Startling Cloud Cost Data
February 10, 2010
The story “Cloud Shrinks IT Costs by 90%” contains the type of data I like to use in my public lectures. First, it is a blockbuster number—taking $1.00 in costs and chopping them down to one thin dime. Second, the statistical foundation of the number is rarely challenged as long as I can point to an “authoritative source” like ComputerWeekly.com.
For me, the key point in the write up was:
Companies that are using cloud computing are paying as little as one-tenth for the same processing power as they would for equivalent in-house facilities. This emerged from a floor debate at the Powered by Cloud conference in London this week. Asked what return on investment they had achieved from their cloud experiments, representatives from mobile network operator Vodafone and TV broadcaster Channel 4 said the cost of their cloud-based processing was a tenth of traditional in-house computing. A speaker for Verizon, which offers cloud computing, said its customers were saving between 25% and 75% of the traditional costs.
Let’s assume that this type of savings is accurate. What’s the future of on premises software? Well, grim, I suppose. What happens to traditional enterprise software companies? Well, grim, I suppose. What happens to the rationalized IT executives who no longer have a job? Well, grim, I suppose. What about on premises search and content processing systems? Well, grim, I suppose.
The good news is a return to the type of computing environment that characterized some of my early experiences: industry dislocation, limited choice, high costs, and reduced control. Do you see something different?
Stephen E Arnold, February 10-, 2010
No one paid me to write this article. I will alert the facilities manager of the new executive office building, where cost controls are paramount.
Autonomy Bullish on 2010
February 10, 2010
Fresh from a $700 million year, a reader sent me a link to “Autonomy Confident on 2010.” With the US economy on life support, the addled goose gobbled up this bit of good news. For us at Beyond Search, the most salient comment in the article was:
“It’s winter with snowdrops,” he said. “We are very confident in an upturn (the new products) will do very well. Customers from airlines, like American Airlines, through to supermarkets were interested in the products, he said. “It is basically anyone that touches consumers, like Carphone Warehouse , Ericsson and Kraft.”
Information about strong results from Exalead reached us a few days ago. Perhaps the weight of debt in the European Community and the tourist troubling events in Athens and southwestern Italy are anomalies. A recovery may be underway if you are viewing the world from Autonomy’s vantage point.
Stephen E Arnold, February 10, 2010
No one paid the addled goose to write this news item. I will report non payment to the Department of Labor in Washington.
CarryoutText Does Text to Audio
February 10, 2010
I wrote about Google’s translation service for mobile devices a few days ago. I learned about a service called CarryoutText. The idea is to upload text into the CarryoutText. The software will convert the text to an audio file. Perfect for listening on an MP3 device is the benefit. You can learn more about the service at http://www.carryouttext.com.
Stephen E Arnold, February 10, 2010
A freebie. I will report this to FBIS. Ooops. FBIS is an open source intelligence service and does not want to know about the findings of the addled goose.
Sinequa Cozies Up to Actuaries
February 10, 2010
Short honk: A happy quack to the team at Sinequa. The company landed a deal with the US benefits consulting outfit, Mercer. Chock full of actuaries, Mercer provides benefits-related services, an arcane area that baffles the addled goose. According to the information provided to Beyond Search,
Sinequa Enterprise Search will boost Mercer’s productivity, making employees more efficient by enabling them to quickly find relevant information and leverage intellectual capital across the organization. The initial phase of the project has been deployed in the UK, where Mercer has 3,000 employees and an intellectual capital alone consisting of more than 30 million documents. Mercer had previously implemented both desktop and intranet search solutions. However, these disparate search solutions fueled the need for a single unified enterprise search solution.
You can get more information about Sinequa at http://www.sinequa.com. An interview with the managing director of Sinequa is available in the Search Wizards Speak series.
