After Experian, Will Other Publishers Be Next?
October 26, 2013
I read “Senator Intensifies Probe of Data Brokers.” It seems that the leaders in Washington, DC have discovered data aggregation. Let me think. Right. Data aggregation has been around for more than a half century. I remember Ian Sharp (anyone remember him?) telling me about his discovery of data aggregation when he was a lad and before he created his business in the 1970s.
The point of the write up I noted was:
“However, if these recent news accounts are accurate, they raise serious questions about whether Experian as a company has appropriate practices in place for vetting its customers and sharing sensitive consumer data with them, regardless of the particular line of business.” Mr. Rockefeller’s letter is part of a larger effort by the Commerce Committee to understand how companies collect, share and sell intimate details about the shopping habits, health concerns, family circumstances and financial status of consumers at a time when Americans are increasingly sharing personal information online.
I have not comment about Experian or any similar firm.
My reaction is that if the leaders in DC are willing to name a particular company, that’s interesting. More intriguing is the question, “Will the various committees start taking a closer look at outfits like Thomson Reuters, McGraw Hill, and (hold your breath), the New York Times?
There are many ways to deliver a solution to the problem of certain organizations disseminating information.
Stephen E Arnold, October 26, 2013
Scripts on View at Springfield Springfield
October 26, 2013
We would like to let you in on a curious database out of the U.K., Springfield! Springfield!, where a vast entertainment wasteland is (semi-)documented. If you have ever had a fit of nostalgia and wished you could find scripts for television shows or films from years gone by, this is the site to check. Ditto if you’d like to chew over the plot of a show you saw last week. The description on the home page is concise:
“Springfield! Springfield! hosts a database containing thousands of TV show episode scripts and movie scripts. TV show episode scripts are available for all the latest top TV shows including… Breaking Bad, Doctor Who, Family Guy, Game of Thrones, How I Met Your Mother, Glee, My Little Pony, Orange Is the New Black, Pretty Little Liars, Sons of Anarchy, The Walking Dead, The Simpsons, True Blood, The Big Bang Theory”
Now that is a diverse list. As one might expect from the name, the site celebrates the longest-running scripted TV series in the U.S. (Springfield is the name of the town in which The Simpsons is set, for those unfamiliar with the show.) However, scripts from many, many other shows and movies can be found at the site, dating an impressive way back. It does not have a search function, but the scripts are listed in a straight-forward, browsable alphabetical format. There is related content, too, like episode guides, character lists, and screen grabs. Whether you want to take a walk down memory lane or catch up on recent episode of your current favorites, check out Springfield! Springfield!
Cynthia Murrell, October 26, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
BI Users Focus on the Superficial
October 26, 2013
Discontent about business intelligence is at hand. EnterpriseAppsToday reports, “Big Business Intelligence Vendors Not Satisfying Users.” Search by any other name still creates dissatisfaction among some, it seems. The assertion is based on research from Gartner which indicates that users care more about the user interface than what ‘s under the hood. Writer Drew Robb tells us:
“Much of Gartner’s business intelligence (BI) research focuses on customer satisfaction and usability. Two of the biggest takeaways from several Gartner reports released over the past few months are the poor satisfaction rating mobile BI received in the face of its high popularity and the poor performance of big vendors compared to their smaller counterparts.
“Users apparently are overly enamored with the latest display-type bells and whistles, while not paying enough attention to product integration. Is this a sign that BI purchasers fall into the same trap as many car buyers? That is, paying too much attention to cup holders and music systems and not enough to vehicle fundamentals?”
Robb points out that one key challenge for BI makers is to impress upon users the value of strong integration capabilities. Since integration takes place behind the scenes, users unfamiliar with the details may not understand how important it is, let alone how to discern which company is better at it. It is no surprise, then, that they judge a product’s value based on what they can see. This gives some smaller players, who focus on their UI, an advantage over larger companies that have invested years in building strong integration components. Robb makes an apt comparison:
“[Integration] is essentially plumbing, and like the pipes in one’s own home, you really don’t care about them as long as it all works correctly. The only time this comes to your attention is when a sink clogs or a pipe bursts. Similarly, vendors that focus on integration can expect little thanks from their customer base.”
