Expert System’s COGITO Answers
December 12, 2008
Expert System has launched COGITO Answers, which streamlines search and provides customer assistance on web sites, e-mail and mobile interfaces such as cell phones and PDAs while creating a company knowledge base. The platform allows users to search across multiple resources with a handy twist: it uses semantic analysis to absorb and understand a customer’s lingo, therefore analyzing the meaning of the text to process search results rather than just matching keywords. It interprets word usage in context. The program also tracks customer interface and stores all requests so the company can anticipate client needs and questions, thus cutting down response time and increasing accuracy. You can get more information by e-mailing answers@expertsystem.net.
Jessica Bratcher, December 12, 2008
Microsoft Search Head Speaks
December 10, 2008
I enjoyed Microsoft’s interview with Microsoft’s new head of search, Qi Lu. You can find the information here. The questions were not hard balls, but gently lofted nerf balls. I found the answers intriguing. Before I read the interview, I noted with interest this story about Microsoft’s and Google’s cutting back on the big capex spending for data centers. You can read that story here. No big surprise but Microsoft’s own interview with Microsoft’s own head of search said:
Steve and I first met last September, in a hotel in San Jose, California. We spent almost half a day talking. We talked about the competitive landscape, about the possibility to really innovate and take the user experience [of Microsoft’s search capabilities] to the next level, and about creating a more competitive space, particularly in the search space. We all believe that it’s better for everybody involved when we have a healthy, more competitive environment. Two things he said really stood out. First was the level of commitment on investment. Steve made it very clear how he views that as critical for the long-term future of Microsoft, and his strong commitment to invest in R&D resources is very, very important to me.
I found this somewhat jarring. But that’s a nit. Other points that I noted were:
- “I think there is a genuine opportunity to take our search products to the next level.”
- “…we’re here to win, and my view on this is that to win in the search space, fundamentally you build on the strengths of your product.”
- “We have a clear path from where we are today, to where we need to be, and to reach that next level we need to keep executing and building winning products.”
As I read these comments, several thoughts went through my mind. Yahoo was not able to get an ad platform out the door, so Google ran away with the business. Second, Google has what in my opinion is an insurmountable lead in Web search and is now gunning directly for Microsoft’s liver–the enterprise. And, I am not sure I can accept the assertion of “clear path”. Microsoft has taken runs at Web search before. Microsoft bought Fast Search & Transfer which has a decent Web indexing system and a bit of a problem with Norwegian law enforcement. Microsoft bought Powerset and not done too much with the semantic system yet. I will keep an open mind, but time is running out and demographics are on the side of Googzilla.
Stephen Arnold, December 11, 2008
Video Horserace
December 10, 2008
Many Web log wizards are chasing the story about Google’s adding magazine content to its burgeoning commercial database killing service. Old news from my point of view. The GOOG is becoming the go-to service for research with words. In fact, it is game over for Thomson Reuters, Reed Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, Ebsco, and others in this professional content sector. Management at these companies can whip up Excel models to prove me wrong, but Google has demographics and infrastructure on its side. Besides I describe the trajectory of word-centric content in my forthcoming Google and Publishing study.
The real action is in video. Anyone under the age of 17 can explain what’s happening in information. Words are okay, but the future is the rich media experience where words are amplified by music. Do you have a soundtrack for your life? My neighbors’ kids do. Do you make pix and vids on your mobile phone and use these to perform communication functions for which I need pencil and paper? Check out the demographics, and you don’t need the flailing New York Times to remind you of trouble when reporting that Harcourt will not publish books for a while.
