Leaning In and Communicating: Interns Learn from Sheryl Sanberg and Each Other
September 10, 2013
The article Lean In Moments: Anne Madoff at Palantir Technologies on Seeing I-To-I refers to Sheryl Sandberg’s recent publication Lean In, which encourages young women to take on more responsibility and trust their abilities in the workplace. A young female intern at Palantir Technologies felt dismayingly out of her element when she began there. This was not a new feeling, or a unique one. There is an ongoing self-doubt in spite of her achievements and success. The article explains,
“One day at lunch, my insecurities finally subsided. I was sitting with some interns I didn’t know very well, and one of the girls I’d just met said, “Ugh! My Palan-fear was out of control when I got here. I’m so glad it’s eased up.” I looked at her confusedly, and asked what “Palan-fear” meant. “You know, the fear that everyone here is way smarter than you are,” she replied. I felt just like I did at 16 when I read about Sheryl Sandberg’s anxieties: “wow, it’s not just me.”
Simply knowing that this was a wide-spread fear, a disease in fact, seemed to alleviate its effects. Palantir’s interns discovered that everyone feels like the dumbest person in the room on occasion. This sort of marketing seems to channel Marshall McLuhan’s ‘medium as message’ campaign.
Chelsea Kerwin, September 10, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Enterprise Search: Finding Flounders Floundering
September 9, 2013
A founder is a flat fish. In today’s whiz kid world, “flounder” does not make one drool for a fish stew. “Flounder” means to the Free Dictionary, “to move or act clumsily and in confusion.” I made the connection to search as a result of a seemingly innocuous discussion on LinkedIn about improving search.
A flounder not yet out of water.
I am not sure about the rules for linking to LinkedIn content. I have to watch my Ps and Qs because two of the goslings and I learned on Friday, September 6, 2013, that some of the queries I launched from my research computer were not processed by Slideshare. Was this a glitch or some intentional action? I don’t know. To be on the safe side, I will not link to the thread called “How to manage queries having no relevant answers but still matching some terms.” If you are a LinkedIn customer, you can log in and locate the discussion using the LinkedIn “finding” system. How well with that work out for you? Well, that’s another search topic.
To recap the thread, a LinkedIn customer is responsible for an Intranet search system. When its users run a query, the system produces a results list which do not answer some users’ questions. There is term matching, but the content is not on point. I no longer like to beat the drum for precision and recall. We are now in the era of good enough search. Few take the time to create a vetted content inventory. When the search system is rolled out, no one really knows what’s “in” the index. The point that a query contains terms which match some content but makes users grouse is not new.
Caught by an unhappy user who happens to be the CFO figuring out why so much money was spent for a search system that did not work.
The fix, of course, is like trying to refuel an old fashioned propeller driven aircraft with a somewhat more modern jet powered tanker. The job is going to be tricky and may end with some excitement. Jets and prop driven aircraft like enterprise search and quick mixes might not be a happy combination like peanut butter and jelly.
In 2004, then Googler Dave Girouard said in eCommerce Times:
“The funny part is it’s easier to find box scores from the 1957 World Series than it is to find last quarter’s sales presentation in the enterprise. While Web search has gotten really good, enterprise search has stagnated, and that’s why we really believe it’s a problem that needs to be solved and that Google has a unique set of capabilities to solve it.”
Well, Mr. Girouard has moved on and Google is advertising on LinkedIn for yet another wizard to work on enterprise search. If Google cannot knock the ball out of the park, who can? Is HP Autonomy the go-to system? What about a low-cost option like dtSearch? Why not download Elasticsearch, Constellio, of one of the other open source solutions? Maybe a company should embrace a predictive solution from Agilex or Palantir?
Next Generation Content Processing: Tail Fins and Big Data
August 19, 2013
Note: I wrote this for Homeland Security Today. It will appear when the site works out its production problems. As background, check out “The Defense Department Thinks Troves of Personal Data Pose a National Security Threat.” If the Big Data systems worked as marketers said, the next generation systems would these success stories provide ample evidence of the value of these Big Data systems?]
