Can the Math Club Make the Student Council
September 23, 2010
For years the words Internet and Google seemed to be synonymous. Google was the “go to” place on the Internet and it was hard to talk about one without mentioning the other. However, the king better hold on to its throne because social networks are on the rise. Minyanville showcases an interesting piece “Five Reasons Google Can’t Get Social” that attempts to answer whether Google can really be successful in the social media world.
“Revenues for privately held social-media companies, including Facebook, Zynga, and Groupon, are going through the roof.” Google has never been viewed as a social butterfly and past attempts such as the dismal Google Buzz have done little to help their case. Even with plans to unveil a new social network, Google Me, the author sees “five distinct challenges to Google succeeding in the social-media world.”
- Google is simply reacting to the threat of losing its dominance on the Internet.
- Google does not come to mind when thinking about a great social environment.
- Google’s products, though productive, are not what people would consider enjoyable or something they would want to share with others.
- Google places emphasis on conducting searches within social networks instead of promoting a pleasant user experience.
- Facebook has millions of happy users and a heavy presence on both computers and mobile devices.
Google finds itself in a surprising predicament as it tries, so far unsuccessfully, to keep up with social networking. Google is a business first and foremost and the bottom line is they see the revenue they are losing to social networks. Google has always crushed the competition and they are not giving up their throne without a fight. There are dozens of possible reasons Google may struggle but the main one is simply they are doing it for the wrong reasons.
Facebook the biggest social network started off small with people just trying to have fun. They were not looking for riches, simply their next girlfriend. In the beginning I don’t think they thought it would become so massive, it just kind of happened. Kids, simply looking to meet new friends stumbled onto a goldmine. Google’s attitude toward the social world is if you can’t beat them join them. They lack the innocent personal relationship factor that’s behind social networks and that’s something money just can’t buy.
The Beyond Search opinion is that agility in social networking is more challenging that displaying search results as we type a Google query. No landslide for Google to make the Student Council yet.
April Holmes, September 25, 2010
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Access to Search Outside the US
September 23, 2010
This is not specifically about “beyond search”. The article is about “actually searching.” If you are in certain countries, access to mostly unfiltered Web sites can be tricky.
If you want to access all that you couldn’t for various reasons, then there’s LifeHacker.com’s “Top 10 Ways to Access Blocked Stuff on The Web.” It offers tips like getting quickie user/pass combo you can use to log in on just about every site on the net, or tricks to work-around with the browser’s user agent, for checking out Gmail’s new iPad interface on anything but iPad.
The site suggests the old trick of copying and pasting the URL onto Google for the blocked pages, ways to access Gmail when it is down, or how to always get BitTorrent speeds, and access sites taken down by traffic. You also learn to remote control computers, access country-blocked streaming TV, and roll your own proxy to access blocked sites by using PHProxy on the local web server setup on your computer. We find the site information a valuable reference, quite handy for searching information in certain countries.
Our suggestion: download and keep handy if you travel far and wide. We are not advocating any action that would violate a rule, law, regulation, or custom. Information, however, is often just darned useful for its own sake.
Harleena Singh, September 23, 2010
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Google and Open Source Licenses
September 23, 2010
I don’t understand the subtle differences in the various open source licenses. In fact, I don’t want to have this type of legal knowledge. Whenever I look at a legal document, I get a headache. I also know that the word “all” in a legal context is an invitation to trouble. Part of the legal education is designed to force the other party to embrace a categorical affirmative. One exception causes the house of cards to collapse. Nevertheless, we noted an “all” in a story about Google.
Google has come in line with the demands of the time, and announced that, “Google Code developer site will now host open-source projects using any license approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI),” as mentioned in The Register.co.uk article, “Google Code Bear Hugs All OSI Open-Source Licenses.” Google says the shift in its policy is to support open source software developers, but maintaining its strong stance on license proliferation, it says it will, “continue to hunt down and kill non-open source projects or other projects using Google Code as a generic file-hosting service.”
