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
Forbes Gets Classier
August 10, 2010
Short honk: Point your browser thing at “I Guess Forbes Figured Out a Way to Fight Back.” A business publication that once gave McGraw Hill fits has found a way to cope with the Web, according to Rexblog. The key passage for me was:
I noticed the cluttered design, page-view-inflating gimmicks and numerous other user-hating approaches of Forbes.com seem to be undergoing a transformation into something that might work when their competitors throw up pay walls.
Nah, won’t work. Too late. I did enjoy watching Steve’s dad Malcolm wheel his Harley into an uptown joint and hang with the dentists, accountants, and bankers who wanted to be “bad” in a Fifth Avenue manner.
Stephen E Arnold, August 10, 2010
Freebie
Mainframes: Money and Memories
August 10, 2010
When I took my first “computer” class in 1963, there was one type of computer—An IBM mainframe. The university had just upgraded the system. No moving of wires. I could interact with the box via a punched card deck. Those were the days. I would wait in line for keypunch time. I would hand over my card deck to a computer center staffer. I remember looking up the word spindle on my first visit to the shrine of advanced technology in the basement of the engineering building. I would return in 48 hours to get my output. Fortunately I got data not an error statement in line two. Ah, what fun.
Push your digital recorder’s fast forward button three times and we are at 2010, fresh from reading “Big Tech Problem as Mainframes Outlast Workforce.” The write up points out that guys like me who were trained on mainframes are getting old. Yep, my first class was 47 years ago. Almost a half a century. How much fun would it be to have me join an outfit to fix up a mainframe to interact with an iMac? You are right if you think, “Not much. Old guys are cranky, and they don’t own iPads and tweet.”
There were some gems in the referenced Business Week article. Bloomberg has not gutted the former McGraw Hill crown jewel. Examples of the wealth in the story:
- The average age of mainframe workers is 55 to 60
- IBM commands 85 percent of the mainframe market
- There are 10,000 mainframes used by 4,000 to 5,000 customers around the world, down from 30,000 mainframes
- the 3270 terminal emulator is not graphically rich
- IBM’s new mainframe is 60 percent faster than the previous model mainframe
- IBM sells $3.4 billion worth of mainframe stuff each year
- Mainframes are a high margin business, about 70 percent.
Seems to me that those lucky folks with mainframes may have to do recruiting at the local retirement facility. With IBM’s mainframe revenue, why not set up a retirement home for former mainframe professionals? JCL, PL/1, and green bar, anyone? I miss the sound of those line printers too. Chad? Did I mention the keypunch machine jittering as it aligned the card so that it could be punched? Don’t fold, spindle, or mutilate!
Stephen E Arnold, August 10, 2010
Freebie
Sinequa Hits $13 Million in Revenues
August 9, 2010
French enterprise search and content processing vendor Sinequa revealed that its revenues for the 2009-2010 fiscal year were $12.8 million. That’s close enough to $13 million for the addled goose. According to a story in IT Director:
Sinequa announces revenues of $12.8 million for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2009. This is the seventh consecutive year that the company has been operationally profitable. 85% of revenue comes from license sales and maintenance and 15% comes from services and consulting.
The story quoted Jean Ferré, President & CEO of Sinequa as saying:
In the last months, Sinequa signed several contracts worth over a million dollars, two of which exceeded two million dollars. This increase in the size of contracts and our turnover is a result of the technological maturity of Sinequa Enterprise Search 7 in a market that is beginning to take shape. We do not only provide a technological platform, but a complete application: this is why our customers select Sinequa. All these contracts have been won after being in competitive Proof-Of-Concepts where Sinequa demonstrated its technological strength.
In late July 2010, the company revealed that it was thinking about and maybe working on context based search and rich user interfaces. The blog post by M. Ferré revealed:
Nous voila au début d’une disruption industrielle. Nous allons assister à une incroyable transformation de la façon dont les entreprises servent leurs clients et se présentent au marché. Un changement dans la manière d’aider les salariés à travailler efficacement, avec le contexte approprié et toujours en temps réel. Il me tarde d’être dans la section VIP du monde commercial et industriel: travailler dans une entreprise et n’interagir qu’avec des entreprises ou administrations qui utilisent efficacement ces technologies intelligentes. Arrêter de cliquer, scroller, naviguer, et simplement faire l’expérience agréable d’une transition évidente de mon contexte personnel vers les réponses à mes questions. Pour de vrai, cela va changer nos vies en beaucoup mieux.
The purchase of Exalead by Dassault Systems raised the stakes for other French companies in Exalead’s market space. Congratulations to the Sinequa team. Now the company needs to find a way to build its impact in markets outside of France. Maybe ArnoldIT.com’s weaponized information method will be the rosé that works?
