ZyLAB: Marketing Since 1994
August 10, 2010
A reader sent me a link to “ZyLAB Old Promotion Video from 1994.” The theme was “tides of change”, and the discipline was scanning and optical document management, character recognition, and search. One of the customers highlighted was Wang Federal. ZyLAB is still with us. Wang? I’m not so sure. Another fellow said, “Imagine carrying a CD-ROM with thousands of documents.” The video worked nautical, high speed rail, and the OJ Simpson trial into description of ZyLAB technologies.
Three points struck me:
First, with modest editing an a few image shifts, the marketing video could be used today. I am not sure what this says about the progress made in search and content processing since 1994 or about the difficulty of communicating the benefits of digital instances of information.
Second, ZyLAB, like Brainware and a handful of other companies, has an umbilical to paper documents. The 16 years between the 1994 ZyLAB video and the stack of Google patent applications piled next to my desk makes clear to me that much work needs to be done. Search, therefore, may be less important than solving more obvious problems. Search could be viewed as an add-on to a more robust set of functions. If accurate, search is no longer the main event. Maybe search is like a bag of popcorn, a commodity, a consumable?
Third, the metaphors used to communicate the nature of the problem, the value of a solution, and the benefits of that solution don’t do the job. Anyone who thinks that a system can steer an organization has not looked at the challenges petascale flows of data pose to large companies or the inconsistencies and technical problems that make a comprehensive store of an organization’s content available in digital form. Transformation can chew up an information technology budget more quickly than Tess can nibble on a dog biscuit.
Keep in mind that my comments are not directed at ZyLAB. I am including most search and content processing vendors. Not much has changed in 16 years. That was a surprise conclusion for me.
Stephen E Arnold, August 10, 2010
Comments
2 Responses to “ZyLAB: Marketing Since 1994”
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
Hello Arnold,
Great post! I agree with you and I was also surprised by how visionary this video was when I found it in the ZyLAB archive; that is exactly why I posted it on YouTube.
In a way, there are many similarities with what we do today, but there are also some significant differences. Development in search has not completely stood still:
1. The amounts of data we have to deal with these days are at least 2 to the power of 10 (1024) larger than 15 years ago. Being able to search within such vast data populations required significant R&D , and that type of R&D investment will continue as there are no signs that the data growth will stop (http://zylab.wordpress.com/2010/07/02/to-infinity-and-beyond-how-to-avoid-ediscovery-3d-2/).
2. Text mining (both statistical and linguistic) and other exploratory search types such as faceted search (http://zylab.wordpress.com/2010/05/28/faceted-search-how-to-go-from-a-static-to-a-dynamic-taxonomy/) have contributed significant to the usability of search interfaces. 15 years ago, there was not enough electronic data to train the statistical algorithms and there was not enough coverage of languages to implement proper disambiguation of, for instance, pronouns, co-references and entity boundaries (http://zylab.wordpress.com/2010/04/28/how-to-find-more/).
3. Advanced data visualization was not possible 15 years ago, unless you had a lot of time and a very large mainframe. Huge progress has been made in this field (http://zylab.wordpress.com/2010/02/23/automatic-email-and-social-network-analysis/).
4. Natively searching multi-media such as sound, the sound component of videos is becoming a reality. Phone based search is showing acceptable precision and recall measures and the development of large libraries of objects for visual search is reaching levels where it is becoming really useful.
5. But most importantly, the application of content analytics and other search technology is now getting built-in to specific search applications for eDiscovery, compliance, auditing, and other real-world applications. There is more than enough search technology available, but it often lacks useful rules and examples of libraries to apply that technology in specific fields. We see more and more of these types of ready-to-use libraries for sentiment mining, categorization of documents in a large eDiscovery process, automatic clean up of legacy information and automatic filing- and records management in Enterprise Information Archiving.
15 years ago ZyLAB was often still evangelizing full text search, now we are all used to full-text, but we have forgotten about many other tools that are needed in a proper search interface such as taxonomies (http://zylab.wordpress.com/2010/07/20/6-practical-tips-for-designing-taxonomy/) and other tools to help a user to find the right search terms.
Unfortunately not everybody is aware of or using these new techniques. Too many search interfaces are still way too limited or do not fully leverage what is possible today. This will have to change as data size and types (multimedia) will continue to change and will continue to drive ongoing investment in new search technology and capabilities.
Search is dead, long live the new search!
and sorry for the long comment 🙂 !
[…] Search is dead, long live search! August 27, 2010 — jcscholtes Last week, Stephan Arnold wrote a great blog post about an older ZyLAB eDiscovery promotion video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6MhdqHlGzU) which I posted at You Tube a while ago (although we did not call it eDiscovery in those days!). You can find the blog post here: http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2010/08/10/zylab-marketing-since-1994/ […]