Consider the comScore video results table here. The handicappers look at the data, which are probably generally on track but off the mark in absolute values, and see that Google is at the top of the table. Google appears to have about 40 percent of the online video traffic measured and analyzed by comScore. So 60 percent of the video traffic is “in play”; that is, other companies can enter the video ballgame and have some room to maneuver. Look at the number two player, Fox Interactive Media. If comScore data are reasonably accurate, Fox has a chokehold on four percent of the videos viewed market. One of the largest media companies in the world has captured four percent of the market and lags Google’s YouTube by 36 percent. The rest of the field perform less well. Hulu.com, the darling of the old TV kingpins, is in the race. Maybe Hulu.com like a marathon runner getting a marvelous second wind can close the gap between Hulu and Google, but I think I will give Google the advantage for now.
Who cares? The action is text, right?
Wrong, wrong, wrong. YouTube.com could be a major cost sinkhole for Google. If video is expensive for the GOOG, how much of a dent in the bank accounts will video make at outfits like Fox, NBC, and others in the comScore table. Google, for now, seems will to spend to support YouTube.com. As the credit mistral whips through old media, a willingness to spend may winnow the companies in the comScore league table.
Demographics and time, therefore, may give Google an advantage. As pundits gnash their teeth over Google’s overt moves into commercial textual information, Google management is implementing tactics designed to bleed rich media companies, thus weakening them.
Just as the book publishers and other print gurus rolled over into a position of submission to Googzilla, the same fate awaits rich media. Google Books’ growth is old news. The real action is in rich media. The comScore table makes clear to me that the GOOG is poised to destablize more 20th century giants with its 21st century business model. Now tell me why I am incorrect. Facts, please. Catcalls make the geese honk.
Stephen Arnold, December 9, 2008
Enterprise Translation Systems
December 10, 2008
Update: December 14, 2008 I came across Nice Translator at http://www.nicetranslator.com/
Original Post
I received an email from a colleague who wanted to know about translation systems. I fired back an answer, but I thought you might want to have my short list of vendors to peruse. If you run a search on Google for “enterprise translation software”, you get more than 400,000 hits. That’s not too useful. If you want to experiment with free translation services, download this file.
BASIS Technologies licenses its various translation components to a number of search and content processing vendors; for example, Fast Search & Transfer was a customer. BASIS has been a leader in providing machine translation of Arabic and related languages. The Federal government has been a fan of BASIS’s systems. You can get some very specialized translation and language components; for example, a Japanese address analyzer.
Google provides a pretty good translation system. Right now, it is for free, which is a plus. Some of the translation systems shoot into six figures pretty quickly if you pack on the language packs and custom tuning. You can use the Google system by navigating here: http://translate.google.com. You can fiddle around and automate translation, but I have heard that Google monitors its translation system, so if you push too much through the system, the Googlers follow up. You can feed it a line of text or a url.
Language Weaver automated language translation. The company serves digital industries and enterprise customers directly and through strategic partnerships. You can hook this system into other enterprise software. Employees can access documents in their native language.The company recently added new language pairs:
- Bulgarian to/from English
- Hebrew to/from English
- Serbian to/from English
- Thai to/from English
- Turkish to/from English.
Systran has been a player in translation for years. You have to buy Systran’s software. The desktop version works quite well. The enterprise system involves some fiddling, but you can automate the translation and perform some useful operations on the machine-generated files. You can get more information about Systran here. Systran is used for the Babel Fish online translation function in AltaVista.com and Yahoo.
How good are these systems?
None of the systems is perfect. None of the systems translates as well as a human with deep knowledge of the language pairs being translated. However, the speed of these systems and their “good enough” translations can cope with the volume of data flowing into an organization. I use several of these systems. I can get a sense of the document and then turn to a native speaker to clarify the translation.
I have unsubstantiated information that suggests Google has been making considerable progress with their online translation system. Because the system is available without charge, Google is becoming the default system. AltaVista.com still offers an online translation system, but Google has surpassed that system in speed and language pair support. When Google integrates its online translation system with its other enterprise services, I think Google will continue to chew away at the established vendors’ market share. The GOOG, however, seems happy to let customers find their online translation service. The economic downturn may shift the Google into higher gear.
