Visage Dubbed the Latest in Visualization Software
June 11, 2014
The big data boom has made it vital for many companies to quickly and easily translate data points into pretty pictures. Now, FastCompany reports on the latest tool to help with that in, “A Tool for Building Beautiful Data Visualizations.” Of course, there are many programs that supply custom graphics templates for data visualization, and writer Margaret Rhodes links to an article that describes 30 of them. What makes this latest tool, called Visage, different enough to entice designers at prominent sites like Mashable, MSNBC, and A&E? It’s all about the flexibility, especially in branding. Rhodes explains:
That on-brand bit is where Visage shines. “There’s a spectrum of how people define ‘on brand,'” [Visage co-founder Jake] Burkett tells Co.Design. “What’s sufficient for most people are fonts and color palettes.” Visage’s tool has what Burkett calls “canned logos and color palettes,” but they’ll also produce templates in customized color selections–free of charge. “Give us your brand guidelines; it just takes us a little time,” Burkett says.
For taller orders, the Visage team will build a more sophisticated set of tools to channel a company’s visual language. They’ll be available only for the company in question, and even be made as open-source templates, so designers on staff can tweak them on the go. “Everything is designed to be dynamic,” Burkett says.
The Visage platform was launched in 2012 by Column Five Media. Founded in 2009, the design and branding company is based in Newport Beach, California, and maintains an office in Brooklyn, New York City. They also happen to be hiring as of this writing.
Cynthia Murrell, June 11, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Docker and Juicing the Google
June 10, 2014
The revolution is here…almost. Navigate to “Google Embraces Docker, the Next Big Thing in Cloud Computing” or “Docker Launches A 1.0 Product And Gains An Opportunity To Monetize.” Forbes cheerleads for the automation crowd. Wired pumps up Google’s enthusiasm for the open source technology.
Automation is a magical way to reduce costs as long as the pesky humans do not have to code widgets, connectors, and shims. If these software gadgets are not ready for prime time, some of the automation benefits will be more Silicon Valley mumbo jumbo.
For the GOOG, a bit of a computational crisis exists. Google surfed on innovations that other companies were slow to adopt in the 1996 to 2000 time frame. Despite spending bundles on optimization, the GOOG, like other computationally constrained outfits, needs to find shortcuts.
Enter Docker. The technology is one of those “if only” innovations. Here’s what I mean. “If only everyone adopted Docker and if only developers would create the software gadgets to make snap in operation a reality.” Also, “If only the Amazon approach were not so darned popular.”
You get the idea.
Docker is characterized by Wired as something Google has been doing for a long time. Er, okay. Forbes sees Docker as another open source commercialization play with services being the donkey delivering the gold and silver to the stakeholders.
My view is that like many open source plays, the technology is pretty good. Making the technology deliver on the promises “real” journalists report is a different kettle of fish (actually, software gizmos to hook A to B without more coding and tweaking.
The real problem is that existing computer systems are pretty snappy and much easier to use in a timesharing environment than IBM and other mainframe iron from the 1970s. But—and this is a significant concern to me—we are really getting hyperbole for optimization.
What’s needed is a computational platform that makes more sophisticated operations practical. Instead of known methods running faster or deploying with less craziness, we are making the 1985 Corvette perform via add ons.
Short cuts are not breakthroughs that leapfrog the decades old methods. Going faster and cheaper is fun. Better is not part of the calculus of optimization.
Stephen E Arnold, June 10, 2014
UkraineDesk Consolidates Breaking Ukraine Related News
June 10, 2014
I find hope for the future in a Gigaom piece about journalistic cooperation: “VICE, Mashable, Digg and Others Form a Collective for Breaking News About Ukraine, May Expand into Other Areas.” These publications are willing to work together to assure each of their audiences receive as complete a picture as possible about a very important series of events. Naturally, social media is involved. Reporter Mathew Ingram writes:
“A group of six news organizations and digital-media outlets — including VICE, Mashable, Digg, Quartz, Mother Jones and NBC-owned Breaking News — have created a somewhat unusual collective effort aimed at reporting breaking news about Ukraine, an effort they are calling #UkraineDesk. For the moment at least, the venture consists of just a common hashtag that all the different entities have agreed to use, which is then pulled into a similarly-named Twitter account, but some of the players say if it works they may expand into other areas.”
Ingram interviewed a few of the folks who came up with this idea; see the article for their brief takes on how the project came together and their hopes for the future. He also points out the diversity of publications that are participating:
“Whether the group does other things together or not, it’s definitely an interesting effort: VICE is known for its hip videos, Digg is a traffic-driving aggregator (which has also been experimenting with original content), Mashable is a social-media giant that has been doing more serious news since former Roberts joined the company last year, Mother Jones is a site known for its biting political commentary, and Breaking News specializes in mobile and real-time info.”
The write-up goes on to compare the members of this group to those that formed the Associated Press in 1846. That project was spurred by the costs of reporting on the Mexican-American war. I suppose the concept of a press collective was due for an update, and major conflicts seems to be a powerful prompt. I hope this is a sign of things to come—these days there are many who would benefit from exposure to varying points of view.
