Ebook Reality, What Is Hot Sells
June 22, 2010
I enjoyed “Barnes & Noble Confirms New $149 NOOK Wi-Fi, Drops 3G Model Price To $199.” The Barnes & Noble ebook reader is one of those adventures in US corporate innovation that provides fodder to the case studies used in MBA land. The news is that a price cut for the gizmo is in place. The article was quite circumspect and included the Barnes & Noble news release. Three points warrant the goose’s capturing them:
First, the price cut won’t make any difference. The product is not hot and the Apple iPad is. Without buzz, a price cut won’t work. Don’t believe me. Find a 12 year old. Offer the kid a Nook or an iPad. Which will the kid take? Let me know.
Second, companies that are essentially in the middle of deals often are not too good at manufacturing. Compare the first Kindle with the first iPad. Now compare the second Kindle with the Nook. Pick the better of the two devices and go back to the iPad. See any differences?
Third, lowering the cost will clear inventory. A price cut won’t stimulate Barnes & Noble’s revenue itch. The cost of the gizmo, the price cut, and the expensive in store promotions put this product in a tough spot.
So what’s the response of Amazon? Chopping the price of the Kindle. Boy, I am delighted I paid full price. Endears the company to me for sure.
Neither Barnes & Noble or Amazon are hardware pros. Are these devices the Pontiac Aztec’s of the ebook world? Just the view from Harrod’s Creek, and it is an opinion which makes the comments even less valuable.
Stephen E Arnold, June 22, 2010
Freebie
Quotes as Trump Cards in Digital Bridge
June 22, 2010
Quote to note. I think I recall reading a quote along the lines of : “If you want porn, get an Android phone.” Maybe I am more addled than normal. When I read, “Google Boss: Mobile Web ‘Is Going to Change the World over Next 3 Years”, I thought of the alleged purient behavior quip. The passage that triggered a Proustian memory was this alleged statement by Googler Matt Brittin:
“If you want to get headlines, get an iPhone app.”
The Apple quote trumps the Google quote. The porn card is a queen of hearts. The headlines play is a three of clubs in this game of Go Quip.
Stephen E Arnold, June 21, 2010
Freebie
CNN and AP News Shift
June 21, 2010
I read “CNN Drops AP Wire Service.” You may want to check it out as well. I am not sure if I know what to make of the report. Let’s assume the story is accurate. Why would CNN drop a source that many organizations consider “must have”? One view is that AP is no longer a “must have” source. Another view is that CNN wants to innovate with its business model and its vendors have to be sufficiently agile to make CNN comfortable. A few years ago dropping the Associated Press would have been unthinkable. Its state house coverage is tough to duplicate. Maybe CNN wants to cut costs? When i killed a couple of hours between flights last year I realized that CNN is one expensive puppy to keep healthy. With YouTube’s recent news feistiness, CNN may be preparing for battle. If the story is a hoax, the AP is secure. If true, the AP may be showing some signs of losing its magnetism.
Stephen E Arnold, June 22, 2010
Freebie
HMV Shifting to Endeca
June 21, 2010
The HMV Web site is, according to the rumor mill, shifting to a new search platform. Years ago, I heard that the UK music retailer relied on Dieselpoint’s system. In a brief blog post by RossBoardman.com with the title “HMV Adds Endeca Search Engine to Its Web Site”, I learned that a shift may be underway. I have not been able to confirm this change, but moving from one search system to another is almost as common than seventh graders changing their minds. If the rumor is true, Endeca’s strategy of partnering with a wide range of integrators and resellers may be bearing some fruit. You can learn more about Endeca at www.endeca.com. I hope the pink color yields to a color that is closer to the hues of an addled goose.
Stephen E Arnold, June 19, 2010
Freebie
Vendors Offering Free eDiscovery Services Called Out
June 21, 2010
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to “Kroll Ontrack and Iron Mountain Stratify Demonstrate That “Free” Is Usually NOT The Cheapest Solution For Electronic Discovery.” In the pre Prohibition era, saloons would offer a free lunch. The idea was to get folks in the door and sell them unbranded whiskey and other delights. The 21st century version involves software if I understand the write up. The free service may not be free. For me the key passage was:
It’s “buyer beware.
The case examples are interesting. One involves Kroll which until recently was a unit of an insurance and financial services firm. The other references Iron Mountain, a company with roots in document storage. To add color to the write up, a chart shows how costs for a 100 gigabyte eDiscovery project unfold.
Is this analysis definitive? No. Is it suggestive? Yes.
