Thomson Reuters and Open Source
September 29, 2008
Update, September 30, 2008: Thomson Reuters news story about the Thomson Reuters’ Zotero matter is here. I quite like the symmetry of this TR to TR sequence. That’s the way to do news, you graduate students.
Original Post
Despite a Googler trying to speak with me after my statement “Google has won the battle of online for 2009,” I admire the company. Like any publicly traded company, the GOOG has to be mindful of its shareholders. Googzilla can stomp on some flower gardens but in general, Google is muddling along with its “someone else pays” business model. Heck, Googzilla has released some–not all–of its goodies to the open source free for all. The Google MySQL is one example; some mobile technology is another.
Imagine my surprise when I saw the Slashdot link to this article “Thomson Reuters Sues over Open Source Endnote Alike Zotero“. You can find the Slashdot item here and the original article here. Years ago I gave a lecture at the University of Michigan. The professor who set up the lecture was working on a footnote tool, and he showed me an early prototype. Then a couple of years later, an entrepreneur in California showed me a similar tool. I lost track of this category of software because [a] I’m not a student or professor who writes scholarly or semi-scholarly papers and [b] when I needed tools to manage footnotes, I had tools that people sent me to test.
Thomson Reuters wants to stop the developer of a Firefox add in to help Firefox users create footnotes. Okay, I think I can see the value of this add in if I were a student and had zero money, did not know about freeware, or did not have an angle to get a software vendor to give me a copy of the software to test. The idea that a company like Thomson Reuters feels sufficiently threatened to get the court to stop someone from distributing a Firefox add in triggers several thoughts. Now keep in mind that I am an addled goose, not a scholar, generally anti-monopoly, and opinionated. Here are my personal thoughts and opinions:
- The action against Zotero caused me to download and install the add in. I wanted to see what the fuss was about, and I might even be motivated to put a footnote into one of my forthcoming non-scholarly monographs and reports. What great publicity for Firefox, Zotero, and the other programmers who want to poke Goliath in the nose
- I looked into the commercial footnote software and it sure looked to me as if Thomson Reuters is trying to round up the herd, brand the cows, and sell their software at a considerably higher price than Zotero. Zotero is free, so you can calculate the difference yourself pretty easily.
- This type of action is illustrative of the difference between a traditional media company (which Thomson Reuters is despite all the fancy tap dancing) and outfits like Google. Google’s business model allows the company to provide high value services like Google Maps without a fee. Try to get a Thomson Reuters’ product for free, and you will find that its business model is 180 degrees opposite from Google’s. That’s why Thomson Reuters wants to stop Zotero in its tracks. The Thomson Reuters business model dictates the action, and the company has not other ways to make enough dough to stay afloat.
The net net of this is great PR for Firefox, more work for legal eagles, and another example of why traditi0onal media, including professional publishing companies, are in a long, slow decline. Now what will happen if the GOOG puts a footnote function into Google Docs, or, better yet, in the Chrome framework. I wouldn’t be surprised in Thomson Reuters would find itself in court spending big bucks to prevent Google from doing pretty much what Google wants to do. Exciting stuff to consider.
Stephen Arnold, September 29, 2008
Search Monopoly: The Users Are Guilty
September 28, 2008
After 21 days of travel, I enjoyed flicking through the digital fish my newsreader snags for me. One article in Seeking Alpha caught my eye. The title is “We Can’t Afford a Search Monopoly, Even If It Kills Yahoo”. You can read the article here. I think the article is by Michael Arrington, and it originally appeared on TechCrunch, but I can’t be sure. The pivot on which the article turns is Google’s deal with Yahoo. In the background are the data that most Internet users in North America turn to Google for search. I am supportive of Google, not because I love the 20 somethings who come up to me after my lectures and expect me to explain to them why I am describing a Google they don’t recognize. The reason is that Googlers are so involved with a tiny circle of other Googlers that these bright folks can’t see the Googzilla against the background of “do no evil”.
I side with Google because every day users vote with their mouse clicks and key taps to make Google number one. I don’t for a minute think advertisers care who gets them business. As long as the ad money delivers sales, advertisers are happy. I also don’t think that users think too much about how Google generates useful results for a query or a click on a Google canned search within Chrome. If users and advertisers were deeply dissatisfied, the GOOG would find itself just another vendor fighting for survival.
