Googles Plan to Conquer the Enterprise
October 16, 2012
Information Week’s John McGreavy recently doled out some possibly unjustified criticism of Google’s enterprise initiatives in the article, “Google Enterprise, I’m Not Impressed.”
In the article McGreavy accuses Google executives of being overly pompous when discussing the impact of the company’s products on enterprises at the recent InformationWeek 500 Conference.
McGreavy writes:
“Another CIO attendee at the conference questioned Google about its lack of a product road map. Bavor, Google Enterprise’s head of product management, replied with some effervescent, hand-waving description of Google’s process for creating incredible products of all sorts that increase productivity and generate a fabulous (or was it amazing?) experience.
And then Lock, the Google Enterprise VP, attempted to explain the vendor’s development cycle. He explained that Google can’t share much more than a six-month vision because it doesn’t know what it will be doing beyond that time frame.”
McGreavy is not the only person, unsettled by this statement. Will the search giant conquer the enterprise the same way it conquered the Internet? I guess only time will tell.
Jasmine Ashton, October 16, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Citizen Tekk Taps ArnoldIT
October 15, 2012
Short honk: Citizen Tekk, a curated information service, is now featuring articles from Beyond Search and some original content from Stephen E Arnold. You can locate the Arnold articles at http://www.citizentekk.com/author/stephen-e-arnold/. The articles will cover analytics, online and search. Mr. Arnold writes columns for Information Today, Online Searcher, and KMWorld. If you are interested in content produced by Stephen E Arnold or the ArnoldIT team, write seaky2000 at yahoo dot com.
Stuart Schram, October 15, 2012
Search Appliances Developing to Fit Expanding Enterprise Needs
October 15, 2012
Google has recently launched two new plug and play appliances with the Google Search Appliance Version 7.0 boxes. According to the article “Google Launches New Enterprise Search Appliances” on eWeek, these new tools will help users search content in large stores of data to find specific information within their enterprise. The appliances offer features such as document preview, language translation, and a smaller physical footprint and can search information from over one billion documents.
Google explains the necessity for these types of search tools in the article:
“‘You might be searching for last quarter’s sales goals, product launch materials or your colleague’s telephone number—but there isn’t one simple search box to help you find all the information you need,’ Matthew Eichner, general manager of Google’s enterprise search unit wrote in an Oct. 9 post on the Google Enterprise blog. ‘When 60 percent of corporate workers say that it’s hard to find information within their organization, something needs to change.’”
Google is attempting to make that necessary change for enterprises, but they are not the only ones making an impact on the industry. One example is Intrafind, which offers enhanced search features that include secure expert identification and semantic associations within an organization’s data repositories. With these types of high-performance enterprise search features, organizations can be sure that information is secure as well as accessible.
Andrea Hayden, October 15, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
IT Sets Information Delivery Into Motion with Enterprise Search Technology
October 15, 2012
Big Data has caused a chain reaction in the business world and new software developments have required IT departments to scramble to keep up and re-establish their importance. Why? Innovative information intelligence platforms can now perform and replace basic IT functions and increase company ROI by cutting man-hour costs.
Despite the proven efficiency of programming, Information Age’s article “The New Business Intelligence” feels that some human intervention is still needed to maintain quality control:
The IT department is still responsible for maintaining the consistency of data, imposing common data definitions, and incorporating new sources of data, so that as businesses change, users will still have the data they need to get their jobs done. There needs to be the kind of collaboration between the business and IT that means that, even if IT is not directly involved in a BI deployment, there has at least been the opportunity for IT professionals to stress the importance of governance and data quality.
Information intelligence software would require the company’s individual criteria to be programmed in order to function efficiently and generate ROI, so the article was somewhat on point. However, once the parameters are set, IT can take a vacation with software solutions such as PolySpot in place as their technology delivers information.
Jennifer Shockley, October 15, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Automation to Cure Duplicate Content Issues
October 15, 2012
Search Engine Land is shining a light on a common Web site search problem, duplicate content issues. Read the full report in, “An Automated Tool To Eliminate Duplicate Content Issues.”
The author begins:
BloomReach announced a new software product named Dynamic Duplication Reduction (DDR) that aims to eliminate duplicate content issues on web sites. Typically, software tools are known to cause duplicate content issues but this tool promises to reverse it. The tool deeply crawls your web pages and continuously interprets all content on a site. It will automatically discover and act on duplicate pages.
