Google and Charm
May 17, 2011
I read in my hard copy edition of the New York Times about Google’s relying on an attorney to be a diplomat. You may be able to locate the story “Google Turns On Charm to Win Over Europeans” online at http://goo.gl/6pLFs but don’t email me if the link goes dead. (Traditional media outfits are great at being “real” journalists. Keeping information findable and making money, well, those functions are still up in the air in my opinion.)
What struck me as interesting about the story was that the killer prose walked a narrow path through the information mine field:
- What’s up with Google’s contentious situation in Switzerland?
- Is this diplomacy going to ameliorate Google’s legal hassles with nation states on every continent except Antarctica?
- Will the diplomacy method fix up Google’s situation in China, the world’s largest market?
- Will the Google charm help stabilize Google’s situation in the US on a number of issues, including the handling of certain types of advertisements.
The story did mention Germany. One question that occurred to me was, “Is it too late for rapprochement?” US diplomacy often settles on money and other fungible methods. Another was, “Is Google acting like a company or is the company still wearing its nation-state T shirt?”
Stephen E Arnold, May 17, 2011
Freebie
Protected: SharePoint Retrospect: A Productive Decade
May 17, 2011
Autonomy Mines Iron Mountain
May 16, 2011
I have written about Stratify in the three editions of the Enterprise Search Report which I wrote when “search” was hot, and in my Gilbane report named after this blog. Since late 2010, Stratify (originally named Purple Yogi which got some In-Q-Tel love in 2001) has gotten lost within Iron Mountain’s labyrinth of organizational tunnels. Now Iron Mountain seems to face significant financial, technical, business, and management challenges. The details of what Autonomy snagged are fuzzy, but based on the sketchy information that flowed to me since May 12, 2011, here’s what I have been able to “mine”:
Autonomy mines Iron Mountain for revenue, customer, and upsell “gold.” Image source: http://www.davestravelcorner.com/articles/goldcountry/article.htm
- Autonomy will get the archiving, eDiscovery, and online back up business of Iron Mountain
- No word on the fate of Mimosa Systems which Iron Mountain bought in early 2010. (My recollection is that Mimosa used a mid tier search solution obtained from a third party. I want to link Mimosa with dtSearch, but I may be mistaken on that point.)
- Autonomy will apply is well-honed management method to the properties. Expect to see Autonomy push ever closer to $1.0 billion in revenues, maybe this calendar year.
You can get some numbers from the news item “Autonomy Acquires Some Iron Mountain Digital Assets for $380 Million.”
Stratify’s technology was the cat’s pajamas years ago. More recently, the technology has lagged. Iron Mountain’s own difficulties distracted the company from its digital opportunities. My view is the Iron Mountain made an all to familiar error: Online looks easy but looks are deceiving.
Some of the former Web masters, failed “real” journalists, and self appointed search experts will enjoy the opportunity to berate Autonomy for its acquisitions and growth tactics, but I think those folks are wrong.
Autonomy does manage its acquisitions to generate stakeholder and customer value.
In fact, Autonomy’s track record with its acquisitions is, in my opinion, better than either Google’s or Microsoft’s. As for Endeca, that company has fallen behind Autonomy due to different management strategies and growth tactics. Don’t believe me?
Just look at Autonomy’s track record, top line revenue, profits, and customer base, not tweets from a yesterday thinker at a lumber-filled, pay to play meet up.
Stephen E Arnold, May 16, 2011
Freebie.
Endeca and Cyber Situational Awareness
May 16, 2011
Wow, that’s a fresh spin on eCommerce, database technology and search. “Cyber situational awareness” is a semantic angle from Endeca that is fresher than sentiment analysis or lame old search and retrieval.
Bob Gourley acquaints us with “Endeca’s Cyber Situational Awareness.” Endeca revamped their indexing technology in ’09, and it has several features to crow about. However, the most interesting to us is it’s “Cyber Situational Awareness. The article asserts:
Many streams of data constantly pour into the [Security Operations Center]: log analysis, incident reports, network analysis, threat intelligence, and more. When a significant incident occurs, the urgent question is not only ‘how do we handle the incident’ but ‘what’s the impact to current missions and readiness?’ Endeca lets the SOC answer that question with search/discovery tools, by interactively tracing the dependency relationships that start with the compromised asset or exfiltrated data. All the key data is ingested into a common operating picture, inside which analysts can search, drill and pivot through lists and visualizations of each cyber data source.
Now that’s how to go beyond search: probe cyber situational awareness. It will be interesting to see where this leads. I wonder if there will be a YouTube.com series called CSA with intrepid search experts cracking tough problems with next generation technology?
Cynthia Murrell May 16, 2011
Freebie
Google I/O: Focus or Scatter?
May 16, 2011
Are the developments reported in EWeek’s piece, “Google Cloud Music, Movies Open Google I/O,” indicative of Google’s recent focus? It seems that the two most tout-able Google projects involve a music storage service and a movie rental site. Is it just me, or does Google seem to have little search news at its input/output conference?
With the turmoil over PageRank changes, Google is pushing into markets with a “me too” vengeance. I suppose we can’t blame Google for being a little search-shy right now. However, I don’t believe they will prosper by veering far from their core strength.
