Proposal to Allow Google to Think for Students
December 5, 2014
What a brilliant idea? With search traffic waffling around in mobile no man’s land, a Harvard professor has an idea that will tickle Google’s ad sales teams. “Allow Pupils to Use Google in GCSE Exams, Says Academic” is a fine idea. The article reports:
Teenagers should have access to the internet and discuss questions with friends during exams because GCSEs and A-levels are setting pupils up to “fail at life”, according to a leading academic.
Yes, and the assumption is that Google is without error. That is a fine assumption.
How long will it be before the professor realizes that armed with a phone or tablet, the student will be able to buy real time assistance with the exam? Or, what happens if the clever student discovers www.wolframalpha.com. I wouldn’t go to such extremes. I would just ask my friends via one of the many chat services what the answer should be.
I think the physics professor should look for a new career as an advisor to Google. Perhaps he could do an interview with that Google cheerleading outfit located in Boston?
Stephen E Arnold, December 5, 2014
Verity as a Magnet: Great Sales Lead Idea
December 5, 2014
I scanned a machine generated summary of search news. I spotted this story:
I navigate to the link and saw:
I clicked the Verity link, which I assumed would be a 404. I was sent to this page:
Yep, good old www.hp.com.
Marketing 2014.
Stephen E Arnold, December 5, 2014
King CONsumer Service Starts in January 2015
December 5, 2014
I have been trying to figure out where to put items of interest and maybe some humor. A new site called “King CON” sumer will be the place for some of the helpful things that companies do for their customers, suppliers, admirers, and stakeholders. For example, we will collect the IDC “surfing on my name” content (a sport practiced by “expert” Dave Schubmehl). We will post photos of the non-helpful design features of some retail stores (a maze behind vegetables that rival those of the British aristocracy’s maze gardens), and activities of quotidian folks like CON-tractors, pain-ters, and representatives of “we’ll get the quote to you tomorrow” (stated weekly until we gave up calling the vendor). I have had an artist create a character called “King Con”, which is short for a consumer anti-hero. Stay tuned for news.
Stephen E Arnold, December 5, 2014
The Future of News: Looking East
December 5, 2014
I read “Hacking Media: Al Jazeera Hackathon Imagines the Future of News.” The write up is interesting because it suggests that fresh thinking about “real” journalism does not occur in Midtown Manhattan.
The other main point I noted was:
Another of the 19 projects that were chosen for the hackathon is somewhat similar to Perspectives: called ReFrame, it would pull in related information about a major news topic but focus specifically on local perspectives on a national or international story — to try and correct some of the misunderstandings that often surface during the reporting of stories like the Ebola crisis, where journalists are often writing about places they have never been. Another valuable effort, although perhaps a difficult one to automate.
Difficult for some to automate. I can name several firms in the NGIA space with this type of function up and running. I am not surprised if you find this suggestion at odds with the article. But you don’t know what you don’t know as the saying goes.
I also circled this comment about hackathons, which some search vendors are sponsoring in a hope that it will lead to either sales or the landing of a sleek programmer halibut:
Hackathons have gotten a bad rap in some circles because they are often exercises in futility: although everyone has fun drinking coffee or Red Bull for 48 hours straight and eating bad pizza, what comes out of them tends to be goofy little apps or widgets that don’t accomplish a whole lot.
Net net: what seems to be far out innovations may be closer—much closer—than you assume.
Stephen E Arnold, December 5, 2014
Start Your Search Engines…Go!
December 5, 2014
What does predictive analytics have to do with formula 1 racing? Everything, says Computer World UK in “McLaren’s F1 Predictive Analytics Snapped Up By KPMG.” Formula 1 is to Europe as NASCAR is to the United States. It is one of Europe’s most popular sports and a lot of high-end technology is used to make the sport more exciting. McLaren is a top team and KPMG, a tax and advisory firm purchased its predictive analytics. KPMG will then use the analytics software to improve audits and advisory services.
“Simon Collins, KPMG’s UK chairman said: ‘McLaren has honed sophisticated predictive analytics and technologies that can be applied to many business issues. We believe this specialist knowledge has the power to radically transform audit, improving quality and providing greater insight to management teams, audit committees and investors.’”
McLaren is also renowned for its software being used to make split level decisions. The software’s potential is untested and its capability to help more industries is about to take off from the start line.
Whitney Grace, December 05, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Amazon Web Services Lags Behind Google and Microsoft
December 5, 2014
Amazon Web Services is recognized as one of the leading hosts for cloud services, but compared to its competition it is not making as much profit. Enterprise Tech Systems Edition offers “A Rare Glimpse Into The Massive Scale Of AWS.” The article points out that other hosts such as Google, Microsoft, and IBM have bragged about their services and innovations, but Amazon is keeping things quiet.
Senior vice president of the Amazon cloud Andy Jassy believes that the public cloud will grow in demand and companies will stop hosting their own data. His belief is that the public cloud will outpace the locally hosted datacenters and.
Amazon already has more than enough data farms:
“…Each AWS region has at least two availability zones and at least one datacenter if not more, and then added that a typical datacenter has at least 50,000 servers and sometimes more than 80,000 servers. He added that the scale of economy for a datacenter ran out at about that upper level and that after a certain point, the incremental cost of that datacenter went up, not down, as more iron was added to it, and more importantly, at a certain number the “blast radius” of a datacenter failure was too great to allow that many workloads to be taken down by a catastrophic failure.”
