WebM Fancy Dancing
May 30, 2010
Short honk: If you are tracking Google’s video encoder WebM, you will want to read “Google Asks for Delay in WebM License Consideration.” One tip. Perch your open source legal eagle on your shoulder to get some color for the Google request. You will want to tuck the WebM FAQ link in your bookmarks folder. Interesting stuff. Fire, Ready, Aim?
Stephen E Arnold, May 30, 2010
Freebie almost like WebM maybe?
Free and Quality: Google and Its Open Video Codec
May 21, 2010
I am not too interested in video. Too old. Eyes bad. Brain does not process short ADD-shaded outputs. Nevertheless, I know a couple of my two or three readers are into digital video. A couple of the goslings watch Netflix stuff on the iPads. Seems like a waste of time to me, but to each goose his own paddling area. If you are a video lover, you probably think about the visual experience. Fuzzy video is annoying to many people, but I think fuzzy video improves many of the programs I have seen.
The author of “Diary of an x264 Developer” is a person deeply interested in video in general and its deeper gears and wheels. In fact, the write up provides considerable detail about the differences between Google’s free video codec and the not free H.264. The issues boil down to “quality”, which is a difficult concept in information. There are, after all, azure chip consultants, who know about “real” and “quality”, two notions I avoid like the Ohio River. The write up said in Addendum C: Summary for the Lazy”, which is definitely this goose:
VP8, as a spec, should be a bit better than H.264 Baseline Profile and VC-1. It’s not even close to competitive with H.264 Main or High Profile. If Google is willing to revise the spec, this can probably be improved. VP8, as an encoder, is somewhere between Xvid and Microsoft’s VC-1 in terms of visual quality. This can definitely be improved a lot, but not via conventional means. VP8, as a decoder, decodes even slower than ffmpeg’s H.264. This probably can’t be improved that much. With regard to patents, VP8 copies way too much from H.264 for anyone sane to be comfortable with it, no matter whose word is behind the claim of being patent-free. VP8 is definitely better compression-wise than Theora and Dirac, so if its claim to being patent-free does stand up, it’s an upgrade with regard to patent-free video formats. VP8 is not ready for prime-time; the spec is a pile of copy-pasted C code and the encoder’s interface is lacking in features and buggy. They aren’t even ready to finalize the bitstream format, let alone switch the world over to VP8. With the lack of a real spec, the VP8 software basically is the spec–and with the spec being “final”, any bugs are now set in stone. Such bugs have already been found and Google has rejected fixes. Google made the right decision to pick Matroska and Vorbis for its HTML5 video proposal.
Fascinating but not germane to the goose. However, for those who want a piece of the big Internet video file, the Diary’s author suggests that Google’s marketing is a little ahead of the code analyzed by the author of the write up.
With Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and probably your mom getting into digital video, Google may have to take even more bold steps to create a viable revenue stream from its investments in its digital video push. Casting a shadow over the YouTube.com footprint is Google’s nemesis, Viacom. Fascinating business situation with legalities, technology, and other issues mashed up.
Stephen E Arnold, May 21, 2010
Freebie.
ArnoldIT Podcasts
May 20, 2010
The ArnoldIT and Beyond Search goslings have dipped their beaks in podcasts. These are short audio programs on topics related to information management. We are trying to be somewhat broader than search because – quite frankly – search is being absorbed into other types of software. You can find the podcasts on the ArnoldIT.com Web site at http://arnoldit.com/podcasts/. We have posted two podcasts. After we did some research, we have settled on the 15 minute program. Long enough to get the point across. Short enough to fit into a session on an exercise machine.
The first is with Erik S. Arnold, president of Adhere Solutions, and the son of Stephen E Arnold. I always find it interesting when people wonder if I am objective. Of course not. Erik is a talented individual but I am his dad, and I want to showcase his company and his expertise. Think he pays me for this? Think again!
The other podcast is with Sam Mefford, who runs the search practice at Avalon Consulting. In theory, I am going to send Avalon Consulting a huge bill, but the founder is from my home town, and I like what these folks are doing with their middleware and search implementation methods.