Next-generation content processing seems, like wine, to improve with age. Over the last four years, smart software has been enhanced by design. What is your impression of the eye-popping interfaces from high-profile vendors like Algilex, Cybertap, Digital Reasoning, IBM i2, Palantir, Recorded Future, and similar firms? ((A useful list is available from Carahsoft at http://goo.gl/v853TK.)
For me, I am reminded of the design trends for tail fins and chrome for US automobiles in the 1950s and 1960s. Technology advances in these two decades moved forward, but soaring fins and chrome bright work advanced more quickly. The basics of the automobile remained unchanged. Even today’s most advanced models perform the same functions as the Kings of Chrome of an earlier era. Eye candy has been enhanced with creature comforts. But the basics of today’s automobile would be recognized and easily used by a driver from Chubby Checker’s era. The refrain “Let’s twist again like we did last summer” applies to most of the advanced software used by law enforcement and the intelligence community.
[Image file: tailfin.png]
The tailfin of a 1959 Cadillac. Although bold, the tailfins of the 1959 Plymouth Fury and the limited production Superbird and Dodge Daytona dwarfed GM’s excesses. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cadillac1001.jpg
Try this simple test. Here are screenshots from five next-generation content processing systems. Can you match the graphics with the vendor?
Here are the companies whose visual outputs appear below. Easy enough, just like one of those primary school exercises, simply match the interface with the company
The vendors represented are:
A Digital Reasoning (founded in 2000 funded in part by SilverLake. The company positions itself as providing automated understanding as did Autonomy, founded in 1996)
B IBM i2 (industry leader since the mid 1990s)
C Palantir (founded a decade ago with $300 million in funding by Founders fund, Glynn Capital Management, and others)
D Quid (a start up funded in part by Atomico, SV Angel, and others)
E Recorded Future (funded in part by In-Q-Tel and Google, founded by the developer of Spotfire)
InetSoft Ramps Up Marketing
July 25, 2013
My Overflight system alerted me to a PR spike from InetSoft, a business intelligence software vendor which opened for business in 1996. One unique selling proposition for InetSoft is its small footprint. The idea is that some of the newer systems consume significant resources.
The company issued a news release in late June 2013 which explains the firm’s market approach for the balance of 2013. What’s interesting is that many business intelligence vendors do not articulate a strategy. When my goslings (colleagues) and I talk about the companies which once showed promise and seemed to fade after the venture funds hit the bank account, there are some “strategies” which manifest themselves. For example, some business intelligence vendors keep a low profile and pursue government funding; for example, Agiliex, Digital Reasoning, etc. Other business intelligence vendors go where the Wall Street money is; for example, financial services solutions from MarkLogic, Palantir, etc. Other firms sell out and the acquiring firms sell business intelligence to existing customers; Oracle Endeca, Microsoft Fast Search, etc.
So what is InetSoft announcing. Let me highlight a few of the items from “Business Intelligence Pionee4er InetSoft’s Chief Strategy Officer Discusses Results, Strategy, and Outlook”:
- Leverage the InetSoft reputation for being a good partner
- Emphasize the importance of finding out if the client has a budget for business intelligence software
- Focus on business intelligence, not certain operations such as real-time monitoring
- Delver dashboarding, reporting, and data mashups
- Emphasize ease of use
- Improve forecasting
- Keep balance between lease based contracts and outright purchase contracts.
The write up reported that the InetSoft’s Rajiv Bala Subramanian allegedly said:
I think we are positioned as a niche vendor in the business intelligence market with three core strengths: we offer real-time web-based dashboards that can be built by end users, on-demand publishing-quality reports, and a patent pending data mash up platform that does not require a data warehouse of any kind. Our team is also highly skilled in web and end-to-end portal technologies, making us quite a unique outfit. Practically every business intelligence vendor in the market right now claims to have invented visual analytics. The fact is, visual analytics is simply business intelligence with a different sales and marketing hat on. It has been around for years, and all business intelligence vendors do a very good job at it. But there are these three things that InetSoft is great at, and our goal is to continue to be great in those three areas.
For more information about InetSoft navigate to www.inetsoft.com.
