IBM Docs Beta Now Available
January 23, 2012
IBM shouts, “Me too, me too!” Well, not literally, but ZDNet reports, “IBM Readies Answer to Google Docs and Office 365.” A beta version of IBM’s cloud-based document editing tool, IBM Docs, has officially been launched. Though it is similar to Google Docs and Microsoft’s Office 365, it does have a security feature that they don’t. Writer Daved Meyer explains:
It has a feature to assign specific sections of a document to key staff for editing. . . . In addition, businesses can set security levels for certain sections of a document, so only employees with that clearance can see sensitive information. This feature is undergoing testing with one of IBM’s government customers, according to [IBM product manager Jeanette] Barlow.
IBM Docs is part of the LotusLive cloud platform, soon to be known as the IBM Smart Cloud for Social Business. Hmm, interesting change; it seems the company noted the popularity of everything “social.” I wonder how long before the word is out of vogue. A few years, tops?
The final product is expected to be finished later this year, but you can check out the beta here. The echo of “Me too” will be audible.
Cynthia Murrell, January 23, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Why Not Order a Victim Online?
January 22, 2012
Well, here’s a new spin on predictive search. CNet News reports, “Chicago Restaurants Stop Taking Cell Phone Orders.” In parts of Chicago, so many delivery drivers have been robbed by cell phone users that businesses are now limiting their orders to landline customers. Writer Chris Matyszczyk reports:
“Chinatown and Hyde Park are the two areas where cell phone miscreants appear to have had their pizza and eaten it.
It seems to have become such a problem that the local police had to issue a warning to all business owners, complete with certain cell phone numbers that have already been involved in such incidents.
What a racket; the criminals don’t have to search for a victim. Victims come to them. But since when is this specific to mobile orders? There are whole zip codes in my area that businesses refuse to deliver to, and this began long before cell phones became common.
The write up points out that the landline-only policy is impractical, anyway. Almost everyone has a cell phone, and landline subscriptions are in a free-fall. A cell-phone order ban could put a delivery establishment out of business. Purveyors of that famous Chicago pizza may want to look into the forbidden zip code option instead.
Cynthia Murrell, January 22, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Why Free Services Can Be Costly
January 22, 2012
I stumbled upon a interesting post where blogger Tyler Nichols lamented the way that customers mistreat and inherently devalue free services in the article “I am Done with the Freemium Business Model.”
According to the post, Nichols obtained this opinion after creating a free Letter from Santa site over this Christmas holiday. Despite the 1,000,000 page views and 50,000 free Santa letters created, Nichols noticed that his customers refused to follow simple directions and fagged his follow up thank you letter as spam.
Nichols concluded:
Free customers are higher maintenance than paying customers. I think it’s because they aren’t paying, they show little or no attention to directions. I focused on making the UI of the site drop dead simple and easy to use. I created a pretty thorough FAQ to answer 99.9% of the questions people might have. I even linked to the FAQ in the email response they got with their download links to the letter they created. I still had hundreds of free customers ask for help with simple questions that were answered in the FAQ.
It’s no surprise that paying customers place a higher value on their products and services than the one’s that receive it for free. But we wonder if this frustration over the freemium business model will inevitably spill over into open source search. We are monitoring, which is a free activity.
Jasmine Ashton, January 21, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Thomson Reuters Innovates via Print!
January 22, 2012
From the “beavers do what beavers do” file.
With musical chairs in the senior executive ranks, flat earnings, a drubbing by Bloomberg and a Hail, Mary! attempt to gin up excitement via YouTube, Thomson Reuters is giving me a headache. I can’t imagine what David Thomson and the other stakeholders think about the tie up of a professional publishing company with a global news outfit.
What I did not expect was the Wall Street Journal story “Thomson Reuters Considers a Magazine Launch” in the Saturday hard copy edition delivered to my goose pond. The interesting passage in the news story, which does not seem to be of much interest to other news outfits, is:
Still executives don’t rule out the possibility of a regularly produced publication. “We’re all sitting around thinking about what we do next,” said Jim Impoco, executive editor of Thomson Reuters Digital and managing editor of the Davos magazine. He said the magazine was “part of an arsenal to embellish our consumer profile.”
