Coveo Discloses Client Wins in Q209
August 14, 2009
Coveo is a technology company with some interesting products. I learned about the firm when I poked into the origins of the desktop search system called Copernic. The firm flashed on my radar with a snap in solution for SharePoint. I saw a demonstration of email search that provided features I had heard other vendors describe. Coveo implemented them; for example, maintaining a complete email archive for the user’s desktop computer so if he or she lost a mobile device, the mail was recoverable.
Getting information out of Coveo has not been easy for me. I received a link to a Marketwire article that provided me with some useful information, and I wanted to snag it before the data gets buried in the digital avalanche that cascades into the goose pond each day.
Coveo disclosed several interesting customer wins:
- Goodrich Corporation, a Fortune 500 company
- Odyssey America, an insurance firm
- The Doctor’s Company, an insurer of physicians and surgeon.
Coveo also formed alliances with New Idea Engineering and a number of other integrators around the world.
A happy quack to Coveo and a wing flap to the person at Coveo who provided this information.
Stephen Arnold, August 14, 2009
PageSuite and Its Digital Newspaper
August 14, 2009
PageSuite Ltd., http://www.pagesuite.com, is powering the new http://mydigitalnewspaper.com, the “world’s first” digital newspaper aggregator and search suite. Now you can search for and read stories from online papers from all over the world, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and more. A marketing e-mail from PageSuite alerting us to the service highlighted the search function. It can be segmented by country, publication, date and even the type of title in publications ranging from daily, weekly, monthly, free and paid for newspapers. The site is fairly simple and easy to use. It’s a great idea, although the newspaper industry is still torn on digital access issues, which led to this problem we ran into that was mentioned above: A simple story link to guardian.co.uk was blocked, requiring site registration.
Jessica Bratcher, August 14, 2009
Textbook Publishers Experience Open Source
August 14, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me the link to the Slashdot story “Open Textbooks Win Over Publishers In Ca.” The point of the story is that the for fee textbook crowd looked like the folks who received “Also Participated” awards when I was a high school debater. Now the for fee crowd will have to respond. I wonder if the big name text book publishers have checked out the lectures on iTunes and YouTube.com. The multimedia content has possibly slipped away as well.
Stephen Arnold, August 15, 2009
Belief Networks Beefs Up Lingospot
August 14, 2009
Back in May we wrote about Lingospot, http://www.lingospot.com/, (see http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2008/05/09/lingospot-in-text-content-discovery-means-auto-linking/) and its in-text auto-linking Discovery Bubbles. We tested the Lingospot set up at Forbes.com and didn’t find it very useful, though it seemed promising. We just got a pointer that a product put out by Belief Networks has improved the service of real-time personalized recommendation. Rather than bubbles, the suggestions are displayed in a one-line “Like This Story?” banner at the top of the page. You can check out Belief’s service at Charleston, S.C., news aggregator, The Digitel (http://thedigitel.com/). We like it because it doesn’t block the text that we’re trying to read. Looks like auto-recommendations are much improved. A happy quack to Belief Systems.
Jessica Bratcher, August 14, 2009
Elsevier, Clumsy, Arrogant, or Greedy
August 14, 2009
TechDirt’s “Elsevier Caught Again: Published Ghost Written, Industry Supporting Articles as Scientific Research” makes the Beyond Search marketing Web log look like a real literary gem. I admit that this Web log is a marketing vehicle. The ads on my Web site promote my Google study. I use AdWords to make a few bucks each month. I sell Search Wizards Speak write ups to anyone who can get a $5 bill into one of my webbed feet. If TechDirt’s information is on target, Elsevier emulates the addled goose but keeps the marketing part quiet, out of sight. TechDirt reported:
Coral Hess notes yet another scandal, once again involving Elsevier’s (now) fake stamp of approval. This time, it involved people hired by certain pharma companies ghostwriting scientific “review” articles that were supposed to give an overview of all the research on certain treatments, but… “emphasized the benefits and de-emphasized the risks” of those treatments. And people wonder why we’re so skeptical about allowing pharma companies to dictate both our healthcare plans and our patent laws…
The addled goose does not deal in information that is a matter of life and death. Elsevier does. Honk.
Stephen Arnold, August 13, 2009
Blocking News Called Dumb
August 13, 2009
Contentious.com’s “Why Blocking News Aggregators Is Dumb and Won’t Work” takes a clear position about a “crack epidemic” in big media senior management meetings. You may find the write up interesting because it constitutes a summary of how the young at heart view some of the tenets of traditional book, magazine, television, and newspaper companies. For me the most insightful statement in the article was:
As I noted earlier today (see Washington Post: Go Gawker Yourself), news organizations probably have more to gain by creating their own summaries and aggregators than by railing against the people who spotted this opportunity first. Or, if they’re just not up to that challenge, they could actively partner with aggregators, bloggers, and entertaining “newsmockers” like Gawker and The Daily Show to make the relationship more mutually beneficial.
I find the idea of partnering interesting. The partners of interest to me, however, are not mentioned in the article. I wonder if big media has considered surfing on the Google? Probably but is big media’s analysis of the opportunities Google presents fully informed?
Stephen Arnold, August 13, 2009
Wall Street Journal Spamming
August 13, 2009
Short honk: Rupert Murdoch’s minions are still spamming me. I am a paid subscriber and I am being bombarded with emails begging me to become a paying customer. Unlike the Viagra and Nigerian methods, the Wall Street Journal shows neither originality or cleverness. And folks wonder why the WSJ is not what it once was?
