Scalable Video Production for SharePoint
November 27, 2014
Video production capability comes to SharePoint with the introduction of SoMedia Networks’ Scalable Video for Microsoft SharePoint app. MarketWatch has all the details in their article, “SoMedia Brings Scalable Video Production to Microsoft SharePoint.”
The article begins:
“SoMedia Networks(VID), the pioneer of scalable video production solutions, is pleased to announce the launch of Scalable Video for Microsoft SharePoint, an integrated video app that brings affordable, high volume video production capabilities with integrated video players and advanced analytics to SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online.”
This is another great example of a company that specializes in add-on solutions or apps to enhance the SharePoint experience, especially when it comes to social functionality. Stephen E. Arnold is a longtime leader in search and a follower of all things SharePoint. He reports on all the latest news, tips, and tricks on the SharePoint feed of ArnoldIT.com. Keep an eye out on his feed in order to make the most of the latest releases for your SharePoint implementation.
Emily Rae Aldridge, November 27, 2014
Remember That Twitter Search System?
November 26, 2014
I read “New Twitter Search API Won’t Be Available to Third-Party Clients.” The write up says:
Twitter doesn’t have the guts to just end them outright, so they’re just gradually inflicting passive-aggressive wounds over time to quietly shove them into the sunset.
The notion that unlimited, free access to the Twitter content resource is one with which I cannot relate. There are useful items tucked into Twitter, and the company is likely to become increasingly restrictive in the access to and use of the Twitter content objects and attendant metadata.
Stephen E Arnold, November 26, 2014
Web IQ Slumping
November 26, 2014
I read “How Much Do You Know about the Web?” The write up reports that a US research firm discovered that “only 21 percent could identify Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.” This is a surprise? The most interesting point in the write up struck me as:
… College grads are likely to score relatively high on most Pew Research knowledge quizzes, and this one is no exception. Compared to Web users who have not attended college, graduates have a great awareness of facts like Twitter’s character limit, or the meaning of terms like “URL.” They aren’t whizzes at everything, though: only 12 percent knew the first widely available graphical Web browser.
I thought that US education was the best in the world. I assumed that our citizens are fully informed about social, political, financial, and technical matters.
I will have to get back to the Honey Boo Boo reruns. When is the next basketball game? Oh, oh, I am out of Doritos.
Stephen E Arnold, November 26, 2014
Attensity Finds New Data Trends But Is It Different Than Anyone Else?
November 26, 2014
Enterprise Apps Today has an article called “Attensity Boosts Ability To Discover ‘Unknown’ Trends In Data,” discussing how Attensity was updated with new features to detect themes in real-time social data, catch spam, and make it easier to compose/filter queries. Before Attensity’s new software updates, social analytics tools use mentions to measure interest in products. The “mentions” are not the most quantifiable way to see if a product is successful.
The new Attensity Q tracks themes, trends, anomalies, and events around a product in the context of online conversations. This makes it easier to create new vocabularies and brand-unique terms into queries.
” ‘Social analytics has largely been limited up to this point by forming hypotheses and testing them – the hunting and pecking for insights that traditional search requires you to do,” [Senior Project Manager and NLP Strategist Katherine] Matsumoto said. “But there is a growing need for our customers to be presented with findings that they didn’t know to look for. These findings may be within their search topic, adjacent to it or many degrees removed through nested relationships.’ “
Attensity Q has more applications than retail. It can be used for legal departments to detect fraudulent activities and by HR departments to target area for improvement. It could even be used with healthcare patient data to track unusual patterns and offer a better diagnosis.
Rather than bragging about big data’s possibilities, Attensity is describing some practical applications and their uses.
Whitney Grace, November 26, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Forgetting Is Costing Google More
November 26, 2014
“The right to be forgotten” law is certainly causing Google more harm than they had intended. ZDNet tells us in the article “French ‘Right To Be Forgotten’ Decision Takes Link Removal Beyond Europe” that Google France is facing an 1000 euro fine each day, unless it stops linking to a defamatory article. The Paris Tribunal de Grande Instance passed the fine in September and it could set a precedent that the law could be enforced outside Europe.