Developers can now mention their license in the “other-open source” option in the Google Code’s license selector, to specify a license that is not included in Google’s existing list. Previously criticized for snubbing the AGPL, Google now expresses regret over rejecting the zlib and the AGPL. The giant seems to be opening-up, at least for the code.
Now, about that one exception? I opine that we will have to wait and see how the new policy actually works when and if an open source action steps on a Google toe.
Stephen E Arnold, September 23, 2010
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Exclusive Interview: Mats Bjore, Silobreaker
September 23, 2010
In some follow up work for the Lucene Revolution Conference, I spoke with Mats Bjore, the former blue chip consultant at the blue chip McKinsey on Tuesday, September 21, 2010. After we discussed our respective talks at the upcoming open source conference sponsored by Lucid Imagination, I asked about the Silobreaker technology. Mats explained that there were some new developments that would be discussed at the upcoming Boston conference.
If you have not used Silobreaker.com, you will want to point your browser at www.silobreaker.com. When you click on the interface, you get an instant report. You can run a more traditional query, but Silobreaker uses proprietary methods to highlight the most important stories, provide visualizations related to the story and entities mentioned, and links to related content. The public Silobreaker is a demonstration of the more robust enterprise solution available from the firm. Silobreaker is in use at a number of interesting client facilities in the US and elsewhere.
I captured our conversation using the handy Skype recorder add in. The full text of our conversation appears below.
Mi, Mats, it’s good to talk with you again. I keep hearing about Silobreaker, so you are getting quite a bit of attention in the business intelligence space. What’s new with Silobreaker in the last few months?
Yes, we are getting quite a bit of media attention. As you know, the primary objective of launching the free news search engine was to showcase our technology to enterprise users and to make them see how easily a Silobreaker solution could be tweaked to fit their domain and requirements. The Silobreaker Enterprise Software Suite (“SESS”) was successfully installed last year as the core engine for the Swedish Armed Forces new news intelligence system and we are just about to release a SaaS product online called Silobreaker Premium that is specifically aimed at business and government agency users who don’t need or want a standalone installation. We already have some US clients as pilot clients.
Silobreaker’s splash screen at www.silobreaker.com
How do you describe Silobreaker at this stage in its development?
We’ve come a long way, yet have an exciting product roadmap ahead of us. But most importantly, we have finally reached some milestones in terms of commercial robustness and viability with the platform. Silobreaker Premium will be an exciting new product in the marketplace. Also since our technology and team is highly customizable – our clients and users demands is the most important guide for our development,
What new services have you introduced that you can talk about?
As I said, Silobreaker Premium is the new product for us this year, but we also develop a lot of integrated entity and content management functions for clients that want to have integrated Intelligence analytical tools.
What new functions are available to commercial licensees?
We think Silobreaker Premium is a powerful enterprise product for professional media-monitoring, early warning, risk management, intelligence and decision support.
Available as SaaS (Software as a Service) in a single intuitive and secure user interface, you are able to define monitoring targets, trigger content aggregation, perform analyses, and display results in customized dashboards, e-mail alerts and by auto-generated reports.
What else can the system do?
Let me list a few of the functions. You can set up watch lists and collaborate with colleagues. Also, it is easy to monitor news, reports, multimedia and social media. Clients can track big movers in the news by heat tools and other analytics. A user can easily save and export findings straight into third party applications. We make it very easy to mix and match free and premium content.
What’s the pricing?
Good question for sure. Silobreaker Premium will be priced with a single monthly flat fee per enterprise to allow and encourage large user groups within an organization to use the service regardless of the number of queries, monitoring agents, dashboards, watch lists, alerts, or reports.
There has been quite a bit of “noise” about Palantir and Recorded Future? I thought Silobreaker provided similar functions. Is that correct?
That is correct. I think conceptually we are very similar in what we are trying to deliver to our customers, but there are also some noticeable differences. We crawl different databases, we use different search methodologies, and as companies we are different in size and our pricing differs. Also I believe that from an analyst perspective the Silobreaker , in its customized versions, can provide tools that encompasses the whole intelligence process to a price that enables even large organizations to deploy our systems to everyone. We believe in Silobreaking also when it comes to collaboration.
