Beyond the Valley of the Liars
September 14, 2012
We’re shocked, shocked I say! We thought the Silicon Valley crowd embodied truth, justice, and the American way. Now, Nick O’Neill tells us, “Silicon Valley is Filled with Liars.” The write up begins by citing a TechCrunch dust-up about a certain party (if curious, see here, then follow up here), then goes on to say that her dishonest behavior is really not uncommon in the tech field.
O’Neill describes the types of common dishonest behavior he has observed, with categories like “Vanity Metrics”, “We’re killing it!”, and “X investors are committed.” See the article for more, and his comments about each. The piece concludes:
“Ultimately all these lies are essentially forms of embellishment. People stretch the truth. Yes, some people cross the line of flat out lying, like the girl Techcrunch pointed out, but it’s not exactly a surprising act to see given the culture of half-truths, name dropping, and hyping. Ultimately most people who stretch the truth frequently end up being caught. Just as often, they get away with their embellishing. One thing I’m certain of however is that catching this form of behavior doesn’t require a watch dog publication (i.e. Techcrunch) to ‘reveal’ these malevolent actors.
“That’s because too many people are guilty of such behavior. I’d argue it’s simply a byproduct of this aggressive culture.”
Well, maybe. . . but the same could be said of Wall Street. We all know how ignoring their bad behavior has panned out. Shining a light has to start somewhere.
Cynthia Murrell, September 14, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Intel and Server Giant Decline: The Knock on Effect for HP
September 13, 2012
I don’t pay any attention to the chip and chip set world. However, after I read “Intel Confirms Decline of Server Giants HP, Dell, and IBM,” I thought about the knock on effect. The idea is that one action strikes another object. Sometimes the nudge is a plus. Other times the bonk breaks something.
The article asserts, “Some of the biggest server buyers are cutting out the big-name middlemen.” Google gave credence to the method, and I as said in The Google Legacy in 2003-2004, Google has pointed the way to what is now a much broader shift from brand name servers to white boxes and commodity devices.
If HP slips in high end hardware sales, the company has to generate new revenue. If the revenue growth is lackluster, then HP will have to terminate more people or squeeze other operating units to generate more revenue. EDS has been a disappointment. There is not much information about how Autonomy is performing. What I think of when I hear about “HP Autonomy” is the $10 billion paid for the search and content processing business. Some of the key executives have departed from Hewlett Packard.
There are quite a few search and content processing options available today. I am not sure how quickly HP can scale Autonomy’s revenue to make up for the alleged decline in server revenue and the investment in Autonomy. In short, HP may have to look for ways to cut costs associated with certain lines of business and find a way to sell high value services to existing Autonomy licensees and customers.
Fascinating shift, if the decline is accurate.
Stephen E Arnold, September 13, 2012
Sponsored by Augmentext
cXense: Context Understanding
September 13, 2012
I received a heads up from a reader about a company founded in 2010. The firm is cXense, which can be pronounced in several ways. My source called the company “sea sense”. The spelling of the company’s name is wisely tuned to the findability challenges which less distinctive company names fall victim; for example, Expert System and Sinequa, to cite two company names which can introduce ambiguity to a user’s query.
The firm is under the able management of John Lervik, who was one of the founders of Fast Search & Transfer. I have written extensively about Fast Search, so I won’t go back over well-trodden ground.
cXense delivers to its customers: more control, improved relevance, and more revenue. For companies struggling to generate more income from their online activities, cXense appears to be just what the doctor ordered.
cXense provides several services. These include cX::Ad, cX::Analytics, cX::Recs, and cX::Search. Each of these “promises” to online businesses real time information, complete audience analysis, and a search engine. The search engine is described as “the first contextual search engine.” The assertion about the first caught my attention. I recall that a number of other companies have developed search systems which could figure out the context of content; for example, the DR LINK developed in the late 1990s by a venture firm, consultants, and engineers from Syracuse University.
