Online Social Systems: Flirting Is Popular
January 16, 2009
Jemima Kiss, writing in the Guardian, crafted a fetching headline: “Facebook Is… A Place for Flirting, Says Research.” You can read the original story here. She snags one of the Pew Internet and American Life studies and highlights this “finding”:
One in five users of MySpace and Facebook have admitted they use the Web sites to flirt, according to new research on US social networking trends. Most networking activity, around 89%, is focused on contacting existing friends, while 57% use sites to make plans with friends and only 49% use them to make new contacts.
For me, the key point is that 20 somethings arrive at their job already connected. Pew Internet’s own news release on this study and its findings provides another interesting factoid here:
The share of adult Internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years — from 8% in 2005 to 35% now…
Let me think through what’s going on in my addled goose mind. More adults are jumping into social networks. Some of those adults are using these sites for recreational purposes. Three out of four young people in the 18 to 24 age group are connected. An organization now faces the distinct possibility that its policies about Internet access may need revisiting. The de facto use of social networks, if the Pew data are correct, is for recreation. An organization that deploys its own social network must make certain its assumptions about the use of the organization’s social network align with the usage habits of its 18 to 24 year old staff. The older workers embracing the social network may require coaching to reduce their concerns about security. At a time when budget pressures are rising, a social system–for example, social search with collaboration built in–may incur costs that the licensees’ have not anticipated. Vendors and consultants pushing social search and related systems pooh pooh the concerns that I am considering. I don’t anticipate social system cheerleaders altering their sales pitch in the near term.
Stephen Arnold, January 16, 2009
Aster Data: $12 Million More in Funding
January 16, 2009
Aster Data is one of those companies that interests me. Although not directly in the search and content processing sector, the company’s technology has significant implications for organization struggling with petascale data flows. On January 13, 2009, the company announced here that it has raised an additional $12 million in Series B funding. The Aster technology, based on my analyses, is Googley. In my 2005 study The Google Legacy, I pointed out that Google’s engineering would influence other companies. In short, I argued, whether Google succeeded or failed, the Google legacy would be to make it easier for other innovators to build on the Google learnings and examples. (You can order a copy of The Google Legacy here. Its content is germane today because Google’s recent moves are anticipated and their effects described in this 2005 analysis.) The Aster Data news story said:
Aster nCluster provides an always-on, always-parallel MPP architecture with the In-Database MapReduce programming framework for business-critical applications. Unlike traditional analytic databases, Aster’s online fault tolerance and hands-free administration allows it to run on low cost, commodity hardware. Aster delivers automated one-click scaling, recovery, backup, restore, and upgrades – enabling enterprises to maintain current staffing levels, even as data sizes multiply each year.
The total funding for the company is now over $20 million. In addition to JAFCO, Sequoia and several other high profile funding sources have supported the company. More information about Aster Data is here.
Google Shutters Trondheim Office
January 15, 2009
According to Adressa.no here, Google has closed its office. The reason is that the company wants to streamline its operations. Google itself has not said, “The Trondheim office is closed.” Pia Martin Wold and Kristoffer Furberg’s story here suggests that the lack of skilled labor may be a contributing factor. A story by Marius Jørgenrud and Ander Brenna here adds some color to this development. Their story appeared in Digi.no. Trondheim is not a large operation for Google, but the city has a solid technical reputation, particularly in search. Google’s office in Luleå, Sweden, may be on the same track as well. Beyond Search believes that small Google offices add to costs, so concentration in larger cities makes financial sense. Microsoft may be able to snag some of the former Googlers. A happy quack to the Beyond Search reader who alerted us to this second alleged reduction in force at the Google. The first wave of cutbacks affected contractors. The second allegedly cut loose 100 recruiters. Now comes, if true, closures of small offices.
Stephen Arnold, January 15, 2009
Googzilla: Subtle No More
January 15, 2009
TechCrunch ran a very interesting article called “Gmail Grew 43 Percent Last Year. AOL Mail And Hotmail Need To Start Worrying” here. The story provides meat on the bone of the headline. I loved the chart showing the GOOG moving on, keeping on. After reading this article, you will want to pop over to this official Google page and read about the GOOG’s utility to migrate Web logs from one service to another. Like Gmail, the migration tool will wow the Python heads and leave others cold. Over time, the migration tool will probably get some tweaks and then one day, the GOOG is the big dog in the blog house. Competitors who ignore Google’s emulation of American revolutionaries in buckskins will find themselves on the wrong end of the bayonet. The tactics are explained in more detail here.