And silobreaking means what?
Most organizations have “walls” between units. Information in one silo may not be easily accessible to authorized users in other silos. So, our product is a “silobreaker.”
I like the name. My view is that pr, venture capitalists, and the name “Google” blow some technologies up like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon. What anchors the Silobreaker approach? Don’t give me PR talk, okay?
No problem. Our independence and our beliefs makes Silobreaker unique. We are not VC-financed and have managed to build the business through our own money and customer revenues. That may mean that things have taken a bit longer, but it shows that what we do is for real, which is far away from the many “hype today gone tomorrow” companies that we’ve seen in passing over the last few years. We also anchor all we do in a strong belief in that information overload is not evil but a reassuring consequence of freedom and innovation, but that it is the ability to refine this overload and extract benefits from it that truly create the “killer app” that everybody needs.
Let’s assume I am a busy person. I have to make decisions and I don’t have much time. What do I have to do to get a custom output from Silobreaker?
Not much. Our Premium users typically do two things to generate custom output. Firstly, they create one or several watch lists. This could be people, products, companies or anything else they are interested in – or a list of favorite publications. Such lists can then be used to make queries across all our tools and features or to customize dashboards, email alerts and reports.
What happens if a new content stream becomes available. Say, for example, the Tumblr micro-blogging service. What is required to intake that content and include its content in my results? Is there an open source component or API for Silobreaker?
We support many different types of content. At the moment we will add open sources on request which are added easily through RSS/Atom feeds or through crawling the site. As a general rule, we do not allow users to add sources themselves. Having said that, though, Premium users can add “internal content” through an upload facility, enabling them to mix internal reports and posts with external content.
I find some visualizations pretty but either confusion, meaningless, or downright misleading. What has Silobreaker done to make information for quickly apprehendable? I guess this is called the UX or user experience?
We actually believe that graphics and visualizations should play as big a role for text-mining as it does for numerical analysis. However, I agree with you that usability becomes a big issue in order to make users understand what the visualizations are showing and how they can be used for more in-depth analysis. That is something we are working on all the time, but users must also realize that keyword-based queries generating just lists of search hits can never be the way forward for search, so we hope they are open-minded and about these new ways of presenting results.
As you look ahead, what are the two or three big changes you anticipate in next generation information access?
The focus on “how many hits at what speed” feels very much like first generation features and haven’t really helped with information overload. Context, analysis, and query customizations will be the challenges for next generation algorithms and services.
How can a reader explore Silobreaker.
Silobreaker.com is free and anyone is welcome to a free trial of Silobreaker Premium. Just get in touch.
If a person wants more information, what’s the best way to get that information or contact you?
Contact us directly at sales@silobreaker.com or call or sales director Anders Kasberg at +46 (0) 8 662 3230.
See you in Boston and then in Bethesda the following week, okay.
Yes.
Stephen E Arnold, September 23, 2010
Freebie. The last time I was in Sweden I got herring. I want a taco.
Free File Conversions
September 23, 2010
Connectors are tough to code. If you license them, you may require one of the hefty Ford F 250s with four rear wheels to move the money from your bank to the vendor’s office. Oracle, for example, has connectors for sale, and we have used them. They work as advertised, but some clients find the license fee interesting.
We have found a service that may warrant some testing, gentle reader.
Online-Convert.com provides the facility that can “convert media files online from one format into another.” You can now convert instantly and freely, all your audio, video, image, document, eBook into many different formats online, without installing any software.
The procedure for conversion is quite simple. The user uploads the file in the original file format, which is stored on a server, where it converts into the specified new file format, and then is provided to the user as a unique download link. There is a file size limit of 100 Megabyte to upload a file for free conversion, and the link for downloading the converted file is valid for 24 hours or up to 10 downloads. Using the facility of QR codes, one can also access the download links on the mobile phone as well. Definitely, a useful service worth bookmarking that might come handy anytime.
