Business Structures Revealed through New Analysis Technique
April 7, 2013
Now here is an interesting implication of social-graph analysis in business. The MIT Technology Review reports, “Social Networks Reveal Structure (And Weaknesses) of Business.” We’ve known for some time that, through the analysis of connections, social networks can reveal even more about us than is obvious to most users. Now, researchers at Israel’s Ben Gurion University used this concept to derive an impressive amount of information about businesses. The article reveals that the team begins:
“. . . by using a search engine to find the Facebook pages of a number of individuals who work for a specific company.
“Using these individuals as seeds, they then begin crawling the social networks, sometimes jumping from one network to another, looking for other individuals at the same company. These in turn become seeds to find more employees and so on.
“They end up with a basic network of links between employees within the company. It’s then that the fun begins.
“Using standard measures of connectedness, Fire and co then identified people in positions of leadership and by adding in details such as location, mined from the Facebook pages, they reconstructed the international structure of these organisations. They also used community detection algorithms to reconstruct the organisational structure of the company.”
Wow. The researchers used their method on several “well known hi-tech companies” and found startling details. For example, they found a cluster of comparatively disconnected folks at a large organization, and discerned they belonged to an acquired startup that had yet to be well-integrated into the company. This sort of information can be used by companies to monitor themselves, but it could also be used by potential investors (for good or ill for the business, I suppose, depending on what turned up.)
More ominously, competitors could use the information to their advantage. Now that this technology is in the news, many companies will want to prevent such details from emerging, but how? Researcher Michael Fire advises them to “enforce strict policies which control the use of social media by their employees.” Immediately, I might add. And, I suspect that whatever was previously considered a “strict policy” must become even more strict in order to avoid exposure from this technique.
Won’t employees be thrilled?
Cynthia Murrell, April 07, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
LinkedIn Focuses on Search
April 5, 2013
LinkedIn wants to make search easier for its members. The Computerworld article “LinkedIn Sharpens Search Engine Feature” gives all of the details about the new revamped search system. With this new system LinkedIn wants its members to be able to find information easier on their site. LinkedIn’s initial goal was to provide a place for professionals to place their career bios as well as interact with their peers and colleagues. However, LinkedIn has grown and now serves a much larger audience. Companies as well as various groups have set up pages. In addition there is a job section as well as a section where individuals and publishers can share or posts comments, as well as provide links to articles. LinkedIn’s search engine sales 5.7 billion queries last year alone so the new search features will definitely reach a large audience. Johnathan Podemsky, a LinkedIn product manager shared the following
“Now, all you need to do is type what you’re looking for into the search box and you’ll see a comprehensive page of results that pulls content from all across LinkedIn including people, jobs, groups and companies.”
In addition to segmenting their results users will also enjoy auto-complete and suggested search capabilities to help them fine-tune their query terms. The search engine will also keep a log of members search queries in order to help deliver better results. It is important to note that these changes will only be applied to the main site and not the mobile application. Regardless, these new search features will definitely improve LinkedIn search capabilities for users. It seems that LinkedIn is definitely paying attention to the needs of their users and takes search very serious. Users want good results but they also want a user friendly and efficient search system. Looks like LinkedIn is on the right page.
April Holmes, April 05, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Beyond Search Twitter Saga
March 20, 2013
Just a quick update. First, don’t call me and say, “Beyond Search is distributing bad stuff.” We are not and we have been working with Twitter, including its head of search, to get this problem resolved. So far no luck. There is little I can do because the script kiddies have changed various Twitter data elements so Twitter does not know that Beyond Search is a service which comments about search and retrieval, not pop stars’ indiscretions. We have in place an alternate newsfeed, and we will be announcing it in the next few days. In the meantime, make a note: “The 69 year old operator of Beyond Search is not interested in rock and roll, stolen software, and other topics which make 13 years olds salivate.” Twitter is a free service and I, like anyone else, run a risk when using it. If you don’t want to see what the pirates are pumping out, kill the follow and get the posts on Facebook or LinkedIn. Better yet, read the blog.
Stephen E Arnold, March 20, 2013
Do Not Try To Keep Up With Twitter
March 11, 2013
Real-time tools are used to record information that corresponds directly to actual life. One of the best examples of real-time information is the social networking tool Twitter. CNET wrote an article about Twitter’s time fallacy, “Time Calculator Shows Futility In Trying To Keep Up With Twitter.” The article mentions that in small doses, Twitter is a great tool to keep updated on information, but if can make someone instance trying to follow it all the time. If you feel like life is passing you by if you cannot keep up with tweets, then web developer Koobazaur created the Tweetulator. The Tweetutular calculates how much time you would need to read every single tweet on your feed.
