MetaVis Leaders in SharePoint Migration Web Site Launch
August 30, 2012
MetaVis Technologies are innovation leaders in the semantics industry. They are well known for their SharePoint Migration and data managing tools. Their company just recently announced the launch of their new web site, http://www.metavistech.com. The site is said to offer new solutions for migration, administration, and have different tools for SharePoint users. The article, MetaVis Technologies Launches New Website goes into more detail:
“Our new Website reflects the tremendous growth we have seen with sales growing more than 175 percent year over year,” said Peter Senescu, President and Co-founder of MetaVis Technologies. “Our new product suites are built on the MetaVis platform providing one user interface to manage all your migration, security, backup and information architecture needs in SharePoint or Office365. Customers no longer need multiple third-party vendors or products.”
MetaVis Technologies is a household name in the SharePoint migration world and nothing but the newest technologies and highest grade is expected from their latest installment. You can expect to see things like their Migration Suite, Administration Suite, Tools for Office 365, and Tools for SharePoint Users on the new site. As an added bonus all products from this company already come SharePoint 2013 ready.
Edie Marie, August 30, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Poderopedias Technology Tracks Chilean Elite
August 30, 2012
A new technology tested in the Poderopedia project completely changes the meaning of “Big Brother is Watching.” The tools are first being run in Chile to promote transparency. Data storage and queries are being used to map out and visualize the different relationships between Chile’s most influential people. The article, The Semantics Behind Poderopedia tells us a little more:
“These technologies allow us to represent a diverse set of relations between entities (people, companies, organizations) in a flexible way. The goal is to identify and express relations of power and influence of people and organizations…we added many new classes and subclasses of connections. This may sound trivial, but it involved a lot of debate and the hard work of our entire team before we could show it to others — with the hope that it could be a small contribution to the open-source community.”
This is a very interesting way to implement the use of these semantic technologies – and if the logistics of Poderopedia are of interest there is a link on the article to more details, which is a recommended quick read. Of course, it is safe to assume that if it works in Chile it’s only a matter of time before it spreads to other countries, including the US. But, here in the states it appears that invasion of privacy could come to the forefront in the execution of this kind of technology.
Edie Marie, August 30, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Watson in Your Hip Pocket: Win TV Game Shows Anywhere, Anytime
August 29, 2012
Autumn is fast approaching, and it is time for IBM to wheel out the Big Berthas of its marketing campaigns. I spotted the story “IBM Creating Pocket Sized Watson in $16 Billion Sales Push.” The headline snagged my attention. First, it pointed out that the $100 billion services giant wants to generate $16 billion more. A goal can be useful. Second, one of the products which will help blast through this sales target is Watson.
Will IBM Watson pull a rabbit from a hat or wear a hat which looks like a rabbit?
I found this passage particularly interesting:
The next version, dubbed “Watson 2.0,” would be energy- efficient enough to work on smartphones and tablets. The challenge for IBM is overcoming the technical obstacles to making Watson a handheld product, and figuring out how to price and deliver it. Watson’s nerve center is 10 racks of IBM Power750 servers running in Yorktown Heights, New York, that have the same processing power as 6,000 desktop computers. Even though most of the computations occur at the data center, a Watson smartphone application would still consume too much server power for it to be practical today.
Okay. No problem.
The fact that a noted technology expert like Ray Kurzweil is passing along public relations output which flowed from IBM to Bloomberg to Mr. Kurzweil is instructive. The Bloomberg story is “IBM Envisions Watson as a Super-Siri for Businesses.”
Several observations:
First, Watson won a game show. I questioned the credibility of a machine victory particularly when game shows are produced. The good old days of College Bowl on which I appeared in the 1960s were live. Today’s game shows are subject to lots of work by men and women in edit booths. I was okay with the stunt, but did it sell Watson? I don’t know.
Second, I called attention to IBM’s assertions that Watson would rework health care. You can find those write ups—“IBM Watson in Health Care,” “IBM Watson Still Chasing Health Care,” and “IBM Public Relations Chugs Away on Watson and Health Care”—in Beyond Search’s archive. I have lost track of Watson’s revolutionizing medicine.
Third, I have been skeptical about IBM’s claims that Watson slices, dices, and performs various works of retrieval magic in an affordable manner. The most recent analysis of Watson appears in my discussion of Watson in a monograph about open source search which is in press at this time. The full megillah will be available from IDC, the giant consulting firm, in the fall. You can get a taste of what we do at this link: LucidWorks Profile. Let me say that Fancy Dan systems are difficult to make into profitable businesses of the magnitude of IBM’s $16 billion. Autonomy was about a $1.0 billion when it was sold to Hewlett Packard. I mention this as a point of reference only.
Third, the voice search thing is viewed as one of the next big Star Trek things for big companies to do. The challenges, however, are intriguing. There is the issue of accents. There is the issue of ambient noise. There is the issue of a lousy phone due to the owner’s dropping it or spilling a smoothie on it. There is the issue of computational horsepower. There is network latency. There is confusing strings of speech which, if you consider your conversation with a colleague, is full of fits and starts and direction changes. There is the issue of lousy hardware in an automobile’s “smart” dashboard. You get the idea.