Stephen Arnold, December 10, 2008
Overflight Enhancements
December 9, 2008
ArnoldIT.com’s Google monitoring service made some changes over the last few days. You can access the service by clicking here. Overflight Google allows you to look at the most recent Web log posts on more than 70 Google Web logs. The change is the addition of a link that says, “Show Overflight Update Stream”. When you click it, we display the additions to Google Web logs and put the date on each item. The Update Stream function has been added for each of the Google Web log clusters. If you want to scan headlines, you can browse the most recent items for each of the Google Web logs.
The other enhancement is the addition of entity extraction to the Exalead search system’s index of the corpus of Google Web logs. I am not too happy with the phrase “vertical search”, but I must admit, the Exalead index of more than 70 Web logs is a sharply focused vertical search engine. Here’s a screen shot of the Exalead entity extraction. You can use it to learn the name of the Google customer at Genentech and similar interesting ways to learn about the GOOG.
A happy quack to the Exalead team. More enhancements are coming. If you would like an Overflight service on your Web site, write seaky2000 at Yahoo dot come.
Stephen Arnold, December 9, 2008
Google and Salesforce.com: The Plot Thickens
December 8, 2008
For years, I have heard that Google had an interest in Salesforce.com. In my for-fee briefings, I dig into the Salesforce.com technology for multi tenant applications. I am certainly no wizard in the magical world of patent documents, but I thought some of the Salesforce.com methods were somewhat elaborate. In those briefings, I commented that Google seemed to have another approach that exploited some of its more unusual inventions. One example is the elaborate system to determine the context of a user. I refer to these as the Guha patent documents. There are others, of course. My point is that Google seemed to be building functions into its broader data management and container operations. (Please, don’t write and ask me for these briefings. I don’t release that type of information into the wild nor in these largely recycled Web log musings.)
I read “Force.com + Google App Engine = Cloud Relationship Management” by Steve Gillmor here with thought, “Yep, the GOOG is on the move.” Mr. Gillmor’s write up’s lead paragraph hit the nail on the head. He wrote on December 7, 2008, “Salesforce and Google have extended their strategic partnership with Force.com for the Google App Engine.” His article provides useful technical background and some observations about Google’s approach to an “operating system.” You will want to read this article and then save it to your GoogleOnTheMove folder.
My take on this expanded use of the Google App Engine reaches outside the boundaries of Mr. Gillmor’s story. My thoughts are:
- Google gets Salesforce.com to hook into more Google technology without significant risk or cost. If Salesforce.com’s multi-tenant technology is suitably impressive, Google could increase its involvement with Salesforce.com. If the merged clouds don’t work too well, Google has learned possibly significant information about the Salesforce.com approach.
- Google receives valuable information about such factors as the efficiency of the Salesforce.com system
- Google has a reasonably well-controlled lab test for hooking clouds together. The Salesforce.com cloud is more of a wrapper around the data stores at the core of Salesforce.com. Google is more of a next-generation cloud engineered to minimize certain types of bottlenecks associated with traditional database management systems.
Salesforce.com, on the other hand, has more marketing clout. I have heard that the Google relationship makes otherwise dry explanations of multi-tenant technology more interesting. Who knows? Sales presentations are like magic. What you see is often not what allows the magician to entertain and enthrall the audience.
The big loser in the deal is Microsoft. The Google and Salesforce.com relationship comes at a time when Microsoft is making a push for its Dynamics system. Customers will want to hear about the new Google-Salesforce.com deal. That can complicate some procurements and maybe derail some others.
But the best is that Google still retains its freedom with regard to CRM. Google can still buy Salesforce.com or it can pass. Google can sign similar cloud federation deals with other vendors, or at some point, stitch together existing Google services to offer its own cloud-based CRM solution. To sum up, the Google is once again using its mass to distort the enterprise information market. Google’s “dark matter” lets it exert influence in ways that can be difficult to detect.
