An Unlikely Open Source Supporter: LexisNexis
January 24, 2012
We are constantly searching for solutions to Big Data, and LexisNexis says its new HPCC Systems is much faster and better equipped than the well-known Hadoop technology.
The company developed the processing data platform to handle its own research business and wants to expand to other markets. However, that goal may be difficult to achieve following in open source Hadoop’s shadow. The competition is not stopping LexisNexis from attempting to add open source technology, according to the ComputerWorldUK article, “Hadoop Challenger LexisNexis Wants to Add Open Source Developers.” The article asserts:
The company has opened sourced the HPCC platform, and says it is challenging Hadoop in benchmarks. The company says there are now about 1,000 HPCC Systems developers worldwide, most of who have been trained since the platform was opened sourced in June, By contrast, a Hadoop developer conference last summer drew a crowd of some 1,700.
LexisNexis is finally embracing open source? Don’t want to rush do we? Clearly, the company faces a difficult battle here attempting to follow in Apache’s footsteps. It just might be a little late in the game. But a little open source jazz for marketing? Seems okay and trendy.
Andrea Hayden, January 24, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Standing Up for Google in the UK
January 24, 2012
An imaginary conversation is at the heart of “The Google Dialogues: Search Neutrality” at ComputerWorldUK.
Writer Alec Muffet stands against censorship, and feels that attempts to control Google and its search algorithm fall into that realm. There are competing products out there, he points out; Google is not to blame if users eschew the alternatives.
Responding to criticisms of Google from PICTFOR, the UK’s Parliamentary Internet Communications and Technology Forum, Muffet envisions himself discussing search neutrality with such a critic. Here’s an excerpt:
“So why not create your own search engine that is better and promote that? Or use Bing? Or support Duck-Duck-Go which is tremendously ethical?
Because Google are here, they’re wrong and they need to be fixed.
Yes, you said that. So Google should listen to you regards how to order their search results?
Yes.
Why?
Because their ordering is not fair and it promotes their own content, such as Google+!
And… ?
…and we have to use Google because it’s a monopoly!
But it’s not really a monopoly. . . .”
. . .And on it goes. It’s an interesting thought experiment, and I recommend checking it out. The author’s point of view deserves some consideration.
Responses to Google’s great influence seem to be fluid and situational. It us no wonder, then, that the company continues to push at boundaries and venture into murky territory; they know their gains are likely to outweigh any punishments.
Cynthia Murrell, January 24, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Facebook, Google, and Evil: Standard Operating Procedure?
January 23, 2012
One of the most over-used and little-understood words attached to online is “evil.” Long before Google, I was in a meeting at which ABI/INFORM announced per online type pricing. I think the person who described the decision to charge $0.25 per online type for Format 5 on Dialog was Martha Williams, one of the stalwarts of the online industry and a respected figure at the University of Illinois science and engineering libraries.
A tip of the trident to http://reinventingtheeventhorizon.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/midnight-in-the-garden-of-good-and-evil%E2%80%94mafia-style/
Evil, according to Dictionary.com–which is tough to use because of the ads for Zoho, InetSoft, and RingCentral–iterates through 10 definitions:
- morally wrong or bad; immoral; wicked: evil deeds; an evil life.
- harmful; injurious: evil laws.
- characterized or accompanied by misfortune or suffering;unfortunate; disastrous: to be fallen on evil days.
- due to actual or imputed bad conduct or character: an evil reputation.
- marked by anger, irritability, irascibility, etc.: He is known for his evil disposition.
- that which is evil; evil quality, intention, or conduct: to choose the lesser of two evils.
- the force in nature that governs and gives rise to wickedness and sin.
- the wicked or immoral part of someone or something: The evil in his nature has destroyed the good.
- harm; mischief; misfortune: to wish one evil.
- anything causing injury or harm: Tobacco is considered by some to be an evil.
Like many words in every day use, evil can denote or connote different shades of meaning.
I thought about these 10 definitions after I read “Facebook to Google: Don’t Be Evil, Focus on the User.” The write up presents a respected real journalist’s report about information exchanged in a meeting. The main point of the write up describes a way to make Google work the way it did before the social bonus program kicked in and the Google Plus avalanche rumbled down the roof of the Googleplex.