Cynthia Murrell, June 10, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Palantir Advises More Abstraction for Less Frustration
June 10, 2014
At this year’s Gigaom Structure Data conference, Palantir’s Ari Gesher offered an apt parallel for the data field’s current growing pains: using computers before the dawn of operating systems. Gigaom summarizes his explanation in, “Palantir: Big Data Needs to Get Even More Abstract(ions).” Writer Tom Krazit tells us:
“Gesher took attendees on a bit of a computer history lesson, recalling how computers once required their users to manually reconfigure the machine each time they wanted to run a new program. This took a fair amount of time and effort: ‘if you wanted to use a computer to solve a problem, most of the effort went into organizing the pieces of hardware instead of doing what you wanted to do.’
“Operating systems brought abstraction, or a way to separate the busy work from the higher-level duties assigned to the computer. This is the foundation of modern computing, but it’s not widely used in the practice of data science.
“In other words, the current state of data science is like ‘yak shaving,’ a techie meme for a situation in which a bunch of tedious tasks that appear pointless actually solve a greater problem. ‘We need operating system abstractions for data problems,’ Gesher said.”
An operating system for data analysis? That’s one way to look at it, I suppose. The article invites us to click through to a video of the session, but as of this writing it is not functioning. Perhaps they will heed the request of one commenter and fix it soon.
Based in Palo Alto, California, Palantir focuses on improving the methods their customers use to analyze data. The company was founded in 2004 by some folks from PayPal and from Stanford University. The write-up makes a point of noting that Palantir is “notoriously secretive” and that part(s) of the U.S. government can be found among its clients. I’m not exactly sure, though, how that ties into Gesher’s observations. Does Krazit suspect it is the federal government calling for better organization and a simplified user experience? Now, that would be interesting.
Cynthia Murrell, June 10, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
DocuSign Awarded by Microsoft for Partnership
June 10, 2014
SharePoint is growing in size and usage. In order to stay effective to a multitude of organizations of various sizes and purposes, Microsoft is relying more and more on apps and third party add-ons to increase customization options. MarketWatch covers one such partner in their article, “DocuSign Awarded 2014 Microsoft Office and SharePoint App Development Partner of the Year.”
The article begins:
“DocuSign, Inc. (DocuSign®) announced it has been named the 2014Microsoft Office and SharePoint App DeveloperPartner of the Year. The company was honored among a global field of top Microsoft Corp. partners for demonstrating excellence in innovation and implementation of customer solutions based on Microsoft technology.”
This type of customer solution is becoming more and more valuable to users, according to Stephen E. Arnold. He has made a career out of covering all things search, and reports his findings on ArnoldIT.com. His SharePoint feed often features tips and tricks for users, as well as highlighting solutions that are enhancing user experience and customization capabilities, without a lot of headaches.
Emily Rae Aldridge, June 10, 2014
Autonomy and Search: A Surprise Regarding Search
June 9, 2014
I was flipping through the Overflight links for HP Autonomy. One item caught my attention. The tweet pointed me to the HP Autonomy Web site at this link http://bit.ly/1hJQXzx. IDOL is now at version 10.5. Keep in mind that the system was rolled out in 1996, so big leaps are not what I expect. HP defines Autonomy in terms of these functions or applications:
- Big Data Analytics
- Compliance Archiving
- Contact Center Management
- Database & Application Archiving
- Document and Email Management
- Enterprise Search
- Knowledge Management
- Legal Hold
- Litigation Readiness Archiving
- Media Intelligence
- Policy-driven Information Management
- Records Management
- Rich Media Management
- SFA Intelligence
- Storage Optimization Archiving
- Supervision & Policy Management
- Video Surveillance
- Voice of the Customer
- Web Experience Management
- Web Optimization
Quite a list of buzzwords. With Elasticsearch toting around $70 million, it might be difficult for HP to get IDOL to pay off the $11 billion purchase price, grow its top line revenues, and generate enough profit to keep stakeholders happy. One thing HP has going for it. HP is explaining IDOL search somewhat more clearly than IBM describes Watson. By the way, what is “SFA Intelligence.” I suppose I could ask Watson if there were a public demo.
Stephen E Arnold, June 9, 2014
The Turing Test: Fooling You Is Real Search
June 9, 2014
The estimable IDC published “An AI Milestone: Chatbot Passes Turing Test by Posing as 13-Year-Old Boy.” I assume that the writer was compensated and the IDC issued a contract for the write up. Isn’t that the way IDC operates most of the time?
Well, maybe. More interesting to me than the tap dancing of the big outfits their way to revenue is a story that points out computers can fool humans. Humans fool humans, so it makes sense that humans will want computers to fool humans too.
According to the “real journalist” story:
At an event on Saturday at the Royal Society in London, a conversation program running on a computer called Eugene Goostman was able to convince more than a third of the judges that it was human. It marks the first time that any machine has passed the Turing Test proposed in 1950 by Alan Turing, regarded as the father of artificial intelligence (AI), according to the university, which organized the event.
Good for Eugene.