Stephen E Arnold, July 25, 2013
Sponsored by Xenky
Big Data Startup Parade Begins with These 14 Companies
July 14, 2013
Business Insider posted an article titled 14 Big Data Startups You’re Going to be Hearing A Lot More About on June 4, 2013. The article explores the big data companies teetering on the edge of wild success and fame. The companies named include WibiData, Hadapt, Sqrrl, Precog, Datameer, HStreaming, Alpine Data Labs and Kontagent. The article claims,
“Google, Facebook, Amazon and other web giants have harnessed big data to solve some of their biggest tech challenges. Now many of these engineers are setting out on their own with startups. Some are focused on analytics. Some are working on in-memory databases, which do all their work on data stored in memory instead of hard drives. Others are casting their lot with NoSQL, a new kind of database that spreads processing and storage across multiple servers and storage systems.”
For example, Data Gravity, founded in 2012 with headquarters in Nashua, NH and star Paula Long, makes big data more affordable by embedding the tech into storage systems. The implications posed by these startups for IBM SPSS, SAS, Palantir and Digital Reasoning are as yet unclear. VC’s certainly seem optimistic, with almost all of the startups mentioned raking in millions of dollars from various backers.
Chelsea Kerwin, July 14, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Search and Content Processing Vendor in the Spotlight
June 8, 2013
Once again I have no opinion about allegations regarding data intercepts. Not my business. Here in Harrod’s Creek, I am thrilled to have electric power and a couple of dogs to accompany me on my morning walk in the hollow by the pond filled with mine drainage.
I did read a TPM story commenting about Palantir, a company which has more than $100 million in funding and now has a PR profile higher than the Empire State Building. The write up explains that a company with search, connectors, and some repackaged numerical recipes may be involved with certain US government activities.
Here’s a quote from a quote in the write up:
Apparently, Palantir has a software package called “Prism”: “Prism is a software component that lets you quickly integrate external databases into Palantir.” That sounds like exactly the tool you’d want if you were trying to find patterns in data from multiple companies.
The write up has some links to Palantir documents.
Several thoughts:
First, there are quite a few firms working in the same content processing sector as Palantir. Some of these you may know; for example IBM. Others are probably off your radar and maybe drifting into oblivion like Digital Reasoning. The point is that many organizations looking to make money from search and content processing have turned to government contracts to stay afloat. Why haven’t real journalists and azure chip consultants cranking out pay to play profiles described the business functions of these outfits? Maybe these experts and former English majors are not such smart folks after all. Writing about Microsoft is just easier perhaps>
Second, the fancy math outfits are not confined to Silicon Valley. Nope, there are some pretty clever systems built and operated outside the US. You can find some nifty technology in such surprising places as downtown Paris, a Stockholm suburb, and far off Madrid. Why? There is a global appetite for software and systems which can make sense of Big Data. I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, but these systems do not vary too much. They use similar math, have similar weaknesses, and similar outputs. The reason? Ah, gentle reader, Big O helps make clear why fancy math systems are pretty much alike as information access systems have been for decades.
Third, the marketers convince the bureaucrats that they have a capability which is bigger, faster, and cheaper. In today’s world this translates to giant server farms and digital Dysons. When the marketers have moved on to sell Teslas, lesser souls are left with the task of making the systems work.
My view is that we are in the midst of the largest single PR event related to search in my lifetime.
Will the discussion of search and content processing improve information access?
Nope.
Will the visibility alter the trajectory of hybrid systems which “understand” content?
Nope.
Will Big Data yield high value insights which the marketers promised?
Nope.
My thought is that there will be more marketing thrills in the search and content processing sector. Stay tuned but don’t use a fancy math system to pick your retirement investment, the winner of today’s Belmont, or do much more than deliver a 1970s type of survey output.
Oh, the Big O. The annoying computational barriers. The need to recycle a dozen or so well known math methods juiced with some visualizations.
The search and content processing bandwagon rolls forward. The cloud of unknowing surrounds information access. What’s new?
Stephen E Arnold, June 8, 2013
Sponsored by Xenky, the ArnoldIT portal.