Protected: Prepare for SharePoint BLOB Storage
January 23, 2012
Looking Toward SharePoint 2013
January 23, 2012
In the constant conversation surrounding SharePoint, the next SharePoint release seems to always be on the horizon, ever present in the blogosphere. SharePoint 2010 is still relatively new, and yet some experts have already moved on to the yet unknown SharePoint 2013. Mike Walsh discusses this and more in his piece, “End of year look at SharePoint.”
Walsh offers:
SharePoint 2010 came out in May 2010 so we are now just over halfway through the usual three year cycle before the next version of the product . . . Also while clearly most of the developer team have been working on the new version since they virtually left the SP 2010 forums in summer 2010, people from the team such as Bill Baer seemed to have stopped writing anything on SP 2010 and there was even a Microsoft SP 2010 blogger who recently announced the end of his SP 2010 blog articles because he had moved to working with the next version of the product. Whether this means that they are already informing people . . . about what the next version will include is something that I don’t know . . . I do however suspect that if that stage hasn’t been reached yet it will be by maybe May 2012. That would be followed by the first private betas (end summer 2012?) and in time by the first public beta . . .My own guess is that we’ll be back to the October (2013) release date we had for the 2007 products.
It seems to me that Microsoft is stuck in an old-fashioned update routine. Instead of making updates, improvements, and patches a constant fluid process, SharePoint is confined to a rigid three-year release cycle. We wonder if users might be getting a bit tired of the three-year redesign schedule. It is a bit like a lame duck presidency – if something is on the way out then it gets no further attention. Everyone is looking forward to the next thing.
For this and other reasons, we like the flexibility and agility of third-party enterprise solutions. Fabasoft Mindbreeze, for example, releases updates quarterly for on-site installations and monthly for the cloud.
From their web site:
Continuous quality assurance and performance optimization ensure extremely short release cycles. We release a new Mindbreeze Cloud update every month.
If you are looking forward to a day when SharePoint is no longer hindered by the three-year cycle, consider a third-party solution like Fabasoft Mindbreeze, and enjoy the added agility that it brings to your organization’s enterprise needs.
Emily Rae Aldridge, January 23, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
India Improving Their Product Development Process
January 23, 2012
As product lifecycle management (PLM) grows in the United States and Europe, it has also taken to life in India. Moneylife’s article “Adoption in Automotive and Heavy Engineering Sectors to Drive the $139.5-Million PLM Market Toward $437.9 Million by 2017, predicts Frost & Sullivan” discusses the growth and challenges ahead for India’s manufacturing industry.
Business research firm, Frost and Sullivan, found in their “Strategic Analysis of the Indian Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)” that the “Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) is expected to be in excess of 15 percent during 2010-2017.” They note that:
“Medium-sized enterprises are gradually shifting from traditional CAD components to include lifecycle data management capabilities. Small-sized businesses, being largely CAD-centric and OEM-driven, are yet to completely appreciate the benefits of PLM.”
Although there is significant growth in the industry, it is also faced with the lack of a “highly-skilled workforce who have expertise in a PLM platform,” the cost of training and reluctant employees.
It seems that India’s manufacturing industry is heading in the right direction, but adapting to swiftly changing technology could be the biggest challenge. Technology companies like Inforbix are always developing new, cutting-edge software that changes the manufacturing landscape. Innovation is not going to stop, but we wonder if India will be able to keep up.
Jennifer Wensink, January 20, 2012
LinkedIn and IndexTank: Open Source Flag Waving
January 23, 2012
According to the GigaOM article “LinkedIn Open Sources Code From IndexTank Acquisition” the purchase of the company is a win-win for LinkedIn and the open source community. “LinkedIn announced that the technology behind IndexTank, the search engine startup it acquired back in October, has been released as open source software under the Apache 2.0 license.
Though the IndexTank technology is impressive, “the team behind it was likely the most attractive aspect to LinkedIn.” IndexTank was started by former Inktomi engineer, Diego Basch. According to the GigaOM article “IndexTank, A Hosted Search Startup Launches” the platform produces fast yet accurate results by “looking at a document and treating constantly changing elements of a page differently from the static content. It then uses memory (and not storage) to store these changing-parts of the document.”
It will be intriguing to see how open source IndexTank is used. Host search systems such as IndexTank and Blossom which is used by Beyond Search have become an invaluable tool for both private and public websites and have become tricks of the trade.
