Google Redux
September 15, 2011
“Are Google’s Best Days Behind It?” asks Infoworld. Co-founder Larry Page, who assumed the CEO position earlier this year, hopes to steer giant Google to achieve the “nimbleness and soul and passion and speed of a startup.” Writer Neil McAllister thinks that’s too much of a stretch.
In fact, McAllister points to many reasons Google is poised to diminish. Its sheer size, for one, will inhibit that hope of Page’s. There’s also the fierce competition the company is up against in its every endeavor. Also, Google’s reliance on advertising dollars over subscription fees may limit its opportunities. Changes in the development process, says McAllister, are stifling innovation. And, of course, we can’t forget the company’s legal challenges and privacy complaints.
This lengthy piece concludes with this observation:
[Google] is a large and growing corporation, with obligations to its shareholders, its customers, and its staff. Among those obligations are to use its resources wisely, to compete vigorously, and to protect the interests of its customers, including their privacy. But perhaps above all else, it must also learn to assess itself honestly and recognize that its days as an arcadia for hacker savants may be coming to an end. It’s time for Google to graduate.
I asked Stephen E Arnold for his take on this assessment. His response: “Google’s been on the wrong side of the happiness curve since early 2007. The cause is a combination of factors, including management, competition, and legal issues.”
Indeed.
Cynthia Murrell, September 15, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
Funnelback Tunes in Telstra
September 15, 2011
Telstra recently announced its new telecommunications site, www.nowwearetalking.com.au, will be hosted by Funnelback, as reported in the article, Funnelback Launches New Search for Telstra, on Blog Hosting Info. Telstra, Australia’s leading provider of telecommunications and information services, provides basic telephone services, mobile phone services as well as broadband and internet. They pride themselves on their vast geographical coverage of mobile and fixed network infrastructure, and provide
The Funnelback technology, which is a commercial product for sure, will allow users of the new site to search within blog posts, comments, forum posts, and online discussions for information. Funnelback’s promise to clients is that their services “comprehensively tailor the search facility to deliver on your business objectives.”
Funnelback offers commercial search engine services that help companies manage their online activities. As their website explains,
Funnelback can search across a myriad of corporate content repositories including websites, intranets, shared drives, SharePoint, Email systems and databases. For additional flexibility, it can be deployed as a fully managed, SaaS solution, installed within your firewall or hosted in the cloud. No matter how large or small your organization, we can tailor a solution to suit your business needs and information architecture.
As more and more digital data is being sent and received within companies, the need for content management grows. Companies, such as Funnelback, help maximize production and worker effectiveness by allowing humans to work on higher-level thinking projects and the computers sort through the myriad of data.
Catherine Lamsfuss, September 15, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
Palantir Settles Lawsuit and Invests in Ness Computing
September 15, 2011
Palantir Technologies, a software firm providing analytics platforms for premier financial and intelligence clients, based out of Palo Alto, California, has remained silent since the company’s public image suffered blows in a lawsuit instigated by their competitor i2 Group in early 2011 accusing Palantir employees of illegally obtaining i2 software. According to Palantir’s third black eye: i2 lawsuit settled:
Palantir CEO Alex Karp issued a public statement apologizing for his company’s role in preparing a plan for Bank of America to strike back at Wikileaks, the Internet-based nonprofit group famed for obtaining and releasing sensitive documents into the public domain.
Since the February settlement and a Forbes article released in March, little has been heard from the secretive data analysis start-up other than a July 2011 San Fransisco Chronicle article siting Palantir as an investor in another California start-up, Ness Computing. In the article, Palantir Technologies co-founder Joe Lonsdale said his reasoning for investing in the company was because “their engineering culture reminds me of Palantir.”
After months of silence, could Palantir’s interest in Ness Computing signal that they are looking to their roots to put February’s scandal behind them?
Jasmine Ashton, September 15, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Protected: Is There a SharePoint Chasm of Despair?
September 15, 2011
PolySpot Secures Investment
September 15, 2011
Polyspot, based in Paris, is a specialist enterprise search solution vendor. I learned of the two million euro infusion of capital in the announcement “PolySpot Raises €2 Million from Newfund to Boost its Growth.” The write up said:
PolySpot’s enterprise search solutions are the result of over 10 years of research and development, featuring a highly innovative architecture and technologies (including Apache/Lucene indexing library and Apache/Solr search service). As a result, PolySpot is able to offer open, functionally rich and highly competitive solutions that are used by major accounts across all sectors, including BNP-Paribas, Crédit Agricole SA, Bureau-Veritas, Veolia, Vinci or Schlumberger. Building on this success, PolySpot is now using this fund-raising round to move to the next level and boost its international business in the coming months. This fund-raising is part of an intensive work that began with the arrival of Gilles André (the figure behind success stories such as Leonard’s Logic and Augure) as the company’s new Managing Director and the appointment of David Fischer as head of R&D in 2010.