HP, Autonomy, and a Context Free Expert Output about Search: The Bet on a Horse Approach to Market Analysis
May 4, 2013
I don’t think too much about:
- Azure chip consultants. You know, these are the firms which make a living from rah rahs, buzzwording, and pontification to sell reports. (I know. I labored at a non-azure chip outfit for what seems like decades. Experience is a good instructor. Oh, if you are a consultant, please, complain about my opinion using the comments section of this free blog.)
- Hewlett Packard. I recall that the company used to make lab equipment which was cool. Now I think the firm is in some other businesses but as quickly as I latch on to one like the Treo and mobile, HP exits the business. The venerable firm confuses my 69 year old mind.
- Autonomy. I think I did some work for the outfit but I cannot recall. Age and the lifestyle in rural Kentucky takes a toll on the memory I admit.
Nevertheless, I read “HP’s Autonomy Could Face Uphill Battle In Data Market.” There were some gems in the write up which I found amusing and illustrative of the problems which azure chip consulting firms and their experts have when tackling certain business issues.
The main idea of the write up for “investors” is that HP faces “challenges.” Okay. That’s a blinding insight. As you may recall, HP bought Autonomy for $11 billion and then a few months later roiled the “investors” by writing off billions on the deal. That was the mobile phone model, wasn’t it?
The write up then pointed out:
HP wanted Autonomy to jump-start its move into software and cloud-based computing. Autonomy is the No. 1 provider of search and retrieval software that companies use to find and share files and other information on their websites and document management systems.
Okay. But that too seems obvious.
Now here comes the kicker. The expert outfit providing inputs to the reporter doing the bull dog grip on this worn out bone is quoted as saying:
“Software license revenue (in this market) isn’t growing at the same rate as before, and we are beginning to see the rise of some new technologies, specifically content analytics and unified information access,” Schubmehl said. These new types of software can be used with types of business analytics software, business intelligence software and other software to help enterprises do a better job of locating specific information, he says, which is the job of search retrieval software.
I don’t know much about IDC but what strikes me from this passage is that there are some assertions in this snippet which may warrant a tiny bit of evaluation.
Will context free analyses deliver a winner? Will there be a Gamblers Anonymous for those who bet on what journalists and mid tier (second string) consultancies promulgate? For more about Gamblers Anonymous navigate to http://www.gamblersanonymous.org/ga/
Here goes:
Swinging for the Fences and Search
April 22, 2013
I have been reading—actually time traveling to an economics class in graduate school—David Stockman’s The Great Deformation. I follow the argument. No problem, but I am skeptical of blame from those who were involved in the events. I have been in quite a few crazy meetings, and I avoid discussing the subjects of most of those stories for two reasons: [a] In the midst of events, I had zero clue about the larger, political forces at work in which the meeting was a grain of sand in the larger dust storm and [b] I focus on search and retrieval, a subject definitely not part of the more interesting meetings in which I have participated over the last 40 years.
What impact does the “big bet” approach to investing have on search, content, and analytics vendors?
However, the “deformation” arguments triggered some thinking after I read “Google Investors Say Yes to Big Bets.” I have been looking at some of the reviews of the book. In the Kirkus Review a theme surfaced:
fiscal math hit the shoals,” leaving a legacy of permanent “massive deficit finance” and the legend that “deficits didn’t matter.”
What’s this have to do with search? Well, that is a good question. I took a moment and looked up the venture money which has flowed into a handful of search and content processing companies. Here’s the table in which I captured my result. The link points to the source (maybe a good source, maybe a lousy source).
| Company | Venture Funding | Year Founded |
| Attivio | $48.2 million | 2007 |
| BA Insight | $10.5 million | 2004 |
| Coveo | $34.7 million | 2004 |
| Digital Reasoning* | $5.2 million | 2000 |
| Palantir ** | $301 million | 2004 |
| Vivisimo | $4 million | 2008 |
* The Digital Reasoning number includes In-Q-Tel funding excludes friends, angels, and family funding
** I included Palantir because in one briefing the system was presented as having a robust search function available to analyst users.
