Avoiding the AP and Its Copyright Hummer
July 9, 2010
It shouldn’t really be surprising that a recent article in Techdirt.com is still highlighting the position by a particular patent attorney when it comes to open source versus proprietary software.
According to the blogger who took the time to dissect the blog from patent attorney Gene Quinn, open source software is actually a hindrance to innovation and some patent holders can claim willful infringement if the party involved had seen their patent.
Legal arguments aside, we’re not sure that the premise for the whole debate is sound, at least from the perspective of Gene Quinn. How can constant innovation not be considered one of the foundations that drives American business forward? The blogger who takes umbrage to this correctly implies that innovation doesn’t require an original idea, just the ability to solve a market need.
The goslings at Beyond Search try to avoid the Associated Press, which could drive its Hummer right over the addled goose and the scrawny little ones. Life is too short for that.
Rob Starr, July 9, 2010
Freebie
Lexalytics Pushes into Pharma
May 26, 2010
Once a search and content processing vendors finds success in a niche market, other vendors are going to follow. I remember listening to Temis executives explaining how that firm’s technology benefited organizations engaged in the type of content processing favored by big pharma.
As the market for basic search continues to face challenges, specialty vendors are looking for ways to pump up their growth. The pharmaceutical industry is one of a handful of business sectors that understand the value that can be derived from structured and unstructured data.
I received a link to a PRWeb item title “Lexalytics Continues Growth Trend with Expansion into Pharmaceutical Search Solution and PR Management and Media Intelligence Markets”. For the life of a may fly, you can read the item on the Web. Once the PR may fly goes to the big picnic in the sky, you will have to hunt for a copy of this document. The company has made a concerted effort to move into advertising and marketing niches. So the push into big pharma is not a surprise to the Beyond Search goslings.
Lexalytics has become a “go to” partner for companies who need to get a Microsoft Fast search implementation off the ground and then into orbit. Now Lexalytics has teamed with another search integration company – Raritan Technologies – to get Lexalytics’ functions into Raritan’s pharmaceutical clients.
Here at the goose pond, the most interesting passage in the news release was:
Raritan Technologies is implementing Lexalytics’ text analytics into its PharmaLytics platform, geared at providing fast, efficient and smart search of the fire hose of medical information available to practitioners, research and development and medical affairs professionals.
Our view is that blurring of search and content processing vendors with consulting businesses is a path that may lead to a treasure chest. However, that path can also lead into a digital everglades. Who is responsible for what feature and function? becomes an important question.
If Lexalytics implements functions within Microsoft Fast, who has to work on the details? Who pays? If Raritan blends Lexalytics with Raritan functions, who works out the glitches? And, of course, who pays?
The easy answer is, “The customer.” Now the tricky bit, “Who is the customer?” With search and content processing becoming more important and, in some cases, more frustrating to licensees, the blurring of product and service presents management challenges to each party in the transaction. I remember a call to Verizon last week about its high speed Wide Area Network service. One customer support engineer told me that Verizon’s Novatel modem was working. Verizon’s network was working. Therefore, the laptop with Windows XP was at fault. It is so easy to absolve oneself of responsibility unless the statement of work and contract are in sync. Then the lawyers get to decide.
Stephen E Arnold, May 26, 2010
Freebie
Funnelback Books London School of Economics
April 14, 2010
The LSE (London School of Economics) has adopted the Funnelback search system. According to a news release issued by Squiz, a content management vendor in Australia:
LSE have set up Funnelback to search all external LSE Web site content as the default. Searches can also be restricted to specific groups or faculties. The public events search facility on the LSE website is also powered by Funnelback. This helps users find out when and where events such as the next concert or public lecture are to be held.
If you are not familiar with Funnelback, it is an open source search solution. The description on the LSE’s Web site says:
LSE uses Funnelback as the search facility for the LSE Web site. Funnelback indexes the LSE website. Submitting a query – word, phrase or question – returns a list of results – pages and documents matching the query – which are sorted by relevance. In addition to this standard search function, Funnelback allows the results to be refined by type, topic, site and file type. This refinement allows results to be more closely associated with the original query thereby aiding discovery of the sought for pages/documents or awareness of their absence from the site.
The service is publicly accessible at http://www.lse.ac.uk. I ran queries on the system and worked through relevance ranked results with different file types clearly marked. The PDF files, for example, are colored blue, which made them easy to spot. Here’s a typical results list:
The search box has a drop down menu that allows the user to limit the results to specific collections.
I find this type of narrowing useful. I was baffled by the link that said, “to improve results, try”. I could not figure out what was happening. I finally figured out that the right hand link to improve my results was a tiny graphic showing the left hand links that allowed refinement by type (which really means topic category), domain, and file type.
There is an advanced search function. The system invites me to fill out a form. The advanced search functions are used by power users but most users whack two or three words in the search box and give the system a go.
Performance was acceptable, but I don’t have a sense of the size of the corpus processed by the system. You can get more information about Funnelback from the firm’s Web site at www.funnelback.com.