If you are not familiar with the firm, Polyspot is pushing forward with integrated information solutions. Founded in 2001, PolySpot designs and sells search and information access solutions designed to improve business efficiency in an environment where data volumes are increasing at an exponential rate. PolySpot’s solutions offer built in connectivity to most file types and file systems. The firm’s solutions are based on an innovative infrastructure offering both versatility and high performance at a competitive price point. The firm’s solutions are in use at such organizations as Allianz, BNP Paribas, Bureau Veritas, Crédit Agricole, OSEO, Schlumberger, Veolia, Trinity Mirror and Vinci.
For more information, navigate to the firm’s Web site at www.polyspot.com. You can get additional information about the firm’s capabilities in this interview with Olivier Lefassy, one of the firm’s senior executives.
Stephen E Arnold, September 15, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Google Bids Rationally: The Motorola Win
September 14, 2011
I remember reading Google papers about how to run an auction. The point of these open source documents was to disclose numerical recipes for sophisticated bidding. The idea was to use data to derive maximum benefit from an auction, bid, or deal. I recall that humans were involved, but the Google method emphasized the system and method of logic. Emotion was for the folks who wanted a hot word for an ad.
Well, now we know that those papers were applicable to many situations just not to the Motorola bid if the information in “Google Upped Its Bid for Motorola by $3B in One Day to Close Deal” is accurate. According to the write up:
In order to secure its purchase of Motorola and the company’s collection of patents, Google outbid itself by 33 percent, or $3 billion, in a single day to reach an agreement.
I don’t want to make a statement that may come back to bite me on the ankle. Consequently I will not point out that “data” which supports a $3.0 billion boost in a bid when there are no other bidders is pretty magical information. Nor will I point out that when one bids against oneself, there are some chapters I recall reading in my Psychology 101 textbook which may be applicable.
Let’s just leave it at $12.5 billion for Motorola Mobility when the only other bidder was oneself. Rational? Okay by me. The strategy worked.
Stephen E Arnold, September 14, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Search May Be Flawed, but Maybe Content Management Is Worse?
September 14, 2011
I pay some attention to search and content processing. I take a dim view of content management because it is a weird business. Unlike records management, CMS as the “real” experts label the systems, CMS has few rules. In the tidy world of records management, there are document retention policies. Even when one ventures into the murk of legal content, there is a body of information about how documents must be tattooed before the legal eagles get to add value to the results of a discovery process. And CMS? Most of it is a Wild West rodeo on broken down horses and amateurs trying to distract the wild bulls and kicking stallions of content creators. I find CMS amusing to watch, but I steer clear. The “governance” experts are swarming over the mess CMS vendors and system users create. Need an example? How about the chaos of many Lotus Notes or Microsoft SharePoint systems. Software just does not impose an editorial policy on employees with degrees in business administration and home economics engaged in writing marketing collateral, proposals, and reports.
I read “Inefficiencies in Collateral Management Cost the Financial Sector More than EUR4 Billion Annually, According to Accenture/Clearstream Survey” and reached two working hypotheses:
First, some information functions may be unmanageable unless rules are set up before the users start cranking out digital outputs. In my experience, this pristine state is tough to achieve. Consequently, most CMS implementations are not going to deliver what users and chief financial officers want. In short, the cost excess is likely to persist. How much money is blown with lousy CMS? Here’s what the article asserts:
The financial services sector could save more than EUR4 billion annually in collateral management costs by addressing operational inefficiencies, according to a survey by Accenture (NYSE: ACN) and Clearstream.
Assume the estimated cost is inflated. Then do a back of envelope calculation that says Manhattan and Tokyo are probably as inefficient. Bingo. We have a nice fat six billion euro number. Not quite like the PIIGS’ debt, but a respectable number which CMS vendors should have kept more manageable.
Second, what about XML. I thought that Extensible Markup Language and systems which whip this file type around would have reduced content costs. I am not sure that has happened. I have formulated a notion that XML has become its own worst enemy. There is not single XML and the costs of pushing verbose objects to and fro, the expense of the humans who must work with systems designed for coding rock stars, and the bewildering diversity of XML tagged content look like deal breakers.
I don’t want to name any XML search and content vendors. I don’t want to highlight vendors who talk about XML and then slap big price tags on content transformation services. I do want to mention that Exalead is XML friendly and does a good job in my opinion with XML in many different forms. To Exalead’s credit, it handles XML quietly. Tooting the XML tuba has not sunk a musical hook in the financial institutions mentioned in the survey.
I am generally suspicious when I read a giant consulting firm and a smaller consulting firm have mined their contacts for data. However, in this case, I think that CMS and XML help me understand the persistent problem which exists in certain market sectors. How do you fix the problem? My hunch is that one should hire Accenture. Given the mess that exists, Accenture may buy better lunches for clients than the “real” poobahs, the art history majors, and the self appointed experts have delivered. Wait. I want to restate this. The problem may be unmanageable. Content is increasing too rapidly and few outfits have the appetite to spend good money after bad. Just my opinion formed in a land fond of beets.