Will Watson slam dunk voice search? In demos, Watson will be impressive. In the real world, it may perform as the system did on Jeopardy.
Stephen E Arnold, August 29, 2012
Sponsored by Augmentext
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Even Better with Summer 2012 Release
August 29, 2012
One of the many positives to the Fabasoft Mindbreeze suite of solutions is the company’s dedication to quarterly updates. Fabasoft Mindbreeze ensures that customers keep up with current trends while never having to bother with disruptive overhauls. Unlike Microsoft, famous for its three-year cycle of software updates, Fabasoft Mindbreeze ensures that products are constantly improved instead of infrequently replaced. The summer 2012 release of Fabasoft Mindbreeze pays a lot of attention to social media needs.
The Fabasoft Mindbreeze blog says:
Nowadays almost every company uses social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook just as much as a document management system. So why not use these tools to collect our search results? The new Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise 2012 Summer Release offers exactly this possibility: Collect from all open interfaces. This helps a company’s employees to save time and energy for the most important tasks, thereby increasing customer satisfaction.
In addition to paying attention to Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise, Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite also gets some attention. InSite gets a facelift with federating capabilities.
Individualism also applies to federated data sources with Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite. Your website visitors can find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise and Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite make you ready for the future. Connect Enterprise and the Cloud. Conveniently and easily.
Regardless of your enterprise technology needs, Fabasoft Mindbreeze has a solution to help you meet it.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 29, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
Business Intelligence Terms in a InetSoft Technology Environment
August 29, 2012
Sometimes things can get confusing in the tech world, specifically speaking the InetSoft Technology world. This perplexity is even worse if you do not get a few key terms. In the article, Business Intelligence Terms in the Context InetSoft’s Technology readers learn meanings to some basic InetSoft words in a practical way. This article explores buzzwords and their definitions. The three major words explored are Big Data, Data Warehouses, and Data Mining. The article then investigates their relevancy in an InetSoft context:
“This post is not just for anyone just starting to learn about the business intelligence solution space…Big Data…All kinds of transactional databases are candidates for creating Big Data, some in a matter of weeks of recording….Data Warehouses…user expectations, both from internal enterprises users as well as external customer users, have been raised where real-time or near real-time access to information is expected….Data mining…It’s the act of looking for trends, relationships, and outliers in data.”
This writer shares some interesting opinions about the relevancy of this vocabulary. This article shares the view that Data Warehouses no longer make sense. It’s certainly true that InetSoft is a unique solution with its data access that offers users two modes of real-time and near real-time catching, but that does not necessarily make Data Warehousing obsolete, at least not yet. However, IntelSoft’s specialty in visual analytics cannot be denied its supremacy.
Edie Marie, August 29, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Semafora Buys Out Ontoprise GmbH Semantic
August 29, 2012
If you have ever traveled to Karlsruhe, Germany you could have run across the company Ontoprise GmbH. This past May after the company announced their bankruptcy they let us in on their plans to be taken over by Semafora. Semafora systems GmbH is a well known player in the semantics game. They offer product solutions and even services catering specifically to semantics. The article by Eric Franzon, Ontoprise GmbH Semantic Product Line Taken Over by Semafora goes into a little more detail about this joint venture:
“Following the news in May that German company Ontoprise GmbH filed for bankruptcy, Semafora Systems GmbH has announced that it will be taking over Ontoprise’s product divisions…The transition also means that the base of operations for these products has moved from Karlsruhe to Darmstadt.”
It is unclear what brought on the companies failure to perform. Ontoprise GmbH was known for their offerings of innovative semantic technologies, information management, and products that allowed active semantic information’s integration. Due to the nature of the company’s focus on new technologies we believe that this match up is going to be a good one. The combination of an innovator with a steadily established business in the market can make for some breakthroughs in the future.
Edie Marie, August 29, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Authors Demand that Google Pay
August 29, 2012
Are authors pulling numbers from thin air? Yahoo News tells us, “Google Should Pay $750 a Book, Say Authors in Copyright Case.” Yes, the authors suing Google argue that the company should be forced to pay $750 per book it copied, distributed, or displayed in its great digitization project. The Reuters article states:
“The authors’ filing was lodged in federal court in the Southern District of New York last month, but was only made public on Friday. In the filing, the Authors Guild, whose president is novelist-lawyer Scott Thurow, urged the court to rule that Google’s digitization project does not constitute ‘fair use’ under copyright law.
“A Google spokeswoman said in an emailed statement: ‘We believe Google Books constitutes fair use by allowing users to identify interesting books and find ways to borrow or buy those books, much like a card catalog for the digital age.'”
Google Books does operate like a card catalog, and its page avows that they only reproduce, in part or in full, works for which they have permission to do so, or those that are out of print or otherwise unavailable “any other way.”
