Tablets and Periodicals
October 19, 2013
Are tablets the salvation of the newspaper industry? Google’s chief economist thinks they may be. In a speech he recently gave in Milan, Hal Varian points to the ways consumers’ usage of tablets differs from that of other devices. Writer Will Conley summarizes:
“Varian said tablets are the most newspaper-like electronic medium due to their status as ‘leisure time’ reading devices. Citing a Pew Foundation study, Varian pointed out that tablets are the preferred electronic news reading medium for mornings and evenings—during which readers spend the most time absorbing the news—beating out both desktop and smartphones for those periods. Ad revenue depends on the amount of time spent reading the news, he said, and therefore the proliferation of tablets will help the online newspaper industry to gain a new foothold for the first time in 40 years.”
Varian believes tablets might even prompt users to devote more time to reading news, restoring the “analytic depth” that has been eroding along with our attention spans. It’s a nice vision. Unfortunately, an article at Gigaom that came out on the same day as Conley’s piece takes a contradictory stance. Gigaom contributor Jon Lund explains “Why Tablet Magazines are a Failure.” (I think we can extrapolate his points to periodicals in general.)
Lund points out that, as of yet, magazine apps haven’t been selling as hoped. Website traffic still far outpaces app usage for the same publications. Lund believes there are several reasons for this, including the ever growing sea of apps in which magazines get swallowed. Then there is the closed nature of these apps. Their content can’t be easily “shared” with a wider social network, and readers have grown accustomed to sharing information with the click of a link. Curation apps like Flipboard and Zite are likewise blocked from reaching in and grabbing content from magazine apps. Finally, he asserts, reading a magazine on a tablet just doesn’t feel right. He laments:
“When I nevertheless manage to find the time to open up an iPad magazine, I feel as if I’m holding an outdated media product in my hands. That’s ironic because these apps tend to be visually appealing, with interactive graphics, embedded videos and well-crafted navigation tools. But the gorgeous layout that works so well in print gets monolithic, almost scary, in its perfectionism on the iPad, and I find myself longing for the web. It’s messy but far more open, more accessible and more adaptable to me, my devices and needs.”
Almost scary? I’m not sure Lund’s discomfort with periodicals in tablet form is widespread and, even if it is, that will probably recede as we move farther from print media. I don’t think his other points are insurmountable, but they are something to consider for Varian and others wishing to pursue a news-coverage renaissance through tablets.
Cynthia Murrell, October 19, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Natural Language Processing with Ruby
October 18, 2013
For those who know the open-source programming language Ruby, NLP is a script away. Sitepoint shares some basic techniques in, “Natural Language Processing with Ruby: N-Grams.” This first piece in a series begins at the beginning; developer Nathan Kleyn writes:
“Natural Language Processing (NLP for short) is the process of processing written dialect with a computer. The processing could be for anything – language modeling, sentiment analysis, question answering, relationship extraction, and much more. In this series, we’re going to look at methods for performing some basic and some more advanced NLP techniques on various forms of input data. One of the most basic techniques in NLP is n-gram analysis, which is what we’ll start with in this article!”
Kleyn explains his subject clearly, with plenty of code examples so we can see what’s going on. He goes into the following: what it means to split strings of characters into n-gram chunks; selecting a good data source (he sends readers to the comprehensive Brown Corpus); writing an n-gram class; extracting sentences from the Corpus; and, finally, n-gram analysis. The post includes links to the source code he uses in the article.
In the next installment, Kleyn intends to explore Markov chaining, which uses probability to approximate language and generate “pseudo-random” text. This series may be just the thing for folks getting into, or considering, the natural language processing field.
Cynthia Murrell, October 18, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Academic Publishers Pay Lip Service to Peer Review Standards
October 18, 2013
Science magazine has published an important article about today’s open-access academic journals— Who’s Afraid of Peer Review?” I highly recommend reading the entire piece, but I’ll share some highlights here. Journalist John Bohannon begins:
“On 4 July, good news arrived in the inbox of Ocorrafoo Cobange, a biologist at the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara. It was the official letter of acceptance for a paper he had submitted 2 months earlier to the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, describing the anticancer properties of a chemical that Cobange had extracted from a lichen.
“In fact, it should have been promptly rejected. Any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper’s short-comings immediately. Its experiments are so hopelessly flawed that the results are meaningless. I know because I wrote the paper.”
You see, Science performed an elaborate sting operation across the rapidly growing field of open-access journal publication. Most of these journals make money by charging authors upon acceptance of their articles; Bohannon began to suspect a number of these publications were motivated to accept papers that would not stand up to rigorous peer review, despite assertions on their websites to the contrary. What he found is truly disheartening.