I think folks are agitated about Google is that after a decade of indifference and casual dismissal of the company as a search engine that sells ads, some people are waking up to the reality of Google’s application infrastructure. Why is the infrastructure important? At this time, none of the competitors have what Google has. Microsoft is rushing to catch up, but it is tough to close a 60 percent market share gap and an infrastructure gap quickly. In fact, if Microsoft catches up, it will be in the difficult position of finding Google farther ahead. Microsoft or any other competitor has to leapfrog Google, not catch up.
Furthermore, trying to legislate away Google’s success may be tough too. The legal process can be long and drawn out. Google has enough money to keep its lawyers digging away for decades. Google is morphing into other business sectors, and it is not clear to me how a decision about Google can transfer from one sector to another or from one country to another. Toss in the fact that most people use Google of their own free will, and the problem of Google’s alleged search monopoly becomes more challenging.
Google now finds itself in a combination position. In some ways it is the 21st century version of the pre break up AT&T. In other ways, it is the child of the thumb typing generation. Google’s been chugging away for a decade, and it is going to be difficult to alter the company’s trajectory or bleed off its momentum with Web log postings, complaints from newspaper publishers, and objections from Microsoft and Yahoo that Google is not playing fair and square.
The problem with Google is that it is a service for users and advertisers. To kill Google, someone is going to have to get those users to stop using Google. That’s a big job and one that may be difficult without the aforementioned technical leap frog.
Stephen Arnold, September 28, 2008
BBC: Search Is a Backwater
September 27, 2008
I just read a quite remarkable essay by a gentleman named Richard Titus, Controller, User Experience & Design for BBC Future Media & Technology. (I like the word controller.) I am still confused by the time zone zipping I have experienced in the past seven days. At this moment in time, I don’t recall if I have met Mr. Titus or if I have read other writings by him. What struck me is that he was a keynote at a BBC Future Media & Technology Conference. My first reaction is that to learn the future a prestigious organization like the BBC might have turned toward the non-BBC world. The Beeb disagreed and looked for its staff to illuminate the gloomy passages of Christmas Yet to Come. You can read this essay “Search and Content Discovery” here. In fact, you must read it.
With enthusiasm I read the essay. Several points flew from the page directly into the dead letter office of my addled goose brain. There these hot little nuggets sat until I could approach them in safety. Here are the points that cooked my thinking:
- Key word search is brute force search.
- Yahoo BOSS is a way to embrace and extend search
- The Xoogler Cuil.com system looked promising but possibly disappoints
- Viewdle facial recognition software is prescient. (This is an outfit hooked up with Thomson Reuters, known for innovation by chasing markets before the revenue base crumbles away. I don’t associate professional publishers with innovation, however.)
- Naver from Korea is a super electronic game portal.
- Mahalo is a human-mediated system and also interesting, and the BBC has a topics page which also looks okay
- SearchMe, also built by Xooglers, uses a flash-based interface.
Xooglers are inspired by Apple’s cover flow. Now how many hits did my query “beyond search” get. Can your father figure out how to view the next hit or make this one large enough to read, a brute force way to get information of course.
These points were followed by this statement:
When you marry solid data and indexing (everyone forgets that Google’s code base is almost ten years old), useful new data points (facial recognition, behavioral targeting, historical precedent, trust, etc) with a compelling and useful user experience, we may see some changes in the market leadership of search.
I would like to comment on each of these points:
Sisense Update
September 26, 2008
Back in August, Beyond Search wrote about Sisense, a business intelligence start up dealing in software solutions. They’ve been working on software that taps Google spreadsheets holding customer data, runs the information through pre-defined intelligence schemes, and crunches away. You can review the basics here.
That software, called Prism, is now on the market. Licensing starts at $50 per month for a workgroup and $10-20 a month for additional users. There’s also a free (hey!) version and a personal option ($100) out there too.
According to a Sisense press release, Prism is desktop-based product with strong analytics and reporting and graphing capabilities. They also promote that it’s the only business intelligence software that doesn’t need IT support. Not a bad plan for users on the road like advertising or distribution personnel.
You can get a trial version at https://www.sisense.com/register.aspx.