The podcasts are fun to do, and the goslings have more planned with Access Innovations, Exalead, and several other companies. If you want to know more about what we do to get these podcasts in circulation or want to talk about a podcast or videocast, write me at seaky2000@yahoo.com.
These are not “webinars”. We have a different angle of attack that produces traffic and gives those who participate a marketing “hook”.
Stephen E Arnold, May 20, 2010
Right, I am going to pay myself, bill my son, and charge a guy who is from my hometown for this post. Regulators and journalists, I am not of your ilk. Free write up.
Google, GIPS, and a Possible Squeeze Play
May 19, 2010
Now the Global IP Solutions deal is important.
The GIPS was founded in July 1999 in Sweden to develop and market technology designed to mitigate make VoIP more stable. In December 1999 GIPS raised cash from private investors and the shares became quoted on the Norwegian Securities Dealers Association’s OTC-List.
In the short term, I don’t think GIPS will do much to help the Google in the consumer video play that Amazon, Apple, and dozens of other companies are pursuing. But The deal to buy Global IP Solutions will give the Google a thumb screw that is already attached to Microsoft’s paw and, come to think about it, to IBM’s, WebEx Cisco’s, and Samsung’s paws as well. Yahoo could be hurting, but its pain will be ameliorated by whatever Microsoft does to cope with the specter of Googzilla in the media processing for Internet protocol business.
GIPS has deals with some interesting companies.
That GIPS VideoEngine is going to be tough to rip and replace quickly. The deal could be a BP oil spill event for the companies dependent on the Global IP Solutions. Yep, it’s that big. Android video calling and conferencing are on the way. If Google fails to pull off its other video centric acquisitions, GIPS can be repurposed for other types of video programming. Not fun or easy, but doable. And, Google is Google with those many talented engineers.
Some items I found in my Overflight file:
Company Description from 2007
Global IP Solutions offers multimedia technologies for real-time communications over packet networks and enable companies to deliver IP applications that offer the highest quality user experience, as well as revenue-enhancing opportunities across a multitude of devices and services. Global IP Solutions provides best-in-class voice and video quality and fidelity in end-to-end IP communications with robustness against packet loss. Global IP Solutions’ world-renowned media processing and IP telephony experts deliver these solutions to service providers, enterprises, applications developers, network equipment, and gateway and chip manufacturers. Companies using Global IP Solutions products include Nortel, Skype, WebEx, Yahoo!, AOL, EarthLink, BlueCross/BlueShield and other key players in the VoIP market. Global IP Solutions is a member of the Intel(R) PCA Developer Network, the Motorola Design Alliance and Symbian Platinum Partners. Global IP Solutions has headquarters in San Francisco and offices in Santa Barbara, Stockholm, Hong Kong and Boston. Source.
You can get more color about this company’s technology and its core vision from its 2007 FAQ document, which was still available at this link as of 10 am, May 18, 2010.
Beyond Search Comment: The hardware angle is important in light of the integration announcements rumored to be on tap at the Google I/O conference.
Google Sees Big Money
A white paper (commissioned report) for GIPS presented the size of the video conferencing market in 2008. With the present volcanic excitement and the financial pressure front, these numbers are likely to be even more azure tinted. Source.
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- The global market for videoconferencing endpoints was $1.1 billion in 2007, and will grow to $3.9 billion in 2014, according to Frost & Sullivan.
- The Unified Communications markets’ global revenues are estimated to grow from $22.6 billion in 2007 to $48.7 billion in 2012, according to Data from In-Stat and Wainhouse Research.
- The North American web conferencing market revenues are estimated to increase from $632 million in 2007 to $1.5 billion in 2012, according to Frost & Sullivan.
Beyond Search Comment: If ad sales plateau, the Google wants to have a lever in the enterprise sector. Whoops. Google wants a SWAT door buster in any sector dependent on IP communications.
HD Voice = Android Advantage
When I learned about HD Voice, I thought marketing. However, the GIPS lads and lasses have crated an app development environment. More information appears in “GIPS Simplifies VoIP App Development for Android Mobiles”.
