Weekly Watson: A Peddler at Its Core
December 11, 2015
I read “IBM’s Watson Is Now in the Marketing and E Commerce Business.” My initial reaction is the IBM is trying to generate revenue from its massive Watson “product.” Watson is home brew scripts, acquired technology, and open source software. Instead I learned that Watson itself is a smart marketer able to help a company generate oodles of revenue.
The write up points out with nary a raised eyebrow:
IBM gives the example of an online fitness retailer who might find that a newly launched line of active wear is underperforming sales expectations. So the retailer asks Watson to drill down and find out why. Watson displays results that show that although mobile traffic is high, it’s only strong in a handful of locations. As a result, the retailer could offer a discount in the identified underperforming areas.
My question, “Has the Watson system been used by IBM?” If the answer is, “Yes,” I would like some specifics. The best case is the experience of the company manufacturing the product. Someone told me that the old Microsoft called this “eating one’s dog food.”
The write up also offered:
Pete Wharton, Commerce Solutions Product Marketing Leader, noted that users of the IBM e-commerce platform can employ Commerce Insights without asking for Watson’s help. But, he said, “if you do, you can ask in natural language and Watson can understand the data and make predictive suggestions.”
IBM has tallied more than a dozen consecutive quarters of decreasing revenue. If IBM has such a powerful, smart system, why isn’t IBM reporting revenue growth?
The write up included a quote from an IBM expert. I highlighted this in red ink red highlighter:
Wharton [IBM expert] said that while many analytics solutions are employing machine learning to continually improve their performance, Commerce Insights with Watson lets a user see the data in context and take immediate action on the WebSphere platform in response. He also noted that Watson’s cognitive ability gives it a unique ability to “reason, learn and understand.” At some point, he predicted, systems will be able to implement their own recommendations. If discount coupons need to be offered in specific markets, he said, the system will do so within set limits, so that marketers and business managers can “focus on strategic problems.”
IBM obviously does not have a problem with pitching IBM as a marketing system when IBM’s own revenues are flagging. There is a proverb my grandmother repeated about shoemaker’s children. IBM has transformed the shoemaker’s children who have lousy shoes into the progeny of Watson.
Talk, it seems, is easier than making Watson into a billion dollar shoe factory.
Stephen E Arnold, December 11, 2015
Paper.Li Enterprise Search Daily Not Updating
December 11, 2015
Update December 12, 2015–The Enterprise Search Paper.li is updating again. The content is primarily about Big Data.
The Enterprise Search Daily, which shifted from enterprise search to Big Data, is not updating. Is it a Paper.li problem or a lack of suitable information about search?
The archives are available from this link. If the page resolves, click on the Archives and you can view a Search Daily by clicking on a calendar. My hunch is that the flow of information about enterprise search slowed in 2015. Marketers have embraced Big Data even if their systems do not really handle lots of information without developing indigestion. Earlier this year, I heard that a real publisher was going to introduce a newsletter about enterprise search. I am not sure if anyone will notice.
If the Enterprise Search Daily turns up in my Overflight system again, I will note the date. For now, fans of enterprise search will have to entertain themselves by running queries on the topics related to search. Big Data is not a useful search phrase. Everybody does Big Data according to the marketers and the venture firms funding search and retrieval. What about the conference organizers who run for fee shindigs to discuss enterprise search? Yikes. I am delighted to be beyond search.
Stephen E Arnold, December 11, 2015
Weekly Watson: Quotes about Trend App
December 11, 2015
I know. I know. I keep writing about IBM Watson. The product, service, marketing behemoth is the future of IBM. I think it is even though another IBM Watson top dog headed for the greener grass at GE. (Read about the jump in “GE Poaches Key IBM Watson Exec.” I like the “key” word.)
My highlight of the IBM Watson week is a story in Customer Think. I don’t pay much attention to the customer think arena, but I saw a link to Watson and gave the mouse a poke.
Bull’s eye. The write up is an interview under the SEO friendly title “IBM Chief Strategist for Watson Trend App Answers 4 Questions for Marketing Innovators.”
Yikes. Am I allowed to read this interview. I am not a marketing innovator and my questions usually go unanswered; for example, what happened to the goal of $10 billion in Watson revenue in five years? See what I mean.
Here are three highlights from the interview with Justin Norwood, who carries a significant burden with the Watson as a consumer app play.
Mr. Norwood is an innovator. Here’s his response to a question about why the Watson Trend App is important:
I believe that cognitive computing – of which IBM Watson is the leading example – is the missing link to making mass personalization a reality.
Belief, like hope and faith, is a useful characteristic. I personally put a bit more emphasis on revenue. But that’s what makes horse races.
A second quote I circle in Big Blue blue is:
The app has already improved my personal gift giving experience.