Besides, the move into music isn’t without its own complications. The article asserted:
“Unfortunately, like Amazon, Google has not secured music labels’ permission for streaming the songs…Jamie Rosenberg, Google’s director of digital content, argued that its approach is completely legal, that it is simply providing a music storage service for users. However, he allowed that labels were not receptive to Google’s service under its current iteration.
We’ll see which of Google’s many, many initiatives pan out as time goes on. We want to see more emphasis on search and details about the Blogger crash. If Google wants me to use a Chromebook, I want the Google cloud to be there, not offline with apps and content lost in the fog. The Google scatter may be reflections of the cloud coming to earth and reflecting at odd angles.
Cynthia Murrell May 16, 2011
Freebie
Bitten by a Mad Panda?
May 16, 2011
SearchEngineWatch.com reports, “Google: Ask Yourself These 23 Questions if Panda Impacted Your Web Site.” In response to the outcry from sites that have been adversely affected by Google Panda’s reorganization of search rankings, Google has some questions for web masters to reflect upon. We noted:
Previously, beyond telling webmasters to identify and remove (or improve) low-quality or ‘shallow’ content, Google hasn’t had much to say. Until today, at least. In a new blog post on Google Webmaster Central, Google’s Amit Singhal has posted what he calls ‘guidance’ to webmasters in the form of 24 questions you should ask yourself as you go about recovering and determining ‘quality.’
The list of questions is too long to reproduce here, but the list seems pretty sensible to me. The article does, however, mention one flaw in the Panda’s procedures. It claims that “scrapers are outranking the original content in many cases.” Hmm.
What a mess SEO has wrought. Has Google caught the “soft revenue syndrome” or come down with a bad case of the “Facebook migraine”? I see the Panda crashing through the digital forest now. Gotta run.
Cynthia Murrell May 16, 2011
Digital Reasoning Continues to Expand
May 16, 2011
Move over Palantir and i2 Ltd. Digital Reasoning is expanding due to its rapid growth. As reported in MSN’s “Digital Reasoning Introduces Federal Advisory Board,” the data analytics leader has created a board to guide its push into the federal market. We learned:
With the federal government’s increased focus on cloud computing, (Digital Reasoning’s) flagship product Synthesys® provides a unique Entity Oriented Analytics solution that enables government agencies to tap into the power of big data. The Advisory Board represents a team with unique insight into the requirements of Big Data, text analytics and intelligence solutions for government agencies.
The board members are: Gen. William T. Hobbins, who retired as Commander, U.S. Air Forces in Europe; Bob Flores, founder and president of Applicology Inc., who spent 31 years in the US intelligence community; Anita K. Jones, who managed the Department of Defense’s science and technology program; Capt. Nick Buck, who spent 15 years in National Security Space, including 10 years in the National Reconnaissance Office; and Mike Miller, currently president of M4 Associates and previously VP of Juniper Networks’ Public Sector Division where he was responsible for all business with Juniper’s Public Sector customers in the US. This kind of talent should be valuable guiding Digital Reasoning’s federal sector strategy.
We have tracked this Franklin, Tennessee, company since its inception. To get some insight into the firm’s approach, you may want to read these two interviews ArnoldIT.com, the owner of this news service, conducted with Tim Estes, the founder of Digital Reasoning. The February 2010 interview explores the core technology of the firm and how it differs from other vendors’ methods. The December 2010 interview probes the new version of the firm’s flagship technology.
Stephen E Arnold, May 16, 2011
Freebie
Protected: Is SharePoint Hurt in a British Scrum?
May 16, 2011
Google and Its Cloud Outage
May 15, 2011
Short honk: The Google I/O giveaway and “to be” love fest did not provide a forum for a Google cloud outage. With the cloud the pivot on which Google’s future spins, the Blogger.com crash had a low profile. You can read the “Blogger Is Back” story, dated May 13, 2011, to find a modest amount of information about a 20 hour outage. So, Google wants me to build a business on its cloud services. Hmm.
Stephen E Arnold, May 15, 2011
Freebie
Visualization Components
May 15, 2011
David Galles, of the Computer Science University of San Francisco, gives us a useful collection of visualization components in his “Data Structure Visualizations” list. The structures and algorithms addressed include the Basics, Indexing, Sorting, Heap-like Data Structures, Graph Algorithms, Dynamic Programming, and “Others.”
In his page discussing visualizations, Galles explains,
The best way to understand complex data structures is to see them in action. We’ve developed interactive animations for a variety of data structures and algorithms. Our visualization tool is written in JavaScript using the HTML5 canvas element, and run in just about any modern browser — including iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad, and even the web browser in the Kindle! (The frame rate is low enough in the Kindle that the visualizations aren’t terribly useful, but the tree-based visualizations — BSTs and AVL Trees — seem to work well enough).
Galles also provides a tutorial for creating one’s own visualizations. Check it out if you’re wrestling with your own complex data structures. As search vendors thrash and flail, business intelligence looks like a promising market sector. Nothing sells business intelligence like hot graphics. Just ask Palantir.
Cynthia Murrell May 15, 2011
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