The cXense search system is described this way:
Imagine a search solution that quickly and easily allows you to implement a customized, state-of-the-art search feature with all the fancy matching and navigation features your visitors expect, but without the costs and hassles of having to invest in, deploy and operate a complex on-premises enterprise search engine. Now, stop imagining and take a look at cX::search: A simple-to-use search solution securely hosted in the cloud. Search on a website shouldn’t be static. It needs to be highly dynamic and continuously adaptable to work well. Searchable documents and their popularity change, but also what people search for and what they consider to be relevant changes over time. In addition, people searching your site move from place to place and often use different devices to interact with your web content. When you think about it, managing all this continuous change in content, content relevance, access locations, time and user devices really boils down to being able to properly understand and manage the context of any user interaction. Source: http://www.cxense.com/cXsearch.html
cXense is offering an alternative to hosted site search which is available from Blossom Software, Google, and a number of other companies.
If you are looking for hosted solution which offers site search, recommendations, analytics, and customizable ad modules, cXense warrants a close look.
Stephen E Arnold, September 13, 2012
Sponsored by Augmentext
Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite Boasts Information Pairing
September 13, 2012
Web site search can be a struggle from the user’s viewpoint. Navigating a Web site, particularly a commercial one, can be arduous at best. And yet organizations have had a hard time better designing a site to users’ needs. However, Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite offers a solution. Fabasoft Mindbreeze offers a wide variety of smart solutions for the enterprise, but InSite is particularly geared toward smart public-facing Web site search.
Read an explanation of the information pairing technology behind the product’s success, written by Daniel Fallmann, in the entry, “Information Pairing Makes Websites More Intelligent!”
Fallmann describes the InSite product’s success:
Behind this ‘magic,’ however is a great deal of digital know-how. The key term here is information pairing, under the motto ‘bringing together what belongs together.’ To put it in concrete terms, the current Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite release enables a maintenance-free, always up-to-date conflation of information from different areas. Always relevant. Always interesting. Always to the point. For both you and your website’s users.
Information pairing technology is secure and award winning. Best of all, it improves your company’s Web presence without a huge investment in time or development hours. For organizations that know the importance of grooming their online appearance, Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite is an easy investment.
Emily Rae Aldridge, September 13, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
Building a Better Dashboard
September 13, 2012
How do you fix a the problem of poorly designed dashboards? Why, start a contest urging folks to come up with a better one, of course. Stephen Few has issued that challenge, the 2012 Perceptual Edge Dashboard Design Competition, from his Visual Business Intelligence blog under the post titled “Defeating Bad Dashboards by Example.” One contender, Michael Schiff, has written about his solution at The Mashup, also titled “Defeating Bad Dashboards by Example.” Though Few specified contestants may use a program like Photoshop to create a mock up, Schiff chose to make his interactive. Kudos to him.
Few’s challenge is based in the teaching field, but we should be able to apply the principles explored by contestants to business intelligence and other fields. He writes:
“This will be the most challenging event of this type to date resulting in the most esteemed award for dashboard design (in my not-so-humble opinion) since I judged a similar competition for the B-Eye-Network back in 2006. . . .
“The winning dashboard will be featured in ‘Information Dashboard Design, Second Edition’, due out during the first half of 2013, and in an article in the ‘Visual Business Intelligence Newsletter”. No, you won’t win $10,000 or an all-expenses-paid vacation to the Bahamas. Instead, you will have an opportunity to advance the information age by showing a better way to display data for performance monitoring. In other words, you will have a chance to do something useful for the world.”
Ah, virtue as its own reward and all that. Bragging rights will just be the icing, right? The submission deadline is September 21, so hit up Few’s post for details if you would like to take part. Otherwise, check his blog sometime around October 10 for the winning design. I know I’m curious about the results.