Stephen E Arnold, April 14, 2010
A freebie.
When Dinosaurs Fight: Oracle vs IBM
January 30, 2010
I enjoyed the Bistahieversor sealeyi fight between Oracle and IBM. The eWeek story “IBM Defends DB2 Against Ellison’s ‘Ignorant’ Remarks” is a delightful he-said, she-said. What made it even more delicioius for me is that both of the companies have aging products and are facing some tough competition from a certain outfit in Silicon Valley. When I read the article, I thought about two dinosaurs making big bird calls and scratching the earth. I want to highlihgt one exchange I though worthy of the Scott McNealy school of competitive sniping:
Ellison [Oracle]: “I can’t understand why IBM has never come out with a database machine. DB2 doesn’t cluster, doesn’t scale, nothing. You cannot run an OLTP [online transaction processing] application on DB2, because it doesn’t scale.”
Spang [IBM]: “Let’s talk about the TPC-C [Transaction Processing Performance Council] benchmark. Over the last seven years, DB2 has been in the leadership position about twice as long as Oracle. This game with benchmarks is a leapfrog game. Companies use the latest hardware, [the results improve] and it depends on point in time. What really matters is looking over a period of time for the consistency in the leadership position. So seven years, about twice as many days in the leadership position [over Oracle].
“I’ll give you another one close to a real-world situation: In the three-tiered SAP benchmark, DB2 [on Power systems] has held the record there for almost five years now, doing more than 50 million SAP steps per hour.
“Let’s talk about the SAP apps themselves. Just last year we announced that more than 100 companies had switched from Oracle to DB2 to power their SAP applications. The stories we hear are: better performance—in the range of 20 percent better—while reducing costs 30 to 40 percent. Coca-Cola Bottling was one that was quoted back then, talking about migrating from Sun servers to Power systems. It just made sense to them from a money point of view. “Larry also said something else: That the [recent] uncertainty about Sun systems was just a blip [due to the acquisition process]. Well, Coca-Cola pointed out that they have been switching from Sun to Power systems over a number of years. “I would argue that the uncertainty about Sun systems versus IBM accelerated a trend, and frankly, the uncertainty remains.
IBM and Oracle are more alike than different. Neither seems ready to acknowledge that an ecosystem change may send both big birds to the butcher.
Stephen E Arnold, January 30, 2010
A freebie. I will report this food related post to the Department of Agriculture.
Google Squeezes LexisNexis and Westlaw Hard
November 18, 2009
Google’s Uncle Sam service is arguably a more effective way to find information from various US government entities. I heard a couple of years ago that Google was indexing the content on various state servers. During that time, LexisNexis (a unit of Reed Elsevier) and Westlaw (a unit of Thomson Reuters) have continued with their for-fee content services without much significant change. The legal world has been hit hard by the economic downturn. Many well-heeled corporate clients have holes in their shoes. The law firms to these giants have been asked – nicely, of course – to reign in their spending. Law firms are complying and some are even trimming their staff and looking closely at the expense account of some partners.
Google announced on November 17, 2009, that Google Scholar will contain the full text of
legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts using Google Scholar.
Bang. Just like that the worlds of the for-fee legal information services hear the shockwave of the Google hypersonic bombers buzzing their citadels.
I can hear the rationalizations now: “Our legal content contains footnotes and cross references to make legal research quick, easy, and trouble free.” Or “Google does not understand how to present complex legal information as well as we do.” Or “Lawyers cannot trust Google.”
These and other truisms may have some accuracy embedded in them, but the one big reality is that Google is indexing legal content. Furthermore, Google has some nifty algorithms that can and will add metadata to content so that the Google service will be “good enough.” For law firms struggling to pay their country club fees, Google’s service will be given a close look. My hunch is that the small law firms who cannot afford the fees assessed by the LexisNexis and Westlaw systems will use the Google system. Over time, Google’s approach will choke off much of the oxygen to the commercial legal firms. These outfits have to respond.
So, what are the options?
First, the smart legal publishers will want to figure out how to surf on Google. In my own experience, most of these executives will dismiss this idea, but I think some thinking about this approach is warranted. My videos at http://www.arnoldit.com/video might offer some ideas to legal publishers nervous about the Google’s legal content push.
Second, the firms on the fringe of legal information now have a way to access some information that can be used to enhance their existing content offerings. Google’s service delivers a Ford F 350 stuffed with information that is now accessible. Raw material in my opinion.
Finally, government agencies may just pump content directly into Google. This creates an opportunity for a different type of information service. Lateral thinking is useful for the companies in Washington, DC that recycle information for their constituencies. I see opportunities in this sector.
What is the financial outlook for the LexisNexis-type and Westlaw-type firms? Short term there won’t be much change. Over time, life gets tougher. I do quite a bit of work in online information, and I am not sure these outfits can adapt to the Google’s legal push. Just my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, November 18, 2009
A quick report to the Department of Justice. I was not paid by anyone to write this opinion. You, gentle reader, have not paid me to read it. Seems fair.