Before the current decision, if someone wanted to be forgotten they had to sue Google in the US, now the search engine giant’s subsidiaries can be help accountable and forced to remove information. Google accepts and reviews requests to have links removed. If approved, the mentions of a subject are only taken down from European domains. Google still includes results when accessed through the Google.com link.
“A Google spokesperson told ZDNet the company is considering its options.
‘This was initially a defamation case and it began before the CJEU ruling on the ‘right to be forgotten’. We are reviewing the ruling and considering our options. More broadly, the ‘right to be forgotten’ raises some difficult issues and so we’re seeking advice – both from data protection authorities and via our advisory council – on the principles we should apply when making these difficult decisions,”’ the spokesperson said.”
Another issue forcing Google to police the Web. While the right to be forgotten helps some people, such as child abuse victims, it allows other people to whitewash over their criminal pasts. Another will follow this one incident in either France or another European country, getting the boulder rolling for more Google trouble.
Whitney Grace, November 26, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Disappearing Content: You Cannot Search for It if It Is Not There
November 25, 2014
The issue of shaped and filtered content is becoming more and more of a mainstream topic. I read “Uber Removed Blog Post from Data Science Team That Examined Link between Prostitution and Rides.” The world’s oldest profession meets the world’s newest ride service. I noted this passage in the write up:
“The company examined its rider data, sorting it for anyone who took an Uber between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. on a Friday or Saturday night. Then it looked at how many of those same people took another ride about four to six hours later – from at or near the previous nights’ drop-off point. Yes, Uber can and does track one-night stands. Consider it the Uber equivalent of the walk of shame.”
How will this corporate approach to content play out? My hunch is that content has been getting removed for a long time. I recall looking for information about the Spyglass browser decades ago and finding a 404 error.
At least today there are copies of the Web, caches on public systems, and people who store content on their drives. Nevertheless, most people cannot search for content that is not “there.” Has anyone looked for CMS information about the original MIC, RAC, and ZPIC contractors? My hunch is that more attention should be paid to content that goes missing, not because of its prurient nature, but because the disappearance of content provides very useful information about the behavior of people, systems, and organizations.
Stephen E Arnold, November 25, 2014
Enterprise Search: Fee Versus Free
November 25, 2014
I read a pretty darned amazing article “Is Free Enterprise Search a Game Changer?” My initial reaction was, “Didn’t the game change with the failures of flagship enterprise search systems?” And “Didn’t the cost and complexity of many enterprise search deployments fuel the emergence of the free and open source information retrieval systems?”
Many proprietary vendors are struggling to generate sustainable revenues and pay back increasingly impatient stakeholders. The reality is that the proprietary enterprise search “survivors” fear meeting the fate of Convera, Delphes, Entopia, Perfect Search, Siderean Software, TREX, and other proprietary vendors. These outfits went away.
Many vendors of proprietary enterprise search systems have left behind an environment in which revenues are simply not sustainable. Customers learned some painful lessons after licensing brand name enterprise search systems and discovering the reality of their costs and functionality. A happy quack to http://bit.ly/1AMHBL6 for this image of desolation.
Other vendors, faced with mounting costs and zero growth in revenues, sold their enterprise search companies. The spate of sell outs that began in the mid 2000s were stark evidence that delivering information retrieval systems to commercial and governmental organizations was difficult to make work.
Consider these milestones:
Autonomy sold to Hewlett Packard. HP promptly wrote off billions of dollars and launched a fascinating lawsuit that blamed Autonomy for the deal. HP quickly discovered that Autonomy, like other complex content processing companies, was difficult to sell, difficult to support, and difficult to turn into a billion dollar baby.
Convera, the product of Excalibur’s scanning legacy and ConQuest Software, captured some big deals in the US government and with outfits like the NBA. When the system did not perform like a circus dog, the company wound down. One upside for Convera alums was that they were able to set up a consulting firm to keep other companies from making the Convera-type mistakes. The losses were measured in the tens of millions.