Jessica Bratcher, September 26, 2008
Microsoft: The Future and a Key Admission of Weakness
September 26, 2008
A Microsoft wizard shared Microsoft’s view of the future of computing. CNet’s Dan Farber does a very good job summarizing the key points. Mr. Farber has included some interesting screen shots. You can read his story “Microsoft’s Mundie Outlines the Future of Computing” here. Tucked away deep in the write up was a comment attributed to Mr. Mundie that caught my attention. Here’s the statement:
Programming tools, which have been a strength of Microsoft, will play a crucial role in the emergence of spatial computing. To create a kind of parallel universe–a cyberspace version of the physical world–everyone has to contribute on a continuous basis, Mundie said. Sensors and users will be generating trillions of bits of data, which requires addressing concurrency and complexity in a more loosely coupled, distributed and asynchronous environment, he said. “Our tools are not designed to address this level of system design,” Mundie explained. “We have to see a paradigm change in the way we write applications.” [Emphasis added]
My research suggests that Google has invested in programming tools. One interesting patent document discloses that JavaScript can be automatically generated. The idea is to free up talented programmers to tackle more substantive tasks. Google’s janitor technology can clean up certain ambiguities by checking methods out of a library, trying them out, and remembering which method worked better. No human programmers required.
Microsoft needs to shift from catch up to leap frog mode. Is it possible that Microsoft is so far behind that despite its best efforts it will be Fox Rental Car to the Hertz of cloud computing? Share buy backs won’t address this value issue in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, September 26, 2008
Battle of the Business Models: The Mobile Front
September 26, 2008
Fresh from the victories in online advertising and Web search, Google is using its auction business model to disrupt the mobile telephony sector. Now patent documents are not products. Compared to IBM or Intel, Google does not run a high output patent factory. Furthermore, some of Google’s several hundred patent documents are interesting but not particularly substantive; for example, the cooling gizmos for Google’s servers.
On September 25, 2008, the USPTO published US20080232574, “Flexible Communication System and Methods.” The abstract for the invention, filed in March 2007, states:
A method of initiating a telecommunication session for a communication device include submitting to one or more telecommunication carriers a proposal for a telecommunication session, receiving from at least one of the one or more of telecommunication carriers a bid to carry the telecommunications session, and automatically selecting one of the telecommunications carriers from the carriers submitting a bid, and initiating the telecommunication session through the selected telecommunication carrier.
In a nutshell, Google has applied its auction methods to mobile telephony. Carriers bid to handle your call. You can read Wired Magazine’s discussion of this invention here. Let me offer several observations:
- The notion of a battle of business models, for me, is quite important. Telcos may find themselves innovating within a closed room. Google innovates outside those boundaries. Those in the room may find themselves conceptually unable to break of their confines. Could this trigger a replay of what’s happening in newspaper advertising?
- The computational infrastructure required to handle mobile call auctions is going to get a work out. Based on my research, no telco has a Google-killing infrastructure in place and on line. Will one or more telcos have the cash to match Google’s ability to compute at scale.
- In my briefings to selected telcos earlier this year, I recall the easy dismissal of Google’s telco dreams. I wonder if those executives are rethinking their earlier position?
With online advertising and Web search in the bag, Google is moving into another business sector with more to come.
Stephen Arnold, September 26, 2008
Knol Understanding
September 23, 2008
Slate’s Farhad Manjoo’s “Why Google’s Online Encyclopedia Will Never Be as Good as Wikipedia” takes a somewhat frosty stance toward Knol. You can read his interesting essay here. For me the most significant point was this one:
Knol is a wasteland of such articles: text copied from elsewhere, outdated entries abandoned by their creators, self-promotion, spam, and a great many old college papers that people have dug up from their files. Part of Knol’s problem is its novelty. Google opened the system for public contribution just a couple months ago, so it’s unreasonable to expect too much of it at the moment; Wikipedia took years to attract the sort of contributors and editors who’ve made it the amazing resource it is now.
Knol is one of those Google products that appear and seem to have little or no overt support. I agree. I would like to make three comments:
- Knol may be a way for Google to get content for itself first and then secondarily for its users. Google wants information, and Knol is a different mechanism for information acquisition. Assuming that it is a Wikipedia may only be partially correct.
- Knol, like many other Google services, does not appear to have a champion. As a result, Knol evolves slowly or not at all. Knol may be another way for Google to determine interest, learn about authors who are alleged experts, and determine if submitted content validates or invalidates other data known to Google.
