My Refrigerator Door Shuts Automatically or Content Processing Vendor Works Hard at Repositioning
August 3, 2015
This weekend I checked out the flow of news from several dozen search and content processing vendors. What I discovered was surprising. For example, for the set of 36 vendors, there was zero substantive news about the companies’ information access technology. More disturbing were the hints of revenue difficulties; for example, New Zealand based SLI Systems, a public traded company, continues to lose money. Search and content processing sales challenges are forcing vendors to reposition themselves or align themselves with business trends which are more likely to have traction with senior managers.
How does a semantic technology company adapt. The approach is surprising, and it involves the Internet of Things. This is the push to put a Nest in your home and an Internet node in your appliances. One benefit is energy efficiency. The other idea is increased opportunities to push advertising to the hapless consumer who just wants to nuke a burrito in a microwave (smart of dumb microwave may not matter to a hungry teen).
I am not sure about your refrigerator. My double door General Electric refrigerator (what my grandmother called an “ice box” and some folks call a “fridge”) has doors which shut automatically. The refrigerator has an odd energy efficient sticker like the ones I remove from monitors which persist in going to sleep when my intelligence does not match the gizmo’s.
I understand that someday soon I will have a refrigerator with lots of intelligence. I am confident that with a few moments thought, I can kill that puppy’s brain.
In my narrow world, bounded by gun toting neighbors and dynamite crazed bridge builders, the Internet of Things or the somewhat odd acronym “IoT”, pronounced by my Spanish tutor “Eee ooooh tay”, will be a bit like Big Data, semantic search, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and data lakes. The idea is that a search and content processing vendor can surf on a hot idea like fraud and pump some air into the sagging balloon labeled sales leads.
I am more convinced of this verbal magic each time I read about “new” technology from companies that are essentially vendors of look up functions applicable to information access.
The IoT is, in my opinion, more about getting information about a machine’s performance, the leasee’s adherence to maintenance schedules, and alerts about highly probably device failure.
One of my neighbors has a Mercedes which beeps, vibrates, and flashes when my neighbor strays across the white lines on the highway. Annoying but semi useful. The Mercedes also can phone home if my neighbor’s big expensive SUV experiences a malfunction. Useful. Maybe annoying if the malfunction occurs when the SUV is parked in front of the local Neiman Marcus or Goodwill store.
I read “Content Analysis and the Internet of Things: Never Leave the Fridge Door Open Again?” The main point of the write up is the question which I already answered. My refrigerator automatically shuts its door.
The article states:
The Internet of Things is the expanding network of physical objects that collect information, communicate and sense or interact with their internal states or the external environment according to Gartner, which reports that there will be nearly 26 billion devices on the Internet of Things by 2020.
Ah, yes, the mid tier firm Gartner, an excellent source of objective, unbiased, inclusion free information.
Here’s the article’s keeper passage I noted from a senior manager at a content processing company. Keep that phrase in mind: “content processing.”
With the common method of interaction, we will speak, devices will read, the design will be predicated upon our needs and less so upon the device. The trend seems so simple—for us to understand these devices, the devices must understand us. The difference is meaning. Data is an abstraction, understanding is communication, and to understand and communicate one must know meaning.
I am delighted that data have meaning. I just wonder how much of a stretch it is to apply text centric methods to outputs from an industrial machine connected to the Internet via an iGear service. My hunch is, “Not too much.”
To me the phrase “content processing” means words, not data output from my neighbor’s flashy Mercedes or an Internet enabled refrigerator.
As I said, my refrigerator door closes automatically. Do I want anyone to know that let the hinges do the work?
Stephen E Arnold, August 3, 2015
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