They say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure and in this case the prevention needed is effective Web site indexing. Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite quickly crawls and indexes all Web site content delivering search results based on relevancy. Misspellings are even corrected with InSite and duplication is prevented. Fabasoft Mindbreeze is a longstanding leader in third party solutions for the enterprise. InSite is quickly becoming the icing on the cake of this industry leader.
Emily Rae Aldridge, October 15, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
New App Mila Applies Semantics to Sales
October 15, 2012
The “micro-entrepreneur” movement has taken off in recent years, and now there’s now an app for that. Semanticweb describes how enterprise resource planning company Core Systems has employed technology from Knowledge Hives to craft the new tool in its piece, “Mobile App Mila Uses Semantics to Match Micro-Entrepreneurs to Social Media Customer Leads.”
Mila is free, though premium services are expected to be added later. Unfortunately, the app is so far only available to users in Switzerland. That could change, though, if it proves successful. Besides serving up social media leads, the software also helps users set up their (micro)businesses. Upon registration, entrepreneurs answer a series of questions designed to help the app “understand” their company and products. Writer Jennifer Zaino reports on comments from Mila’s Sebastian Kruk:
“That [understanding] feeds into its social media monitoring capability for lead generation. Currently, it supports only Twitter, but Kruk says other social outlets will be on the way. ‘Whenever we see there is some potential interesting lead or tweet, we try to find the companies in our database that sell that product or that are in categories that match the lead, and then send the lead to the company,’ says Kruk. Mila uses natural language processing technology and Knowledgehives’ Civet service, which extracts meaning from text, to help with analyzing the tweets, fixing on their most important keywords and also user locations.”
Interesting. We would like to see some user feedback on how well this process works.
Founded in 2002 and based in Windisch, Switzerland, CoreSystems strives to be the world’s top business app provider. Systems and consulting firm Knowledge Hives makes its home in Gdynia, Poland. Its solutions are underpinned by its semantic Web and social networking technologies.
Cynthia Murrell, October 15, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Sift Science Offers Faker Finder
October 15, 2012
There is no doubt that online fraud and fake reviews are a growing problem; Gigaom supplies “5 Ways to Sniff Out Online Fakers.” The article highlights the efforts of Sift Science, a new company co-founded by former Google software engineer Brandon Ballinger. In fact, six of the eight employees of the site-guarding startup are ex-Googlers.
Sift Science’s tool is built on the open source projects Hadoop, HBase, Avro and MongoDB. Customers can protect their sites, they say, by adding some Javascript code and using JavaScript Object Notation APIs to track user events. Writer Barb Darrow reports on her conversation with Ballinger:
“‘Based on user actions, we build a model of what a normal user would do on a site versus what a fraudulent user would do. We look at the time of account creation, the sequence of pages viewed. If they’re browsing around, they’re probably normal. If they set up an account and jump straight to a transaction, probably not,’ Ballinger told me by phone. But then again, they’re tricky. Sift Science found that someone who opens an account, then waits an hour before transacting is 7 times more likely to be fraudulent than the average user.
“The process is similar to Google Analytics in that Sift Science creates a history of user events and comes up with a score for each user that rates the likelihood that he or she is involved in fraud, he said.”
A beta trial of the software turned up some trends (the titular “5 Ways” to identify fraudsters). Fake accounts tend to be created late at night, for example. Also, these deceivers seem to use less current browsers and operating systems and really like Yahoo email. The geographic point of origin was also found to be significant.
We think Sift Science gives us a step in the right direction, but our question now is this: how can a search system differentiate valid research, verifiable facts, and “spin”? We’d love to see a few lines of code that can crack that one.
Cynthia Murrell, October 15, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
IntelTrax Top Stories: October 5 to October 11
October 15, 2012
This week’s top stories from the IntelTrax advanced intelligence blog focused on the impact of big data analytics solutions on a multitude of different industries.
According to “New Pike Research Report Analyzes Smart Grid Analytics” there will be a spike in smart grid data analytics spending that is forecasted to reach more than $34 billion. The bulk of this spending, which will occur worldwide, will be in the Asian Pacific.