Check out the article for its take on several specific companies and how their approaches have helped or hurt them. The takeaway is this: platforms that actually perform the best, by far, are getting passed over for ones that look pretty. Robb points out that many of these solutions from what he calls the “little guys” meet their real tests when faced with deployment in large enterprise environments. How much trial and error will it take for users to grasp the importance of strong integration?
Cynthia Murrell, October 26, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Bright Planet Gets Coverage in Rolling Stone
October 25, 2013
Bright Planet once provided a federated search system, competing with outfits like Deep Web Technologies and the pre-IBM Vivisimo. I learned in “Meet the Private Companies Helping Cops Spy on Protesters” that Bright Planet has expanded into a search application niche. The write up surprised me. Here’s the passage that caught my attention:
Another program, made by Bright Planet and called BlueJay, is billed in a brochure to law enforcement as a “Twitter crime scanner.” BlueJay allows cops to covertly monitor accounts and hashtags; three that Bright Planet touts in promotional material are #gunfire, #meth, and #protest. In another promotional document, the company says BlueJay can “monitor large public events, social unrest, gang communications, and criminally predicated individuals,” as well as “track department mentions.” Bright Planet did not respond to a request for comment.
As search and content processing vendors seek to generate revenues, product extensions are understandable. My question, “How many other search and content processing firms are shifting from enterprise search to other niches?”
I am okay with these moves, but I have not seen a comprehensive listing of search and content vendors moving in this direction. Perhaps one of the azure chip consulting firms has this report available for a fee. Is there a no cost, publicly available listing of these companies. The Rolling Stone magazine has, it seems, done a better job of reporting on search than some of the poobahs, wizards, and former English teachers now covering the field. I thought Rolling Stone wrote about moving rocks. I am definitely out of touch.
Stephen E Arnold, October 25, 2013
The Increasing Usages of Open Source Software
October 25, 2013
According to “Greed is Good: 9 Open Source Secrets to Making Money, the creation of open source software is not always seen as solely a charitable act. While it is true that many programmers have been performing many acts of pure charity, in the form of contributing long and hard hours of work to create open source software, many companies have utilized open source software as another money-making asset.
One of the uses for open source software is to strengthen a company’s marketing arsenal. Some companies choose to release products as an open source package to attract users and to spread the word about their offerings.
MySQL reportedly says it is not important to focus on how many people get a free product. Instead, energy should be focused on the “upsell”:
“The trick is to make sure that the moneymaking features are compelling enough to support the rest of the product. They should be a small part of the product but crucial for the folks who will pay. Sometimes the extra may be a feature that increases stability for enterprise clients that want their software to run smoothly 24/7. Others offer privacy and force users of the open source version to broadcast their work to the world. These small features are supporting hundreds if not thousands of companies today.”
Many may see this article as disillusioning to the tenets of open source philosophy that were developed without such corruptible factors, like money, in mind. While the article may beg readers to question if the philosophy of open source has been tarnished, we hope that is not the case and that a less greedy crowd of open source pioneers remain.
Megan Feil, October 25, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
More to Search than Relevancy, Accuracy, Precision and Recall?
October 25, 2013
There is a good chance that we may hear someone cry heresy after reading the Moving Fulcrum post: “The Growing Irrelevance of Google Search.” The author presents his case as a focus group of one who happens to no longer utilize Google as his primary search engine any more. Instead, the author finds information using the following sources: Twitter, Stack Overflow, Wikipedia and Yelp.
The author admits that his searches are focused around himself as opposed to Web sites of information. Whether this has always been the case or not, there are certainly many media available now in order to address the needs of every individual using the Internet.