See the article for the methodology behind the fake paper and Bohannon’s submissions procedure, both of which are informative in themselves. The results are disheartening. When the article went to press, far more journals (157) had accepted the bogus paper than rejected it (98). Even respected publishers like Elsevier and Sage were found to host at least one of these questionable journals. Most of the publishers that performed any review at all focused on mechanical issues like formatting, not substance. What is going on here? Bohannon offers:
“A striking picture emerges from the global distribution of open-access publishers, editors, and bank accounts. Most of the publishing operations cloak their true geographic location. They create journals with names like the American Journal of Medical and Dental Sciences or the European Journal of Chemistry to imitate—and in some cases, literally clone—those of Western academic publishers. But the locations revealed by IP addresses and bank invoices are continents away: Those two journals are published from Pakistan and Turkey, respectively, and both accepted the paper…
“About one-third of the journals targeted in this sting are based in India—overtly or as revealed by the location of editors and bank accounts—making it the world’s largest base for open-access publishing; and among the India-based journals in my sample, 64 accepted the fatally flawed papers and only 15 rejected it.”
So, opportunists in the developing world have seized upon faux-reviewed academic publishing as the way to turn a PC and an Internet connection into profits. Good for them, bad for science. How does one know when Bing or Google links to fake info? Does it matter anymore? I have to think it does. I hope that people in the field, like Bohannon, who care about open access to legitimate research will find a way to counter this flood of bad information. In the meantime, well… don’t believe every link you read.
Cynthia Murrell, October 18, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Quixey Forges Ahead with Funding and Big Plans
October 18, 2013
What’s the best way to find a mobile app? The answer may just be Quixey, which has recently secured some hefty funding. We learn about the company and its novel approach in, “Quixey Raises $50M from Alibaba & Others to Build the Search Engine for the Mobile Era” at TechCrunch. Quixey already underpins the app searches for several browser makers, OEMs, and even Sprint. Now, the company is gearing up to bring their app searches directly to mobile consumers.
It seems that search optimism is alive and well. Even as it captures funding from Alibaba and other investors, Quixey is working to build revenue with its recently launched sponsored-ad feature. The company also plans to expand overseas, which means they are hiring engineers in Europe, India, and Israel. A unique goal sets Quixey apart—they are working to locate not just apps, but also content within those apps. Writers Natasha Lomas and Sarah Perez report:
“‘We think our company’s mission is to get people into apps, which doesn’t just mean finding you a new app, it means we should be able to find you the content within apps,’ said Quixey co-founder and CEO Tomer Kagan. An example use-case could be a user searching for Thai food — and being returned results across apps, as well as things like Yelp reviews and a current Groupon deal for a restaurant, for instance.”
Kagan emphasizes that his company’s solution cannot accurately be called a “Google for apps,” because the focus is different. Leaving aside the charge that Google falls short in the mobile space, Quixey is all about the apps. “In the mobile space, apps haven’t been given the opportunity to shine and reach users on an equal footing; Quixey wants to change that,” he said.
In their pursuit of a (non-beta) consumer-facing tool, the company is eyeing Android. The article tells us:
“One possibility is an Android app that will allow Quixey’s app search to get baked in directly into the OS of the device. ‘Android is best place to start doing something unique and different because of the flexibility of the operating system,’ [Kagan] said. ‘We want to go deeper into the apps — something that Android lets us do. That’s the whole point of why we raised this money — so that we can explore that…how can we find the best answer inside of the apps.'”
Best of luck to Quixey. It is good to see someone pursue a fresh take on mobile search. Kagan and co-founder Liron Shapira started the company in 2009 and secured their first round of funding in 2011. Quixey is headquartered in Mountain View, California.
Cynthia Murrell, October 18, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
SharePoint Business Data Connector Needed
October 18, 2013
Many organizations still see SharePoint as an internal enterprise tool and have yet to take advantage of any opportunity for external data integration. No doubt external integration is trickier and few organizations are willing to take risks. So, many are turning to the Layer2 Business Data List Connector to seamlessly integrate external data streams into an existing SharePoint infrastructure. OpenPR covers the product in their story, “Layer2 Business Data List Connector for SharePoint V5 Released To Close Gaps With External Data Integration.”
The article begins:
“Layer2 has announced version 5 of the SharePoint Business Data List Connector (BDLC) that connects almost any external corporate data source with native SharePoint lists and closes many gaps that still exist with SharePoint data integration.”