You input the number of people you follow, reading speed, and number of tweets you read a day. For example Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey would need fourteen hours each day to keep up with the 1330 people he follows.
“The Tweetulator results aren’t really that surprising, but it does manage to put Twitter time into perspective. Let’s just say that if I miss a few tweets here and there, I’m not going to feel bad about it.”
Let us say there is more to life than Twitter and time can be better spent developing new enterprise search strategies.
Whitney Grace, March 11, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
IBM Launching New Collaborative Communications Products Including Upgrade to Connections
February 26, 2013
The IBM announcement that it will be rolling out new communication products and new upgrades for its existing social networking product, Connections hasn’t really come as a big shock to many. IBM has spent time and money acquiring new technologies and working to integrate those technologies.
CIO’s “IBM To Beef Up Content Management, Analytics In Connections Enterprise Social Product,” takes consumers through some of the basic changes they can expect to see when the products are unveiled on Monday at Connect 2013.
“At a press conference after the session, Mike Rhodin, senior vice president of IBM’s Software Solutions Group, said that the impact of enterprise social technologies in collaboration and front-office business processes like HR and marketing amounts to a “generational shift” that is transforming how companies function, and will do so for the next two decades.”
We aren’t really told which acquisitions are responsible for which upgrades and integrations but if IBM’s dreams come true, the new content management function of Connections will rival that of Microsoft’s SharePoint, a big assertion for sure.
The IBM Employee Experience Suite is one of the few newly designed products that fully explains where the new upgrades came from, in this instance, the human resource management apps are courtesy of the $1.3 billion acquisition of Kenexa.
While still a little cloudy on the content, it will be interesting to keep an eye on IBM over the next year and not just at its product reveal early next week. It’s a sink or swim time in business technology with so many up and coming developers and technologies just waiting in the wings for an opportunity. We’ll see how IBM continues to stack up.
Leslie Radcliff, February 26, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Original Ways To Use Social Media Data
February 18, 2013
I recently heard on a news program that instead of taking cigarette breaks, people are now taking Facebook, Twitter, or social media breaks. The concept of constantly being connected is integrating into society as a regular, even necessary habit for some people. As a result social media creates a lot of data and organizations want to take advantage of its multiple uses. While social media data provides the standard trends, habits, etc. of people, some organizations have found interesting ways to harness it. Digimind takes a look at “5 Innovative And Original Uses of Social Media Data.”
The article lists five amazing and practical ways universities have used various social media outlets. The University of Bristol tracked the UK’s public mood and found that negativity resulted strongly from poor economic times. The University of Virginia is trying to detect early signs of adverse drug reaction, while Virginia Tech is looking into a project to find vehicle defects for auto manufacturers. Digimind even launched a Web site to track global funding deals in real time. The best, though, involves saving dolphins:
“This is a definite contender for one of the most noble uses of social media ever. Scientists in Australia’s Duke University used data from social media (Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and YouTube) to document ecosystems and development in Western Australia in an impressive bid to protect “the last great marine wilderness left on Earth”.
By using the digital footprint of volunteers to map the state of coastal ecosystems, in particular the snubfin and humpback dolphins, researchers were able to detect where human activities and marine resources overlap and potentially conflict. It’s easy to imagine how a similar social media mapping project could be extended into other areas of conservation to monitor the status of endangered and threatened plants and animals.”
Imagine! Using technology to save the Earth instead of destroying it. Social media information holds a lot of potential to do more than track consumer habits. Maybe it even holds the key to world peace.
Whitney Grace, February 18, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Change Comes to Attensity
February 14, 2013
Just as the demand for analytics is ascending, Attensity makes a management change. We learn the company recently named J. Kirsten Bay their head honcho in “Attensity Names New President/CEO,” posted at Destination CRM. The press release stresses the new CEO’s considerable credentials:
“Bay brings to Attensity nearly 20 years of strategic process and organizational policy experience derived from the information management, finance, and consumer product industries. She is an expert in advising both the public and private sector on the development of econometric policy models. Most recently, as vice president of commercial business with iSIGHT Partners, Bay provided strategic counsel to Fortune 500 companies on managing intelligence requirements and implementing customer and development programs to integrate intelligence into decision programs.”
The company’s flagship product Attensity Pipeline collects and semantically annotates data from social media and other online sources. From there, it passes to Attensity Analyze for text analytics and customer engagement suggestions.
Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, folks at Attensity pride themselves on the accuracy of their analytic engines and their intuitive reports. Rooted in their development of tools that serve the intelligence community, the company now provides semantic solutions to many Global 2000 companies and government agencies.