Treat from an Online Search
October 30, 2009
I am making my way from the frozen wilds of Canada to the comfort of Harrods Creek. I ran a query on the Courier Journal’s Web site and spotted this news item. (Yes, I know the site is almost unusable, but that’s not my problem, gentle reader.) I cannot resist sharing it with my two or three readers.
Navigate to the story “Nord’s Long Johns Will Lure Bacon Fans.” Read the article and consider your own breakfast fare. A pastry with a strip of bacon. Now that’s Kentucky kuisine.
Stephen Arnold, October 20, 2009
Obviously no one in his or her right mind would pay me for an article with the word “kuisine” in it.
Coveo Launches Thought Leader Initiative
September 14, 2009
Interesting item crossed my desk this evening (September 11, 2009): “Coveo Announces Thought Leaders of Enterprise Search – Seminar Series”. The news item stated:
[Coveo] announced the first seminar in its Thought Leaders of Enterprise Search – Seminar Series, taking place Thursday, October 1st, 2009, at Haley & Aldrich headquarters in Boston, MA. The Series will also be held in New York, San Jose, Brussels and Montreal.
The idea is to feature a customer describing the benefits of using the Coveo technology for enterprise search, content processing, and discovery. The Beyond Search team thinks this is a very good idea.
Stephen Arnold, September 14, 2009
Google Books and Lousy Indexing
September 6, 2009
Thomas Claburn’s “Google Books Metadata Includes Millions of Errors” disclosed some dirty meta data laundry from the Google Books project. Mr. Claburn reported:
A metadata provider gave Google a large number of book records from Brazil that list 1899 as a default publication date, resulting in about 250,000 misdated books from this one source.
Mr. Claburn rounded up additional information that suggests the error problem is orders of magnitude larger than some expect. The good news is that Google is working to correct errors. The bad news is that Google, like other commercial database producers, generates products and services that users perceive to be “right”. In reality, there are quite a few flaws in electronic products. Mistakes in print can be seen and easily shared with others. Electronic mistakes often behave differently and in many cases will go uncorrected for a long time, maybe forever, without anyone knowing what’s amiss or what the impact of the mistake is when smart software sucks up errors as fact. Whizzy new systems that generate reliability and provenance “tags” can be easily fooled. The repercussions of these types of propagated errors are going to be interesting to understand.
Stephen Arnold, September 6, 2009
Google Certification Baby Steps
July 6, 2009
Microsoft’s “partner” program has been a gold mine. Partners pay to be certified. Partners pay to attend conferences. Partners spend to dedicate engineers to things Microsoft. Google has some partner savvy wizards on its staff, but the company has been taking baby steps to build a really big partner ecosystem. Today’s partners are more like junior Googlers than the Big Deal Certified Gold outfits that Microsoft has in tow.
That might be changing.
Read “Google Sets up Accreditation Programme to Safeguard Site Conversion”. You see words that suggest that Google wants to do good. You see words that dance away from Big Time Certification and Accreditation. I noted this passage:
Google has extended the project by launching the Google Conversion Professional (GCP) programmed to help brands connect with those companies it deems to be the best conversion specialists….Graham Cooke, Google UK senior ecommerce manager, said, “We want our customers to get the best ROI from their advertising. If we’re driving paid clicks to a site but they’re not converting as well as they could be, we want that to be improved.”
For this addled goose, the Google is taking some baby steps.
Stephen Arnold, July 6, 2009
Brainware Gets Oracle Certification
July 1, 2009
I found the news story on the Forbes.com site interesting. (I am again puzzled about who wrote what on Forbes.com, so the provenance of this “story” may be Brainware’s ever alert PR department.) Assume that it is 100 percent beef. The headline offers only the tip of an implication iceberg: “Brainware Distiller Receives Latest oracle E Business Suite Certification”. Brainware is a vendor of search and content processing systems. The firm has an end-to-end capability; that is, a licensee can scan, convert to text, and then index with the Brainware trigram technology the content. For the industrious, Brainware provides a method to hook a taxonomy or other controlled term list into the system. What’s remarkable about this announcement is that Brainware is following in the footsteps of Autonomy, the original ace holder in Internet marketing. Here’s why:
- Oracle allows third parties to develop for its platform. This type of deal is usually additive. The Brainware approach allows somewhat deeper hooks into the cherished realm of Ellison land.
- Oracle is already making it tough to find information about SES10g. Ultra Search seems to be a popular moniker now, but Brainware is at its core a search system with an unusual technology. I wonder if this deal is a prelude Oracle’s finally making an effort to get search and content processing technology that is affordable, integrates with Oracle stuff, and works reasonably well.
- Brainware, already a player in legal document publishing, has found a way to put its search nose into a number of potentially lucrative Oracle customers’ cook outs. Other search vendors may want to rethink their Oracle strategies.
I am eager to see how this plays out with the Oracle sales machine.
Stephen Arnold, July 1, 2009
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