Instant Reputation: Help for Failing Enterprise Search Vendors
September 16, 2015
I know the economy is booming for marijuana vendors in Colorado. In other business sectors, the economic weights hang heavy.
One sector which has suffered for many years is what I call search and content processing. As a result, many vendors have magically changed from search into something else entirely. My textbook example is Vivisimo, the metasearch and on-the-fly clustering outfit spawned at a university in Pittsburgh. Yes, it is a high tech center. Uber bought a schools’ robotics department.
Vivisimo morphed from clustering and pretty good de-duplication to enterprise search. The search thing was okay but it required lots of fiddling with scripts and there was an annoying limit on the size of the indexes, but, hey, the company was trying. After years of effort and hitting more than $15 million in revenues, Vivisimo and its investors sold the company to IBM. Presto. Chango. Vivisimo became a Big Data outfit.
A single example selected from many search transmogrifications.
I read “I Created a Fake Business and Bought It an Amazing Online Reputation.” This service, which I assume works like a champ, is ideal for the search and content processing sector.
Gasping vendors of proprietary search systems can sign up, create a subsidiary, and charge the marketplace with an outstanding reputation. Imagine the value of Fast Search & Transfer’s indicted executive when he innovates. What about the surge of interest in Fast-Search derived systems, when those are repositioned. Think of the possibilities for these applications:
- Mid tier consulting firms can shake allegations of hanky panky and enjoy a great reputation
- Failed webmasters promoting “real” news can join the ranks of the publishers disseminating information via Facebook and Twitter
- Unemployed sales and marketing professionals can reinvent themselves as something more marketable than a former CEO with a track record of failed companies stapled to an Island cotton shirt
I learned in the write up:
I’m not the first to set up a fake business as a honey pot for fake reviews. In 2013, the New York attorney general’s office went undercover for “Operation Clean Turf.” Pretending to be a fro-yo place in Brooklyn plagued with negative reviews, the office called up “SEO shops” asking for help burnishing its online reputation. Many of them wrote fake reviews, using IP maskers and cheap freelancers abroad. At the end of that investigation, the attorney general fined 19 companies from $2,500 to $100,000 each for breaking business laws. Yes, writing fake reviews is illegal. False advertising is a misdemeanor crime. You can be fined up to $5,000 for it and spend six months in jail, or more if it’s your second offense. Even writing a real review where you don’t reveal that you were compensated to do it violates guidelines set forth by the Federal Trade Commission, which is one of the reasons why it wasn’t kosher for Kim Kardashian to pose on Instagram with her favorite morning sickness pills. But lots of people are still doing it. Technology research firm Gartner thinks that 10-15% of all reviews online are fake.
Does this mean that mid tier consulting firms, unemployed middle school teachers, and struggling search vendors will not use the service?
Good question probably best answered by the outfits who have pumped tens of millions of dollars into search and content processing companies.
Stephen E Arnold, September 16, 2015
HP: A Lesson in How to Sell
September 16, 2015
I am not much of a sales person. Hey, I don’t sell because no one in Harrod’s Creek is in the market for an old, fat, half deaf, and poorly sighted Washington, DC escapee.
I did learn something when I read “HP Announces 25K-30K Layoffs as Part of Split.” Hewlett Packard, the creator of the HP way, is going to split itself into two companies. I just heard that this mitosis will reignite innovation at HP. (Doesn’t HP sell printer ink and fund lawsuits targeting those who were silly enough to sell HP a company?) News travels slowly in rural Kentucky.
The misguided approach to sales I had prior to learning about the HP way was to perform the following steps. Let me use the example of my selling a motor scooter. I did:
- Clean the scooter
- Service the scooter
- Fill the scooter with fuel
- Get the manuals together in one envelope.
The idea was that I wanted the potential buyer to get a ready-to-roll motor scooter.
Now here’s what I learned about the HP way of sales:
- Figure out what parts of a giant company with quarter upon quarter of declining revenue make a Pile A and Pile B
- Assure the lawyers that the litigation against Autonomy will continue
- Terminate lots of people (the equivalent of my taking the rear wheel off my scooter which is for sale
- Appearing on a TV talk show on CNBC saying, “The sale will ignite innovation.”
I plan to try to HP way of sales the next time I sell a vehicle. I am darned confident that potential buyers will be impressed with an unusable vehicle.