Stephen E Arnold, June 21, 2010
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Real Time Search Systems, Part 1
June 21, 2010
Editor’s note: For those in the New Orleans real time search lecture and the Madrid semantic search talk, I promised to make available some of the information I discussed. Attendees are often hungry to have a take away, and I want to offer a refrigerator magnet, not the cruise ship gift shop. This post will provide a summary of the real time information services I mentioned. The group focuses on content processed from such services as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and other geysers of digital confetti. A subsequent blog post will present the basics of my draft taxonomy of real time search. I know that most readers will kick the candy bar wrapper into the gutter. If you are one of the folks who picks up the taxonomy, a credit line would make the addled goose feel less like a down pillow and more like a Marie Antoinette pond ornament.
What’s Real Time Search?
Ah, gentle reader, real time search is marketing baloney. Life has latency. You call me on the phone and days, maybe weeks go by, and I don’t return the call. In the digital world, you get an SMS and you think it was rocketed to you by the ever vigilant telecommunications companies. Not exactly. In most cases, unless you conduct a laboratory test between mobiles on different systems, capturing the transmit time, the receiving time, and other data points such as time of day, geolocation, etc., you don’t have a clue what the latency between sending and receiving. Isn’t it easier to assume that the message was sent instantly. When you delve into other types of information, you may discover that what you thought was real time is something quite different. The “check is in the mail” applies to digital information, index updating, query processing, system response time, and double talk from organizations too cheap or too disorganized to do much of anything quickly. Thus, real time is a slippery fish.
Real Time Search Systems
Why do I use the phrase “real time”? I don’t have a better phrase at hand. Vendors yap about real time and a very, very few explain exactly what their use of the phrase means. One outfit that deserves a pat on the head is Exalead. The company explains that in an organization, most information is available to an authorized user no less than 15 minutes after the Exalead system becomes aware of the data. That’s fast, and it beats the gym shorts of many other vendors. I would love to pinpoint the turtles, but my legal eagle cautions me that this type of sportiness will get me a yellow card. Figure it out for yourself is the sad consequence.
Here’s the list of the systems I identified in my lectures. I don’t work for any of these outfits, and I use different services depending on my specific information needs. You are, therefore, invited to run sample queries on these services or turn to one of the “real” journalists for their take. If you have spare cash and found yourself in the lower quartile of your math class, you may find that an azure chip consultant is just what you need to make it in the crazy world of online information.
- Collecta – www.collecta.com – Venture funded with another infusion of $5 million
- Crowdeye www.crowdeye.com – Former Microsoft employees’ start up
- DailyRT http://dailyrt.com –
- Ice Rocket www.icerocket.com – funded by Mark Cuban
- ITPints www.itpints.com – Single entrepreneur
- Leapfish — www.leapfish.com Metasearch, controversy over alleged link fraud, backed by DotNext; integrates Topsy.com
- Newslookup – www.newslookup.com, founded 2000 regions and categories, open source engine, DataparkSearch
- OneNewsPage www.onenewspage.com – Live access to top news and analysis
- Red Tram www.redtram.com – Russian service, broad coverage in nine languages, including Chinese. Based in Cyprus
- Scoopler www.scoopler.com – Y Combinator funded
- Topsy www.topsy.com – Ignition Partners and other VC firms
- Twazzup www.twazzup.com – Self funded start up. Don’t confuse this with Exalead’s Tweepz.com
- Tweetmeme www.tweetmeme.com – Part of Fav.or.it in the UK via angel funding
- Yauba www.yauba.com – IIT and UC Berkeley, privacy safe
In my lectures I made four points about these types of real-time search services.
First, each of these services did at the time of my talks deliver more useful and comprehensive results than the “real time search” services from the Big Gals in the Web search game; namely, Google, Microsoft Bing, and Yahoo. Yahoo, I pointed out, doesn’t do real time search itself. Yahoo has a deal with the OneRiot.com outfit. The service is useful and I suppose I could stick it in the list above, but I am just cutting and pasting from the PowerPoint decks I used as crutches and dogs in my lecture.
Podcast Interview with Paul Doscher, Part 2: The Exalead Technology
June 21, 2010
Exalead’s Paul Doscher talks about Exalead’s technology on the June 21, 2010, ArnoldIT Beyond Search podcast. Exalead has been growing rapidly, landing blue-chip accounts with the largest technology company in North America, the French postal service, and Canada’s Urbanizer.com. In this podcast, Mr. Doscher talks about Exalead’s technical approach to content processing and the framework that makes search-based applications crack tough problems in information access. You can listen to the podcast on the ArnoldIT.com Web site. More information about Exalead is available from www.exalead.com. The ArnoldIT podcast series extends the Search Wizards Speak series of interview beyond text into rich media. Watch this blog for announcements about other rich media programs from the professionals who move information retrieval beyond search.
Stephen E Arnold, June 21, 2010
Sponsored by Stephen E. Arnold
Predicting the Weather: Risky at Picnics, Even Riskier for Cloud Computing
June 21, 2010
I am parked in Madrid, Spain, waiting to give my talk about real time content. I am catching up with the news from the “real journalists”. I just read “Why Microsoft’s Hybrid Cloud Threatens Google.” I flashed back to 1958. In the Midwest, the local weather person was Bill Houlihan. He explained the weather each evening on the 6 pm news, and he almost always got it wrong. He started a chicken restaurant with a 30 foot plastic chicken on the roof and he got that wrong too. The restaurant failed as quickly as his weather forecasts.