Stephen E Arnold, August 9, 2010
Six Semantic Vendors Profiled
August 9, 2010
I saw in my newsreader this story: “Introducing Six Semantic Technology Vendors: Strengthening Insurance Business Initiatives with Semantic Technologies.” The write up is a table of contents or a flier for a report prepared by one of the azurini with a focus on what seems to be “life and non life insurance companies.”
For me the most interesting snippet in the advertisement was this sequence, which I have formatted to make more readable.
Attivio offers a common access platform combining unstructured and structured content [Note: one of Attivio’s founders has left the building. No details.]
Cambridge Semantics wants to help companies quickly obtain practical results [Note: more of a business intelligence type solution.]
Lexalytics has a ‘laser-focus’ on sentiment analysis. [Note: lots of search and content processing in a Microsoft centric wrapper.]
Linguamatics finds the nuggets hidden in plain sight. [Note: the real deal with a core competency in pharmaceuticals which I suppose is similar to life and non life insurance companies.]
MetaCarta identifies location references in unstructured documents in real-time. [Note: a geo tagging centric system now chased by outfits like MarkLogic, Microsoft, and lots of others]
SchemaLogic enables information to be found and shared more effectively using semantic technologies. [Note: I thought this outfit managed metatags across an enterprise. At one time, the company was focused on Microsoft technology. Today? I don’t know because when one of the founders cut out, my interest tapered off.]
The list and its accompanying prose are interesting to me for three reasons:
First, the descriptions of these firms as semantic does not map to my impression of the six firms’ technologies. I am okay with the inclusion of Cambridge Semantics and Linguamatics but I am not in sync with the azurini who plopped the other four outfits in the list. I think I can dredge up an argument to include these four firms on a content processing list, but gung-ho semantic technology. Nope.
Second, the link pointed me to a reseller of market research. The hitch in the git along for me was that the landing page did not point to the report. When I ran a query for “semantic technology vendors” I saw this message: “Sorry, no reports matching your search were found. For personal search assistance, please send us a request at contact@aarkstore.com.”
Third, the source of the report did not jump off the page at me. In short, what the heck is this document? How much does it cost? How can anyone buy it if the vendor’s search system doesn’t work and the write up on the Moso-technology.com Web site is fragmented.
I can’t recommend buying or not buying the report. Too bad.
Stephen E Arnold, August 9, 2010
Exclusive Interview: Erik Arnold, Adhere Solutions
August 9, 2010
How does one consultant interview another? Cautiously. How does a father interview a son? Buy the Diet Coke and provide the questions before flipping on the digital recorder. I spoke with Erik Arnold, managing director of Adhere Solutions in a charming eatery in Chicago with a buzzing neon sign advertising “Free Refills” on Sunday. Today is Monday. Now some readers wonder if I write about my son and get paid for that work. Anyone who has a successful son knows that fathers get to pay. What’s my compensation? When you have a gosling flying circles around your goose pond, you will figure it out.
Erik Arnold, managing director of Adhere Solutions, will be giving a talk about the use of open source search technology for the White House’s USA.gov Web site.
Erik Arnold has over 15 years of experience in the search industry, divided uniquely between both Web and enterprise search. Adhere Solutions is a consulting firm that advises companies on improving their search systems. Prior to Adhere, Erik served as a subject matter expert for a government consulting company where he primarily worked with the House of Representatives and the USA.gov web portal. He started his career at Lycos, one of the first Internet search engines, where he was a product marketing manager. Erik then moved to NBCi search engine (Snap.com) where he served as business development manager.
He will be giving a talk about the impact of open source search on certain US government initiatives at the October 2010 Lucene Revolution Conference.
The full text of the interview appears below:
Here we are again talking about search technology.
That’s right.
For readers who may not know about your company, what’s an Adhere Solutions?
Adhere Solutions offers products and services that help organizations with their of search systems. We focus on Google and open source technologies. Adhere Solutions has been a trusted Google Enterprise Partner since 2007, with a client roster of Wal-Mart, Lexis-Nexis, and the Federal Trade Commission among others.
You have worked on the USA.gov and related Federal projects. When did you get into this type of work?
A decade ago. I think I did my first Federal consulting job in 2000 for the Clinton Administration.
Arnold For Fee Columns for August
August 9, 2010
Here’s the run down for my for fee August 2010 columns. These will appear over the next four to 12 weeks. Each for-fee publication has a different editorial cycle.
- Information Today, “Question-Centric Queries: Can Socrates Save Search?” The focus is on Ask.com and question-and-answer interfaces.
- Information World Review, “SAP Follows IBM to Open Source: A Phase Change?”. SAP seems to be playing the open source card. Will this be the magic SAP needs to grow in 2011? Read IWR to find out my take.
- KMWorld, “Google’s MapReduce, Chubby, and the Hadoop the Loop.” The topic is Hadoop and the risk Google has taken with its open source tactics.