Stephen E Arnold, September 15, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Search to eMarketing: A Bridge Too Far?
September 14, 2011
I find the creativity of search vendors fascinating. We have the search to customer support method. The play worked for InQuira,which was snapped up by the Google nemesis Oracle. We have the search to freebie, which is the path Microsoft is taking with the remarkable Fast enterprise search platform. We have the search to business intelligence play which has worked well for SAS and its Teragram acquisition. Now we have search to eMarketing.
Navigate to “E-marketers Using Less Than Half the Data Available to Them.” Sponsored by Endeca, the article highlights some data which I find useful when I need to support my assertion about how little progress has been made to make information findable and actionable:
half of the respondents report that they are still using multiple tools (at least three or more) to support business intelligence (BI) decisions, underscoring the need for data to be lifted from these separate silos and streamlined into a unified and easy-to-understand view.
The conclusion I draw is that I should use a tool such as Exalead’s search based application technology. But my hunch is that Endeca wants me to embrace the Endeca approach.
A handful of other findings reported strike me as suggestive:
- 35% say they spend hours combining data from various data sources and over half say they would like to analyze all information in a single view.
- 48% of respondents say their analytics requirements change at least monthly, with 20% of respondents requirements changing daily or hourly.
- More than 40% of respondents cite that it often takes months to have their BI requests fulfilled or they often cannot get their requests fulfilled at all.
Will emarketing business intelligence become the next big gold mine for search vendors? My thought is that companies like Attensity have been in the game for a while and may have a head start.
Stephen E Arnold, September 14, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Harmony: Heuristics and Search
September 14, 2011
Need help with that Sudoku puzzle? “Neat Algorithms – Harmony Search” discusses an unconventional path to a solution.
I don’t hear “heuristics” tossed around much in normal conversation, though we’ve been participating in heuristic optimization our entire lives. In fact, it is one key component to unlocking artificial intelligence. A basic description would be an iterative process of arriving at the best solution based on selecting the ideal combination of variables. It is tantamount to the human decision making process, evaluating multi-variable situations based on knowledge of quality and previous experience (which can be too grey an area for computers). The definition of quality is continually built upon for refinement and thus increased success.
This blog post provides an excellent example of heuristic optimization in action: the music produced by jazz ensembles. Creating good music requires knowledge of what notes mesh well, what notes your band mates may select, pitch etc. There is a reason why more often than naught it is seasoned professionals that play the best. Practice does make perfect.
Rightfully so, the algorithm investigated in this piece is dubbed Harmony Search (HS) and has numerous end users. For reference, there are examples of code for developing harmonies included in the linked post. Of particular interest to me is the ability to apply this method to applications like heat exchanger designs or planning construction site layouts.
Now, I mentioned that this algorithm could be employed to get to the bottom of those pesky Sudokus. This is true. The post does include a thorough explanation of fitting the Sudoku model into the HS framework, referencing the work of HS’s creator. The interesting conclusion is this:
“Sudoku however isn’t really a good test bed for these algorithms because its easy enough to write a solving algorithm, and you have to write most of that algorithm to apply HS to sudoku anyways.”
Considering this statement earlier in the post:
“For problems where it is hard to decipher why changing an input changes the quality (and thus the optimal solution isn’t very obvious), these algorithms are extremely useful.”
To me, while a puzzle like Sudoku can be adjusted to the HS requirements of quality measurement, this is not a true fit. There is no “better” solution to Sudoku. It is correct or it isn’t, hence the author’s suggestion that a simpler algorithm can save you a lot of processing trouble. HS is an amazing tool, but not even the best tool works for every job.
The moral of this story? If you are that confounded over a Sudoku puzzle, perhaps you should stick with the Word Search? When search becomes a puzzle, there will be more than human instinct operating.
Sarah Rogers, September 14, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
Kroll in the UK and Its Content Technology
September 14, 2011
The recent disturbances in London have lead UK Prime Minister David Cameron to reach across the pond to consult Kroll Chairman and former American police chief, William Bratton on preventing gang related violence and building safer communities. There’s nothing like an outside US expert to come to the aid of our British cousins.
Altergrity, a specialized law enforcement training company and owner of Kroll, quoted Mr. Bratton in an Aug 12, Media Release:
I would certainly be in a position to discuss the contemporary American experience and my work in these areas – in particular the successes that created real reductions in gang-related crime in Boston, New York and most recently in Los Angeles, where we also saw significant improvements in the relations between the police and the city’s diverse communities. There are many lessons from these experiences that I believe are relevant to the current situation in England.
Based on this release, Mr. Bratton appears confident in his abilities to solve the world’s security concerns. We hope that UK police and civilians are equally secure in the role that his company takes in dispelling the violence affecting their country. If you want some basic information about the types of search and content processing tools that Mr. Bratton brings to his engagements, navigate to the interview with former Kroll wizard David Chaplin here. This is quite impressive technology.
Jasmine Ashton, September 14, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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