I will let you, gentle reader, know how my emulation of the Hewlett Packard approach to sales works out.
In the meantime, why not try the HP method of sales yourself? A sure winner.
Stephen E Arnold, September 16, 2015
Recommind Hits $70 Million
September 16, 2015
A video from the Big Data Landscape, part of their Big Data TV series, brings us an interview with Recommind’s CEO, Bob Tennant. The 11-and-a-half minute video and its transcript appear under the headline, “How Recommind Grew to $70M in Big Data Revenue.”
The interview by Dave Feinleib explores Recommind’s right-moves-at-the-right-time origin story, what its intelligence and eDiscovery software does, and why Tennant is confident the company will continue to thrive. This successful CEO also offers advice for aspiring entrepreneurs in any field, so check out the video or transcript for those words of wisdom.
Interestingly, the technology Tennant describes reminds us of early Autonomy methods [pdf]. He discusses working with unstructured data:
“So what you have to do is try to understand at a deeper level what’s happening semantically. What Recommind does is marry up a very highly scalable system for dealing with unstructured information– and the kind of database you need for doing that is different than what you would utilize for online transaction processing. But it also marries that up with a very deep knowledge of machine learning, which is the root of the company and where our post-docs were doing their research, to help understand what the key pieces of information in the sea of textual stuff are. And once you understand the key pieces, then you can put that into applications for further use or you can provide it to business intelligence applications to make sense of, or you can feed it elsewhere. But that’s very different from dealing with very structured data that most people are familiar with.”
Launched in 2000 and headquartered in San Francisco, Recommind provides search-powered analysis and governance solutions to customers around the world. The company’s Malolo technology stack is built upon their CORE information management platform.
Cynthia Murrell, September 16, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Where’s the Finish Line Enterprise Search?
September 16, 2015
What never ceases to amaze me is that people are always perplexed when goals for technology change. It always comes with a big hullabaloo and rather than complaining about the changes, time would be better spent learning ways to adapt and learn from the changes. Enterprise search is one of those technology topics that sees slow growth, but when changes occur they are huge. Digital Workplace Group tracks the newest changes in enterprise search, explains why they happened, and how to adapt: “7 Ways The Goal Posts On Enterprise Search Have Moved.”
After spending an inordinate amount of explaining how the author arrived at the seven ways enterprise search has changed, we are finally treated to the bulk of the article. Among the seven reasons are obvious insights that have been discussed in prior articles on Beyond Search, but there are new ideas to ruminate about. Among the obvious are that users want direct answers, they expect search to do more than find information, and understanding a user’s intent. While the obvious insights are already implemented in search engines, enterprise search lags behind.
Enterprise search should work on a more personalized level due it being part of a closed network and how people rely on it to fulfill an immediate need. A social filter could be applied to display a user’s personal data in search results and also users rely on the search filter as a quick shortcut feature. Enterprise search is way behind in taking advantage of search analytics and how users consume and manipulate data.
“To summarize everything above: Search isn’t about search; it’s about finding, connecting, answers, behaviors and productivity. Some of the above changes are already here within enterprises. Some are still just being tested in the consumer space. But all of them point to a new phase in the life of the Internet, intranets, computer technology and the experience of modern, digital work.”
As always there is a lot of room for enterprise search improvement, but these changes need to made for an updated and better work experience.
Whitney Grace, September 16, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Hewlett Packard Autonomy: Bank Issues Alleged
September 15, 2015
“The Price of Silence on Wall Street” provides a bit of information about the role of intermediaries in the HP deal for Autonomy. I find it difficult to figure out if the bank was doing its normal sales job for a juicy deal or if the bank was doing some fancy dancing.
Here are portions of the write up I highlighted when I was out of Internet range in a far off land. There is some value to printing online article for offline reading.
Item 1:
He [a bank whistle blower] says he believes people need to know about certain acts related to Barclays’ role in Hewlett-Packard’s $11.1 billion acquisition of Autonomy, a British software company, in 2011. Barclays was a financial adviser to HP on the deal and the sole provider of a one-year, $8.3 billion loan to be used, in part, by HP to buy Autonomy. Since then, the Autonomy acquisition has generally been viewed as a disaster. In 2012, HP wrote down the value of Autonomy by $8.8 billion, and said that some $5 billion of it stemmed from a willful misrepresentation by Autonomy’s management of the company’s financial performance (Autonomy’s management disagreed, and the two sides headed to court).
