Semantra Snags $3 Million in Additional Funding
July 23, 2008
The economy is uneven. Semantra, however, has obtained $3 million in funding from CPMG, a unit of Cardinal Investment Company. The “C” means cardinal and the “PMG” means Public Market Group. No matter, the CPMG investment in Semantra totals about $9 million.
What’s a Semantra?
The company is a leader in “conversational analytics.” This buzzword means that a user of a Microsoft Dynamics CRM system can ask a question in plain English. Semantra converts the question to a syntax Microsoft Dynamics understands. Semantra then displays the answer. The company say that it :
…is a pioneer in Natural Language and Semantics that is applied in a search and information access context that enables enterprises to quickly and easily retrieve precise, critical information from complex corporate databases through inquiries in the language of a user’s business. With an understanding of linguistics, conceptual modeling and relational theory, Semantra built its software to empower business users with real time, common language commands and requests unavailable through traditional BI or enterprise search solutions. Semantra significantly improves the value of any enterprise business application. Semantra’s headquarters are located in Dallas, Texas.
A typical interface looks like this:
The company received an infusion of cash from CPMG about one year ago. The company plans a product roll out later in 2008. You can learn more about the company here.
Despite the challenges some text and content processing companies face with their sources of funding, Semantra appears to have few problems.
Stephen Arnold, July 23, 2008
CNet Uses the M Word
July 23, 2008
Charles Cooper’s “So When Do We Get over with It and Declare Google a Monopoly?” is a benchmark for Googzilla. You can read the full text of the essay here. Put aside the summer of transparency with Googlers explaining how to innovate, run cloud services, and motivate math wizards.
Writing in CNet News.com Mr. Cooper quotes noted legal eagle, Richard Schmalensee, laborer in the knowledge vineyard at MIT, probing Mr. Schmalensee about when a company becomes a monopoly:
There’s no magic threshold but with high share levels, you get to be concerned… On the other hand, monopolists are allowed to compete. The question is whether the arrangement would stifle competition.
My thought is that Google is far ahead of Google and Yahoo in plumbing. Search and advertising pay the bills but these are applications. Google is poised to move into other sectors.
Google is not a monopoly; Google is a 21st century East India Company. If you recall your history, EOC operated as a nation state but as constructs do, EOC faded.
Stephen Arnold, July 23, 2008
Intellectual Riches from the Fortune Brainstorming Tech Conference
July 22, 2008
Harrods Creek is a long way from Half Moon Bay, California. Thanks to the modern technology available here in the hills among the possums and the rabbits, I have been able to follow some of the action at the Fortune Brainstorming Tech Conference. Fortune, as you know, is the Batman of business magazines, and it uses its glittering reputation to corral big thinkers to brainstorm.
One of the most interesting articles about this conference is Stefanie Olsen’s “Viacom CEO: Great Content Is King”. I hope this discussion among Viacom, Verizon Communications, and Google finds its way to YouTube. Please, read Ms. Olsen’s full text report here.
What stopped me in my tracks was this quote from the brainstorming cyclone from Time Warner, owner of Fortune Brainstorming Tech Conference:
We [Viacom] have vast libraries of content, and we are able to find new audiences thanks to emerging distribution. People in Asia are discovering Beavis and Butt-head and it hasn’t been in the United States for seven years…For us, it’s about finding more and more places to put it.
Google’s Vint Cerf asked a Googley question about if “content and distribution of content will be separate going forward?” This is a darn good question. The Viacom and Verizon executives’ answers, in my opinion, were muddled. In my opinion, I don’t think either the Viacom or the Verizon executive knew what Mr. Cerf meant. His question was a lot clearer to me than the answers given to Mr. Cerf.
As I understand, Viacom’s answer, creating and distributing are different but the two are joined by an economic interest. And Verizon emphasize that Verizon is all about the network.