Stephen Arnold, January 15, 2009
Dead Tree Publishers in Italy Build a Hadrian’s Wall
January 15, 2009
Hadrian’s wall is an interesting tourist stop. Archaeologists continue to thrive as rubbish pits are exhumed and effluvia from the garrisons reveal the secrets of a miserable life far from Rome. Now Italian publishers (yep, the dead tree crowd entrenched in paper, ink, and 15th century business processes) are creating a digital Hadrian’s Wall. Perhaps one day far in the future, scholars will twiddle bits to figure out the secrets of traditional publishers nine years into the 21st century. You can read about this development in the International Herald Tribune (a thin thing I scan whilst in an airport outside the US) here. The article is called “Italian Publishers Form Online Alliance.” There’s no author on the version I scanned online. The source is another dead tree outfit, Thomson Reuters. The idea is that big newspapers are going to team up to create “an online alliance.” The article points out that newspapers have been affected by the downturn in readership, advertising, rising costs, etc. Not much of a surprise in my opinion.
For me the most important comment in the article was:
In the United States, several newspaper publishers have already formed consortiums to take advantage of rising online advertising. About 800 U.S. newspaper Web sites in the Newspaper Consortium have arranged a partnership with Yahoo, and several top U.S. newspaper publishers have formed an advertising sales network called quadrantONE.
The idea that there are 800 newspapers working in concert in the US was news to me. This means that there is another digital Hadrian’s Wall probably running through the wilds of Kentucky. My ignorance knows no bounds, but I am an addled goose. If there is a consortium, what is the group doing to generate significant revenues for its members. The Chicago Tribune is introducing a tabloid version of the newspaper and retaining the traditional “big” paper. Okay, that’s one way to make sales I suppose. In Detroit one newspaper is producing a hard copy three days a week. That will thrill advertisers and readers who want sports news for a game played last night. Well, the newspaper will provide the news in a couple of days. That will work too, right? If the Courier Journal (the local newspaper) gets any smaller, I won’t be able to wrap trash in it.
Italy is building a digital Hadrian’s Wall. The US newspaper publishers already have one. The problem is that the walls won’t do much if anything to reverse what is a problem brought about by a change in the way in which people think about timely information.
I would wager that Hadrian himself would point out the folly of a digital wall. He used troops who killed intruders. Now the enemy is the children of the newspaper media wizards. My hunch is that the progeny of the newspaper barons use iPhones and the Google, not hard copy documents to keep up with what’s happening.
Stephen Arnold, January 15, 2009
IBM Wins the Patent Derby
January 15, 2009
Reuters posted a story on Yahoo News about the 2008 patent derby. You can read the story here if it has not been deleted by the Yahoo team. Yahoo News articles can be tough to find sometimes. IBM, according to the article, was awarded 4,186 patents by the often criticized US Patent & Trademark Office. Runner up Microsoft obtained 2,030 patents, and chip giant Intel snared 1,776. What I found interesting was that according to my tally of Google patents, Googzilla generated a total of about 200 US patent documents, based on my quick look on January 14, 2009. That’s fewer than about four patent applications and granted patents each week compared to IBM’s stunning 80 patents granted a week in 2008. Several questions come to mind:
- Is Google asleep at the switch? IBM obviously is focusing quite a bit of effort on invention. Google seems retrograde in innovation, or is it? Could Google patent only important innovations that require some protection?
- IBM’s patents are literally all over the technical map. Is Google more focused on search and advertising than IBM or Microsoft for that matter?
- Will Google decrease its patent application output because of the rumored reform that will be coming to the USPTO?
My own review of Google patent documents suggests that the GOOG has a strategy that relies on specific technical inventions. The focus is the strength and, of course, the weakness of Google’s approach. But when making a league table, IBM, Microsoft, and the other high output companies are the winners. Google is up for relegation if one relies only on a raw count of volume. I think quantity is not as important as quality when it comes to Google’s approach to patent documents.
Stephen Arnold, January 15, 2009
Google Cost Cutting
January 14, 2009
The GOOG is implementing its New Year resolutions to reduce costs and focus. Beyond Search has learned that Google is trimming the sails of some weak sister services; to wit: Google Video, Google Catalog Search, Google Notebook, Google Mashup Editor, and at long last the deflated Dodgeball. You can get links on ArnoldIT.com’s Overflight service here or navigate to the official Google announcements on Catalogs here, Notebook here, and Video here. Details are Googley, so the Beyond Search team is poking around for more information. “Stopping development” does not mean the services are no longer online… yet.