The post states:
Google excels at searching for the long tail of information. That was true a few years ago, when an individual’s opinion could only be expressed on either a blog post or a forum post, which Google could index/rank like nobody’s business.
But in a world with Twitter, and the silos of information that are now sites like Stack Overflow and Wikipedia, Google Search is becoming more and more irrelevant.
While Google is all about relevance, accuracy, precision and recall, we have to ask the question “is that what people want?” For example, the recent New York Times article “It’s Not Just Political Districts. Our News Is Gerrymandered, too” suggests people might not want to search or see much more than their own reflection.
Megan Feil, October 25, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Personal Search Engine Enters the Scene
October 25, 2013
So you read an article and you know you will want to explore that topic further in the future. What do you do? Bookmark it. Moments later, you find yourself on a great new social analytics search engine. That gets bookmarked too – in addition to many other Web sites and articles that you might want to remember to revisit one day. When that day arrives, it can often be troublesome to locate the specific link you wanted to find amongst all the others you have bookmarked. This is why services like PSE (Personal Search Engine) are incredibly useful. We recently read a helpful write-up on PSE in particular: “PSE Is A Personal Search Engine, Makes Browser Bookmarks Useful Again.”
PSE does not require a download. It is a bookmarklet and it works in any browser except for Internet Explorer. It appears that mobile usage is a potential future update that the developers are exploring.
The article tells us:
“The service is great for articles, but it’s especially good for research or other snippets of information that you know you’ll need later not based on the page title or where you found it, but the actual content of the page you were reading. If you stumble on a site with a great recipe, for example, highlight the recipe and add it to your database. Then later you can search for ‘garlic’ and find it, instead of trying to remember that the recipe was on ‘easycheapweeknightdinners.com.’”
While this service definitely seems like a step in the right direction towards supplementing our invariably fallible memories, it may not be the be-all, end-all of search. What about a personal search engine that truly allows a user to search every folder, email, bookmark across multiple applications, devices and more?
Megan Feil, October 25, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Search Vendor Management: Frazzled and Scared
October 24, 2013
Generalizations are terrible. Generalization can be useful. I read “Why Being a Thinker Means Pocketing Your Smartphone.” The story appeared on the CNN Web site. I find this amusing, since CNN is associated in my mind with content delivery for those with some sort of dependence on TV filtered information. The key point in the write up struck me as:
“You can’t make headway without thinking about a problem for a long time, in collaboration with smart researchers from different fields, as well as reading a lot,” says epidemiologist Caroline Buckee, one of CNN’s 10 Thinkers for 2013. “But sometimes that hard work reaches fruition or comes together at a random time once you have let thoughts settle down.” We know this — as surely as that 20th-century magnate knew it — and yet we regularly ignore the advice. We surf the Web; we scan news on our phones; we keep our minds digitally occupied in a million ways. When we have a few minutes of down time now, we pull out our mobile devices instead of daydreaming.
The statement is only partially correct. Let me narrow the focus to behavior influenced by uncertainty about what actions to take and the insecurity generated by not having a product or service that people want to pay for.,
Think about your last interaction with a vendor of search, content processing, and analytics. How did the interaction flow? I have noticed since the summer vacations ended and management of search vendors focused on making money that two words characterize many behaviors of the senior management of search and content processing companies. The two words?
Frazzled and Scared
What do I mean?
Here are some recent example:
- Information promised on a specific date has not been provided six weeks later. The fact that the information was needed for a potential investor adds to the spice of the incident.
- A statement “We will meet at the X conference” became three weeks later, “We are traveling outside the United States”
- An assurance that customer support would provide an activation key to a search system generated four additional assurances. But no key arrived.
At a recent conference, I noticed:
- A vendor who beamed when a colleague and I approached the booth. The vendor launched into a series of questions about budget, decision time, and internal staffing capabilities. When I pointed out that I did analyses for my clients, the vendor turned off the charm and moved to another “fish”
- Four vendors in four consecutive presentations said, “We do real time content processing of all information.”