Litigation began not long after the 2004 agreement between Google and a number of libraries, including those at Harvard University, Oxford University andStanford University, to copy millions of tomes. Apparently authors thought they should have a say about the digital availability of their work. Over 20 million books have been scanned since the agreement was made.
Cynthia Murrell, August 29, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Former Facebooker Airs Social Doubts
August 29, 2012
Ex-Facebook employee Katherine Losse has become a rebel, of sorts. The Washington Post declares, “Refugee from Facebook Questions The Social Media Life.” The former Zuckerberg ghostwriter found herself growing uncomfortable with the level of privacy invasion her employer, and other tech companies, were engaged in. So, she cashed in some of her valuable Facebook stock, moved to a tiny Texas town, and wrote a tell-all: “The Boy Kings: A Journey Into the Heart of the Social Network”. Oh, and she took down her own Facebook page. For a little while, at least.
Losse cites an encounter with a colleague, an engineer who was working on video-upload functionality. She tells us he made, and circulated on an internal Facebook page, a video of her napping in a car during a road trip. The article relates:
“‘The day before, I could just be in a car being in a car. Now my being in a car is a performance that is visible to everyone,’ Losse said, exasperation creeping into her voice. ‘It’s almost like there is no middle of nowhere anymore.’
Losse began comparing Facebook to the iconic 1976 Eagles song ‘Hotel California,’ with its haunting coda, ‘You can check out anytime you want, but you can never leave.’ She put a copy of the record jacket on prominent display in a house she and several other employees shared not far from the headquarters.”
Ah, the Eagles; it is a classic song. The article spends some time discussing Losse’s book, Facebook in general, and Losse’s new home in Marfa, NC. Not a bad read, even if it does have a bit of a conspiracy-theory feel to it. It wraps up with a description of Losses’ current search for balance in her own life between technology and the real world. Touching.
Cynthia Murrell, August 29, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Darpa May Be Hilbert
August 28, 2012
Wolfram Math World has a good run down of the 23 problems presented by the original fashion pace setter, David Hilbert. “Hilbert’s Problems,” according to Math World:
are a set of (originally) unsolved problems in mathematics proposed by Hilbert. Of the 23 total appearing in the printed address, ten were actually presented at the Second International Congress in Paris on August 8, 1900. In particular, the problems presented by Hilbert were 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 13, 16, 19, 21, and 22 (Derbyshire 2004, p. 377). Furthermore, the final list of 23 problems omitted one additional problem on proof theory (Thiele 2001). Hilbert’s problems were designed to serve as examples for the kinds of problems whose solutions would lead to the furthering of disciplines in mathematics. As such, some were areas for investigation and therefore not strictly “problems.”
This blog post is not the appropriate forum for a review of the status of research regarding the PhD carnival these problems have created. You may recall that one of the problems, “the cardinal number of the continuum” can drive some people crazy.
I noted the story “23 Mathematical Challenges.” DARPA, a US government research agency, has rolled out its own set of 23 problems. Presumably PhD candidates and grant writers will hop to them. Here’s a sample problem if you think you are pretty good at solving USA Today sudoku puzzles:
Quantum and statistical methods have had great success modeling virus evolution. Can such techniques be used to model more complex systems such as bacteria? Can these techniques be used to control pathogen evolution?
Once you have that nailed, what about:
Extend our understanding of symmetries and action principles in biology along the lines of classical thermodynamics, to include important biological concepts such as robustness, modularity, evolvability, and variability.
My question, “Is Darpa the new David Hilbert?” Hilbert fedoras would be a wonderful addition to the Darpa authorized clothing regulations.
Stephen E Arnold, August 28, 2012
Sponsored by Augmentext
SharePoint Updates and Versions
August 28, 2012
SharePoint followers understand the constant battle in terms of keeping up with SharePoint versions and updates. Microsoft is notorious for its three-year cycle of highly-anticipated updates. In the meantime, small tweaks and patches normally focus on capability with emerging technologies as well as fixes and security patches. On the Material SharePoint blog, James Sturges helps sort out the details in, “SharePoint Versions and Updates.”
Sturges begins:
Thus far I haven’t found a simple official chart by Microsoft on TechNet or otherwise that shows not only the version number for each SP version. Even more, the few resources I’ve found only cover 2010 individually, and certainly not WSS/MOSS. However, Todd Carter has a brilliant blog post on all major SP versions for 2007 and 2010 I’ve referred to so many times I copied here below. I refer to it so much in fact that when he recently moved his blog and the page was unavailable for a day or so I was completely lost.
The remainder of the post is equally helpful for those who follow SharePoint. However, for enterprise users who are tired of keeping up with changing versions complicated updates, a switch to a smart third-party solution might be a good bet. Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise serves as a stand-alone enterprise solution or compliments an existing SharePoint infrastructure. Most importantly, Fabasoft Mindbreeze provides ease of use and an intuitive interface, both of which SharePoint lacks.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 28, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
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