Stephen Arnold, January 14, 2009
Symantec Taps Autonomy
January 14, 2009
Autonomy landed another big deal, according to this Reuters’ item at TradingMarkets.com and at Forbes.com. This time Autonomy beat out a number of search and content processing vendors at the security and information management outfit, Symantec. The company owns the Norton Antivirus product, but it has been pushing into the enterprise with acquisitions and internal development. Details are sketchy, but it looks to me that Symantec will use the Autonomy system to process content stored in its enterprise back up, email, and repository systems. Information about Symantec’s full range of products and services is located here. The company’s Enterprise Vault 8.0 product is in need of a search and retrieval system. Autonomy is a player in the enterprise data management sector as well. Autonomy acquired several firms that have provided a client base and upsell opportunities. One example is Autonomy Zantaz, a company that is well known in the email and eDiscovery sector. Symantec is a $6.0 billion a year company; Autonomy is considerably smaller. However, Symantec faces significant challenges, including increased competition in the consumer sector. Enterprise data management is emerging as an increasingly important market sector. Will the Autonomy technology provide the boost that Symantec needs to maintain its growth and profit margins in these tough financial times? I think that data management requires more than search. Google, in my opinion, is one of a handful of companies with the “as is” technology necessary to handle petascale email flows, low-cost scaling, and content processing options. Symantec may have to look beyond today’s competitors and start thinking about the implications of an aggressive move by Google into this sector.
Stephen Arnold, January 14, 2009
Nexplore: Another Google Challenger
January 14, 2009
Nexplore Search here is a Web search system with some interesting functions. A reader alerted me to the firm’s sharp increase in Web traffic. I had looked at the system last year, and I wanted to revisit the Web search company’s service.
The company said:
It starts with Nexplore Search Redefined a visually engaging user friendly, interactive multi-media interface makes navigation effortless and drill down obsolete.
The company indexes 50 billion Web pages. According to the company here, its system:
redefines the search experience. A visually engaging, user-friendly, multi-media interface makes navigation effortless and drill down obsolete. Computer intelligence combined with human community fosters greater relevancy — in both search results and ad displays. Intuitive refinement tools and advanced personalization features make search faster, easier and more enjoyable for everyone — from Web newbies to average users to accomplished surfers.
My test queries returned useful results. For example, for “enterprise search” returned links to Vivisimo, Coveo, and Endeca as “sponsored results”, which is okay. The first hit–somewhat surprisingly was to Microsoft.com enterprise search page here, not to the Fast Search page here. The Fast Search page seems a bit spare these days, so Nexplore seems to have indexed the Microsoft page as the number one enterprise search hit. I find this surprising, but I don’t have a good enough feel for what Nexplore is doing to determine relevancy.
Nexplore results for the query “enterprise search”.
The interface provides hot links to suggested or related queries, a feature Nexplore calls “Pop Search”. The system includes a link to a “Wiki Search”, which is okay, but the number two result in the hit list is a Wikipedia link. The sponsored results contained a surprise. There was a direct link to Ontolica, a unit of Surf Ray. Surf Ray has been the subject of considerable speculation. In fact, if you run a query for “Surf Ray” from this page on the Beyond Search Web log, you can follow the conversation about the company’s various managerial and financial ills. Obviously someone paid to put the Ontolica ad on the Nexplore results page, so this cannot be an error. So0me of the firms in the Sponsor Results were equally interesting; for example, I don’t think too much about Abbrevity, Accenture, or EMC as big players in the enterprise search sector. But someone is paying to reach eyeballs for the query “enterprise search”. Two results struck me as peculiar in the main results list. First, the inclusion of the Enterprise Search Summit 2009. I heard the show attracted 60 paying customers, so the owner of the show must be working overtime to pump up the search engine optimization to get the program to appear among vendors of search systems. The second anomaly is the exclusion of Google and its Google Search Appliance. Odd. Google has more than 16,000 licensees of its enterprise search appliance, which puts it on an equal footing or slightly ahead of Autonomy, another company not in the results list.
One useful touch is that the results for a news search are run against the query in the query box. No annoying retyping required. The video link did not return a direct link to any videos on the Google Channel. Majority of the videos came from Blinkx, a company touting itself as the largest index of video content. The exclusion of Google may be due to Google, not Nexplore, however.