- Smart Business Network, “Inbound Marketing: Will Bytes Adds Zest to Traditional Marketing?” The article explains the difference between traditional marketing (what I call outbound marketing) and inbound marketing (which is the use of social network methods) to generate leads. The story will appear in SBN’s dozen print publications.
The full text of these articles is available directly from the publisher. Every five or six years, I gather up out-of-date columns and put them on ArnoldIT.com. Best bet to get these write ups, then, is to contact the publisher who buys the copyright from me.
Stephen E Arnold, August 8, 2010
Freebie but I get paid to write these for fee thingies.
Is Q-Go a Yugo?
August 9, 2010
Last week, I received a call from a fancy pants MBA about NLP or natural language processing. NLP seems to be a new opportunity. NLP has been around a while, and like the formerly hot notion “taxonomy” and “semantics”, NLP is in vogue. The question concerned a company I knew about, Q-Go. I dipped into my Overflight service and realized that the company had gone quiet. In some cases, “going quiet” is a prelude to either a massive investment like Palantir’s $90 million or closing up shop like Convera did earlier this year.
Q-Go provides an application aimed at redefining customers’ web searching experiences. Research indicates that a growing number of customers are sick of turning to search engines for answers because they get responses with millions of unrelated websites.
According to their website, “31 percent of users are unhappy with their online interaction with web sites and 70% are unable to find what they are looking for.” And Q-Go asserts that it has the answer for the airline, financial services, and telecommunication industries. Q-Go reduces customer service issues by providing a search application that can more successfully interpret the meaning behind user questions—in all major Western languages. The approach sounds like InQuira’s.
The result? Fewer customer service calls, lowered costs, and higher conversion rates. It almost sounds too good to be true. With a guaranteed six-month return on investment, the only downside I see is that there are still some languages Q-Go can’t work with. But I’m guessing that will eventually change if the company avoids the “quiet” state.
Stephen E Arnold, August 12, 2010
Minority Report and Reality: The Google and In-Q-Tel Play
August 9, 2010
Unlike the film “Minority Report”, predictive analytics are here and now. More surprising to me is that most people don’t realize that the methods are in the cateogry of “been there, done that.”
I don’t want to provide too much detail about predictive methods applied to military and law enforcement. Let me remind you, gentle reader, that using numerical recipes to figure out what is likely to happen is an old, old discipline. Keep in mind that the links in this post may go dead at any time, particularly the link to the Chinese write up.
There are companies who have been grinding away in this field for a long time. I worked at an outfit that had a “pretzel factory”. We did not make snacks; we made predictions along with some other goodies.
In this blog I have mentioned over time companies who operate in this sector; for example, Kroll, recently acquired by Altegrity and Fetch Technologies. Now that’s a household name in Sioux City and Seattle. I have even mentioned a project on which I worked which you can ping at www.tosig.com. Other hints and clues are scattered like wacky Johnny Appleseed trees. I don’t plan on pulling these threads together in a free blog post.
© RecordedFuture, 2010. Source: http://www.analysisintelligence.com/
I can direct your attention to the public announcement that RecordedFuture has received some financial Tiger Milk from In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of one of the US government entities. Good old Google via its ventures arm has added some cinnamon to the predictive analytics smoothie. You can get an acceptable run down in Wired’s “Exclusive: Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring.” I think you want to have your “real journalist” baloney detector on because In-Q-Tel invested in RecordedFuture in January 2010, a fact disclosed on the In-Q-Tel Web site many moons ago. RecordedFuture also has a Web site at www.recordedfuture.com, rich with marketing mumbo jumbo, a video, and some semi-useful examples of what the company does. I will leave the public Web site to readers with some time to burn. If you want to get an attention deficit disorder injection, here you go:
The Web contains a vast amount of unstructured information. Web users access specific content of interest with a variety of Websites supporting unstructured search. The unstructured search approaches clearly provide tremendous value but are unable to address a variety of classes of search. RecordedFuture is aggregating a variety of Web-based news and information sources and developing semantic context enabling more structured classes of search. In this presentation, we present initial methods for accessing and analyzing this structured content. The RJSONIO package is used to form queries and manage response data. Analytic approaches for the extracted content include normalization and regression approaches. R-based visualization approaches are complemented with data presentation capabilities of Spotfire.
Database Security Model
August 8, 2010
I received a call on Friday, August 7, 2010, about a security model for a structured database. I told the caller I had to dig through my Overflight archives. The called said, “Can’t wait.” I did locate the document I recalled. You can get a copy of “SAIC TeraText DBS 4.3.13 Security Target” without charge from Common Criteria. The write up focuses on the TeraText data management and search system, but I have found the presentation, the diagrams, and the various bullet lists quite useful. So, for my really rushed, 20-something caller, I found the document that might provide a starting point. For the other two or three readers of this blog, attend or not.
Stephen E Arnold, August 8, 20100
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