Cynthia Murrell, February 14, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
ChaCha Reels In Another $14 Million in Series G Funding
February 9, 2013
ChaCha keeps on getting money. We learn about the outfit’s latest round of funding in All Things D’s piece, “ChaCha, Still Grinding Away at This Online Q&A Thing, Raises Another $14M.” Like Coveo ,it appears that ChaCha’s intake of investment is not yet generating an output of profit. Is its big pay day just around the corner?
Writer Liz Gannes sees the pattern, too, noting that the firm has now collected $82 million in funding. She reports that CEO Scott Jones believes his company has almost, after a history of ups and downs, conquered the Q&A conundrum. The key points: transitioning from the use of paid answerers to “passionate” (volunteer), identifiable sources; emphasizing social distribution over search; and offering brand-names the chance to share their wisdom, for a fee of course. Gannes writes:
“So: After clashing with Google by gaming its search results, ChaCha wants to take the even harder path of competing with Google head on, by trying to better answer the sort of quick questions Google now surfaces on results pages through its ‘Knowledge Graph.’
“But Jones said ChaCha can go further than Google because it has spent years focusing on how to answer ‘out and about’ questions about surroundings, make judgment calls and recommendations, and process phrasings that evade natural linguistic processing.
“And, in the meantime, ChaCha has built up an audience of 45 million uniques per month and two billion questions answered.”
Not too shabby, especially considering the setback the company experienced when it tangled with Google’s Panda in 2011. ChaCha has also found success with its “sponsored tweet scheme” Social Reactor, which pays out up to $100,000 per month to contracted tweeters. The distribution power associated with that program, says Jones, will help when the company pushes more forcefully into the mobile-app realm later this year. Let us hope ChaCha finds success soon; I’m sure their investors do.
ChaCha‘s free “ask-a-smart-friend” answer service can be accessed at chacha.com or through their mobile app. The company was formed in 2005, and currently employs 70 individuals. ChaCha is headquartered in Carmel, Indiana, just north of Indianapolis.
Cynthia Murrell, February 09, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
A New Enterprise Search For Social eCommerce
February 5, 2013
Enterprise search is one of the key forces behind any enterprise deployment plan. Why? The reason is, if you cannot find your content, how can you do your job? PR Newswire reports that “Hakia Enterprise Semantic Search (HESS) To Drive The Social eCommerce Provider, Flow.” Flow, Inc. is a Canadian corporation that recently licensed hakia Enterprise Semantic Search (HESS). The HESS is a modular, extensible, and adaptable toolset for enterprise, government, education and research applications that enables developers to use the meaning of language for various search applications in addition to simple text string matching.
Flow has already added the alpha version of Hess to its mobile commerce platform. The company hopes to gather data relating to user intent and contextual meaning of terms as they are searched on Flow’s dataspace.
The higher-ups of each company had this to say:
“William Cockburn , Executive Director of Flow said ‘We believe that semantic search will facilitate the next evolution in data delivery, namely, a powerful engine to deliver relevance, context, interpretive cultural lexicon and imagery targeted by a user’s request.” Cockburn further stated that “we believe this is a fundamental practical requirement for people to find answers in a global marketplace… the who, what, where, why and when from their search.’
Dr. Riza C. Berkan , CEO of hakia, said ‘We are excited that Flow has chosen to integrate HESS into its social commerce platform. We expect many other technology innovators to move in this direction.” Dr. Berkan added that,” HESS provides the technological and ontological resources that enable a new dimension to search and content analysis applications in the current marketplace’.”
The mobile market is where many companies are focusing their new business plans. It is still relatively untapped and ready for innovation.
Whitney Grace, February 05, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Microsoft Wants In On Social Search
February 4, 2013
Facebook’s Graph Search launched recently and quick as a hare Microsoft follows with its own social search. ZDNet reports that “Bing And Beyond: How Microsoft Is Attacking ‘Social Search.’” Microsoft is not a social networking company, but it does use Bing’s social sidebar to sync with Facebook. Microsoft now allows more Facebook content via the social sidebar. How much? An average of five times more information from links, status updates, photos, and all the usual Facebook content.
Microsoft and Facebook already have an ongoing deal and the PC-maker wanted to remind users of its existence:
“Microsoft officials played up the increased Facebook integration in a January 17 Bing Community blog post. Two days ago, when Facebook announced its Graph Search technology, the Bing team reminded users that Microsoft is still providing Web search for Facebook. Bing isn’t providing any of the back-end search for Graph Search, however.”
Microsoft and Facebook may be partners right now, but judging how Facebook is trying to compete with Google search by developing an in-house search tool. They might be closer to a dissolution than we think. Microsoft sounds like the gold star student, who is suddenly replaced by a new kid. Microsoft is standing in the back and waving its hand, “I can do that too! Don’t forget about me!”
Whitney Grace, February 04, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
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