Okay. I must admit I don’t know what these two executives are trying to tell me. Viacom’s intellectual riches include Beavis and Butt-head, who have earning power in China. The Verizon person talks about network, and my last dealings with the company involved a charge for data services in Canada where the data service was explicitly not supposed to work. No one cared about that $300 charge. I just paid the bill and concluded that Verizon is about charging me for services that are not supposed to work outside the US. I paid a price for my curiosity.)
I am still laughing about the reference to Beavis and Butt-head in the context of the Fortune Brainstorming Tech Conference. If this is tech from Fortune, I am glad I live in rural Kentucky, and I am delighted that I dropped my Fortune subscription. I wonder if there are any reruns of Beavis and Butt-head on my Apple TV?
Stephen Arnold, July 22, 2008
Google: More Insight into Its Cloud Play
July 22, 2008
The summer of transparency continues. The lucky beneficiary of the Google summer of openness is Doug Henschen, the capable journalist at Intelligent Enterprise. Mr. Henchen does a good job of capturing the thoughts of Rishi Chandra. If you are a Google watcher, you will want to read the full text of this interview here.
Several points stuck in my addled goose brain after reading this interview. May I share these with you? Then I will offer a handful of observation from the hills of rural Kentucky. Now the main points for me:
- The Salesforce.com tie up with Google “is at the application layer.” The idea is that Salesforce.com can tap Google and–the interesting bit–Google can tap into Salesforce.com. Google also pats Salesforce.com on the head. Mr. Chandra says, “”…They helped us improve those APIs so they [Salesforce.com] can do a lot more than third parties could do previously.”
- App Engine is designed or engineered to “bulld onto Google infrastruture and gain the same capabilities and scalability.”
- Mr. Chndra notes, “We built our infrastructure os it’s particularly tuned for Web applications.”
- Mr. Chandra reveals, “Our appraoch will follow the model … to go from consumers to the enterprise”
I find these points significant because Google transparency talks “run a game plan.” Google is not the slap dash group of beer drinking math club members that some in the media see when scrutinizing Google. My research suggests that Google is caclulating. In fact, the subtitle of my 2007 study is “the Calculating Predator.”
Let me offer some observations about these four points. I will reference some of the research data in my Google Version 2.0, so if you want the nitty gritty, you will need to track down that 250 page, dull as dishwater report here.
Observations from the Addled Goose
First, Salesforce.com wants to do a lot more than date Google, according to my research. Google has technology that can cure the scaling and performance issues that make Salesforce.com brittle. Like eBay, making wholesale changes to the core architecture is expensive, complicated, and risky if the fix doesn’t work. Google, for its part, is cheerleading Google and providing some coaching. What’s Google get from the deal? Well, it’s not just exposure to the ways of enterprise cloud computing. Google is able to learn from the Salesforce.com efforts. I think of the Google-Salesforce.com tie up like a lab experiment. Salesforce.com also has some tasty multi-tenant technology. This invention virtualizes virtualized infrastructures. So, yoiu have an application. You run it so it is stable, scalable, and reasonably reliable. Then you allow different companies to use the application as if that application was dedicated to the one company. Everything is partitioned. Very cool stuff indeed.
Second, the reference to the “same infrastruture” is one of those phrases that carry a truck load of meaning. I remember a teacher in a required literature class making us talk in depth about William Carlos Williams’ phrase “red wheelbarrow”. The phrase “same infrastructure” means that the goodies running on the Google infrastructure can–at some point in time of Google’s choosing–be made available to an enterprise. Want to crunch 20 years’ American Express credit card data for the week before Mother’s Day in New York City? Today AMEX cannot do this without some work. With the Google data management infrastructure, the query is not only trivial. The query will return results in a fraction of the time American Express’ MBAs now wait. This is–believe me–a very big deal.