Not Even Apple Is Immune
Apple? Yep, Apple. Navigate to “GIPS Voice Technology Boosts iPhone’s Business Potential”. One question I asked myself, “Where did Google learn about the GIPS outfit?” Here’s the passage I found interesting:
GIPS uses ingenious technology, in the form of what it calls a “voice engine,” to improve the quality of IP phone calls. GIPS’ customers incorporate the voice engine in soft phones or other software to make the VoIP calls that they provide sound better. The customers’ software typically handles chores like call setup and the user interface, while the voice engine takes care of delivering high-quality audio. GIPS’ technology deals with problems like jitter and packet loss — that is, voice packets that arrive inconsistently or not at all…the announcement that GIPS has developed an iPhone version of its voice engine (the company already had desktop, Symbian and Windows Mobile versions) is an especially good indication of the device’s business-use potential.
Some IP (Remember, please, this blog is free)
At the end of 1999, GIPS filed its first patent. GIPS has more than a dozen patents and has others in pending status.
Stephen E Arnold, May 19, 2010
Freebie
Quote to Note: Pre I/O YouTube Prognostication
May 17, 2010
Rumors abound. Free Android pads, country specific TV services, deals for Google TVs with Intel and Sony. Wow. What is true and what is not? Got me. I will be working on my humble monograph about Google Beyond Text. Fortunately or unfortunately, my research chugs along outside the heat of the PR supernova. In “YouTube Hits 2 Billion Views per Day” there is an interesting comment, an alleged quotation. Here it is:
“This is only the beginning of the video revolution. We’re just getting started,” YouTube stated.
Maybe, maybe not. There is Viacom, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and lots of legal eagles who may try to pull the ignition wires.
Stephen E Arnold, May 19, 2010
Freebie.
Social Network Data and the Future of Research Bibliographies
May 15, 2010
A two for one link. Navigate to HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog and “The Ultimate List: 300+ Social Media Statistics.”. Useful data collection. Well done. On the downside, this article helped me see the future of bibliographies. Years ago I studied with JJ Campbell, one of the editors of the Chaucer corpus. We made lists. The new bibliography happily romps across images, videos, and supporting links. JJ would probably have objected if I submitted my work as multimedia.
Stephen E Arnold, May 15, 2010
Endeca Moves toward Video Search
April 22, 2010
I am putting the finishing touches on Google Beyond Text and came across a news release from Endeca with the catchy title “Endeca Extend Partner Program Adds Leading Video Search Software Vendors”. I was intrigued and partly because I could not figure out the “extend” and “video search” notions. The idea seems to be a good one. With interest in non text content drifting upwards, Endeca is taking steps to allow its McKinley search platform to process video objects. According to the release:
Inaugural Endeca Extend partners in the video search category include 3Play Media, Brightcove and Nexidia. The majority of video and audio files do not have highly attributed meta-data surrounding them. However, through the Endeca Extend program, Endeca and its partners allow customers to use extracted meta-data and high quality, time-synchronized transcripts to increase search recall for audio and video content, and provide new facets for Guided Navigation, cluster related topics, offer landing pages, and improve search relevancy. Endeca customers can easily run their data through an Endeca Extend partner solution, extract additional meta-data elements or transcripts from the most common audio and video file formats and append that information to the original content. Through the partner solutions, search and navigation results will also offer segment-specific playback capabilities for audio and video content. This lowers the integration costs and adds significant structure to the content to enhance the overall user experience. The pre-built integrations allow joint customers the ability to implement best-of-breed technologies without sacrificing ease of integration.
Will Endeca gain traction in the fiercely competitive video search sector? Many organizations put their videos on YouTube and link to them. The pointers and description of the video are text descriptions of the videos. The SEO crowd is chattering about the usefulness of videos and descriptions of them in a Google PageRank effort. We are not too sure about the SEO angle, but we know video is hot for the under 25 crowd.
In our experience, talking about integration of video content and implementing video search can be one of those management tasks where slips between cup and lip can occur. More information is available directly from Endeca at www.endeca.com.