It took Amazon a while to achieve this number, but the company has been working on it for years. The greater problem now is advertising and improving its search. Ever try to NOT out unpublished books from a Kindle search? Ever try to upload native content to Amazon enterprise search? It gets better and then it gets worse.
Whitney Grace, December 05, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Bye-Bye Google Glass Stores
December 4, 2014
The great thing about owning an Apple product is when you need service all you have to do is schedule an appointment and visit a store. Apple is quite unlike any other company with technical support, because they actually help resolve issues without trying to sell you more products at the same time. Also person-to-person help is more effective than phone support.
Google must have been thinking the same thing, because Digital Spy reports in “Google Glass Basecamp Stores Closing In The US?” the search giant opened three Glass Basecamp storefronts for Google Glass tech support and to buy accessories. Just as quickly as they opened, the storefronts are closing in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
According to the article, the stores were not meant to be permanent, which is strange considering the consumer version of the Google Glass is set for release soon.
“Earlier this month, it was reported that the launch of the consumer version could be delayed until 2015.
The apparent delay comes as developers are reportedly losing interest in the technology, with some pulling out of making apps.
While there are almost 100 apps available, there are some notable omissions including Twitter, who stopped supporting Glass in October.”
It sounds like Google has a blunder on its list along with forcing all users to sign up for Google Plus. Is the world ready for technology like Google Glass, the answer is yes. The technology, however, is still clunky and not widespread. What can it be compared to? There is Nintendo’s Virtual Boy and Power Glove, the DIVX player, and laser discs.
Whitney Grace, December 04, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
A Wikipedia For The News
December 4, 2014
The news community is a very disorganized place with outlets competing for your attention and clicks. A different perspective on stories also creates chaos when trying to find accurate information. While news aggregators can sift through the bulk of the junk news, they still manage to squeeze through way through algorithms. The news seems to be increasing and disorganization is mounting.
Larry Sanger, one of the co-founders of Wikipedia, decided enough was enough with the news. He is starting Infobitt, a new endeavor similar to Wikipedia, except it revolves around the news. Sanger explains his goal in a short essay: “How We Can Organize The News.” He wants to catalog every news article generated for the Web, summarize it, and store it on Infobitt:
“Here’s the Infobitt model. We grab different facts from different news sources, summarize them in sentences which link back to those sources. We each drag-and-drop the facts into our preferred order, and the system calculates the sense of the community. The result is a bitt.
That’s not all. There’s a stream of new bitts arriving in the system. We put bitts in order of importance by drag-and-drop as well. We’ve made a new way to collaborate on collecting the news.”
Sanger points out that people thought Wikipedia was crazy. Now it is one of the main information sources in the world. The goal is that 100,000 people will upload a one sentence description with a URL. It will work, it will just take a long time.
Whitney Grace, December 04, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Ramp Brings Native Video to SharePoint
December 4, 2014
The biggest buzz in SharePoint right now relates to video. Ramp released a new native video component this week and CMS Wire covers all the details in their article, “Ramp Introduces Native Video For SharePoint #smwest.”
The article begins:
“Video for SharePoint or Office 365! Before this week, it was a pretty low key affair. Now Microsoft is launching a video service. And just yesterday, video experience provider Ramp released what it says is the first enterprise-class, self-service webcasting solution for SharePoint. The new native solution, developed by Ramp in partnership with Wowza Media Systems, will provide SharePoint users with a way of broadcasting live events by either Internet or intranet, whether that event is a schoolyard marbles tournament or a large-scale training webinar across different geographies.”
It seems a good trend that Microsoft and others are taking the need for dynamic content seriously within the realm of enterprise. Stephen E. Arnold has made a career out of following all things search, including enterprise, and reporting back on his Web service ArnoldIT.com. He even has a dedicated SharePoint feed to enable readers to more quickly track the latest happenings in the world of SharePoint, including the latest news on videos and dynamic content.
Emily Rae Aldridge, December 04, 2014
Enterprise Search: Gritters Are Ready, Enterprise Info Highway Is Resistant
December 3, 2014
In UK talk, a gritter is a giant machine that dumps sand (grit) on a highway to make it less slippery. Enterprise search gritters are ready to dump sand on my forthcoming report about next generation information access.
The reason is that enterprise search is running on a slippery surface. The potential customers are coated in Teflon. The dust up between HP and Autonomy, the indictment of a former Fast Search & Transfer executive, and the dormancy of some high flying vendors (Dieselpoint, Hakia, Siderean Software, et al)—these are reasons why enterprise customers are looking for something that takes the company into information access realms that are beyond search. Here’s an example: “Accounting Differences, Not Fraud, Led to HP’s Autonomy Write Down.” True or false, the extensive coverage of the $11 billion deal and the subsequent billions in write down has not built confidence in the blandishments of the enterprise search vendors.
Image source: http://thehappyhousewife.com/homeschool/files/2013/01/salt-truck.jpg
Enter the gritters. Enterprise search vendors are prepping to dump no skid bits on their prospects. Among the non skid silica will be pages from mid tier consultants’ reports about fast movers and three legged rabbits. There will be conference talks that pummel the audience with assertions about the primacy of search. There will be recycled open source technology and “Fast” think packaged as business intelligence. There will be outfits that pine for the days of libraries with big budgets pitching rich metadata to trucking companies and small medical clinics who rightly ask, “What’s metadata?”
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