- Knol may be part of a larger grid or data ecosystem. As a result, looking at it out of context and comparing it to a product with which it may not be designed to compete might be a partially informed approach.
Based on my analysis of the Google JotSpot acquisition and the still youthful Knol service, I’m not prepared to label Knol or describe it as either a success or failure. In my 10pinion, Knol is a multi purpose beta. Its principal value may be in the enterprise, not the consumer space. But for me, I have too little data and an incomplete understanding of how the JotSpot “plumbing” is implemented; therefore, I am neutral. What’s your view?
Stephen Arnold, September 23, 2008
VideoSurf: Video Metasearch
September 23, 2008
I received an invitation to preview VideoSurf, a video metasearch provider, based in San Mateo, California. I tested the system whilst recovering from my wonderful Northwest Airlines flight from Europe to the US of A. When I fired up my laptop with the high speed Verizon service, I couldn’t get the video to run. When I switched to a high speed connection in my office, the search results were snappy and the videos I viewed ran without a hitch. Nice high speed network, Verizon.
The system offers a number of useful features:
- When I misspelled Google, the system offered a “did you mean” to fix up my lousy typing
- A handy checkbox in the left hand column allowed me to exclude certain video sites from the query. I noticed that the “world’s largest video search engine” Blinkx was not included.
- There’s a porn and no porn filter, which you can use to turn on porn. However, when I ran my test query “teen dancing” on the non-porn setting, I got some pretty exciting videos in my result set. I was too tired to watch more than a few seconds of gyrations to conclude that the non porn filter needs some fine tuning.
VideoSurf analyzes the contents of video. Most video search engines work with metadata and close caption information. Googzilla, not surprisingly, has introduced its own technology to index the audio content of files. For now, I thought VideoSurf was useful for general purpose queries. I did not find it as helpful for locating Google lectures at universities or for pinpointing presentations given at various Microsoft events. But it’s early days for the service.
This is what I saw when I ran my test query “Bill Gates”.
The company says here:
VideoSurf has created a better way for users to search, discover and watch online videos. Using a unique combination of new computer vision and fast computation methods, VideoSurf has taught computers to “see” inside videos to find content in a fast, efficient, and scalable way. Basing its search on visual identification, rather than text only, VideoSurf’s computer vision video search engine provides more relevant results and a better experience to let users find and discover the videos they really want to watch. With over 10 billion (and rapidly growing!) visual moments indexed from videos found across the web, VideoSurf allows consumers to visually navigate through their results to easily find the specific scenes, people or moments they most want to see. Users can now spend less time searching and more time being entertained! VideoSurf was founded in 2006 by leading experts in search, computer vision and fast computation technology and aims to become the destination for users looking to find, discover and watch online videos. The company is based in San Mateo, California.
The company was founded by Lior Delgo of FareChase.com fame. The technical honcho is Achi Brandt, who is a certified math whiz. The rest of the company’s management team is here.
The service merits a closer look.
Stephen Arnold, September 23, 2008
Google Yahoo: A Contrarian’s View
September 21, 2008
In high school, I would get into trouble by asking, “What if we look at this idea from a different point of view?” My high school teachers were kindly but not too eager to listen to a question and then a suggestion that their world view was out of kilter. I am not sure why I developed this habit of mind, but I learned when I got to my first real job at Halliburton (Nuclear Utility Services), I discovered that the nuclear physicists and mathematicians that made up 80 percent of the unit liked my approach. Instead of ignoring me or putting my desk in the hall as my high school teach Miss Sperling did, these guys and gals would light up light up like white LEDs and dig in, intellectually speaking.
After reading Randall Stross’s analysis here, I felt he was on the roight track for 180 degree thinking, but he was hitting the snow covered peaks, ignoring the basalt layers on which his big idea rests. Then I read with enjoyment Michael Arrington’s “Why the Google Yahoo Ad Deal Is Something Fear.” You can read that essay here. Not only did I enjoy his writing, several of his points resonated with me. Nevertheless, my contrarian approach levered both of these astute gentlemen’s comments into several ideas that are rotated a few degrees from each’s positions.