My view is that search engines already fool humans, effectively and frequently. A user assumes that the results from a free Web search will be timely, accurate, and objective. Like IDC’s approach to its authors’ content, the assumptions are sometimes not in line with reality.
Run queries on Bing, Google, and Yandex. What do you get? On the test queries I present in my lectures about getting through the advertising and self serving content takes a lot of work.
I assume that Eugene’s impact will make it more difficult to get information that answers a user’s question with what might be called “real” information.
Artificial intelligence is artificial. Fooling one third of the judges is not as impressive as fooling most people who look for information in a major Web search system and get filtered, skewed, distorted, and pay to play results.
Progress is not an illusion. Like much in today’s go go world, magic happens. Few are the wiser. When you read a document with an “expert’s name” on it, you may be reading the words of another person who is trampled upon. Exciting. Eugene, good work fooling humans.
Stephen E Arnold, June 9, 2014
New And Upcoming Search Engine
June 9, 2014
There is always something new and original in the search sector of the IT community, but there actually might be something in the article, “DigiBC Says These 25 Startups Are British Columbia’s Most Innovative Technology Companies” from BetaKit that could make its way to the more secular headlines soon. There are many “top” lists and awards the highlight past accomplishments and endeavors in fields. What makes DigiBC’s list noteworthy? DigiBC is the British Columbian industry Association for Digital Media and Wireless Companies. These awards are the first time the technology innovation has been recognized in the area.
“ ‘There are awards shows recognizing past, current and great technologies; but we want to identify who is paving innovation for the future in BC,’ said DigiBC president Howard Donaldson. “Our own backyard is a hot bed for innovation. Digital Media companies alone in BC account for over 900 companies, employing 14,000 people. With numbers like that you can only imagine the innovation we have in BC that you haven’t seen yet.’ ”
Here is the company that caught our eye at number nine:
“EchoSec is the next generation of the Search that connects you with trillions of pictures and posts made by billions of people, which never normally make it to common search engines.”
Not only does EchoSec search the hidden Web, but it can search through the terabytes of files that other search engines have trouble with too? EchoSec advertises itself as the next generation of search. It’s been claimed before. We ask EchoSec what they offer that other startups do not? We can only test EchoSec with their search app. Be the judge after using it.
Whitney Grace, June 09, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Nobody Reads The PDFs
June 9, 2014
The Washington Post’s Wonkblog asks an important question in the article,” The Solutions To All Our Problems May Be Buried In PDFs That Nobody Reads.” This abridged question is asked: what if all of the world’s problems were solved, but no one had bothered to read the PDF? The World Bank, the UN’s international financial institution, produces a lot of PDFS. They are long, technical, thusly boring.
“The World Bank recently decided to ask an important question: Is anyone actually reading these things? They dug into their Web site traffic data and came to the following conclusions: Nearly one-third of their PDF reports had never been downloaded, not even once. Another 40 percent of their reports had been downloaded fewer than 100 times. Only 13 percent had seen more than 250 downloads in their lifetimes. Since most World Bank reports have a stated objective of informing public debate or government policy, this seems like a pretty lousy track record. “
It is understandable that the general public does not download the reports for the leisure reading. Also the World Bank is not the only place to get this information. The article only uses the World Bank as an example of how the government generates reports and how most of them are not read. The problem is that so many are produced that the good ideas are lost. There probably is a better way of doing this, but has anyone thought of it? Much less trying to change the government is slower than dial up.
Whitney Grace, June 09, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Elasticsearch: Bulldozing Content Processing
June 7, 2014
When I left the intelligence conference in Prague, there were a number of companies in my graphic about open source search. When I got off the airplane, I edited my slide. Looks to me as if Elasticsearch has just bulldozed the search and content sector, commercialized open source group. I would not want to be the CEO of LucidWorks, Ikanow, or any other open sourcey search and content processing company this weekend.
I read “Elasticsearch Scores $70 Million to Help Sites Crunch Tons of Data Fast.” Forget the fact that Elasticsearch is built on Lucene and some home grown code. Ignore the grammar in “data fast.” Skip over the sports analogy “scores.” Dismiss the somewhat narrow definition of what Elasticsearch ELK can really deliver.
What’s important is the $70 million committed to Elasticsearch. Added to the $30 or $40 million the outfit had obtained before, we are looking at a $100 million bet on an open source search based business. Compare this to the trifling $40 million the proprietary vendor Coveo had gathered or the $30 million put on LucidWorks to get into the derby.
I have been pointing out that Elasticsearch has demonstrated that it had several advantages over its open source competitors; namely, developers, developers, and developers.
Now I want to point out that it has another angle of attack: money, money, and money.
With the silliness of the search and content processing vendors’ marketing over the last two years, I think we have the emergence of a centralizing company.
No, it’s not HP’s new cloudy Autonomy. No, it’s not the wonky Watson game and recipe code from IBM. No, it’s not the Google Search Appliance, although I do love the little yellow boxes.
I will be telling those who attend my lectures to go with Elasticsearch. That’s where the developers and the money are.
Stephen E Arnold, June 7, 2014
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