Item 2:
Mr. Sivere [bank whistle blower] says he believes there is more to the HP story, in particular that Barclays may have breached its internal ethical walls regarding the deal, allowing some confidential information from the banking side of Barclays to be used by Barclays traders. He reached this conclusion in his role as a compliance officer and after he saw internal digital correspondence between the two groups that made him nervous that the wall had been breached. In 2013, Mr. Sivere tells me, he filed an internal report at Barclays that questioned the ethics and legality of what he had witnessed. He reported his concern that confidentiality had been breached around certain foreign-exchange trades; around so-called Contracts for Difference trades, known as C.F.D.s; and around certain representations that Barclays had made to HP when it provided the $8.8 billion loan.
Item 3:
Mr. Sivere wrote in his letter to the Barclays board, he also believed that Barclays entered into certain suspicious derivative transactions with HP at the time of the Autonomy acquisition. “Some of these transactions included FX trades, a dollar/sterling option and C.F.D.s traded prior to the announcement (and also the bridge loan pegged to a possible manipulated Libor rate),” he wrote. “The unwinding of such derivative transactions most likely occurred during 2012 which should have raised suspicions of what exactly the Hewlett-Packard write-down was related to if not for Autonomy’s purported accounting improprieties, misrepresentations and disclosure failures.
The article includes other interesting information. I urge you to read it.
My view is that the HP Autonomy deal remains interesting to me. The amount HP paid for Autonomy set a high water mark for a content processing acquisition. This write up suggests that there is information about the deal which has not been revealed in publicly accessible articles.
The parallels with the Fast Search & Transfer matter may be worth exploring.
Stephen E Arnold, September 15, 2015
SEC Cracks Down on News Release Interceptors
September 15, 2015
What’s better than a flash trade? I would suggest perusing news releases before the news releases are released. “SEC Takes $30m Pound of Flesh in Newswire-Hacking Scandal” reveals that the US Securities and Exchange Commission frowns on “trading on info swiped from press releases before they were made public.”
The write up reveals:
According to the SEC, two Ukrainian hackers compromised the wire services and then fed the stolen information to dozens of investors who made illegal (and highly lucrative) trades. The defendants are accused of violating the US Securities Act and the US Exchange Act.
Interesting. Will the SEC expand its crusade to ensure that news releases remain off limits to those who would exploit the financial system?
My hunch is that Martha Stewart type investigations and prosecutions are more appealing to some enforcement outfits. I have heard that there is a revolving door between certain financial outfits and US government positions. Chasing Ukrainians does not modify standard operating procedures. Do I have a pending folder named “hold ‘er”? I will check.
Stephen E Arnold, September 15, 2015
Alphabet Google in Russia: From a Ride to Space to a Day in Court
September 15, 2015
I remember when Sergey Brin was going to ride into space on a Russian rocket. See “Google Co founder Slated as Next Space Tourist.” No ride, no joy. Yet.
I learned in “Russia Says Google Broke Antitrust Laws” that the Alphabet Google thingy will have to deal with this alleged infraction:
Google Inc. has violated Russian antitrust laws by requiring that manufacturers pre-install its services on their devices, the local antitrust authority ruled, in a blow to the Internet giant’s bid to overtake domestic search-market leader Yandex NV.
The grouser is Yandex, a Russian information access outfit. I am not sure whom to believe. On one side of the legal matter, I see the Alphabet Google thingy. The company has spelled joy, creativity, and imagination. On the other side, there is Yandex, a company which offers a pretty good search system. The Russian language version provides access to content that I find difficult to locate in the Alphabet Google thingy.
The article reports:
Yandex has been losing market share to Google recently as the Mountain View, California-based rival is strongly positioned on devices running Android. Yandex’s share of Russian searches fell to 50 percent last month compared with 54 percent in January of 2014, according to LiveInternet.ru, while Google’s share rose to almost 42 percent from 34 percent. “It’s a violation that Google required equipment makers to pre-install its services, including search, to get the Google Play application store on their devices,” Vladimir Kudryavtsev, head of the IT department of the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service, said by phone on Monday. The regulator will issue detailed instructions on remedies to Google within 10 days, Kudryavtsev said.