Cynthia Murrell, September 13, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Wajam Plug In Offers Social Search Capabilities
September 13, 2012
The endless data users are providing to social networks via statuses and check-ins is being harnessed by a new search tool, Wajam. A review of the service, “Review: Wajam, a Tool for Searching Socially,” on Technology Review tells us how the approach works. Queries will yield results from related posts from your friends on different social networking sites. The free plug-in brings in up a pop-up containing this data and is also available in an iPhone app.
The review tells us more about the service’s capabilities:
“Wajam bests the big guys with its availability and flexibility. You can use it on all four major browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari), and it pulls up relevant social data on both the obvious websites and less-expected ones like IMDb, TripAdvisor, and Shopping.com. Once you sign up on the site and download the plug-in, your Wajam results show up as a pop-up on the page, sometimes with ads (although you can turn ads off in Wajam’s settings).”
Although the reviewer cites some kinks (sluggish, only works on 3G,) it’s easy to see this type of search becoming the norm because we tend to care about and value opinions and experiences of people we know. Companies like Google and Microsoft are also harnessing this data to personalize results and we are curious to see where social search will grow and improve.
Andrea Hayden, September 13, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
HP Security Believes Stability is Overrated
September 13, 2012
The likely assumption for those working in information technology systems is that stability is an ultimate goal. However, according to HP Software Security Evangelist Rafal Los in the article “Three Steps for Introducing More Chaos Into Systems (Yes, That’s a Good Thing),” on ZDNet, too much stability is a bad thing. Los warns that too much stability would cause IT departments to lose their edge by encouraging complacency and resistance to change. Los argues that in smoothly running departments, if something goes wrong, it will be more difficult to recover.
The article reads:
“‘Every organization I’ve ever been a part of has spent countless dollars and immeasurable energy striving for stability in which everything is predictable,’ [Los] says. ‘Unfortunately, these are the organizations that recover slowest when the inevitable, unpredictable catastrophe hits.’ An apt comparison may be ‘a search-and-rescue team that sits idle for too long can become rusty under pressure without constant drilling and practice.’
Instead of striving for stability, IT executives should strive for more resiliency, Los says. In essence, be a little more of a ‘chaotic’ enterprise.”
His suggestions for “chaos?” Allowing some components to fail on purpose and not building completely unbreakable systems. We disagree with his thinking that chaos should be a goal. A strong and steady flow in an organization is something we think should be strived for as opposed to a chaotic environment.
Andrea Hayden, September 13, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Honk Tackles Black Swans in Search and Content Processing
September 12, 2012
We have just completed the lead article in Honk for September 25, 2012. The essay takes a look at the lone black swan in the information retrieval sector and asks the question, “Can black swans in search and content processing be identified before the bird flies away?” The answer may surprise you. In the article are references to companies which looked like black swans but upon closer inspection were healthy, but ordinary swans. A dead robin is discussed as well. If you have not signed up for the Beyond Search opt-in newsletter, you can. It is free and issued each week. Here’s the link to get on the mailing list: http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/honk/.
Donald C Anderson, September 12, 2012
Sponsored by Augmentext
Attivio vs Sinequa: Who Does What?
September 12, 2012
When I was assembling the Attivio company profile for IDC (http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=236514), I noted a catchphrase conflict. I ran the query “unified information access” and got a hit on Wikipedia. The phrase seems to have been coined by Sue Feldman, an IDC expert in search. The phrase “unified information access” is also strongly linked to Attivio within a Google search results list. In our research for the IDC Attivio profile, Attivio had made extensive use of the phrase for several years.
What was interesting was that we noticed that Sinequa, a vendor of enterprise search technology, was using the same phrase. You can see Sinequa’s use of the phrase in the banner of the Sinequa Web site.
Other companies are using the phrase as well; for example, BA-Insight, Endeca, Exalead, MarkLogic, PerfectSearch, and Palantir.
What is the value of a phrase if a number of vendors use it to describe what their systems deliver? Does this create confusion? Can Attivio’s strong grip on the phrase be eroded? Like “search enabled applications,” a phrase can lose its meaning when a number of companies use it. The words “search,” “information,” “big data,” “taxonomy,” and “semantics” have become almost impossible to define. Marketers “assume” that the words are understood by the reader or listener. Are they?