- One company president had beads of perspiration on his forehead as he talked on his mobile phone in a corner of the booth. He looked fearful.
So what?
Based on the information in our Overflight system, a number of search and content processing vendors are no longer updating their blogs with regular posts of a substantive nature. The flow of emails about free webinars and new products is on the rise. I received a half dozen on Wednesday, October 23, 2013. For example:
Might you have a few minutes for a call with Mike Schmitt, Senior Director of Product Management for Astute Networks, to discuss the paper and its findings? It is interesting how even today, smart IT executives are still thinking about storage cost only in terms of the device, vs. the extended consequence it has across performance and productivity, as well as business flexibility and agility.
The “paper” is one of those azure chip, toot toot things. Sigh.
I also am inundated with messages about the “crisis” in search, the lack of traffic to search vendors’ Web sites, and the death of “leads”.
Perhaps the search and content processing companies should step back, take a deep breath, and consider the impact of wild and crazy statements, odd duck behavior at trade shows, and a panhandler’s approach to revenue generation.
Visionary Talend Looks to the Future
October 24, 2013
Talend is a visionary, according to research firm Gartner. Virtual-Strategy Magazine reveals, “Talend Positioned as a Visionary in the Magic Quadrant for Data Quality Tools.” To land in the annual report’s Visionaries column, Gartner says, companies must “understand where the market is going or have a vision for changing market rules.” The report cites two Talend products as evidence of the company’s foresight: their Open Studio for Data Quality and their Platform for Data Management.
Apparently Talend’s vision includes fresh leadership, for hard on the heels of the above press release came another, “Talend Appoints Mike Tuchen as CEO” posted at 4-traders. The write-up explains why Tuchen is their choice for the company’s next phase:
“Prior to joining Talend, Tuchen served as the CEO of Rapid7 and led the company through an exponential growth, dramatically expanding its marketing, sales, partnerships and product line. A former Microsoft executive and seasoned marketing and product strategist, he also served as the General Manager of Microsoft’s SQL Server Marketing team, helping grow that business from $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion. Tuchen is also a board member of ThousandEyes.”
Already a leader in open source data management, Talend boosted that standing in 2010 with its acquisition of Sopera. The company supplies data-management and application-integration middleware to organizations of all sizes. They cite their scalable platform, flexible architecture, and easy-to-use tools as reasons they have grown to serve more than 4,000 enterprise customers. Talend was founded in 2005, and is based in Los Altos, California.
Cynthia Murrell, October 24, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Tips in the SEO Struggle against the Hummingbird
October 24, 2013
Hummingbird, the latest iteration in Google’s continuing quest to improve its search-engine results, has the SEO crowd concerned. Everything PR offers these folks some advice in, “What Content Strategies Work for Google Hummingbird SEO.” SEO professionals, who have built their careers by exploiting vulnerabilities in a service that is being constantly updated, can be tenacious. The article points out that, with Hummingbird, Google is now keeping back what used to be one of SEO’s primary tools, the keyword:
“Although keyword data is no longer provided, it doesn’t mean that Google stopped using keywords as a signal for its algorithm – it just means that you don’t know about it. You cannot know which keywords perform, how customers find you in search… Creating content seems an impossible guess work, that may, or may not lead anywhere.
“In fact, things are not that complicated. As always, instead of focusing on general keywords, focus on the ‘long tail.’ Optimize for the most relevant phrases likely to be used by searchers to find information. Hummingbird seems a bit more intelligent than Google’s previous algorithm, allowing the search engine to parse full questions (as opposed to parsing searches word-by-word).”
The write-up explains that Google’s changes are in pursuit of a more conversation-like interface, and recommends making one’s content “conversation-worthy.” Here’s a thought—perhaps content written to communicate ideas and information is naturally more conversational than content crafted as a search-results ploy.
Cynthia Murrell, October 24, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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