Yes, hands on personal testimony. I wonder what the recipients of the gifts have to say. Did the app really hit the gift on the head or were the recipients (Mr. Norwood’s daughters) telling anyone who would listen what they wanted from Amazon, an outfit with some recommendation technology that works okay. It produces revenue by the way.
The third and final gem I circled in red ink red (my Big Blue blue marker gave out on me):
I am also very motivated to see an end to hunger and malnutrition in Africa in my lifetime, so I recently partnered with an organization called Seeds of Action to work towards that.
Good idea. Imagine how much money can be routed to help folks in Africa if IBM Watson generates the much needed billions IBM management presaged a couple of years ago. By the way, there are hungry folks in the USA as well.
Stephen E Arnold, December 11, 2015
Short Honk: Space Time for the Couch Potato Physicist
December 11, 2015
Hey, the weekend is almost here with football and thoughts about the joy of the upcoming holidays with family. For a relaxing read, check out “What Is Spacetime, Really?” For fans of network and graph analysis, Stephen Wolfram shares his most recent big idea. In addition to references to his books, which I assume you, gentle reader, have read, Wolfram explains spacetime. If you are a bit rusty on the notion of space time, Einstein’s theories, and theoretical physicals, don’t worry. The answer is nodes.
Stephen E Arnold, December 11, 2015
Search Data from Bing for 2015 Yields Few Surprises
December 11, 2015
The article on Search Engine Watch titled Bing Reveals the Top US and UK Searches of 2015 in the extremely intellectual categories of Celebs, News, Sport(s), Music, and Film. Starting with the last category, guess what franchise involving wookies and Carrie Fisher took the top place? For Celebrity searches, Taylor Swift took first in the UK, and Caitlyn Jenner in the US, followed closely by Miley Cyrus (and let’s all take a moment to savor the seething rage this data must have caused in Kim Kardashian’s heart.) What does this trivia matter? Ravleen Beeston, UK Sales Director of Bing, is quoted in the article with her two cents,
“Understanding the interests and motivations driving search behaviour online provides invaluable insight for marketers into the audiences they care about. This intelligence allows us to empower marketers to create meaningful connections that deliver more value for both consumers and brands alike. By reflecting back on the key searches over the past 12 months, we can begin to anticipate what will inspire and how to create the right experience in the right context during the year to come.”
Some of the more heartening statistics were related to searches for women’s sports news, which increased from last year. Serena Williams was searched more often than the top five male tennis players combined. And saving the best for last, in spite of the dehumanizing and often racially biased rhetoric we’ve all heard involving Syrian refugees, there was a high volume of searches in the US asking how to provide support and aid for refugees, especially children.
Chelsea Kerwin, December 11, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Google Executives Have a Look but No Touch Rule
December 11, 2015
Have you ever been to a museum and the curator told you to “look, but don’t touch the exhibits?” The phrase comes into play, because museums want to protect the integrity of the exhibits and to keep them preserved for the ages. One of the draws about these new, modern companies is that all employees are allowed to engage with each other in different departments and the higher-ups are available without a hassle. Or at least that is the image they want to project to the public, especially Google. Business Pundit exposes bow Google CEOs interact with their employees in “Google’ s Top Execs Are Always Visible But Almost Never Approachable” like a museum exhibit.
Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Sundar Pichai make themselves seen at their Mountain View headquarters, but do not even think about going near them. They are walled off to small talk and random interactions because all of their time is booked.
Company developer advocate Don Dodge wrote on a Quora Q&A that Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Sundar Pichai are in the no approach zone, Dodge explains:
“However, that doesn’t mean they are easy to approach and engage in discussion. They are very private and don’t engage in small talk. They are usually very focused on their priorities, and their schedule is always fully booked. Larry is a notoriously fast walker and avoids eye contact with anyone so he can get to his destination without disruption.”
Get Larry a Segway or one of those new “hoverboard” toys, then he will be able to zoom right past everyone or run them over. Add a little horn to warn people to get out of the way.
Whitney Grace, December 11, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Harvard, Lingerie, and Instinctual Decisions
December 10, 2015
I read “Proof Data Can’t Always Help You Make Decisions.” (Note: you may have to jump through some hoops to read this article. If that’s the case, speak with the real journalists at Fortune, not me.)
The write up is by a person who attended Harvard and founded a lingerie company called Adore Me. This seems quite plausible.
The point of the write up is that a person with an advanced degree from the prestigious French university Les Mines, originally École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris.
The write up featured this statement:
I [Morgan Hermand-Waiche] did some heavy researching and everything I found only emphasized what a terrible idea it was to start a lingerie company: A single player whose reign seemed never-ending fully dominated the lingerie market, barriers to entry were sky-high, and every single player that had tried to penetrate the lingerie market had failed—even huge brands with a lot of money and resources like Abercrombie & Fitch and the now-deceased Fredericks of Hollywood. The data clearly pointed out that this was a no-go. As a usually very rational guy, the story should have ended right then because data was telling me to give up. But for the first time in my life, I had a gnawing feeling that didn’t go away. And because that gut feeling went so against the very definition of my data-driven DNA, I knew I just couldn’t ignore it. And so I, a man with no knowledge of lingerie, started a lingerie startup.