Yowza!
I don’t think of the Davos crowd as average Harrod’s Creek consumers. I also am not sure if “arsenal” is the word I would choose to describe the hundreds of impossible to differentiate products and services which Thomson Reuters now offers. Have you thought much about eMAXX or EcoWin Pro? I did not think so. In case you know these two products, you will make sense of these offerings as well:
- Puntolex
- Round Hall
- Serengeti.
Yep, highly consumer oriented.
My view of Thomson Reuters is that it is a “beaver”, an animal which no matter where it finds itself, tries to build a dam. This means that Thomson Reuters is going to do products it understands; for example, a print magazine for the wealthy, well connected professional.
Is this a consumer play? Not in my dreams.
Thomson Reuters has to find a way to generate growth, pay dividends, service its debt, and compete with outfits like Factset. Until then, beavers do what beavers do and there is not much of a market for displaced beavers who are trying to build dams in a world far from forests, rivers, and glens.
And search! Yep, WestlawNext is working. The other implementations? Beavers do the beaver thing.
Stephen E Arnold, January 22, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
RefDot a Time Saving Citation Tool
January 21, 2012
Here is a useful tool for researchers and writers. Lifehacker informs us, “RefDot Automatically Pulls Citations from Amazon Books.” The write up explains:
RefDot simply pulls out the citation information for the books you’re viewing and displays it in a TXT or HTML format. You can add as many as you need to all at once. The feature set doesn’t include automatic newspaper article citations, but if you’re referencing a ton of books it’s a handy means to quickly get the information you need without having to sift through the copyright information inside the physical book.
Oh, the time that would have saved me in college! RefDot, from Readdot, is available for the Chrome browser at the Chrome Web Store. So far, it works for plenty of books, but journals and Web sites are being added over time.
One caveat- a reviewer cautions that, as of now, RefDot only provides room for one author name, so users will have to go back and double check that manually. However, that same commentator also had high praise for the application’s design.
We recommend that anyone with citations in their future check it out. Hurry, some large outfits like Thomson Reuters, offer for fee bibliographic citation products and can be touchy about free or low cost competitors.
Cynthia Murrell, January 21, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
TopQuadrant Earns ReportingHub Contract
January 21, 2012
TopQuadrant, a well-known semantic data integration company has been awarded a major contract by the Exploration and Production Information Management Association or EPIM.
According to the document “TopQuadrant To Deliver New Data Reporting System For Oil and Gas Operators on the Norwegian Continental Shelf” on TopQuadrant.com, EPIM has awarded its ReportingHub contract to TopQuadrant. EPIM focuses on coming up with IT solutions that efficiently moves the information flow path between all users. They have been working closely with the oil industry to come up with a plan that will allow companies to collect, normalize, validate, analyze and report data concerning the daily activities of the North Sea oil and gas drillers.
According to an Executive Director at EPIM,
TopQuadrant offers scalable data integration and reporting solutions that support end-to-end systems for the oil and gas industry. Working with EPIM, TopQuadrant will develop a new reporting system that will provide flexibility to meet current and future information sharing needs of the NCS operators and authorities.
TopQuadrant has worked to position itself as a developer of taxonomy tools. We find it interesting that content processing firms are finding ways to leverage core information retrieval technology in interesting ways.
April Holmes, January 21, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Gartner Predicts a Volatile Year for the IT Industry
January 21, 2012
Technological innovation and the creation of media tablets and advances in mobile is having a disruptive impact on many industries. Taume recently reported on a predictive Gartner study for the IT industry in the article “Gartner Identifies Top Vertical Industry Predictions for IT Organizations 2012 and Beyond”
According to the article, Gartner’s annual Predicts research on industry trends features 15 strategic planning assumptions that CIOs, senior business executives and IT leaders should factor into their enterprise planning and strategy-setting initiatives.
Kimberly Harris-Ferrante, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner said:
“Many industry business models will be challenged through 2015 as customers continue to adopt an always-connected digital lifestyle and market competitors exploit emerging technologies to achieve business growth and success. Cloud computing and social media will continue to provide industries with new avenues for effective customer communication and engagement, facilitating increased revenue and sustainable interaction with key customers.”