Third, Mr. Chandra says clealy that what Google built to do Web search has now, after a decade–that’s 10 years of Internet time–is tuned for Web applications. I suppose Google could buy a billboard on Times Square, but the company is crystal clear in telling Mr. Henchen and his readers that Google is an application platform. Yoiu can read more about how a Web search system works like a big distributed laptop in my 2005 study The Google Legacy here. Note: this is also dull and long, stuffed with technical diagrams that explain why Microsoft and Yahoo are lagging Messrs. Brin and Page in online services.
And, finally (actually fourthly), Mr. Chandra lays out the strategic thrust of Google. Google has been using this phrase for a number of years. I think I have a note somewhere that the first use of the phrase was in 2001. Google is not a wacky math club. Google is a supra-national enterprise that competitors, regulators, and mavens are just now–after a decade in Internet time–beginning to perceive in its broad outlines. It’s thrilling that ComScore and NetRatings report that Google has a two thirds share of the search market, but the take make it very tough to look at Act II at Google. My research suggests that ACT II will be a compelling event to watch from the sidelines. I don’t want to be under one of Googzilla’s paws when the beast heads for the Fortune 100 in earnest. Keep in mind that as Google “hooks” young folks, these little Googlers will pull Google into the enterprise. Hence, the consumer becomes the enterprise customer. An ad in eWeek or CIO won’t stop this type of demographic play.
Net net: Kudos to Doug Henschen for getting a Googler to talk. I love to watch the Jedi knights at Google run the game plan. The tactic is one that an NFL owner can understand. Senior managers at IBM and Oracle? I’m not sure.
Stephen Arnoold, July 22, 2008
ComScore: Google’s Search Share Falling
July 22, 2008
ComScore, hard on the heels of Google’s pretty good financial results, reports “US Search Rankings Issued for June, Google Share Down from May”. You can read the news story in Marketing VOX here. If you want to know how bad it is for Google, here’s what ComScore’s analysis revealed:
Google Sites retained its [sic] lead in the US core search market capturing 61.5 percent of the search conducted in June, down slightly from 61.8 percent in May (though in expanded search it gained)…
The “sky is falling headline” baffles me, but it works like a click magnet. The ComScore data are at odds with Hitwise’s recent report.
Neither ComScore of Hitwise count clicks. Both outfits rely on data provided by partners. Google, according to my sources, has the ability to count every click. When one of these outside firms calculates market share, the numbers are general indications, not absolutes.
If you are either Microsoft or Yahoo, Google’s share–whether 60 percent and falling or 70 percent and stable–are meaningless. Both of these companies have to reverse years of inattention to search. Whether Microsoft and Yahoo have to narrow the gap by 50 or 60 percent before Google gains more share is likely to be a thrilling task.
Fiddling in the board room and buying technology that may not scale or cannot be installed without a regiment of engineers is not the way to close the gap. How about a leap frog play? Why not buy Yandex? There are some bold actions to take, but third party firms want to get traffic, sell statistical analyses, and find those lucrative consulting jobs. I applaud their efforts.
Too bad the data are all to often off the mark. Googzilla is, according to my sources, accounting for a significant share of the Web search traffic and a bigger chunk of online advertising. The company faces big challenges, but when I looked out my window the sky was where it was supposed to be and Google was delivering search results with alacrity.
Stephen Arnold, July 22, 2008
Microsoft: Me-Too, Me-Too
July 22, 2008
Matt Asay’s essay “Microsoft Copies Google, Salesforce, and Red Hat in New Partner Initiative” reveals another piece of Microsoft’s “moon shot” to catch Google. You can read the full text here. The premise of the article is that after decades of honing a partner strategy, Microsoft is proving that it is not too old to learn. The notion is that Microsoft is borrowing tactics from Google, Red Hat, and Salesforce.com. For me, the most important statement in the essay was a reference to a comment in The Motley Fool:
Although partners will get a 12% cut of the first year’s subscription, and 6% thereafter, they will now be competing head-to-head against Microsoft for delivering value-added services. This marks a dramatic departure from the way Microsoft has worked with partners in the past.