Stephen Arnold, August 13, 2009
WSJ Still Spamming
August 13, 2009
The Wall Street Journal assumes spam will cause me to buy another subscription. Wrong. I have called. I have emailed. I have blogged. Still the WSJ spams me—a paying customer. I guess that “charging for online” angle is going to need support from the Viagram and Nigerian schools of marketing. Classy. I suppose that is to be expected from a business newspaper with sports where thought provoking stories once dominated. Here’s the DKIM signature:
v=1; a=rsa-sha1; c=relaxed/relaxed; s=default; d=filtereddest.com; h=From:To:Subject:MIME-Version:Content-type:Message-ID:Date; i=wsjo@filtereddest.com; bh=FEMkOSfgzljzY2zc+3QvT9jLplY=; b=QxZVh9xof482RyxSlsSeL/jkes/JNgxaUZjBXJSSBHda1a7HahsjcXWnviuAjszrZaIIPxIgycPn 1PegWn8zKDdTUroYMNgVdW+OqPdfFaAeTuSAXsbj0BflBrQONvxoYlelWi0Eqz3ACZeaepCRZVhK 3EWADz9IirnupQdXtlY=
Stephen Arnold, August 12, 2009
Google File System, The Next Version
August 13, 2009
Cade Metz’s “Google File System II: Dawn of the Multiplying Master Nodes” pulls together some Google information about an important plumbing change at the Googleplex. The Register points to an interview with a Googler named Sean Qunlan. For me, the most interesting point was:
“Our user base has definitely migrated from being a MapReduce-based world to more of an interactive world that relies on things such as BigTable. Gmail is an obvious example of that. Videos aren’t quite as bad where GFS is concerned because you get to stream data, meaning you can buffer. Still, trying to build an interactive database on top of a file system that was designed from the start to support more batch-oriented operations has certainly proved to be a pain point.”
The Google continues to innovate. The challenges of the “interactive world” will separate those who can from those who cannot in the next generation Web services world.
Stephen Arnold, August 13, 2009
The Content Crisis Deconstructed
August 13, 2009
Business Week’s Lars Bastholm wrote an interesting article. When I read it, I thought about a wacky professor I had at Duquesne University decades ago who loved beyond all reason the approach to textual analysis pinned to Jacque Derrida. (If you cut that class in modern critical analysis, you can get a brief here.) On the surface, “The Content Crisis” is another one of those the “sky is falling” articles that “real” journalists write. When these crisis revealed articles appear in traditional magazines like Business Week, I take notice. My reasoning is that the top brass at McGraw Hill probably does not think to much about the pressures on the worker bees in the journalistic hive on Sixth Avenue. The worker bees do think about what is happening to the magazine industry in particular and the broader traditional information industry in general. A write up like Lars Bastholm is essentially a news story about that now tired phrase “the content crisis”. Passages like this one are recycled like newspapers by the Rumpke Corporation which operates in Harrod’s Creek:
What I propose is that phone companies and Internet providers just slap additional content fees onto their bills. Sure, I don’t like the additional fee. But if a $10 monthly content fee was added to both my existing AT&T and Time Warner bills, and in return I got access to all the content I wanted, it would feel pretty close to free.
The article argues that a magazine can charge for content. The money, however, would be collected by an outfit such as AT&T and Time Warner. Okay. I wonder if Mr. Bastholm knows how money is shared by a utility across multiple providers? That question is one that has been sidestepped in the write up. That question is an important one, however.
The traditional world has morphed. One cannot go back. Image source: http://www.astrococktail.com/images/Deconstruction700.jpg
The article concludes with what was probably in journalism school a killer peg:
So when you think about it, is $20 a month really a big price to pay for saving movies, TV, music, magazines, and newspapers and getting rid of unwanted advertising in one fell swoop? It feels like a bargain to me.
What triggered the Derridaesque moment for me were these notions waddling through this addled goose’s brain:
- The article is less of a news story and more of a plank in a political platform for Rupert Murdoch’s campaign to charge for information with a nod to the microcode method favored by the Associated Press. I can see the senior editor, the publisher, and one McGraw Hill vice president standing in the hall with copies of the print publication, smiling and nodding about a job well done.
- The notion that a utility (essentially a monopoly if set up correctly) will share money in a way that returns the lion’s share of the revenue to one supplier is at odds with my experience. Utilities, due to buying power and market control, force suppliers to deliver at very competitive rates. Instead of a payday, the utility wheels and deals. Coal is a commodity to Duke Power. Information is a commodity to AT&T and Time Warner. Forgetting what business utilities are in will lead to a financial surprise when the first payment arrives 45 to 90 days late.
- The solution advocated in the article does not address the broader challenge. The children of publishing executives—possibly Mr. Bastholm’s own or his friends’ are not interested in traditional media as much as I was when I was young and callow. In fact, each generation in the demographic pipeline younger than the preceding cohort will be less and less interested in the “traditional” approach to information.
Yesterday I had a conversation with a young journalist. I asked about the person’s recent experience in journalism classes at one of the * major * journalism schools. I jotted down that person’s comment because it underscores the need to deconstruct what Business Week has written about “the content crisis”. The journalist told me:
I think that my professors know that the media and news world is changing. But the classes don’t reflect that change. Now that I am working, I see first hand that the traditional approach to news is not where the opportunities are. Online is the future and it has arrived. (Editor at a magazine publisher located in the United States.)
As M. Derrida observed, “Every discourse, even a poetic or oracular sentence, carries with it a system of rules for producing analogous things and thus an outline of methodology.”
Stephen Arnold, August 13, 2009
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