Wither Nervana?
April 16, 2010
I received a call about a company in the Seattle area. The firm is Nervana, founded in 2001, and if you are one of the lucky folks attending the Gilbane conference in San Francisco, you can hear a talk by Nervana’s founder, Nosa Omoigui. Nervana focused on semantics and natural language processing. My Overflight files has a meaty collection of information about this company’s technology. The firm received funding and ramped up its marketing in 2006. The firm pushed into the processing of health and medical content. Then the firm refocused its efforts on the processing of résumés. The firm’s Web site is online at www.nervana.com, but the news section has not been updated since November 2006. I continue to track the firm because Mr. Omoigui is involved with Youth for Technology Foundation which has a presence in Louisville, Kentucky.
What’s important about Nervana is that the company’s trajectory shows how a very bright entrepreneur in the field of content processing has positioned what is, in my opinion, a quite interesting technical system. The firm’s technology is anchored in “a unique technology that allows knowledge workers to ask questions naturally within the context of their meanings.” A LinkedIn description adds:
“Nervana, Inc. provides knowledge discovery solutions for companies. Its solutions enable knowledge based workers to find, correlate, and retrieve the information from repositories both inside and outside their enterprise. The company’s products include Drug Discovery that provides Medline, life sciences news, and life sciences Web content for research and development teams; Business Discovery, which offers Medline, life sciences news, general news, patents, and life sciences Web; IP Discovery that enables users to discover and retrieve information from the United States, European, Japanese, and other worldwide patents; and Premium Discovery for enterprise customers to manage their in-house information. It also offers project management, logistics, pre-configuration, onsite installation, informatics consulting, and documentation services. Nervana was founded in 2001 and is headquartered in Seattle, Washington.”
My notes show that one of the sources of funding is now involved in a company that seems to use the original Nervana logo. This firm is Dipiti. SeattlePI in February 2008 ran a story “Dipiti, a Search Engine for Message Boards.” Dipiti seems to have gone off line and now redirects to Hot Shopper.
What’s interesting is that the trajectory of Nervana shows that next generation content processing has huge potential. Management and investors tried a number of different markets. The other thought that struck me is the words and phrases used to describe the firm’s technology are as fresh today as they were in the firm’s marketing push in 2006. Next generation content processing evokes considerable market interest. Nervana, shortly before it repositioned, was named a “Hot 100” company and touted some major clients, including Procter & Gamble. (Lists of “hot” companies may not be valid indicators of a firm’s health in my opinion.)
This is an interesting case example of the challenges facing some types of technologies.
Stephen E Arnold, April 16, 2010
A freebie.
Siri and Its Virtual Assistant
April 16, 2010
The idea of having our own personal assistant to handle all the mundane stuff in life sounds intriguing to most of us. No more flipping through yellow pages, making routine phone calls, or even searching on Google (gasp!) sounds like a fantasy land akin to The Jetsons. However, Siri International has released a new phone application that appears to do all those things and more. “Siri Launches Virtual Personal Assistant for iPhone 3GS” announces the release of their virtual personal assistant that with just a vocal prompt can purchase theatre tickets, call for a taxi or make restaurant reservations. Born out of SRI International’s CALO (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes) project, Siri utilizes advanced technologies to enable an intelligent, context-aware, question-and-answer interaction. The wide variety of Web services and APIs available allows Siri to get things done; things you no longer have to do yourself.
Melody K. Smith, April 16, 2010
Two Acquisitions: Divvyshot and Episodic
April 14, 2010
While on travel on Saturday, I read two separate news items about two competitors’ acquisitions. Facebook purchased a photo sharing outfit called Divvyshot. I had never heard of it. To my added goose eye, the Divvyshot service looks like Flickr with the requisite search and social functions that make venture capitalists drool. The service makes it easy to create a collection of images, which Divvyshot calls events. This is in line with the type of thinking I heard described years ago when a Microsoft researcher was explaining how people think about information; for example, the letter I received when I got engaged.” This is the “hook” approach to content organization.
The Google purchase delivered an outfit that is able to stream live video. YouTube.com has its own streaming video technology. Episodic is able to stream and it includes a package of services; that is, instead of an invention, Episodic has a more or less complete service, including a function that makes flash videos work on the Apple iPhone and presumably the iPad. See “Episodic Makes Flash Videos iPhone Friendly”.)
Several observations:
First, the Facebook acquisition goes into the guts of what Facebook users are now doing. Facebook is one of the largest photo repositories in the social media space. Divvyshot is likely to make existing customers happier because Facebook is not particularly good at certain types of content organization. The company is improving, but there are some constraints that madden users like me. The Google acquisition is more a product and people deal. Google can do specific inventions, but Episodic puts different things together in a reasonably coherent package.