If I total these numbers, I get $403.6 million. Tossing out the astounding $301 million for Palantir, the more “searchy” vendors’ funding in this sample total $102.6 million.
Several questions rose in my mind:
First, in today’s economy, how will these firms return to investors their money, interest, and a profit?
Tougher Times for Cash Hungry Content Processing Vendors?
April 18, 2013
I read the troubling write up “Q1 Venture Capital Spending And Number Of Deals Down, M&A Activity Drops 44 Percent And Pre-Money Valuations Plummet”. Try as I might, I could not see much good news in the data presented.
The main point of the write up was in my opinion:
Deals in Information Technology (IT), Healthcare, Energy and Utilities, and Industrial Goods all declined, and deals in Business and Financial Services, Consumer Goods, and Consumer Services investment increased from the previous quarter.
For companies in the search, content processing, and analytics sector with a consumer angle, the good news is that money may continue to flow and may, in some cases, spike.
For other types of outfits, money may become more difficult to get. If a funding source is available, my hunch is that investors may be taking increasingly critical looks at the companies ingesting money. How does one age a Type A 35 year old senior manager? My thought is, “Ask for actions that deliver revenue, not marketing puffery.” I am probably off base, but the Techcrunch story suggests that a downward trend may be upon us.
One cannot forget that the investors’ expectation is a return. For companies in the old “search” space, revenues are going to be needed to avoid one of those legendary investor actions: Top management replacement, fire sale, forced merger, intellectual property auction, shut down, or some similar step.
Going forward, search, content processing, and analytics vendors are going to have to generate more revenue. In short, the squeezable days of the last three years may be going away.
Can the search, content processing, and analytics vendors which have taken sums ranging from a few million (BA Insight, Digital Reasoning) to tens of millions (Attivio, Coveo) to hundreds of millions (Palantir) deliver significant top line growth and demonstrate a here-and-now value proposition? One or more of these companies will definitely perform. The ones which do not? Well, that’s what makes search and content processing so darned interesting.
One of my financial clients has asked me to poke around with some numbers and market appetite. No results in hand yet. The project is interesting.
Stephen E Arnold, April 18, 2013
Sponsored by HighGainBlog
Government Initiatives and Search: A Make-Work Project or Innovation Driver?
March 25, 2013
I don’t want to pick on government funding of research into search and retrieval. My goodness, pointing out that payoffs from government funded research into information retrieval would bring down the wrath of the Greek gods. Canada, the European Community, the US government, Japan, and dozens of other nation states have poured funds into search.
In the US, a look at the projects underway at the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval reveals a wide range of investigations. Three of the projects have National Science Foundation support: Connecting the ephemeral and archival information networks, Transforming long queries, and Mining a million scanned books. These are interesting topics and the activity is paralleled in other agencies and in other countries.
Is fundamental research into search high level busy work. Researchers are busy but the results are not having a significant impact on most users who struggle with modern systems usability, relevance, and accuracy.
In 2007 I read “Meeting of the MINDS: An Information Retrieval Research Agenda.” The report was sponsored by various US government agencies. The points made in the report were, like the University of Massachusetts’ current research run down, were excellent. The 2007 recent influences are timely six years later. The questions about commercial search engines, if anything, are unanswered. The challenges of heterogeneous data also remain. Information analysis and organization which is today associated with analytics and visualization-centric systems could be reprinted with virtually no changes. I cite one example, now 72 months young, for your consideration:
We believe the next generation of IR systems will have to provide specific tools for information transformation and user-information manipulation. Tools for information transformation in real time in response to a query will include, for example, (a) clustering of documents or document passages to identify both an information group and also the document or set of passages that is representative of the group; (b) linking retrieved items in timelines that reflect the precedence or pseudo-causal relations among related items; (c) highlighting the implicit social networks among the entities (individuals) in retrieved material;
and (d) summarizing and arranging the responses in useful rhetorical presentations, such as giving the gist of the “for” vs. the “against” arguments in a set of responses on the question of whether surgery is recommended for very early-stage breast cancer. Tools for information manipulation will include, for example, interfaces that help a person visualize and explore the information that is thematically related to the query. In general, the system will have to support the user both actively, as when the user designates a specific information transformation (e.g., an arrangement of data along a timeline), and also passively, as when the system recognizes that the user is engaged in a particular task (e.g., writing a report on a competing business). The selection of information to retrieve, the organization of results, and how the results are displayed to the user all are part of the new model of relevance.
