping that Microsoft’s CRM offerings will generate even greater demand for third-party tools that tame the Dynamics’ beastie.
ArnoldIT.com analyzed the Dynamics product and technology late in 2007 and found that it was even more complex than Microsoft SharePoint Search. Given the multiple products that make up SharePoint Search, we were surprised to find that the Dynamics team had bested the SharePoint team on this important yardstick. The Dynamics product line up consists of Microsoft’s own technology, Axapta, Great Plains, Navision, and Solomon components. These are mixed-and-matched into a somewhat complex suite of products.
We wish Semantra great success with their system. There will be strong demand for a product that can simplify the Microsoft CRM system. You can get more information about Semantra at wwwsemantra.com. The splash page for Microsoft Dynamics is at www.microsoft.com/dynamics. If you are interested in the ArnoldIT.com analysis of the Dynamics suite, contact seaky2000 at Yahoo dot com. The report costs US$125 via online payment for a password protected PDF.
Stephen Arnold, May 15, 2008
Vertica and Cloud-Based Business Intelligence
May 15, 2008
The IDG news service reported on May 12, 2008, that Vertica Systems will offer business intelligence as a service. You can read the complete IDG story here. Please, navigate to it quickly, since some IDG items can become tough to locate a few days after they appear. The computing horsepower will be provided by Amazon. Vertica will use the EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) infrastructure introduced by Amazon in August 2006.
Vertica, another column-oriented database shop, sees an opportunity for hosted and software as a service products. Smaller firms often lack the resources to install industrial-strength business intelligence systems on premises.
The pricing for the service begins at $2,000 per month for 500 gigabytes of data. You can read the Amazon Web Services catalog entry here.
In the meantime, Amazon has worked hard to build out its Web services. I’ve heard that the company has embraced Hadoop (a Google File System variant in open source) and Xen (another open source solution). Amazon has experienced some technical hiccups but has recovered quickly.
Amazon’s putting significant effort into its Web services, and Vertica’s use of the EC2 service will be an interesting one to watch. Amazon’s cloud services have beaten Google and other firms to the punch. Although one Google source pointed out to me that Google is able to learn from Amazon’s efforts. The implication is that Google can watch and wait until the market is “right” for Google to make a move. When it comes to infrastructure investments, Amazon’s spending lags behind Google’s. Amazon also has a leaner technical team. If Google enters this sector in a major way, Amazon’s technologists will have an opportunity to demonstrate their superiority to Google’s cloud-centric engineering.
I’m going to watch the Vertica service. If successful, it may spark a strong run up for Amazon. Then Vertica will have to make the math work. A typical Vertica on premises installation costs about $125,000. So, Vertica will have to make up the difference on volume, since the cloud service is likely to generate less revenue per customer. If support and customization costs rise, Vertica may find that getting the math to work could be tricky. Meanwhile, Google watches and learns.
Stephen Arnold, May 14, 2008
The Library of Congress and Semantic Search
May 14, 2008
The buzz about semantic search is rising. Powerset’s demonstration using Wikipedia data has triggered interest in searching in more intuitive ways. I received a news item about Semantra http://www.semantra.com, another player in this search market segment.
The Library of Congress is in the game too.
There’s an interesting news item “Semantic Search the Library of Congress”. To see how the US government approaches “beyond search”, navigate to http://lcsh.info/sh95000541. Once you have this url in your browser’s address bar, you can open a new window, and use this url to get a list of LCCNs to search semantically.
http://lcsh.info/.
The search result is a list of Use For terms, Narrower Terms (each of which is a hot link to more terms), the LC Classification, the date the entry was created, the date the entry was modified and alink to the Concept URI.
You will want to navigate to ProgrammableWeb.com http://www.programmableweb.com/api/library-of-congress-subject-headings and check out their explanation.
Based on this demonstration, today’s semantic search engines are not likely to be challenged in a meaningful way by a US government initiative any time soon.
Stephen Arnold, May 14, 2008
Sybase Jumps into the Content Processing Appliance Fray
May 13, 2008
Sybase announced on May 12, 2008, the roll out of its Sybase Analytic Appliance. The hardware is an IBM Power System preconfigured with Sybase IQ, Sybase PowerDesigner, and MIcroStrategy 8. The idea is to eliminate the fiddly tasks associated with setting up a data and content processing system. The idea is that a customer will get the benefits of a custom-built enterprise data warehouse in a ready-to-deploy device.
Sybase IQ is the column-oriented Sybase database engine. Column databases offer a performance boost over traditional relational databases. Sybase PowerDesigner is a model-driven tool intended to reduce the pain of building report requirements, models, and related tasks. MIcroStrategy 8 is a business intelligence system.
The cost for the system is based on the data volume. The information I saw quote an introductory price of $27,000 per terabyte of data. The design of the appliance allows “snap in” scaling. There are three versions of the appliance, and the prices rise as you move from the starter to standard to enterprise version. You can buy the device from Sybase, MIcroStrategy, or mLogica (a systems integrator).
Appliances can be criticized for their limited functionality. Sybase has done a good job of providing a bundle that gives the licensee considerable freedom to configure the device and manipulate data. Compared to other industrial-strength appliances, Sybase has an attractive launch price point. You will need to determine your data volume and data change rate in order to determine which appliance version is appropriate for your organization.
Stephen Arnold, May 13, 2008
Commercial Intelligence: A Better Way to Do Competitive Intelligence
May 13, 2008
Business intelligence and competitive intelligence are “not really intelligence”, asserts Robert D. Steele, well-known advocate of open source information and managing director of OSS.Net. In an exclusive interview with Beyond Search, Mr. Steele–who is one of the strongest advocates for the use of open source information for intelligence–says that commercial business intelligence “systems are edging toward failure. The systems aren’t very good, useful, or usable.”
The fix to the problems of today’s software-based approaches to intelligence is a mixed approach. He says that a better approach:
…consists of requirements definition (understand the question in context, the desired outcome); collection management (know who knows), source discovery and validation (generally done by expert humans who have spent their life mastering the domain, at someone else’s expense); analysis, which can be aided by but does not necessarily require automated support; and compelling timely actionable presentation to the decision-maker.
You can read the full interview on the Interview section of the Beyond Search Web log site here.
Stephen Arnold, May 13, 2008
Search News- Bender Forms Group to Promote OLPC's Sugar UI - PC World
- Analyst: PS3, 360 due for price cuts - GameSpot
- Cyber Bullying Mom Charged in Suicide In MySpace Case - CRN
- Apple Signs More Nonexclusive iPhone Deals - InformationWeek
- Threatened Bear May Hold Health Secrets - Living on the Earth
- Lawmakers concerned over Charter's Web tracking - The Associated Press
- Google Maps Could Cross EU Privacy Laws - BusinessWeek
- Nintendo set to launch "Wii Fit" exercise game - Reuters
- A Pest Without a Name, Becoming Known to Ever More - New York Times
- Who Is Facebook Trying to Protect? - TechNewsWorld