First, the barn is on fire. It’s burning fast. The horses gone. The hay is burning fiercely and the Harrod’s Creek fire engine aided by fire engines from elsewhere can’t douse the flames. So the fire fighting professionals hose some bushes, squirt water on the roof of an adjoining building, and watch the barn burn. My view is that Google was ignored in the period from 1995 to 1998 when Messrs. Brin and Page were fooling around with BackRub. Then in the period from 1998 to 2004, some smart money urged the Googlers and their small cohort of former DEC / AltaVista.com, Bell Labs, and Sun Microsystems’ colleagues forward. When the IPO loomed, Google settled with Yahoo for about a billion dollars. Yahoo realized that Google had learned from early GoTo.com, Overture.com, and other ad efforts. Instead of reinventing the stone wheel, Google had vulcanized a Michelin radial. Clumsy metaphor but if you have a stone wheel and your friendly competitor has Michelins you have limited choices. Yahoo sued and elected to keep using stone wheels. The result is that Yahoo has the kind of choice that BF Goodrich gives NASCAR teams. Use our tires or don’t race. Works in auto racing, and it is working in online advertising.
Who wants to stand in front of this and slow down this bullet train?
Second, Google really doesn’t “sell” advertising. Like the local utility monopoly or the local water company, you can sign up for power and water or spend your money drilling a geothermal hole, erecting solar panels, and buying Evian by the truck load. Google is a service, and if the users and the advertisers did not want to make whoopie, there’s not much Google can do about it. In fact, legislating to company dependent on Google traffic that it can no longer advertise is probably one of those remarkable opportunities to explore the law of unintended consequences in detail. I don’t know about you, but I have yet to meet a government paenl or regulatory committee who has a solid grasp that Google is a giant digital computer. Ad matching and users searching are just applications. If Google removes these functions, develoeprs can use Google’s APIs to build their own systems and Google can charge a fee and take a piece of the action. The result? No changes and maybe even more money for Google because there is a great deal of interest in tapping into Google traffic.
Oh, My. Google Personal News
September 21, 2008
Newspapers worldwide no longer ignore Google. Nope. The “kill more trees” crowd sees the LCD message. The GOOG does news. If you have not explored Google’s personal news service, here’s the url http://news.google.com.my/news
The Star Online here has a good summary of what the service delivers to users worldwide. The Star is published in Malaysia. Users in more than 48 countries can use the service in the country’s native language. If you find a story you can’t read, you can use Google Translate to sort out the meaning here.
After some clicking you can configure a nifty summary of what’s happened in the last 36 hours. Some headlines turn up more quickly, but for the personalized topics that I track, Google lags me by about eight hours. Your mileage may vary.
There are no advertisements on the Personal News page that I could spot. Even Google seems reluctant to jab more digital lances into the media bulls’ necks. What’s interesting is that I can replicate most of the Google functionality with other free services. What sets the GOOG’s service apart is the easy to use configuration tool and the speed with which headlines, images, and snippets render on my cheap laptop in Utrecht via a snagged, open WiFi signal.
Will the global media titans be able to stop Googzilla? In my opinion, the media titans are about 10 years too late and Googleplex of technology savvy short. But, just for goose fun, let’s assume that the newspaper titans get this Google News “my” service turned off. Here’s a scenario for you:
Google offers to share revenue for stories posted by freelance journalists, retired journalists, or Web log people whom Google certifies. Slap a few ad slots on the “my” page and call it a day.
I know many people love Yahoo News. I have a personal Yahoo news page, and I find headlines that don’t update, weird configuration tools that don’t give me control, and a content selection function that makes me do too much work. The standard news page features weird pop ups, which I dislike, and the tab that I have to select to see stories from services that are not featured. In the last year, I have learned to put up with Yahoo and love newsreaders. Now “my” Google News is flirting with me.
In this scenario, three constituencies may have some trouble:
- The media titans are in for a long slog through a revenue Sahara
- Web 2.0 newsreader providers may have to do some additional work
- Yahoo, long number one in Web news, may face some competition
Check out the “my” service. I used to work for a traditional newspaper which was purchased by a global media titan. After watching the daily news hole shrink, talented journalists fired, and the paper chopped down to the size of a legal pad, I must say, “Well, dudes, you are in a bit of a pickle now.” Chuckle. Chuckle.
Stephen Arnold, September 22, 2008
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