Expert Systems Brags API Thinks Like a Human
November 25, 2014
Computers are only as smart as the humans who program them, but they lack the spontaneous ability that humans possess in droves. This does not mean that computers are not getting “smarter,” in fact, according to Market Wired their comprehension levels just increased. Market Wired reports on “Expert Systems Extends The Cogito API Portfolio: To Fashion, Advertising, Intelligence, And Media And Publishing Applications.” Expert Systems is one of the world’s leaders in semantic technology and the Cogito API has been designed to increase an organization’s use of unstructured data.
” ‘Companies want to better exploit the ever growing amounts of internal and external information,’ said Marco Varone, President and CTO, Expert System. ‘Cogito API is the perfect match for these needs and we’re thrilled that the community of developers and all the organizations can leverage our semantic technology to increase in a significant way the value of their information across any sector, whether that is entering new markets, extending their customer reach, or creating innovative products and services for market intelligence, decision making and strategic planning.’ “
Cogito is available as part of the CORE or PACK packages. Expert Systems promises that its technology can be tailored to suit any industry and provide an array of solutions for semantic technology.
Whitney Grace, November 25, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
The Sound of Ontopia Silence
November 25, 2014
Ontopia has been silent since August 1, 2013. Prior to that outdated update, Ontopia used to share news three or four times a year. Ontopia was developed as a community for open source tools for building, maintaining, and deploying topic maps-based applications. Topic maps are knowledge structures that directly connect information to a source. The process is also are also called information mapping or mind mapping, which is a concept that has been played around with by many develops. An old Mashable article has a list: “Twenty Four Essential Mind Mapping And Brainstorming Tools.”
Perusing the Ontopia Web page leaves it in the throws of Web 1.0 and with only some features that could pass as a modern Web site. Even the product’s description, in all its simplicity, is dated:
“Ontopia is a set of tools which contains everything you need to build a full Topic Maps-based application. Using Ontopia you can design your ontology, populate the topic map manually and/or automatically, build the user interface, show graphical visualizations of the topic map, and much more.
The core of Ontopia is the engine, which stores and maintains the topic maps, and has an extensive Java API. On top of it are built a number of additional components, as shown in the diagram below. More information about these components can be found on the right.
Ontopia is 100% Java, and runs on any operating system which has Java 1.5. It is fully open source and can be used without any restrictions beyond those in the Apache 2.0 license.”
The last time Ontopia updated, they wrote a post about how version 5.3.0 was just released and the details were available on the wiki. Has Ontopia been in the sequestered in a closet working on the latest version or has it gained abandoned open source project?
Whitney Grace, November 25, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Choosing Office 365 or Azure
November 25, 2014
There is not just a single cloud, or Cloud with a capital C. Rather, there are multiple cloud-based services for SharePoint deployments. CMS Wire helps break down some of the choices that users face when determining which cloud to choose. They even have a handy survey at the end to make selection even simpler. Read more in their article, “SharePoint in the Clouds: Choosing Between Office 365 or Azure.”
The author begins:
“There are dozens of cloud hosting options for SharePoint, beyond Office 365. Amazon, Rackspace and Fpweb offer compelling alternatives to Microsoft’s public cloud for SharePoint online with a mix of capabilities. These capabilities fall on the spectrum between two options: 1) IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) — cloud hosted VMs on which YOU install Windows, SQL, SharePoint … 2) SaaS (Software as a service) — fully managed solution delivering SharePoint services with full subscribed provider managed availability, backup, performance, installation, etc.”
There are definitely pros and cons on both sides. If you need any help sorting through the various angles, turn to Stephen E. Arnold of ArnoldIT.com. He has spent his career following enterprise search, and has collected quite an impressive collection of tips, tricks, and news articles on his SharePoint feed.
Emily Rae Aldridge, November 25, 2014
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