Is Microsoft now competing with its own partners no matter what size the account? My hunch is that Microsoft is like the US when it first tried to match the Sputnik. The best way to do this is with a dramatic “moon shot” type program. These initiatives toss out the playbook. Engineers and business mavens start with a clean sheet of paper.
Based on my narrow angle of observation from the hollow in rural Kentucky, I see this strategy playing out in SharePoint search. First, the “free” version competes with low-cost providers of search technology. Second, larger Certified Gold Partners find themselves looking at “baked in” search in industrial strength versions of SharePoint. Third, Microsoft bought Fast Search & Technology in order to have an answer for SharePoint customers who wanted to index larger document sets, a feat which SharePoint struggles to accomplish in a snappy, pleasing way. Finally, internal search initiatives at Microsoft are trying to figure out what the future holds.
If catching Google requires the sacrifice of a handful or Airbus full of partners, well, that is an eventuality warranting some consideration. In my opinion, the Certified Gold Partners with search technology have little choice but ramp up their innovation and marketing efforts. This means that Microsoft may face some additional challenges in the enterprise. Google has an abundance of wizards, but a number of the SharePoint snap in search solution vendors have a few budding smarties too.
Catching Google may now be harder. Microsoft will have to chase down Googzilla while dealing with aggrieved former partners. Agree? Disagree? Let me know.
Stephen Arnold, July 22, 2008
Efficient Frontier’s Startling Data about Online Advertising
July 21, 2008
M2, the UK news outfit, reported on a news story that appeared in Telecomworldwire. I tried to get the nested links to work and ran into latency issues. You will want to read the M2 story here. The key point in the item in my opinion was this statement:
According to the report, for every new dollar (USD) spent on search advertising in Q2 2008 versus Q2 2007, Google received USD1.10, while Yahoo! lost USD0.09 and Microsoft Live Search lost USD0.01. Google accounted for 77.4% of total search engine spending in Q2 2008, an increase of 2 percentage points over the previous year. Yahoo! lost nearly 2 percentage points of search engine share in that period, accounting for 17.8% of total spend, while Microsoft Live Search’s share remained relatively stable at 4.8% of search engine spending.
I had seen some of these data elsewhere. But this paragraph underscores the challenge Microsoft, Yahoo, and others in the online advertising game face in their “close the gap” efforts with Google.
Stephen Arnold, July 21, 2008
Scale Fail: Amazon and Pizza Team Engineering
July 21, 2008
My news reader is chock full of glowing embers of hostility this morning. It’s 8 30 am in rural Kentucky, where nothing works very well. Power failed again last night, but we have oil lamps and candles. Based on scanning a number of the Amazon S3 outage, Amazon may want to shore up Dr. Werner Vogels’ engineering team today. Shoestrings are great for keeping sneakers on my feet, but massively parallel distributed infrastructures needs a bit more than shareware, cleaver graduate students from the Netherlands, and technical reviews by PhD candidates from University of California computer science programs.
Amazon codes using teams large enough to be fed with one pizza. The idea is that a SOCOM-type unit is better than a rigorous engineering approach found at Boeing or even Microsoft for that matter. Amazon also allows its teams considerable latitude when solving problems. In fact, some teams can use whatever programming language or method that allows the team to solve the problem.
This is a burned pizza. Great ingredients, distracted chef. Source: http://msp71.photobucket.com/albums/i122/xoaleycat926ox/6298db24.jpg
This approach is fast, economical, and flexible. The downside is that if the fix triggers a fault elsewhere, the pizza team or teams must scramble to figure out what happened and why. If the previous team used some off beat language or clever method, then the fixers have to puzzle out the solution. Some folks love puzzles, but I don’t think Amazon Web Services’ customers are too keen on the approach, if I read some of the nasty grams this morning.