Second, the Facebook deal is about addressing a “now” problem. The Google buy seems to be part of a build out strategy for rich media at Google. What strikes me is that Facebook is chugging along and taking steps to “me too” service functions available elsewhere just not within the Facebook walled garden. Google is trying to short cut product development. Which is the better strategy? I don’t know.
Third, both companies are buying as well as investing in their own technologies. Facebook is more of a tactical move. Google seems to be evidencing some impatience with its own line up of video inventions, products, and services. Is Google also buying staff in order to accelerate the company’s role in rich media.
I want to see how these two companies interact. Right now, Facebook seems less pressured in the rich media space that Google. Google, on the other hand, may find itself falling further behind leaders in rich media. Search and text advertising just may be losing their turbo charging capability. Quite a surprise if this assertion is accurate.
You can request a free sample chapter from Google Beyond Text, my new study of Google’s infrastructure, by navigating to http://www.theseed2020.com/gbt/. I explore rich media as an opportunity for Google to grow or for rich media to gum up the Google F 1 race car engine.
Stephen E Arnold, April 14, 2010
No one paid me to write this.
Arnold Column Added to Information Today
April 14, 2010
Stephen E. Arnold, an expert in search, content processing, and online systems, and author of “Google: The Digital Gutenberg” (Infonortics, 2009) and three other significant Google studies, will be writing a column for the information industry’s trade paper, Information Today.
The column will focus on new directions in search and content processing, and themes from “Successful Enterprise Search Marketing,” which Arnold co-authored with Martin White of Intranet Solutions.
“I want to document the rapid changes now taking place in the way users interact with search systems. The era of the desktop PC is ending and new devices with new form factors mean major changes in search and retrieval,” Arnold said. Arnold has worked in the search and content processing field for more than ten years. He also writes columns for the Smart Business Network, Information World Review, and KMWorld.
More information about Arnold and his strategic information consulting business is available at http://www.arnoldit.com/sitemap.html. He also supports two blogs: Beyond Search, http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/, focuses on next generation search issues, and the Strategic Social Networking Blog, http://www.SSNBlog.com, addresses trends and current events in social media for business. His Google studies are available at http://www.infonortics.com/publications/google/google-trilogy.html.
Jessica West Bratcher, April 14, 2010
Cpedia Previews the Future of Content Assembly
April 13, 2010
There are two services that anticipate some interesting future search methods. One company is Kosmix and the other is Cuil.com, the much maligned search service from Anna Patterson (former Googler) and Tom Costello (former IBMer). The folks behind Cuil.com have released Cpedia. According to GigaOM’s “Cuil Failed at Search, Now Fails to Copy Wikipedia”:
Cpedia launched last week with a blog post from Cuil co-founder and former IBM staffer Tom Costello, who described a meeting he had with Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy when Costello and his wife Anna Patterson (a former Googler) were trying to raise money for Cuil. Joy told Costello that people didn’t need a new search engine that just returned a list of results, they needed something that would write an article based on a search. A note on Cpedia topic pages reads: “We find everything on the Web about your topic, remove all the duplication and put the information on one page.”
I have documented a couple of Google patent documents that describe somewhat similar ideas, although the Google systems and methods are tailored to the Google platform’s specific requirements for scale, cross processing, and optimizing performance among Google’s many different “flavors” of servers.
My view of Cpedia is somewhat less harsh than this statement in the GigaOM publication:
Unfortunately, being new and different doesn’t necessarily mean that it is either good or useful. Other users who have tried it out describe it as “sentence after sentence of automated nonsense,” and Tumblr and Instapaper developer Marco Arment says that “if this feature is meant to become a serious product, I truly feel bad for them.”
My view is:
- Conceptual slicing and dicing is a particularly interesting content processing problem. The Cuil method does yield some unusual outputs but for topics like “Julius Caesar”, I found the results in line with outputs from other systems we have reviewed. One can argue that the Cuil method does not produce outputs in line with what a college educated person might assemble after scanning six or seven sources, but the Cpedia results were in the ballpark compared to some of the wackiness we have seen in the past
- The computational load for this type of processing is quite high. Our tests showed that for high frequency queries like prominent topics and major historical figures, results were displayed quickly.
- The inclusion of real time results struck me as one step in providing the much needed context for information pulled from Twitter and Facebook. Too often, real time items are disembodied and make little or no sense. Maybe the Cuil.com approach is not the perfect answer, but I find the inclusion of real time results within a content centric context an improvement over a Collecta box showing items in a stream. (See http://ssnblog.com for an example of the Collecta stream.)
Our tests of Cuil.com continue, and we find that the service has been improving. Cpedia keeps the ball rolling.
Stephen E Arnold, April 13, 2010
Unsponsored post.