British Library Offers Free Downloads for Kindle
February 9, 2010
Short honk: I wrote a few days ago about national libraries not stepping up to the job of scanning their holdings and making them available. Well, wouldn’t you know? The addled goose was wrong. The British Library is making 19th century first editions available via Amazon for the heavily DRMed Kindle. I have a Kindle, so I the goose is in fine feathers. You can read about these 65,000 “rare first editions” in the Telegraph’s “British Library to Offer 19th Century First Editions for Free Download on Amazon Kindle” and get the details. Unlike the commercial services offering special collections, I think the search and retrieval function may be a bit undernourished. I find the Amazon Kindle search system a drag to use. Heck, I think the Amazon.com search service is almost as bad as Apple’s iTunes’ service.
The 19th century novel has been a area of study I loved. I used to read quickly and with great recall. I remember even today such monumental factoids as the name of Pip’s pal in Great Expectations. (You know, Herbert Pocket.) First editions are interesting if you have the subsequent editions that incorporate either the meddling publisher’s fixes or the author’s attempts to salvage a real loser of a novel based on an even lousier series of monthly segments. (Think Pickwick Papers.) The scholar can work through various editions and identify changes. Some of these research nuggets lead to PhDs if not to jobs.
If you hunger for a penny dreadful, you are in luck. Just make sure you own a Kindle.
My hope is that the British Library shifts into high gear and scans, makes searchable, and offers to researchers its collections of periodicals, broadsheets, and books.
With Google being drawn and quartered by everyone from legal eagles to relatives of deceased writers, the national libraries may have to convert their materials to digital form. I don’t plan on buying microfilm reels from ProQuest or hoping that poor conservation methods will preserve millions of fragile information objects.
My concern is that the collection shows the British Library can do the job. Now the library has to finish the job. Without Google, the ball is back in the national libraries’ side of the court in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, February 9, 2010
No one paid me to write this article. I will report this free work to the National Archives, which is embarking on its own digitization project I hear.
SAP Demonstrates Management Floundering
February 9, 2010
Short honk: SAP, the European software superstar with the TREX search deal and an investment in Endeca, has zigged when I expected a zag. I read “SAP CEO Apotheker Resigns With Immediate Effect, Co-CEOs Named” and learned that two CEOs are better than one, or that’s the theory. What happens to TREX? What will this mean for Endeca? Not much. I think search is the least of SAP’s concerns at this time. The traditional enterprise software business may be entering a boundary condition.
Stephen E Arnold, February 9, 2010
A freebie. I will report this to the Red Cross, an outfit who may want to think about sending assistance to the firm mentioned in this write up.
Facebook Scores Another Gain
February 9, 2010
This Facebook site continues to surprise me. Addled geese do not have too many friends. Our SSN Blog has a Facebook presence, but the addled goose leaves that to a couple of talented goslings; namely, Lauren and Sam. When I read “Facebook Overtakes Google News as Media Site Traffic Driver”, I made a note to myself to ask Lauren and Sam, “What’s with this Facebook craziness?” Publishers have been chasing Google, and now it seems that the Web ecosystem has spawned a more problematic recycling of “real journalism”. Humans. The Google is anchored in numerical recipes. Facebook is anchored in humans. Big difference. In my view, it might prove more challenging to corral people than humans, but I could be wrong.
The most interesting comment in the article in my opinion was:
Facebook was the #4 source of visits to News and Media sites last week, after Google, Yahoo! and msn, according to Hitwise. Google News accounted for 1.39% of visits to News and Media websites, and Facebook accounted for 3.52%. That’s a big shift since last April, when they were about equal.
The article includes a nifty chart and it embeds in its white space this question, “How will publishers deal with a threat from people?” Some of these folks may be the progeny of publishers and real journalists. An issue of interest is this.
Stephen E Arnold, February 9, 2010
No one paid me to write this article. Sigh. I will report non payment to the Department of Commerce which is eager to jump start struggling businesses. Maybe there will be a government subsidy for addled geese.
Nine Nations of North America Rediscovered
February 9, 2010
Short honk: Joel Garreau wrote a darned interesting book, the Nine Nations of North America, in 1981. When I read a Russian intelligence analysis that the US would Balkanize, I realized that the Russian analysts had read Mr. Garreau’s book and applied its ideas to the present US political structure. The Russians tossed in some oregano in the form of budget deficits, unemployment, and the allegedly dysfunctional government. I did not agree with the Russian analysts, but I know the team did its homework.