When describing the report, the article states:
“This Pike Research report analyzes the global market opportunity for smart grid data analytics across four key solution segments: meter analytics, grid analytics, asset analytics, and renewables integration for business intelligence, operations, and customer management. The report provides a comprehensive assessment of the demand drivers, business models, policy factors, and technology issues associated with the rapidly-developing market for smart grid data analytics. Key industry players are profiled in depth and worldwide revenue and capacity forecasts, segmented by application and region, extend through 2020.”
“Expert Suggests You Ask Your Analytics Vendor the Tough Questions” explains the importance of advocating for yourself and your business by asking the hard questions when choosing between a myriad of solutions that solve the same or similar data management problems.
The article states:
“SAP customers looking at the possibility of deploying text analytics software within their operations should be diligent about asking vendors lots of questions, according to one expert.
Giving vendors the third degree is especially important when shopping for text analytics technology because there is a wide range of offerings on the market at various levels of maturity, said Hanns Koehler-Kruener, a research director with Stamford, Conn.-based IT research firm Gartner Inc.
Additionally, text analytics technology is still emerging into the mainstream and therefore terminology and performance expectations will vary from vendor to vendor. As a result, the only real way to find out if a particular text analytics product meets specific needs is through questioning and trial and error, the analyst said.”
While most companies see big data as a huge benefit when channeled appropriately, consumers may see it as a threat to their privacy. “The Threat of Big Data” explains how big data can be misused.
The article states:
“What those breadcrumbs tell is the story of your life. It tells what you’ve chosen to do. That’s very different than what you put on Facebook. What you put on Facebook is what you would like to tell people, edited according to the standards of the day. Who you actually are is determined by where you spend time, and which things you buy. Big data is increasingly about real behavior, and by analyzing this sort of data, scientists can tell an enormous amount about you. They can tell whether you are the sort of person who will pay back loans. They can tell you if you’re likely to get diabetes.”
Whether you are looking to utilize big data for good or evil, there are companies out there that are willing to help your company harness data. Digital Reasoning uses automated understanding to take the pressure off employees and gain valuable insights from big data.
Jasmine Ashton, October 15, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
AOL Adds its Video Library to YouTube
October 14, 2012
Search Engine Watch recently reported on AOL’s new plan to syndicate nearly 20,000 videos on YouTube in the article, “AOL Puts Entire Original Video Library on 22 Monetized YouTube Channels.”
According to the article, this was mentioned this as a potential new revenue stream for the company. This deal is quite significant because it is merging together two of the largest video content properties, YouTube’s parent company Google and AOL.
The article states:
“According to comScore, Google sites, driven primarily by video viewing at YouTube.com, had 150,198,000 total unique viewers in August, who watched 13,772,310,000 videos for 443.4 minutes per viewer. By comparison, AOL Inc. had 45,685,000 total unique viewers that month, who watched 725,166,000 videos for 62.8 minutes per viewer.
In other words, YouTube reaches more than three times more unique viewers, who watch almost 19 times more videos for over seven times more minutes per month. If you were to represent their respective shares of the online video market, it would resemble a penny-farthing bicycle.”
By adding its video library to YouTube, AOL is able to reach a whole new audience of viewers. This is certainly a milestone for the online video industry.
Jasmine Ashton, October 14, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Increased Search Functionality Add-On from Sonoma is Released
October 13, 2012
A leading Microsoft partner has recently announced the release of a free add-on tool for Dynamics CRM that promises to provide enhanced search functionality and increased productivity for users. Sonoma Partners, a consultancy with enterprise mobility expertise, released Universal Search, according to the article “Sonoma Partners Releases Universal Search for Microsoft Dynamics CRM” on Yahoo News.
The add-on allows users to view search results from multiple entities with just a single search; a breakthrough, as users have previously been limited to only one entity per search. The article tells us about the development of the tool:
“‘We developed Universal Search to create a convenient way for Microsoft Dynamics CRM users to greatly streamline the experience of searching for records, even if they don’t know what type of record it is,’ said Mike Snyder, principal of Sonoma Partners. ‘With this free add-on, we hope to enable Dynamics CRM users to utilize their on-premise or online deployment to the fullest.’”
Universal Search also allows users the capability to configure which entities are searched, which attributes to search by, and what information to display. To check out the new product in action, steer your browser to the demo video on YouTube.
Andrea Hayden, October 13, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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