IBM and Verizon Team for Search Storage
April 13, 2010
Short honk: I read “IBM and Verizon Look to Draw Large Enterprises to Cloud Data Backup—Search Storage” in File Recovery. The pairing strikes me as one more attempt by IBM to hit a home run in a market sector that is beginning to get some traction. The optimists say an economic recovery is underway. Those in some big companies may be somewhat more cautious. The cloud appears to offer some ways to slash costs, but the idea that a service from two giants like IBM and Verizon will save money strikes me as a proposition that needs some supporting facts. The “search storage” phrase puzzles me. Hosted search works in some situations and it doesn’t in others. More information needed, but the tie up is fascinating.
Stephen E Arnold, April 13, 2010
Nope, a news item written for no dough.
Google Snags Programmable Search Engine Patent
April 11, 2010
Short honk: The programmable search engine invention has been granted a US patent. Filed in august 2005 and published in February 2007, the PSE provides a glimpse of the Google’s systems and methods for performing sophisticated content processing. Dr. Ramanathan Guha, inventor of the PSE, has a deep interest in data management, the semantic Web and context tagging. You can download a copy of US7693830 from the USPTO. There were four other PSE patent applications published on the same day in February 2007, which is a testament to Dr. Guha’s ability to invent and write complex patent applications in a remarkable period of time. The PSE is quite important with elements of the invention visible in today’s Google shopping service, among others.
Stephen E Arnold, April 9, 2010
Unsponsored post.
The Biggest Names in Enterprise Search!
April 10, 2010
I received a link to a “National Press Release.” When I click the link here, I saw this title: “BA-Insight’s SharePoint Search and FAST Search 2010 Webinar Series Features the Biggest Names in Enterprise Search.” I don’t have too much of a problem with hyperbole. I find it amusing that the “biggest names in enterprise search” did not include individuals from:
- Autonomy and its chief wizard, Mike Lynch
- Exalead and the prescient François Bourdonclek
- Google and co founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page
- Lucid Imagination and Eric Gries and Marc Krellenstein.
I could ennumerate this list but I am not sure I would feel comfortable using the bold phrase “biggest names in enterprise search” even if those in my bulleted list were on the program.
Enterprise search is a flawed phrase, but it is one that seems to resonate. The reality is that there are many different types of search, and I am not sure that two firms, despite their stellar reputations, can deliver across the spectrum of chemical structure search in enterprises engaged in drug research, search for specific legal information related to a matter, search for rich media in an enterprise engaged in broadcast television news, etc.
I think the headline would have made me more comfortable if it has said, “A Webinar Focused on Improving Information Access in SharePoint Using Technology Certified by Microsoft.” No superlatives are needed in my opinion. If the “biggest names” can’t make the basic product work, is there not a logical thread to tug?
Stephen E Arnold, April 11, 2010
A freebie.
Not-So-Secret Cell Phone Numbers
April 9, 2010
Tired of unwanted phone calls that show up on caller id only as “unknown name”? Even if the caller is using a cell phone, which many solicitors and crank calls do, you can learn who’s calling you, says private investigator George Martin in “How to look up Unlisted & Unregistered Phone Numbers — Online” on People Records Zone. “Telemarketers, stalkers, prank callers, creditors, and many others could be harassing you under the false assumption that you cannot track them, writes Martin. “Their assumption is false because, thanks to the internet, you can now discover precisely who owns the particular cell phone number that has been calling you. All the recipient has to do is enter the complete phone number into one of many free unlisted-number search directory services, and the caller’s name will be revealed, says Martin. Knowing who is making the calls may not stop all unwanted calls, but if anonymity is important to the caller — especially those with ill intent — it should help.
John Sniffen, April 9, 2010
Post not sponsored.
Boston Search Engine Meeting and Exalead
April 9, 2010
The Evvie Award recognizes outstanding work in the field of search and content processing. Ev Brenner, one of the original founders of the Boston Search Engine Meeting emphasized the need to acknowledge original research and innovative thinking. After Mr. Brenner died, the Boston Search Engine Meeting, then owned by a company in the UK, instituted the Evvie award. This year, the Evvie is sponsored by Exalead, one of the leaders in search-based applications and ArnoldIT.com, are sponsoring the award. in addition to a cash recognition of $1,000, the recipient receives the Evvie shown below.
For more information about the premier search and content processing conference, navigate to the Search Engine Meeting Web site. You can review the program and pre conference activities.
For more information about Exalead, navigate to the Exalead Web site. You can see a demonstration of the Exalead system on the ArnoldIT.com site here and you can explore next generation search and content processing innovations at Exalead’s “labs” site.
For more information about the award, click here.
Stephen E Arnold, April 9, 2010
This post is sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, Exalead, and Information Today, Inc.
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