April Holmes, January 23, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Dahu Edge Tackles Big Data
January 23, 2012
Big data are becoming one of the big problems of the 21st century due to exploding data volumes and the inability for most companies to address it in an efficient and cost effective manner. This issue has carved out a need for innovative technology to help companies manage their data.
The Dahu blog recently shared a post that explains data granularity in respect to big data in the article “Data Granularity – What’s *That* All About?”
Dahu is a new UK based company that combines a passion for innovation with the ability to build effective search to help customers find real value from the web.
The article points out:
Gathering data from a multitude of web-sites is perfectly possible using a wide variety of techniques, but up to now, these techniques have been quite intensive, requiring considerable set-up time and on-going management. This is fine if you are trying to gather data from perhaps one or two web sites and can keep on top of any changes in those sites – but if you need to gather content from perhaps thousands of sites, then you are going to struggle to manage the process in a cost-effective way.
Dahu’s primary product, the Dahu EDGE platform, does an excellent job of addressing this issue by mining content from a variety of structured and unstructured sources. This is a crowded space. Does Dahu have the “edge”? We’re watching.
Jasmine Ashton, January 23, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
For You Library Lovers: eBook Loan Problem
January 23, 2012
E-reader sales have skyrocketed this holiday season and so too have e-book rentals from public libraries. The New York Times reported on the ongoing battle between e-readers and paper books in the article “For Libraries vs. Publishers: An E-Book Tug of War.”
According to the article, due to a fear of loss of revenue, most publishers in the United States now block libraries’ access to the e-book form of either all of their titles or their most recently published ones.
Despite the fact that only one e-book can be checked out at a time, just like paper books, publishers say that the difference lies in the convenience of e-book rentals.
Elinor Hirschorn, executive vice president and chief digital officer of Simon & Schuster said:
The reason publishers didn’t worry about lost sales from library lending of print books is that buying a book is easier — no return trip is needed to the bookstore — and the buyer has a physical collectible after reading it.
While the rapid technological advancement over the last decade has been very lucrative for some industries, in it has lead to the demise of others. In order to keep their overall revenue from taking a dramatic hit, publishers need to find a way to remain cost effective and convenient without putting themselves out of business.
Great idea: encourage people to avoid libraries for content.
Jasmine Ashton, January 23, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Social Media Analytics: What are Industry Leaders Doing?
January 23, 2012
Social media analytics are vital in today’s business world because it allows companies to provide personalized customer service and improves brand and reputation in easy-to-find profiles.
Text Analytics News recently partnered with Useful Social Media to publish a series of interviews with experts in the field of Social Media Analytics. The first installment focuses on digital research and what leading organizations are doing in the area of social media analytics.
Social Media Analytics Expert Interview Series: Part 1” is conducted by the Chief Editor of Text Analytics news, Ezra Steinberg. The interview panel includes: Dana Jacob, Sr. Manager of Social Media Insights & Analytics, Yahoo!; Judy Pastor, Principal Operations Research Manager, American Airlines; Tom H. C. Anderson, Managing Partner, Anderson Analytics (OdinText); Usher Lieberman, Director Corporate Communications, TheFind; and Marshall Sponder, Founder, WebMetricsGuru. A couple of intriguing questions and responses from the interview follow:
“USM: What parts of the business (CRM, Research, CS, HR etc.) do you think can benefit most from social media analytics?
Jacob (Yahoo!): ‘Every part of the business can benefit from social media analytics, but the needs and focuses vary. For marketing, social media analytics provide measurement of campaign effectiveness, brand image and association, and reactions to marketing messages. For product teams, social media could provide insights into users’ mindset as to why they use one brand or type of product versus another, and could help uncover unmet needs in the market place. For the research function, social media is becoming an important data source to compliment traditional market research.’
USM: What skillsets do you feel are most critical in a social media analytics department?
Sponder (WebMetricsGuru): I think having an industry knowledge is important to the social analytics department within an organization and here’s why: Social Data, by its nature, is mostly unstructured (some have said that 90% of the social data is ‘unstructured’) and it takes a lot of additional work to provide meaning to the data in context to what a client actually needs.’
The interview focuses on the importance of social media analytics and how to integrate, and many organizations would be benefited by considering the ideas and opinions provided by these industry leaders. The full interview can be found here and can give insight on developing a social media analytics department and leveraging social media for clients. Before gobbling the social media analytics Cheetos, be sure to check out what constitutes a valid data set.
Andrea Hayden, January 23, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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