Harleena Singh, September 23, 2010
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Alerts and Books
September 22, 2010
One of the champions of Alerts (also known as selective dissemination of information or SDI) is the AtHoc organization. If you are not familiar with the company, you may want to check out its industrial strength tools on the company’s Web site. We also like the alert service available from Indigo Stream called GigaAlert, which is a useful news updating service. It is much better than the free alert available from Google News. Just scroll to the bottom of the News search results page and you will see the sign up link.
But when you want to use a free alert service designed expressly to keep book lovers informed, we have a recommendation for you.
At Any New Books, you simply have to sign up with your valid email, choose as many options from the 42 categories that span a broad range of subjects, and receive one weekly digest of handpicked new book releases for every category selected.
The good thing about this service is that the selection process is not automated, and human editors pick up the books covering the subjects you love. This useful service with the punch line “Never miss a great book again,” is just like another search, without a search angle. It is interesting to find a search service that involves the human aspect in the automated era.
The service is free and seems to work as advertised. No search required either. The curation approach works well in our opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, September 22, 2010
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Google Generates Grousing
September 22, 2010
Short honk: More legal storms seem to be forming around Google.
The TechEye.net article, “Google Needs To Be Sued for Playing Monopoly” strikes us as one of the more aggressive write ups in the last week or so. The story asserts that the global giant’s even bigger looming shadow will negatively cast on the economy. Quite an assertion.
Remember the antitrust threat that once Microsoft posed, which was tackled by the Department of Justice’s blocking Microsoft from extending its monopoly vertically into the broader economy. TechEye asserts: “Google was a vastly more serious antitrust threat to consumers and the economy than Microsoft was,” and then suggests that antitrust authorities have aided and abetted Google’s vertical monopolization. Yikes.
According to the article, “there was no net-economic growth or job creation from Google’s “free” Internet sector model,” and that, “all it creates is a deflationary price spiral, negative growth, property devaluation, and hundreds of thousands of job losses in over 20 industries.” The stated report asks for action by the DOJ before it is too late. Is it just another panic assertion about Googzilla?
To top off the TechEye assertion, we noted that “YouTube to Appeal German Court’s Copyright Ruling” and that the Google Street View service seems to be heading toward some interesting legislation about this type of Google service. See “Germany vs. Google StreetView”.
Nation states can be pesky critters. That’s what happens when you have citizens, police, and other trappings of sovereign power.
Harleena Singh, September 22, 2010
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Exclusive Interview: Quentin Gallivan, Aster Data
September 22, 2010
In the last year or two, a new type of data management opportunity has blossomed. I describe this sector as “big data analytics”, although the azure chip consultants will craft more euphonious jargon. One of the most prominent companies in the big data market is Aster Data. The company leverages BigTable technology (closely associated with Google) and moves it into the enterprise. The company has the backing of some of the most prestigious venture firms; for example, Sequoia Capital and Institutional Venture Partners, among others.
Aster Data, therefore, is one of the flagships in big data management and big data analysis for data-driven applications. Aster Data’s nCluster is the first MPP data warehouse architecture that allows applications to be fully embedded within the database engine to enable fast, deep analysis of massive data sets.
The company offers what it calls an “applications-within” approach. The idea is to allow application logic to exist and execute with the data itself. Termed a “Data-Analytics Server,” Aster Data’s solution effectively utilizes Aster Data’s patent-pending SQL-MapReduce together with parallelized data processing and applications to address the big data challenge. Companies using Aster Data include Coremetrics, MySpace, comScore, Akamai, Full Tilt Poker, and ShareThis. Aster Data is headquartered in San Carlos, California.
I spoke with Quentin Gallivan, the company’s new chief executive officer on Tuesday, September 22. Mr. Gallivan made a number of interesting points. He told me that data within the enterprise is “growing at a rate of 60% a year.” What was even more interesting was that data growth within Internet-centric organizations was growing at “100% a year.”