The image search in response to the query “enterprise search” was not useful. The illustrations did not include the images that I know are available on the Web sites of the leading vendors. For example, the Google search appliance pages include screen shots. Similar images may be found on the Web sites of Autonomy, Coveo, and Endeca, to name just three companies who make visual content available for potential buyers. The inclusion of the defunct Enterprise Search Report was an anomaly. More recent reports such as the Gilbane Beyond Search study and the Galatea Successful Enterprise Search Management were not included on the first page of the results. The image search for this test query was not useful to me. The blog search was not useful either. The majority of the links were not directly about enterprise search. Presumably, the Nexplore indexing system does not handle synonyms for “enterprise search” at this stage of the content processing subsystem’s development. I will monitor this function going forward. A similar statement may be made about enterprise search podcasts. The inclusion of enterprise networking in the results set requires me to listen to a podcast to determine if the information would be of interest to me. My hunch is that “enterprise search” as a podcast subject is too narrow to be of much indexing traction.
The company offers several search related services:
- MyCircle–an application agnostic social computing platform
- AdCircle–Ad creation and management tool
- HitLabel–contents, prizes, and tools for aspiring music stars
The company’s president and founder is Edward Mandel and Dion Hinchcliffe the chief technical officer. Mr. Mandel was in 2004 a distinguished as a finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award. Prior to Positive Software Systems, Mandel ran a successful technology consulting firm, IIT Consulting. Mr. Hinchcliffe served as president and chief technology officer of Alexandria, Virginia-based Hinchcliffe & Company, a premier Enterprise Web 2.0 consulting and advisory Firm.
has added a former Microsoft vice president (Rowland Hanson) to the firm’s advisory board.
Nexplore has stated that the company is attracting more than five million unique monthly visitors and that the search system ranks in the top 5,000 internationally ranked Web sites, based on Alexa data. You can read the news story here. The company is publicly traded under the symbol NXPC. Ask your broker to pull the data from the “Pink Sheet” listings. You can read the company’s 2008 financial news release here. I scanned the information on the three page document. Several points jumped out at me:
- The company describes itself as “a development stage company”. I interpreted this phrase that the firm will be seeking additional funding.
- The company’s net loses through June 2008 were about $17 million. Most of this money is probably due to the investment in the system and software
- Through June 30, 2008, the company generated almost $700,000 in revenues. The next financial statement will make it easier to determine how the present economic environment is affecting this company
The $64 question is, “Is Nexplore the next Google?” If you want to bet on Nexplore, contact the company here. I will add this search system to my watch list.
Stephen Arnold, January 13, 2009
Exalead Profile Now Available
January 14, 2009
The Enterprise Search Report is no more. Thank goodness. A good idea in 2003 when work on the first edition began, the tome became an antique. I wrote the first three editions. I don’t know who did the fourth. With the coming of the new year, the rights to the information in the Enterprise Search Reports, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd editions, came back to me. I will be creating profiles based on my research into more than 50 vendors. At its peak the ESR only contained 30 profiles.
The first profile in the new, free Beyond Search Report series–an analysis of Exalead–is now available on the ArnoldIT.com Web site here. It runs about 11 pages and includes information about Exalead’s search system. I have enough information for a supplement about Exalead’s newest technology, and I will try to get that posted in the next couple of weeks as well.
I will work through my files and publish a profile every week or two. I have not worked out the full publication schedule yet, but I will get that done once I become more familiar with the new format.
There is no charge for these analyses. If you find an error, or if there is something in a profile with which you don’t agree–use the comments section of this Web log to provide your ideas and facts. I try to deliver a zero error document, but I have been writing about companies for a long time. Changes occur frequently, so you may find some variance between what’s in my free report and what the company’s sales rep tells you tomorrow.
The new logo. The Beyond Search goose is a proud mommy. Tess, however, was annoyed. She wanted a canine to identify these free reports.
Keep in mind that some of the information I have about vendors will not appear in the profiles. If you want more information about a vendor, you can write me at seaky2000 at yahoo dot com and ask for a price quote for a more detailed report. I try to track down pricing and patent information, for example, but I don’t put this information in these free profiles. I want to be helpful, but I don’t want to end up as a Wal*Mart greeter. I have to sell some proprietary reports to survive.
Part of my method is to give the vendor an opportunity to comment on my analyses. These profiles are objective, so a vendor may not agree with some of my points. That’s okay. I just don’t want to be sued by 20 somethings who take umbrage at a 65 year old’s view of a search or content processing company. What vendors say and what the software does are two very different things in my opinion.
The combination of the interviews in the Search Wizards Speak series plus this Web log plus the Beyond Search profiles with a nifty new logo makes it easy for a person interested in enterprise search to get smart without spending $1,000 or more for a report that is outdated the minute it becomes available.
Stephen Arnold, January 14, 2009
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