Stephen E Arnold, April 22, 2010
Unsponsored post.
The Seven Forms of Mass Media
April 21, 2010
Last evening on a pleasant boat ride on the Adriatic, a number of young computer scientists to be were asking about my Google lecture. A few challenged me, but most seemed to agree with my assertion that Google has a large number of balls in the air. A talented juggler, of course, can deal with five or six balls. The average juggler may struggle to keep two or three in sync.
One of the students shifted the subject to search and “findability.” As you know, I floated the idea that search and content processing is morphing into operational intelligence, preferably real-time operational intelligence, not the somewhat stuffy method of banging two or three words into a search box and taking the most likely hit as the answer.
The question put to me was, “Search has not kept up with printed text, which has been around since the 1500s, maybe earlier. What are we going to do about mobile media?”
The idea is that we still have a difficult time locating the precise segment of text or datum. With mobile devices placing restraints on interface, fostering new types of content like short text messages, and producing an increasing flow of pictures and video, finding is harder not easier.
I remembered reading “Cell Phones: The Seventh Mass Media” and had a copy of this document on my laptop. I did not give the assertion that mobile derives were a mass medium, but I thought the insight had relevance. Mobile information comes with some interesting characteristics. These include:
- The potential for metadata derived from the user’s mobile number, location, call history, etc
- The index terms in content, if the system can parse information objects or unwrap text in an image or video such as converting an image to ASCII and then indexing the name of a restaurant or other message in an object
- Contextual information, if available, related to content, identified entities, recipients of messages, etc.
- Log file processing for any other cues about the user, recipient(s), and information objects.
What this line of thinking indicates is that a shift to mobile devices has the potential for increasing the amount of metadata about information objects. A “tweet”, for instance, may be brief but one could given the right processing system impart considerable richness to the information object in the form of metadata of one sort or another.
The previous six forms of media—[I] print (books, magazines, and newspapers), [II] recordings; [III] cinema; [IV] radio; [V] television; and [VI] Internet—fit neatly under the umbrella of [VII] mobile. The idea is mobile embraces the other six. This type of reasoning is quite useful because it gathers some disparate items and adds some handles and knobs to the otherwise unwieldy assortment in the collection.
In the write up referenced above, I found this passage interesting: “Mobile is as different from the Internet as TV is from the radio.”
The challenge that is kicked to the side of the information highway is, “How does one find needed information in this seventh mass media?” Not very well in my experience. In fact, finding and accessing information is clumsy for textual information. After 500 years, the basic approach of hunting, Easter egg style, has been facilitated by information retrieval systems. But I think most people who look for information can point out some obvious deficiencies. For example, most retrieval systems ignore content in various languages. Real time information is more of a marketing ploy than a useful means of figuring out the pulse count for a particular concept. A comprehensive search remains a job for a specialist who would be recognized by an archivist who worked in Ephesus’ library 2500 years ago.
Are you able to locate this video on Ustream or any other video search system? I could not, but I know the video exists. Here is a screen capture. Finding mobile content can be next to impossible in my opinion.
When I toss in the radio and other rich media content, finding and accessing pose enormous challenges to a researcher and a casual user alike. In my keynote speech on April 15, 2010, I referenced some Google patent documents. The clutch of disclosures provide some evidence that Google wants to apply smart software to the editorial job of creating personalized rich media program guides. The approach strikes me as an extension of other personalization approaches, and I am not convinced that explicit personalization is a method that will crack the problem of finding information in the seventh medium or any other for that matter.
Here’s my reasoning:
- Search and retrieval methods for text don’t solve problems. The more information processed means longer results lists and an increase in the work required to figure out where the answer is.
- Smart systems like Google’s or the Cuil Cpedia project are in their infancy. An expert may find fault with smart software that is actually quite stupid from the informed user’s point of view.
- Making use of context is a challenging problem for research scientists but asking one’s “friends” may be the simplest, most economical, and widely used method. Facebook’s utility as a finding system or Twitter’s vibrating mesh may be the killer app for finding content from mobile devices.