Adore Me was a success. No math, no analytics, no Big Data. Just a hunch. I wonder what Louis Paul Cailletet (1832–1913), physicist and inventor or Georges Charpak (1924–2010), Nobel Prize in Physics 1992 would say about this approach.
Harvard, lingerie, hunch—makes sense because Adore Me is “ranked No. 2 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies in NYC.”
Stephen E Arnold, December 10, 2015
Google Indexes Some Dynamic Content
December 10, 2015
If you generate Web pages dynamically (who doesn’t?), you may want to know if the Alphabet Google thing can index the content on dynamic pages.
For some apparently objective information about the GOOG’s ability to index dynamic content, navigate to “Does Google Crawl Dynamic Content?” The article considers 11 types of dynamic content methods.
Here’s the passage I highlighted:
- Google crawls and indexes all content that was injected by javascript.
- Google even shows results in the SERP that are based on asynchronously injected content.
- Google can handle content from httpRequest().
- However, JSON-LD as such does not necessarily lead to SERP results (as opposed to the officially supported SERP entities that are not only indexed, but also used to decorate the SERP).
- Injected JSON-LD gets recognized by the structured data testing tool – including Tag Manager injection. This means that once Google decides to support the entities, indexing will not be a problem.
- Dynamically updated meta elements get crawled and indexed, too.
The question one may wish to consider is, “What does Alphabet Google do with that information and data?” There are some clues in the Ramanathan Guha patent documents filed in 2007.
Stephen E Arnold, December 10, 2015
Medical Search Solved Again
December 10, 2015
I have looked at a wide range of medical information search systems over the years. These range from Medline to the Grateful Med.
I read “A Cure for Medical Researchers’ Big Data Headache.” The Big Data in question is the Medline database. The new search tool is ORiGAMI (I love that wonky upper and lower case thing).
The basic approach involves:
Apollo, a Cray Urika graph computer, possesses massive multithreaded processors and 2 terabytes of shared memory, attributes that allow it to host the entire MEDLINE database and compute multiple pathways on multiple graphs simultaneously. Combined with Helios, CADES’ Cray Urika extreme analytics platform, Sukumar’s team had the cutting-edge hardware needed to process large datasets quickly—about 1,000 times faster than a workstation—and at scale.
And the payoff?
Once the MEDLINE database was brought into the CADES environment, [Sreenivas Rangan Sukumar’s [a data scientist at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory] team applied advanced graph theory models that implement semantic, statistical, and logical reasoning algorithms to create ORiGAMI. The result is a free online application capable of delivering health insights in less than a second based on the combined knowledge of a worldwide medical community.
My view is that Medline is not particularly big. The analysis of the content pool can generate lots of outputs.
From my vantage point in rural Kentucky, this is another government effort to create a search system. Perhaps this is the breakthrough that will surpass IBM Watson’s medical content capabilities?
Does your local health care provider have access to a Cray computer and the other bits and pieces, including a local version of Dr. Sukumar?
Stephen E Arnold, December 10, 2015
Bing Wants Google Bridge to Fall down, My Dear Lady
December 10, 2015
Microsoft has not given up on Bing yet. While the Microsoft’s brand name search engine has not gained much traction to take on Google in the United States, the United Kingdom might prove else wise. The Independent reports that “Rik Van Der Kooi: Microsoft Ups Its Challenge To Google With Big Plans For Bing” in the United Kingdom. Rik van der Kooi is Microsoft’s global head of search advertising and he wants to give Bing users a more ambient experience. Microsoft is integrating Bing into more features and applications, such as Microsoft Office, Cortana, Gumtree, Windows 10, and Skype.
Kooi is very eager to introduce Bing into Skype, because it will only benefit users. He says that:
“In the future we are thinking about not artificially pushing it in but maybe putting it in where it’s of use to the user. I could imagine a scenario where if you were either talking with somebody via Skype or chatting via Skype, that providing a search experience inside of Skype is a very valuable experience. And if it’s valuable to the user then we would consider it.”
Google still controls 88 percent of the UK’s search market, but Kooi did not stoop to using insults when he was asked about Google. Instead, he said that Bing and Google have different business approaches. Google is more focused on advertising as a model, which is different than what Bing does. Microsoft has a clear plan for Bing, including the knowledge that it has a lot of advertiser demand and forming partnerships with more UK platforms for quality traffic. Kooi is faithful that Bing will continue to gain traction in the UK and the US, it’s already in the double digits.
Whitney Grace, December 10, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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