Om Malik’s “S3 Outage Highlights Fragility of Web Services” is among the best of the essays I reviewed. You can read his full post here. For me, the key point in his analysis was:
That said, the outage shows that cloud computing still has a long road ahead when it comes to reliability. NASDAQ, Activision, Business Objects and Hasbro are some of the large companies using Amazon’s S3 Web Services. But even as cloud computing starts to gain traction with companies like these and most of our business and communication activities are shifting online, web services are still fragile, in part because we are still using technologies built for a much less strenuous web.
I quite enjoyed Center Networks’ understatement aboiut the problem by reporting Amazon’s own comment:
Amazon S3 has “elevated error rates”.
I think this means crash or fail.
New Idea’s Founder Speaks, New Search Tools Service in Beta
July 21, 2008
New Idea Engineering is one of those specialized engineering firms that keep a low profile because the company is swamped with work. Miles Kehoe and Mark Bennett, the two founders of New Idea have deep experience with search and related technologies. Messrs. Kehoe and Bennett, , revealed in an interview for the Search Wizards Speak series the premise of their firm:
New Idea has from Day One tried to make our products and tools cross-vendor, but none of the major vendors has any incentive to do so until customers start objecting.
This is a clear statement of one reason why search vendors may not rush to resolve some issues for their customers. Now The problems with enterprise search are now becoming more widely known. New Idea’s founders explain why:
…The biggest problem we see in failed implementations is that the technology the customer picked is just not the right one for their environment. Corporate IT managers have to remember that a great demo is indistinguishable from product, but sometimes they seem willing to accept the vendor’s demo as a suitable substitute for their environment. There is also a mind set in many IT departments that search is either not critical – it’s still often a “check-box item” – or that it must be terribly easy…
You can read the full text of the interview here. Additional information about New Idea is here. The company has a useful Web log, and a new addition to the New Idea arsenal of useful resources is a listing of software tools that can help untangle some of the Gordian knots in an enterprise search deployment. An alpha version of the new service called Search Components Online is available here.
Disclaimer: I have provided some information about open source and shareware content transformation tools. Kudos to the New Idea Engineering team for creating a much-needed listing that can help those struggling with flawed enterprise search systems or consultants trying to help their customers get their system back online. I have linked to the company’s enterprise search Web log and cheerfully nabbed nuggets from the company’s informed postings.
Stephen Arnold, July 21, 2008
Microsoft’s Vietnam: Search
July 21, 2008
What an interesting idea. ZDNet posted a short item that caught my attention on this 95 degree Sunday in rural Kentucky. Larry Dignan’s “Microsoft’s Search Ambitions Are Its Vietnam” appeared on the ZDNet Web logs on July 18, 2008. I suggest you read the item here. Mr. Dignan has opened a new line of analysis about the Microsoft – Google face off.
The key point in the piece for me was:
The online services business lost $1.23 billion for the fiscal year ending June 30. I [Mr. Dignan] quipped that it’s no wonder that Microsoft is so hot for Yahoo. Something has to save this online business. And what’s startling about that figure is that Microsoft only lost $732 million in 2007. Microsoft’s online services business was actually profitable in 2005.
Mr. Digan is spot on. One point warrants further comment, however. The cost of catching Google may be beyond Microsoft’s reach. Here’s why?
- Google continues to press forward and Microsoft’s efforts to catch Google seem to be focused on where Google was in late 2006 or early 2007. A leap not a catch up is needed.
- Time is working for Google and against Microsoft. Each month Google continues to increase its lead in Web search. At some point, Google will dominate the market, which means that the race may be over for Web queries and online advertising.
- Google is “seeping” into the enterprise. Microsoft seems confident that its three big revenue producers will fund the online battle with Google. I think the complexity of products like SharePoint will open the door to newcomers, not necessarily Google, by the way. Any revenue loss increases Microsoft’s vulnerability.
Agree? Disagree? Let me know your thoughts.
Stephen Arnold, July 21, 2008
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