- As impressive as Google’s achievements have been in the last 11 years, the approach remains largely a modernization of search systems from the 1970s. A new direction may be needed.
The bright young PhDs have the job of figuring out if mobile is indeed the seventh medium. The group with which I was talking or similar engineers elsewhere have the job of cracking the findability problem for the seventh medium. My hope is that on the road to solving the problem of the new seventh medium’s search challenge, a solution to finding information in the other six is discovered as well.
The interest in my use of the phrase “operational intelligence” tells me one thing. Search is a devalued and somewhat tired bit of jargon. Unfortunately substituting operational intelligence for the word search does not address the problem of delivering the right information when it is needed in a form that the user can easily apprehend and use.
There’s work to be done. A lot of work in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, April 20, 2010
No sponsor for this post, gentle reader.
IBM and Its New Content Delivery Initiative
April 20, 2010
I listened to a talk by an IBM innovator today and I did not hear anything about IBM’s deal with Verizon to float cloud storage nor did I hear anything about IBM’s content delivery initiative. I was puzzled because before the lecture I read “IBM Helps Media and Entertainment Industry Meet the Challenges of Delivering Content in the Digital Age.” My hunch is that IBM executives don’t know too much about other units of IBM. The same problem exists at Google, Microsoft, and other multi billion dollar companies. Read this article. Do you see similarities between what Google has announced and Google’s suite of content delivery patent documents? These jumped right off the page and hit me between the eyes. I wonder if the similarity is a result of my having been immersed in Google patent documents and technical papers for the last nine months or if there was one of those happy coincidences that occur. Remember the calculus dust up?
IBM asserts that it offers media and entertainment companies a way to make their lives much easier. Among the features of the new system are:
- A media enterprise framework. Unlike the repackaging of open source Apache into WebSphere, this framework sounds like a home grown solution
- Personalized content delivery, quite similar to the Google personalization method for set top boxes and other devices
- Business process features; that is, everything hooks together presumably eliminating stand alone and siloized functioned
- Metadata management which makes search of content assets possible
- Security
IBM in this article suggested to the writer:
The IBM Media Enterprise Framework is the software technology backbone that makes a wide range of media and entertainment solutions possible by helping clients to build an integrated platform for all of their operations based on industry standards. This new framework utilizes elements of IBM’s entire software portfolio including WebSphere, Rational, Tivoli, Lotus and Information Management products while leveraging the full range of IBM server and storage products and the industry-specific offerings and consulting expertise of IBM Global Business Services. Additionally, it supports the broad set of independent Software Vendors that address specific application requirements.
Okay, frameworks and backbones. Is IBM, like Google, arriving late to the content delivery party? Akamai and lots of other companies are in this space. Margins seem to be under pressure as firms vie for available accounts. Apple, despite its walled garden approach, seems to be chugging alone. Google’s YouTube.com delivers lots of video. Is there a play for IBM?
We will know if IBM breaks out revenues for this new framework / backbone. My hunch is that IBM is scrambling for any new revenue opportunity it can get. The company has lots of competitors and Fortune 1000 long accustomed to paying IBM big bucks or euros may be counting pennies.
My view is that IBM is cobbling together pieces, partners, and promises in hopes of striking a gusher of cash. Maybe content delivery is another commodity and not exactly what it seems to IBM’s business analysts? And what about search? Maybe another open source play?
Stephen E Arnold, April 20, 2010
A freebie.
eBook Sales to Grow
April 15, 2010
In a report from Goldman Sachs, analysts predicted growth in book sales. “U.S. Book Sales to Increase on E-Books, Goldman Says” included this statement: “Apple’s share of the e-book market will surge to 33 percent in 2015 from 10 percent this year.” Amazon, it seems, will see its share of e-book sales decline to 28 percent from 50 percent. Will e-books remain books, or will e-books morph into interactive media? Will authors of books be able to create products that will appeal to users of new devices like the Apple iPad? If publishers have to invest in software development, will increased costs of production put further pressure on author royalties?
Stephen E Arnold, April 15, 2010
Unsponsored post.
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