I asked Mr. Gallivan about the key differentiator for Aster Data. Data management and chatter about “big data” peppers the information that flows to me from vendors each day. He said:
Aster Data’s solution is unique in that it allows complete processing of analytic applications ‘inside’ the Aster Data MPP database. This means you can now store all your data inside of Aster Data’s MPP database that runs on commodity hardware and deliver richer analytic applications that are core to improving business insights and providing more intelligence on your business. To enable richer analytic applications we offer both SQL and MapReduce. I think you know that MapReduce was first created by Google and provides a rich parallel processing framework. We run MapReduce in-database but expose it to analysts via a SQL-MapReduce interface. The combination of our MPP DBMS and in-database MapReduce makes it possible to analyze and process massive volumes of data very fast.
In the interview he describes an interesting use case for Barnes & Noble, one of Aster Data’s high profile clients. You can read the full text of the interview in the ArnoldIT.com Search Wizards Speak service by clicking this link. For a complete list of interviews with experts in search and content processing click here. Most of the azure chip consultants recycle what is one of the largest collection of free information about information retrieval in interview form available at this time.
Stephen E Arnold, September 22, 2010
Freebie. Maybe another Jamba juice someday?
BA-Insight Lands $6 Million
September 22, 2010
According to CMS Wire, a Microsoft partner—no, fix that—“a key Microsoft partner”—has received a cash injection of $6.0 million. You will get the content management write up in the story “BA-Insight Secures US$6M Funding for Enterprise Search”. The PR Newswire story “BA-Insight’s Strong Growth in Enterprise Search Space Secures $6 Million in Series A Funding” provides a bit more detail. Note: links to PR stories often go dead, so you may have to resort to some poking around via Bing.com which usually indexes Microsoft centric stories reasonably well.
The news release said:
BA-Insight, Inc., an enterprise search software company specializing in Microsoft-based information access technology, announced today that it has secured $6 million in private equity funding led by New York-based Milestone Venture Partners. Paladin Capital Group and Osage Venture Partners also invested in the round. The New York State Common Retirement Fund participated in the financing through funds managed by Milestone Venture Partners and Paladin Capital Group.
What’s the money for? The release said:
BA-Insight will deploy the capital raised to further develop and extend its suite of enterprise search products for SharePoint Search, expand its marketing efforts and grow its sales and support services organizations. “The market for BA-Insight technologies is expanding rapidly,” explained Guy Mounier, CEO and co-founder of BA-Insight. “We have huge growth potential in U.S. government, professional services, energy and other sectors. This investment will allow us to build the organization needed to support our growth in those markets.”
BA-Insight is a vendor committed to the enterprise search market. This “sector” has been under significant pressure from lower cost Microsoft solutions such as dtSearch (Bethesda, Maryland) and open source solutions like Lucene/Solr. In fact, enterprise search is becoming commoditized.
What’s the BA-Insight difference? According to the news release:
BA-Insight’s flagship product Longitude optimizes Microsoft’s SharePoint Search, and FAST Search for SharePoint platforms. Users can find, analyze, and act on relevant information regardless of the format or where the data resides. Longitude offers out-of-the-box SharePoint Connectors to more than 20 business applications including ERP, CRM, Messaging, and ECM. Longitude also provides a state-of-the-art user experience via a rich Silverlight SharePoint document viewer.
My observations are:
- The BA-Insight play is that Microsoft will continue to encourage its top paying certified partners an opportunity to sell into the SharePoint ecosystem. With more than 100 million SharePoint licenses in the wild, that’s a big ecosystem. The risk is that Microsoft could poach the juicy accounts. If BA-Insight gets traction, Microsoft might buy BA-Insight in order to fatten up its offerings. IBM has followed this strategy for several years. The key difference, in my opinion, is that IBM is using Lucene/Solr and buying value-adding technologies to boost the IBM services business. The Microsoft approach will have a unique fingerprint.
- I think that BA-Insight is “glue play”. What I mean by “glue” is that Microsoft leaves it to licensees to hook together various components to solve a problem. BA-Insight and a handful of other Microsoft centric players provide a “snap in” solution to reduce the time, cost, and hassles of getting basic functions to work as required. Fast Search is a complex beastie, and BA-Insight’s approach is to deliver a solution without the Fast cartwheels that can lead to staff turnover.