In Europe, there are similar programs. Examples range from Europa’s sprawling ambitions to Future Internet activities. There is Promise. There are data forums, health competence initiatives, and “impact”. See, for example, Impact. I documented Japan’s activities in the 1990s in my monograph Investing in an Information Infrastructure, which is now out of print. A quick look at Japan’s economic situation and its role in search and retrieval reveals that modest progress has been made.
Stepping back, the larger question is, “What has been the direct benefit of these government initiatives in search and retrieval?”
On one hand, a number of projects and companies have been kept afloat due to the funds injected into them. In-Q-Tel has supported dozens of commercial enterprises, and most of them remain somewhat narrowly focused solution providers. Their work has been suggestive, but none has achieved the breathtaking heights of Facebook or Twitter. (Search is a tiny part of these two firms, of course, but the government funding has not had a comparable winner in my opinion.) The benefit has been employment, publications like the one cited above, and opportunities for researchers to work in a community.,
On the other hand, the fungible benefits have been modest. As the economic situation in the US, Europe, and Japan has worsened, search has not kept pace. The success story is Google, which has used search to sell advertising. I suppose that’s an innovation, but it is not one which is a result of government funding. The Autonomy, Endeca, Fast Search-type of payoff has been surprising. Money has been made by individuals, but the technology has created a number of waves. The Hewlett Packard Autonomy dust up is an example. Endeca is a unit of Oracle and is becoming more of a utility than a technology game changer. Fast Search has largely contracted and has, like Endeca, become a component.
Some observations are warranted.
First, search and retrieval is a subject of intense interest. However, the progress in information retrieval is advancing just slowly in my opinion. I think there are fundamental issues which researchers have not been able to resolve. If anything, search is more complicated today than it was when the Minds Agenda cited above was published. The question is, “Maybe search is more difficult than finding the Higgs Boson?” If so, more funding for search and retrieval investigations is needed. The problem is that the US, Europe, and Japan are operating at a deficit. Priorities must come into play.
Second, the narrow focus of research, while useful, may generate insights which affect the margins of larger information retrieval questions. For example, modern systems can be spoofed. Modern systems generate strong user antipathy more than half the time because they are too hard to use or don’t answer the user’s question. The problem is that the systems output information which is quite likely incorrect or not useful. Search may contribute to poor decisions, not improve decisions. The notion that one is better off using more traditional methods of research is something not discussed by some of the professionals engaged in inventing, studying, or selling search technology.
Third, search has fragmented into a mind boggling number of disciplines and sub-disciplines. Examples range from Coveo (a company which has ingested millions in venture funding and support from the province of Québec) which is sometimes a customer support system and sometimes a search system to Palantir (a recipient of venture funding and US government funding) which outputs charts and graphs, relegating search to a utility function.
Net net: I am not advocating the position that search is unimportant. Information retrieval is very important. One cannot perform some work today unless one can locate a specific digital item in many cases.
The point is that money is being spent, energies invested, and initiatives launched without accountability. When programs go off the rails, these programs need to be redirected or, in some cases, terminated.
What’s going on is that information about search produced in 2007 is as fresh today as it was 72 months ago. That’s not a sign of progress. That’s a sign that very little progress is evident. The government initiatives have benefits in terms of making jobs and funding some start ups. I am not sure that the benefits affect a broader base of people.
With deficit financing the new normal, I think accountability is needed. Do we need some conferences? Do we need giveaways like pens and bags? Do we need academic research projects running without oversight? Do we need to fund initiatives which generate Hollywood type outputs? Do we need more search systems which cannot detect semantically shaped or incorrect outputs?
Time for change is upon us.
Stephen E Arnold, March 25, 2013
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