Add-ons are all too common when it comes to SharePoint deployments Many gaps exist, just like the external data integration gap mentioned above. Stephen E. Arnold, of Arnold IT, is a longtime expert in search and a frequent critic of SharePoint. In a recent article, Arnold highlights that SharePoint is missing the mark on its critical functions, including search. Microsoft would do well to listen, but until a major redesign takes place, users will continue to rely on add-ons.
Emily Rae Aldridge, October 18, 2013
Yandex App Service: More Evidence Search Is Not Enough
October 17, 2013
I have been sifting through decades of reports about search vendors. As my team and I review versions of reports we have sold to azure chip outfits, slick MBAs, and the generally confused management teams—one stark “truth” emerged. You can follow our free analyses of search vendors on Xenky at www.xenky.com/vendor-profiles.
Search is not enough. Not enough magnetism to generate revenue sufficient to maintain the most complex service in the world. Not enough profit to satisfy even the most patient and deep pocketed mother or venture firm. Not enough sizzle to keep the folks turning up for uninspected chicken. Just not enough. Chasing big money with search may be one of those quests some undertake without broader awareness of the difficulty ahead.
The search entrepreneur can triumph over search. A happy quack to http://www.donquijote.cc/.
I read “Search Engine Giant Yandex Launches Cocaine, A Cloud Service To Compete With Google App Engine” and realized that Yandex is more evidence supporting the “truth.” I assume that the story is accurate, but in the world of search and analytics, reality is—shall I say—malleable.
The point of the write up is:
Russian search giant Yandex has launched an open-source platform as a service (PaaS) … that the company says allows developers to build out their own app engines. Yandex, in its documentation, describes [the platform] … as an open-source PaaS system for creating custom cloud-hosting apps that are similar to Google App Engine or Heroku. It supports C++, Python and JavaScript. It is now developing support for Java and Racket.
Observations:
- Search—enterprise flavor and public Web flavor–needs help. The help is apps and advertising.
- Search by itself is not a driver of growth. If it were, why get into the “more than search” business. Apps are not search. Search is no longer precision and recall. It is a weird fantasy land for some dreamers.
- Search does not produce big money. If the big money were available, certain decisions about Yandex’s home country building its own search system and countering Google’s ambitions in Russia would not be a problem. If search were big money, Google would not be an advertising system. Search is just an enabler of other, more lucrative activities.
I am not concerned about Yandex. What interests me is the obviousness of the “truth” that search revenue is a windmill. Language is too slippery. I watched a video on the MIT Video site of a learned panel of search experts. You can give it a whirl at http://goo.gl/tZm0j7. I had to be on my toes. There were some folks charging at search windmills at full gallop.
What’s this Yandex move mean for companies pitching search as the source of limitless revenue?
Interesting question. Some search experts will be saddling up and heading off to attack a windmill. Are there many left in Kentucky? I wager there are some in the Boston area, Silicon Valley, and Moscow.
Stephen E Arnold, October 17, 2013
HP Calls out AWS as Outdated
October 17, 2013
In an interesting twist, tech veteran Hewlett Packard calls out competitor Amazon for being too old-fashioned. Gigaom reports, “Beware of Amazon’s ‘Legacy’ Cloud, Says HP’s Cloud Guru.” We’d like to start with a curious observation—the proclamation contains nary a word about the advantages HP Autonomy offers over Amazon’s CloudSearch, still in beta. We’d think they would want to emphasize that advantage.
The focus of this PR push, though, is the rise of OpenStack, the growing open-source alternative to AWS. HP has contributed much to this project, apparently banking on the sale of related support and services. Writer Barb Darrow informs us:
“HP is hoping that the open-source fervor that propelled Linux to the top of the heap in enterprise and mobile operating systems will similarly motivate enterprise customers to take the OpenStack cloud plunge — with full HP services and support attached, of course.
“Given the sheer number of contributors to OpenStack — HP claims the fourth most contributions to the latest Havana release — it’s clear that the technology has piqued interest among developers and their employers. But since it launched four years ago, it’s still new in the game and businesses weighing a move into cloud need to know that moving legacy stuff to any cloud isn’t a day at the beach. HP, he said, will help assess those difficulties up front and, if needed, help with the move.”
Of course they will; that’s rather the point, isn’t it? Darrow notes that the popularity of OpenStack is fed by the shift toward the hybrid cloud. In this model, businesses can keep their most sensitive data on “private clouds” set up within a company’s own firewall. They can then share selected information in the public cloud for collaboration. The shift from one to the other, however, isn’t always as smooth as desired. This is where HP hopes to fill a niche it is helping to build.
Darrow refuses to dismiss the prospects of AWS. The platform has performed well since its launch eight years ago, rolling out new services at an impressive clip. Amazon must know potential clients are eyeing the hybrid cloud model. Should we expect a hybrid option from AWS soon?