Stephen Arnold, December 8, 2008
Google: Putting Capex on a Diet
December 8, 2008
The point to keep in mind is that Google has been working for a decade to build out its infrastructure. One of the benefits of the company’s willingness to tackle hard engineering problems is that Google obtains a better return on its hardware dollar. Data included in my 2005, The Google Legacy suggested that Google can spend a dollar and get as much as five times to performance that a non-Googlized data center would get. The data appeared in Google technical papers. Some of these papers were written by big Googlers; others by small Googlers. What the performance data share is information that provides a glimpse of the computing capability in Google’s data centers. If we flip the performance data around, a competitor would have to invest as much as five times what Google spends to get comparable performance. Is Google’s engineering that cost effective? Well, a five hundred percent performance boost may be optimistic, but when a data center can cost $600 million the implications are interesting. A competitor would have to spend more than Google to match Google’s performance on data manipulation, disk reads, and queries per second. Let’s assume that Google gets a 25 percent boost. For a competitor to match Google’s performance, the competitor would have to have the known bottlenecks under control and then spend another $125 million which makes a $600 million data center hit the books at $725 million. If you pick a larger performance boost such as two hundred percent, the $600 million data center will require $1.2 billion in capex to match Google’s capacity. Of course, no one would believe that Google wrings such a performance advantage from its commodity hardware. Competitors prefer branded equipment. What’s in the back of my mind is that Google may be keeping its cards close to its chest.
The Washington Post’s “Google Turns Down Some of NC’s Tax Incentives” explains that the economic downturn, among other factors, may be causing Google to trim its capital expenditures. The Washington Post here quotes a letter Google sent to North Carolina officials. For me the key phrase was:
While Google “remains pleased and committed to its Lenoir operations,” economic conditions make it too difficult to be sure the $600 million data center complex will expand as fast as previously thought, the letter said. “Yet the company fully expects to achieve employment and capital investment levels that are consistent with those that the state announced in 2007,” Charlotte attorney John N. Hunter wrote on behalf of Google.
The Google capex expenditures are going to become more important. The economic downturn is affecting most organizations, and I think the GOOG may be battening down its hatches. Good Morning Silicon Valley takes this position. You can read its take on the capex shift here.
What happens if Google does trim its capex for data centers? Maybe Microsoft’s new data centers will leap frog over Google? Google could find itself on the wrong side of high performance if Microsoft builds its own super performance innovations into its data centers. What the Washington Post makes clear is that Google is slowing down at least in North Carolina. The Google may be trying to trim costs by rethinking certain investments. This is another sign of Google’s increasing maturity and could indicate the opening that Microsoft needs to hobble the search Googzilla.
Stephen Arnold, December 6, 2008
Arnold on Disintermediation in New Italian Compendium
December 8, 2008
December 2008 is shaping up as a busy book month. I received on December 6, 2008, my copy of “Galassia Web: La Cultura nella Rete”, published by Civita Associazione with the support of Boeing. I contributed a chapter that begins on page 67 and ending on page 80. My contribution was “Giochi di Open Access e altre nuove tecnologie di communicazione: la tentazione disintermediazion”. If your Italian is a bit rusty, the approximate English translation is “The Interplay of Open Access and Other New Technologies.”
The main point of my contribution hinges on Disintermediation. Institutions such as museums and libraries want to provide an online catalog and some type of access to the information under their stewardship. But large companies such as Google are slowly aggregating a broad range of content. For now, commercial enterprises have not shown a desire to create an aggregated service that includes indexes, images, music, and other information public institutions have created. The risk is that unless groups of institutions take the lead in aggregation, the commercial service may by default become the library or the museum for Internet users. In short, the disintermediation that ravaged commercial online services and corporate libraries may now have an impact on the information now in the control of universities, public agencies, privately-endowed institutions, and governmental entities. I don’t have a timeline but I make the point that acting in a parochial way may waste time. Action can provide a countermeasure for the forces of disintermediation.