It looks like 2012 is going to be a volatile year unless IT companies use the Gartner study predictions to effectively align their business practices with the needs of customer base and partner organizations.
Jasmine Ashton, January 21, 2012
Cheap Textbooks? Baloney, Baloney, Baloney
January 20, 2012
Did I mention “baloney”? I read “Publisher Terry McGraw on Steve Jobs and Digital Textbooks: “This Was His Vision” and stopped what I was doing to capture my personal views on this topic. Here’s the passage that spiked my blood pressure:
After Apple’s big education presentation yesterday, McGraw-Hill CEO Terry McGraw chatted with a gaggle of reporters, and explained things like the logic behind $15 digital textbooks.
Sure, there may a few $15 textbooks. There are even some free textbooks floating around if you are teaching a class in introductory perl. But where the rubber meets the road in Texas or Florida, the textbooks are going to remain expensive and only get more expensive. It does not matter what a senior publishing executive thinks at this point in time. The big textbook outfits are like a government agency. The president exerts precious little control over what these bureaucracies crank out. For what it is worth, here are the points I jotted down:
- Publishers have to maximize their revenue. It is the American way. Look at the cost of electronic books on Amazon over the last three years. Prices are going up. The prices will keep going up. Beavers do what beavers do.
- The digital textbooks will cost more to create than their print counterparts. Publishers have to spend a lot of dough to be decent video, entice programmers to make a multimedia thing work, and hire expensive specialists who have more than an a BA in art history from an Ivy League school. Publishers are not good at making games and movies which is the direction digital content is heading.
- As the method of teaching shifts from the prison model to an online framework, alternative content types will start getting traction. Publishers will buy these outfits and try to recreate the glory days of state wide text book adoption or the wild and crazy personalization required to sell textbooks in Saskatchewan.
Beavers do what beavers do; that is, charge as much money as possible for content intermediated by outfits like McGraw Hill, Cengage, and others. The gnawing is not nibbling away at prices. The gnawing means the prices are going up. And make this content searchable? Not likely in my life time.
Stephen E Arnold, January 20, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Glassbeam: Fusion and Analysis
January 20, 2012
Formerly known as Orchesys, Glassbeam, Inc. provides software-as-a-service (SaaS) based solutions for product analytics. Its namesake technology lets organizations view a continual stream of data regarding product use and configuration. In 2009, the company was included in Gartner Inc.’s “Cool Vendors in BI and Performance Management” report. In 2011, it was a winner of TiEcon’s TiE50 award, which recognizes leading start-ups, and received $6 million in funding from TiE Angel investors. The firm was one of six on IDC’s “2011 Innovative Business Analytics Companies Under $100M to Watch” list.
Glassbeam’s technology enables users to gain insights from large quantities of product operational semi-structured data, such as log data, contained in any intelligent device. The solution converts the product operational data into actionable information using the company’s patent-pending Semiotic Parsing Language (SPL) technology, which scales to analyze terabytes of data using next generation data warehousing techniques.
The firm’s Glassbeam Server includes a parsing engine and an extraction and load engine that process information from terabytes of raw unstructured data. The Glassbeam Support Portal, provides data to departmental portals using information from its data warehouse. The company also provides Glassbeam Workbench, an analytics toolkit that enables users to build and run queries, share saved queries and results with other users, and publish the queries as dashboard widgets embeddable into other applications. Glassbeam Views provides a reporting toolset and infrastructure to design and build reports and insights from its data warehouse. In addition, it offers SPL maintenance, business analytics, enterprise application integration, and report management and delivery. Glassbeam’s Product Analytics solution uses OpSource Inc.’s OpSource Cloud to process large amounts of unstructured data.
Potential clients include those in the server, storage, network, software, telecom, medical, and industrial sectors. While there are no established players in its market, Glassbeam faces competition from firms wanting to build their own solutions.
Rita Safranek, January 20, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Protected: Personalizing SharePoint’s Search Box
January 20, 2012
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