Search and content processing vendors continue to “look alike.” Little wonder. Each company seems to be piggybacking on other wordsmiths’ positioning ideas. Unlike Apple Samsung, there is no physical product involved. The words, therefore, are probably more easily repurposed and shaped. Does this help one understand what a company’s products actually do?
My view is that search, analytics, and content processing vendors are repeating the marketing approach which helped make traditional enterprise search vendors into almost identical systems.
Are the systems identical? In my experience, the systems are quite different, but licensees do not know what difference is meaningful until the license deal has been signed and the license fee paid. Is differentiation no longer important? I thought a unique selling proposition was important, but with vendors recycling terminology, perhaps the USP is old school, and, therefore, irrelevant.
Stephen E Arnold, September 12, 2012
Sponsored by Augmentext
IBM and Its Predictive Analytics Push
September 12, 2012
I prefer to examine the plumbing of search and content processing systems. What is becoming increasingly obvious to me is that many of the “new” business intelligence and eDiscovery vendors are licensing technology and putting a different user interface on what is a collection of components.
Slap on visualization and some game-like controls and you have “big data analytics.” Swizzle around the decades-old technology from Oracle, and you still find the Oracle database system. Probe the Hadoop vendors, and you find fancy dancing away from the batch orientation of the NoSQL data management framework. Check out the indexing subsystems and you find third parties which a handful of customers who license their technology to a “wrapper company.”
The phrase “wrapper company” and the product approach of “wrapper bundles” is now described in some clever marketing lingo. The notion of federation, real time, and distributed data are woven into systems which predict, permit discovery, and allow users to find answers to questions the user did not know to ask.
Everything sounds so “beyond search.” I think many of the licensees and prospects react to the visualizations in the demos and the promise that a business professional can use these systems without knowing about the underlying data, programming, or statistical methods is what sells. Who wants to pay for a person to babysit a system and write custom reports? Chop that headcount because the modern systems are “smart.”
Next generation analytics systems are, like enterprise search, comprised of many moving parts. For most professionals, the “moving parts” are of little interest and even less frequently scrutinized. Users want answers or information without having to do much more than glance at a visual display. The ideal system says, “Hello, Dave, here’s what you need to know right now.”
The IBM Ad
I noted an advertisement in the Wall Street Journal, on September 10, 2012 on page A20. The advertiser was IBM. The full page ad featured the headline, “We Used to Schedule Repairs.” The idea is that smart software monitors complex systems and proactively find, repairs, and notifies before a system fails.
Sounds fantastic.
The ad asserts:
Fixing what will break next, first. Managing [the client’s] infrastructure proactively rather than reactively has helped the utility reduce its customer calls by 36 percent.”
The argument concludes:
Replacing intuition with analytics. No one knows your organization’s millions of moving parts better than you. But now with IBM predictive maintenance, you can spend less time and fewer resources repairing things either too early to too late, and more time focusing your attention on what happens next.”
The ad points me to this IBM page:
Snappy visualizations, the phrase “smarter analytics,” and a video round out the supplemental information.
Observations
Three observations:
- IBM has the resources to launch a major promotion of its predictive analytics capabilities. The footprint of IBM in this concept space may boost interest in analytics. However, smaller firms will have to be able to differentiate themselves and offer the type of benefits and customer references IBM employs.
- The approach of the copy in the ad is to make predictive analytics synonymous with smart management and cost effective systems. Many of the analytics companies struggle to articulate a clear value proposition like this.
- The notion of making a smarter information technology department fits into IBM’s broader message of a smarter planet, city, government, etc. Big ideas like this are certainly easier to grasp than the nitty gritty, weaknesses, and costs of computationally canned methods.
For smaller analytics vendors, it is game on.
Stephen E Arnold, September 12, 2012
Sponsored by Augmentext
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