- The challenge in the market will be one of time. The recession is allegedly “over.” For organizations strapped for cash, economies will be of significant interest. In the “search and SharePoint” niche, there are quite a few competitors. These range from other Microsoft partners such as SurfRay and Fabasoft to integrators who can hook together existing pieces and parts. Companies in this consulting approach to the search business include New Idea Engineering, with whom I have worked in the past, and my son’s company, Adhere Solutions. Note: my son did not pay me to reference him. I think I bought lunch yesterday which is how the family thing works, right?
- The shift in the enterprise market that I will talk about at the ISS conference in October 2010 is that “search” is not what most users require. The need is for low latency processing of mission critical data delivered in what I call a data fusion system. Few companies offer a “platform” that ingests and makes actionable a range of data. The key players in this space include 20 year veterans like i2 in Cambridge, England, Kroll (now a unit of Altegrity), the Palantir organization (now allegedly involved in a confusing legal matter), and the lesser known but up and coming Digital Reasoning, among others. The name “BA Insight” suggests a capability in the data fusion space, but the new release’s emphasis on “enterprise search” suggests that BA-Insight is anchored in the traditional search market. Perhaps this is just a positioning issue specifically for the news release?
The big challenge is use of the money. Increasing “marketing” sometimes works and sometimes does not. In the “search space”, there is a great deal of noise, smoke, and confusion. The strong interest in open source search so far has not spilled over into the SharePoint sector. I think that will happen. When it does, there will be some interest in Microsoft-centric shops. That interest will probably come from new hires and the chief financial officer’s staff. The traditional Microsoft certified professionals like their counterpart Oracle certified database professionals want to preserve the status quo.
The status quo is not such a comfortable place. Big outfits like Oracle are resorting to legal eagles to cope with open source. Microsoft has a mixed record with regard to open source. My hunch is that BA Insight will have to find a way to go viral within the SharePoint community. That will take keen mastery of social media, the sales ability of Autonomy, and the technical savvy of some serious wizards like Exalead, the repositioning touch of Vivisimo, and the market focus of Coveo. BA Insight has the opportunity to be the break out enterprise search vendor in 2010.
Will $6.0 million be enough? I don’t know the answer. The investors’ smart money thinks BA Insight has what it takes to succeed. From the grandstand in Harrod’s Creek, this race will be fun and entertaining to watch.
Stephen E Arnold, September 22, 2010
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Document Intelligence: A New Buzz Word for Search?
September 22, 2010
Brainware every couple of years discovers me. When this happens, the Brainware marketing team wants to meet. I think I will be catching up with the company at an upcoming intel conference. In the meantime, Brainware has rolled out “document intelligence.” The idea of smart content has spawned a conference, fueled the growth of MarkLogic, and now become part of the Brainware offering.
Brainware Inc. has three new modules, and they are set to reveal them at Oracle OpenWorld 2010, later this year in San Francisco, California. On the presentation schedule are Brainware Distiller, Globalbrain and Visibility modules. Touted as being one one of the world’s pre-eminent business-to-business technology exhibitions, demonstrations and theatre presentations are scheduled throughout the event. If in attendance, be sure to witness first hand how Brainware Distiller, paired up with OPEX mailroom solutions can provide advanced mailroom functionality that will extract vital information from the front end, and then delivering valuable data throughout the enterprise with rapid performance.
“I look forward to this opportunity to meet with potential partners and clients,” said Carl Mergele, Chief Executive Officer at Brainware. “Our Distiller solution is unparalleled in its ability to extract data from unstructured documents and streamline vital business processes for Oracle users worldwide, and this event allows us to demonstrate Brainware’s unique capabilities to members of the Oracle community.”
This type of service suggests that companies still have a big paper problem, and integration remains an issue with native oracle tools. Decide for yourself and check the news release (which may go dark at any time) or navigate to the Brainware Web site.
Maybe more after the briefing? What’s interesting about Oracle is that it continues to generate intentionally or unintentionally chatter about a big search deal. What more could one want beyond Oracle Text, SES11g, and partners’ products?
Glenn Black, September 22, 2010
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