I find legal squabbles uninteresting. With the new Google structure, I would deduce that Messrs. Brin and Page find flapping with legal eagles less exciting than soaring with Loon balloons.
From my point of view, the Alphabet Google thingy is a squishy target. Will the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune would the beasty? I don’t know. I assume that riding a Russian space ship is on permanent hold for the Googlers. Still.
Stephen E Arnold, September 15, 2015
Mondeca Has a Sandbox
September 15, 2015
French semantic tech firm Mondeca has their own research arm, Mondeca Labs. Their website seems to be going for a playful, curiosity-fueled vibe. The intro states:
“Mondeca Labs is our sandbox: we try things out to illustrate the potential of Semantic Web technologies and get feedback from the Semantic Web community. Our credibility in the Semantic Web space is built on our contribution to international standards. Here we are always looking for new challenges.”
The page links to details on several interesting projects. One entry we noticed right away is for an inference engine; they say it is “coming soon,” but a mouse click reveals that no info is available past that hopeful declaration. The site does supply specifics about other projects; some notable examples include linked open vocabularies, a SKOS reader, and a temporal search engine. See their home page, above, for more.
Established in 1999, Mondeca has delivered pragmatic semantic solutions to clients in Europe and North America for over 15 years. The firm is based in Paris, France.
Cynthia Murrell, September 15, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Europol and FireEye Are Fighting Digital Crime
September 15, 2015
The Internet is a hotbed for crime and its perpetrators and Europol is one of the main organizations that fights it head on. One the problems that Europol faces is the lack of communication between law enforcement agencies and private industry. In a landmark agreement that will most likely be followed by others, The Inquirer reports “Europol and FireEye Have Aligned To Fight The International Cyber Menace.”
FireEye and Eurpol have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) where they will exchange information, so law enforcement agencies and private industry will be able to share information in an effort to fight the growing prevalence of cyber crime. Europol is usually the only organization that disseminates information across law enforcement agencies. FireEye is eager to help open the communication channels.
” ‘The threat landscape is changing every day and organizations need to stay one step ahead of the attackers,’ said Richard Turner, president for EMEA at FireEye. ‘Working with Europol means that, as well as granting early access to FireEye’s threat intelligence, FireEye will be able to respond to requests for assistance around threats or technical indicators of compromise in order to assist Europol in combating the ever increasing threat from cyber criminals.’ ”
The MoU will allow for exchange of information about cyber crime to aid each other in prevention and analyze attach methods. The Inquirer, however, suspects that information will only be shared one way. It does not explain which direction, though. The MoU is going to be a standard between Big Data companies and law enforcement agencies. Law enforcement agencies are notorious for being outdated and understaffed; relying on information and software from private industry will increase cyber crime prevention.
Whitney Grace, September 15, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Big Data: Trade Offs Necessary
September 14, 2015
i read “How to Balance the Five Analytic Dimensions.” The article presents information which reminded me of a college professor’s introductory lecture about data analysis.
The basics are definitely important. As the economy slips toward 2016, the notion of trade offs is an important one to keep in mind. According to the article, making sense of data via analytics involves understanding and balancing:
- The complexity of the data. Yep, data are often complex.
- Speed. Yep, getting results when the outputs are needed is important.
- The complexity of the analytics. Yep, adding a column of numbers and calculating the mean may be easy but not what the data doctor ordered.
- Accuracy and precision. The idea is that some outputs may be inappropriate for the task at hand. In theory, results should be accurate, or at least accurate enough.
- Data size. Yep, crunching lots of data can entail a number of “big” and “complex” tasks.
I agree with these points.
The problem is that the success of a big or small data project with simple or complex analytics is different from a laundry list of points to keep in mind. Knowing the five points is helpful if one is taking a test in a junior college information management class.
The write up does not address the rock upon which many analytics project crashes; that is:
What are the systems and methods for balancing resources across these five dimensions?
Without addressing this fundamental question, how can good decisions be made when the foundation is assumed to be level and stable?
Most analytics work just like the textbook said they would. The outputs are often baloney because the underlying assumptions were assumed to be spot on.
Why not just guess and skip the lecture? I know. Is this an acceptable answer: “That’s too time consuming and above our pay grade”?
The professional who offers this answer may get an A in class but an F in decision making.
Stephen E Arnold, September 14, 2015
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