Predicting the weather is risky, particularly if you are planning a picnic. Predicting the climate for cloud computing is even riskier. Remember that giant plastic chicken. That artifact is probably still intact, resting in a junk yard somewhere outside of Dunlop, Illinois.
Risk in weather prediction and plastic chickens, the associations—the Forbes article triggered these. For me the most important passage was:
Cloud computing has become a key piece of an enterprise’s IT strategy, typically used in a hybrid (cloud plus on-premise) model of computing that offers customers the best of both worlds: the ability to keep their data on-premise, while leveraging the cloud’s accelerated software development speeds and lower costs by eliminating the need to invest in ongoing on-premise hardware and software. A common example of hybrid is being able to develop applications and test them in the cloud before releasing them onto internal networks. his scenario gives Microsoft (MSFT – news – people ) a major advantage over cloud-only hosted service providers Google ( GOOG– news – people ) and Amazon, one that creates great opportunities for Microsoft’s broader partner ecosystem. Developers can use the same development tools, frameworks and execution environment for either cloud or on-premise applications. Developers can build a single application that leverages the cloud’s scalability for transactional processing while supporting the security of on-premise data storage.
This addled goose is not going to dispute the interest organizations are showing in cutting costs, increasing reliability, and gaining some breathing room from the crazy hot fixes that flood from vendors. Timesharing in its many guises is not new. Today’s economics force organizations to find ways to keep systems up and running, manage available technical staff, and get back online when one of today’s bargain basement solutions crashes.
My concern is that cloud computing comes in different flavors. Most organizations are in scramble mode. There is experimentation, parallel testing, and trials. These include experiments with the Walmart of cloud computing, roll-your-own systems, half baked solutions from the math club, and arabesques on these methods. The idea is that a specific organization knows the one best way to deal with the untenable status quo of information technology is like a weather forecast—probably incorrect. There is one added benefit to this type of prognostication about the future. The observations become today’s big plastic chicken.
Source: http://www.springchickensale.com/images/sign_chicken_sm.jpg
The idea that Microsoft has a slam dunk is interesting as an example of a marketing pitch based on a cloud computing weather prediction. No computing solution has delivered pain free information technology in my experience. Methods have upsides and downsides. My hunch is that cloud solutions will become as tough to figure out as the solution to the BP oil spill.
Opinions are to be encouraged. Predicting the weather and putting up a big plastic chicken make it easy to spot enthusiastic marketing. Will the future unfold with Microsoft dominating the hybrid cloud? I don’t know. What is clear is that lots of predators are chasing this “next big thing”. I don’t need marketing to confuse me. Do you? I just learned it will be sunny and bright in Madrid today. It is now cloudy and it looks like rain.
Stephen E Arnold, June 21, 2010
Freebie
Open Source Factoid
June 20, 2010
Short honk: Navigate to “Being Acquired Is the Best Thing for a FOSS Project.” I was surprised by the factoid I have highlighted in bold in the passage below:
Sourceforge hosts about 7,000 security projects. Daniel says, “From these 7K only 10% will survive; they seem to die quickly.” Security is an area of software development where both open source and proprietary options can co-exist. “I still think open source in the long term will be more secure than closed — people catch bugs all the time.” But he also sees more of the big ones being acquired, or going commercial on their own “to make some kind of money … it’s very hard to be a developer only on the weekends.”
Is this accurate? Not sure. Darned interesting.
Stephen E Arnold, June 20, 2010
Freebie like some software
Artificial Intelligence in Search Driving App Sales
June 20, 2010
People are loading up their iPhones with apps, most of them free or low cost, but the regular consumer doesn’t see the money that’s already changed hands. Case in point: Siri, http://siri.com/, a “virtual personal assistant” app that can make restaurant reservations, book concert tickets, or look up weather forecasts based on spoken commands. It was created by SRI International and has already cost hundreds of millions of privately funded and defense contract dollars. It’s not the end result that’s worth so much money–it’s the how-it-happens. Apple just paid a reported $150-$250 million for Siri’s artificial intelligence, natural language processing functions, and search technology that are the focus of so much interest.
Siri’s just the first of many mobile search apps that started as government-sponsored work and have trickled down to the little people. Watch for that trickle to become a flood as Siri and its future versions start learning and expanding their capabilities in the next step of artificial intelligence. In ten years, will we be picking up our mobile device and having a conversation with the AI to decide on where to go for vacation, and the AI will do all the research, planning, and preparation?
Jessica Bratcher
June 20, 2010
Post not sponsored.
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