Cynthia Murrell, October 17, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
The Flaw in Christensen Management Theory
October 17, 2013
Could the Big Guru in management have made a miscalculation? Clayton Christensen is rightly revered for his contributions to the business field, particularly his theory of disruption. Nobody’s perfect, however; strat?chery tells us “What Clayton Christensen Got Wrong.”
The professor’s blind spot is perfectly illustrated by his thoughts on certain Apple products; he thought there was no way either the iPod or iPhone would be successful. Writer Ben Thompson delves into why Christensen’s theories led him to faulty predictions about Apple. The key point—people are not businesses. The article asserts:
“Christensen’s theory is based on examples drawn from buying decisions made by businesses, not consumers. The reason this matters is that the theory of low-end disruption presumes:
- Buyers are rational
- Every attribute that matters can be documented and measured
- Modular providers can become ‘good enough’ on all the attributes that matter to the buyers
“All three of the assumptions fail in the consumer market, and this, ultimately, is why Christensen’s theory fails as well.”
Elaborating on the second point, Thompson quotes his own words from a 2010 paper. Regarding a feature of the iPod that is difficult to measure, he wrote:
“Apple’s focus on user experience as a differentiator has significant strategic implications as well… namely, it is impossible for a user experience to be too good. Competitors can only hope to match or surpass the original product when it comes to the user experience; the original product will never overshoot (has anyone turned to an ‘inferior’ product because the better one was too enjoyable?)”
Since individual consumers are more likely to care about ease of use than are buyers for a business, this is a good example of purchasers’ different priorities. See the thorough article for more of Thompson’s reasoning and examples.
Cynthia Murrell, October 17, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Blippex for a Different Kind of Search
October 17, 2013
Since Google came to dominate the internet search landscape, many rivals have launched. Some have found varying degrees of success, but none have come close to overtaking the master. Now, blogger Christopher Mims believes he may have found a contender in Blippex; “This Is the First Interesting Search Engine Since Google,” Quartz declares. We also found Blippex interesting.
Mims notes that, unlike most competitors, Blippex is not trying to reinvent the Googly wheel. Its approach is different. Instead of indexing the web in general, Blippex looks only at pages its users have visited. The article explains:
“Blippex’s algorithm, called DwellRank, decides relevance based on how long users spend on a site and how many times Blippex users have visited it. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have, independently of the Blippex team, established that the amount of time someone spends on a web page or document is, not surprisingly, a pretty good measure of how important and relevant it is (pdf). Blippex gets this information by having you download a plugin for your web browser. This plugin measures how long you spend on each site and sends the information to Blippex, anonymized—that is, stripped of any information that could identify you.”
Isn’t this approach a bit limiting? For now, yes, but the makers of Blippex liken the young site to Wikipedia, which became much more effective as users contributed information. Currently, says Mims, the site’s user base is mostly geeky early adopters, so it is a good place to go for programming questions. It is also adequate for recent events, he writes, but is not the place for more obscure searches. With the limitations, why bother? Well, Blippex’s “fanatical” commitment to privacy is one reason; like DuckDuckGo, the site does not track its users. They even made their browser plugin open source, so folks can verify that it is not collecting private information. And, of course, the results will get better as more people install that plugin.
There remains one question—how will Blippex make money on this ad-free site? If co-founders Max Kossatz and Gerald Bäck have figured that out yet, they don’t seem to be sharing the answer. The company, based in Austria, launched last July.
Cynthia Murrell, October 17, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
SharePoint Mobile Still Falling Short
October 17, 2013
SharePoint 2013 is attempting to catch up when it comes to mobile options and technologies, and yet, in many ways it still falls short. CMS Wire covers the latest in the article, “7 Ways that SharePoint 2013’s New Mobile Features Fall Short.”
Their story begins:
“SharePoint 2013’s new mobile features are definitely a step up from the mobile features in previous versions. In fact, one could argue that mobile devices get better support than ever before, with better mobile browser support; new features such as device channels, push notifications and location services; and Office Web Apps integration. But there’s still much room for improvement. Following are seven areas in which I believe that mobile in SharePoint still falls a little short.”
The article then goes on to list the noted issues and possible workarounds. Similar coverage is often offered by Stephen E. Arnold of ArnoldIT, a longtime search industry leader and expert. He writes about the pros and cons of SharePoint, and recently covered the SharePoint – Yammer debate. SharePoint, for many organizations, is a necessity. But for those who are interested in alternatives, there are good suggestions out there. Stay tuned for additional information about SharePoint’s strengths and weaknesses, and effective workarounds.
Emily Rae Aldridge, October 17, 2013
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