I want to send a happy quack to the publisher, Moira Macpherson, and the editorial team that made this collection of essays a reality. So, here comes, “Quack!”
Stephen Arnold, December 8, 2008
Yahoo Jumping Ahead of Google
December 7, 2008
On December 7, 2008, PCWorld reported that Yahoo will offer abstracts, not laundry lists of search results. The news story I saw appeared in the Yahoo technology news service. You can read “Yahoo Technology Will Offer Abstracts of Search Results” here. If the link goes dead, try the PCWorld site itself here. When I saw the story, the search engine on the PCWorld site couldn’t locate the story. Nothing new there, of course. The key point in the unsigned article was that Yahoo’s Bangalore research facility has figure out how to abstract key information on the page. The idea is that when a user searches for “hotel”, the system would provide an address, map, and other information. I described a similar function in my description of Google’s dossier function. See US20070198481. According to the news story, Yahoo will roll out this service in 2009. My thought is that these types of smart services work really well when described on paper. The value of these “reports” or “answer” type systems is that language can be tricky. Google’s approach relies on “context”, a system and method disclosed in the February 2007 patent documents filed by Google’s Ramanathan Guha. My hunch is that Yahoo went public because of the rumors that Google was starting to use some of its niftier technology in certain public facing services. The Googler with whom I had interaction in London knew zero about the dossier function. Maybe Yahoo is trying to jump ahead of Google. We’ll see. I think Yahoo needs to address the shortcomings of its core search service first.
Stephen Arnold, December 7, 2008
Social Software Failures
December 7, 2008
On the flight from London to lovely Kentucky, I reflected on the “big buzz” at the International Online Conference. Delegates seemed fascinated by “social” software companies, features, applications, and technology. From the keynote to the endnote, social was the cat’s pajamas.
You will want to read J.W. Crump’s “A Look at Failed Social Networks”. You can find the article at BivingsReport.com here. The write up presents two cases in sufficient detail to provide useful insights into the use of “crowdsourcing” to provide various features and benefits to users. His analysis of Wal*Mart’s The Hub reveals that the service did not allow its users sufficient freedom.
The second case was VitalSkate, a site for those who enjoy ice skating. The lesson extracted from this social software service was the operator did not understand the users of the site.
The third case was iYomu, which was a social software site for folks like me who are older. Among the reasons this site failed was it was its lack of purpose.
For me, the most interesting chunk of information was the inclusion of a timeline prepared by Danah Boyd and Nicole Ellison. Scanning the list is an easy way to identify the major players and the steady increase in these types of Web sites.
The thoughts that struck me as I reviewed Mr. Crump’s article were:
- Social networks seem to require purpose. entertainment, and keen understanding of the needs of the site’s users.
- Social software appeals to those who are young in heart or who a significant need and find that requirement satisfied by a service that is appropriate and fun to use.
- Social software and its attendant services are not a slam dunk. Despite the excitement MySpace.com and Facebook.com seem to offer services with wide appeal to a youthful demographic.
When the social “big buzz” is transported to an organization, a number of questions may require some consideration before deploying one of the zippy new services I saw demonstrated at the International Online Show; for example:
- A small organization may not have the number of employees and authorized users to make a social site generate sufficient traffic and information to warrant keeping the service online
- The cost of implementing and verifying a workable security system may be too onerous for most organizations. With a slap dash approach, the security and privacy methods may leave the organization exposed
- Are employees in an organization willing to participate in social software services? If the financial pressures are increasing, employees may be unwilling to allocate the time necessary to participate in meaningful ways.
I understand the interest in social software and the functions it makes available. The question is, “Will these services offer up enough tangible benefits to make the investment worthwhile?”
For me, the answer to the question is, “It depends.” Some governmental agencies and not-for-profit outfits may find social software helpful. In regulated businesses, I am skeptical.
Stephen Arnold, December 7, 2008
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