When I read PeteSearch’s “How to Split Up the US”, I was struck by the congruence with Mr. Garreau’s quarter century old analysis. I also had the thought that the author of the PeteSearch article had not read Mr. Garreau’s book. I think there was an opportunity to move a Facebook user analysis into a more significant statement about behaviors of the Facebook community.
Nevertheless, I did find this passage interesting:
Looking at the network of US cities, it’s been remarkable to see how groups of them form clusters, with strong connections locally but few contacts outside the cluster.
Hopefully the hard data will be summarized and placed in the context of researchers who anticipated to some degree this type of binding.
Stephen E Arnold, February 9, 2010
No one paid me to be a pedant. I don’t know to whom to report this behavior. Perhaps the Corps of Engineers? Details are important to this group.
Analysis of Aardvark and Crowdsourcing Answers to Questions
February 9, 2010
We received a copy of the paper “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine”.
The information was interesting. The idea is that individuals who have an intereset in answering questions related to their area of expertise provides an adjunct to other research methods. The paper explains the method used to determine who should answer a question and the other components of the “social search system”.
If you have not visited the Aardvark Web site, you will want to take a look at the service. The url is www.vark.com. The screen shot below shows the search box and the firm’s explanation of what happens when you ask a question of the Aardvark question answering community.
The informatoin in the paper suggests that members’ question are more lengthy than a query sent to Google. Instead of two or three words, think about a sentence with a dozen or more words. In addition, the answerer and the questioneer can enter into a conversation which further disambiguates and tugs out the needed information.
All good.
When we talked about this paper at lunch, the goslings asked a number of rhetorical questions. I want to share three of these with you, so you can think about the Aardvark paper and your own experience with question answering systems:
- The people answering questions have self selected to answer questions. When the method is moved to a more general audience—for example, Facebook or Orkut—will the metrics in the paper be congruent with the broader community’s behavior? (In the self selected community about half of those registered did not ask or answer a question according to the paper.)
- In question answering systems, how will disinformation be identified and filtered? (Some government entities, not the US in my opinion, could inject intentionally shaped information which the questioner could accpet as fact than pass along as accurate information.)
- Pre computing certain values is one way to minimize computational load; however, over time an expert may acquire additional domains of expertise. How can the system adapt and get “old” experts with “new” informatoin on the roster for certain questions?
We think the Aardvark service is interesting and the paper stimulated our thinking.
Stephen E Arnold, February 9, 2010
No one paid us to read and write about this paper. I will report this to the National Parks Service, an outfit familiar with crowds in Yellowstone and elsewhere.
Google Flashes Star Trek Gizmo
February 8, 2010
Short honk: In 2006 one of my partners and I made a series of presentations to Big Telecommunications Companies. After about 15 minutes of introductory comments, I perceived the reaction as my bringing a couple of dead squirrels into the conference room, chopping them up, and building a fire with the telco executives’ billfolds. Chilly and hostile are positive ways to describe the reaction to my description of Google’s telecommunications related technologies. Fortunately I got paid, sort of like a losing gladiator getting buried in 24 BCE in a mass grave.
You can see telco woe when you read and think about the story in the Herald Sun, “Google Leaps Barrier with Translator Phone.” The story apparently surfaced in the paywall secure London Times but the info leaked into the world in which I live via Australia. The key point in the write up was the sentence:
If it [a Google phone with automatic translation] worked, it could eventually transform communication among speakers of the world’s 6,000-plus languages.
Well, if it worked, it means that the Googlers’ voice search, machine translation, and low latency distributed computing infrastructure will find quite a few new customers in my opinion. Think beyond talking, which is obviously really important. I wonder if entertainment executives can see what the telco executives insisted was impossible tin 2006.
One president of a big cellular company in the chilly Midwest said in a very hostile tone as I recall, “Google can’t do telecommunications. It’s an ad company. We’re a telecommunications company. There’s a difference.”
Oh, is there? Bits are bits in my experience. I used to watch Star Trek and so did some Googlers assert I.
Stephen E Arnold, February 8, 2010
No one paid me to write this. I will report non payment to the FCC, a really great entity.
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