Why Google Compare Was Terminated with Extreme Prejudice
March 3, 2016
I read “Google Will generate More Revenue from a Fourth Ad Than from Compare.” The answer is in the headline. The Alphabet Google thing is worrying about lawsuits, costs and revenue. Focus is often a good thing for a giant company with Loon balloons, researchers working on solving death, and mechanics building robots unsuitable for use in a pre-school.
The write up reports:
Since Google now shows four ads on “highly commercial queries” instead of three, the search engine clearly believes that the fourth listing will generate more revenue from one of the price comparison websites than it has done from searchers using its own comparison tools. Morling [a Google watcher it seems] told me that “developing a financial comparison service along with continual innovation takes time, resources and expertise”. He added: “Consumers are unlikely to lose out because those sites dedicated to financial comparison are better placed to provide added value such as supporting information and richer functionality.”
My conclusion is that if a Google service is a liability, that service may be given the Orkut treatment.
Stephen E Arnold, March 3, 2016
IBM Watson, Google DeepMind Is Slicing into Health Care
March 3, 2016
Gentle reader, you may have seen out write ups about IBM Watson and its work to cure cancer and develop innovative recipes for barbeque sauce with tamarind.
I read “Smart Care: How Google DeeepMind Is Working with NHS Hospitals.” The write up points out:
A smartphone app piloted by the NHS could improve communication between hospital staff and help patients get vital care faster.
Yikes, Watson, a phone. Come here I need you will echo in the corridors of these paragons of efficiency throughout Britain.
I learned:
Their research, published in the journal Surgery, showed that half of hospital patients do not get the care they need fast enough, usually because of poor communication, particularly when one team of doctors or nurses hands over to another. In early pilots at St Mary’s Hospital, part of Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, where Darzi [former health minister in the Blair government and director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London] is a consultant surgeon, they found medical staff responded 37% faster when alerted by the Hark app than when they used pagers.
Will an app work cooperatively with IBM Watson? Will DeepMind, the app, keep IBM Watson in the lounge area?
Painful questions for an app to answer or notify in this case of technological innovation.
Stephen E Arnold, March 3, 2016
Artificial Intelligence Competition Reveals Need for More Learning
March 3, 2016
The capabilities of robots are growing but, on the whole, have not surpassed a middle school education quite yet. The article Why AI can still hardly pass an eighth grade science test from Motherboard shares insights into the current state of artificial intelligence as revealed in a recent artificial intelligence competition. Chaim Linhart, a researcher from an Israel startup, TaKaDu, received the first place prize of $50,000. However, the winner only scored a 59.3 percent on this series of tasks tougher than the conventionally used Turing Test. The article describes how the winners utilized machine learning models,
“Tafjord explained that all three top teams relied on search-style machine learning models: they essentially found ways to search massive test corpora for the answers. Popular text sources included dumps of Wikipedia, open-source textbooks, and online flashcards intended for studying purposes. These models have anywhere between 50 to 1,000 different “features” to help solve the problem—a simple feature could look at something like how often a question and answer appear together in the text corpus, or how close words from the question and answer appear.”
The second and third place winners scored just around one percent behind Linhart’s robot. This may suggest a competitive market when the time comes. Or, perhaps, as the article suggests, nothing very groundbreaking has been developed quite yet. Will search-based machine learning models continue to be expanded and built upon or will another paradigm be necessary for AI to get grade A?
Megan Feil, March 3, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Delve Is No Jarvis
March 3, 2016
A podcast at SearchContentManagement, “Is Microsoft Delve Iron Man’s Edwin Jarvis? No Way,” examines the ways Delve has yet to live up to its hype. Microsoft extolled the product when it was released as part of the Office 365 suite last year. As any developer can tell you, though, it is far easier to market than deliver polished software. Editor Lauren Horwitz explains:
“While it was designed to be a business intelligence (BI), enterprise search and collaboration tool wrapped into one, it has yet to make good on that vision. Delve was intended to be able to search users’ documents, email messages, meetings and more, then serve up relevant content and messages to them based on their content and activities. At one level, Delve has failed because it hasn’t been as comprehensive a search tool as it was billed. At another level, users have significant concerns about their privacy, given the scope of documents and activities Delve is designed to scour. As BI and SharePoint expert Scott Robinson notes in this podcast, Delve was intended to be much like Edwin Jarvis, butler and human search tool for Iron Man’s Tony Stark. But Delve ain’t no Jarvis, Robinson said.”
So, Delve was intended to learn enough about a user to offer them just what they need when they need it, but the tool did not tap deeply enough into the user’s files to effectively anticipate their needs. On top of that, it’s process is so opaque that most users don’t appreciate what it is doing, Robinson indicated. For more on Delve’s underwhelming debut, check out the ten-minute podcast.
Cynthia Murrell, March 3, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Drone2Map: Smart Software
March 2, 2016
If you are interested in mapping and geospatial analyses, you will want to read “ESRI Introduces Drone2Map to Process Aerial Images.” The write up reports:
Drone2Map incorporates Pix4D’s powerful image-processing engine to analyze images taken from drones and convert them into a variety of 2-D and 3-D maps.
What’s interesting to me is that the software is available for public download. You will need to know about ArcGIS and some other tools.
You can find the software at this link. You will have to jump through a couple of hoops. Don’t forget to register your drone.
Stephen E Arnold, March 2, 2016
Yahoo Has AI Advantage Maybe?
March 2, 2016
I read “Don’t Laugh: Yahoo’s Open Source AI Has a Secret Weapon.” Sorry, I did laugh. I find the Yahooligans’ periodic “we’re really good at technology” messages amusing. More interesting is the willingness of with it magazines to cover these breakthroughs.
I learned:
Yahoo published the source code to its CaffeOnSpark AI engine so that anyone from academic researchers to big corporations can use or modify it.
Good. Open source software is useful, very useful.
I noted this passage:
Yahoo, for example, uses it to improve search results on Flickr by determining the contents of different photos. Instead of relying on the descriptions and keywords entered by the people who upload photos to the site, Yahoo teaches its computers to recognize certain characteristics of a photo, such as specific colors or even objects and animals.
Interesting, but other outfits do image recognition reasonably well. Check out Yandex’s image search or look at the wonky similar images feature that makes it oh, so easy for me to lose my train of thought when looking for examples of Palantir’s interface via Google’s image search service.
I learned:
CaffeOnSpark, as the name suggests, combines two existing technologies: the popular deep learning framework Caffe and the up-and-coming data-crunching system Spark that can run on top of the even more popular big data platform Hadoop. What Yahoo did was simply create a way to run Caffee atop Spark clusters. It can be run either on Spark alone or atop Hadoop. Besides making it easy for AI developers to use familiar tools and avoid moving data around… CaffeOnSpark also makes it relatively easy to distribute deep learning processes across multiple servers, something that the open source version of Google’s TensorFlow can’t yet do.
The challenge for Yahoo is to deal with its here and now problems. The outfit is for sale and many of the researchers of yesteryear have ridden off into the sunrise to find companies able to generate revenue from innovations.
When you are for sale, publicity is a definite plus. By the way, companies with technology to distribute deep learning across multiple servers are chugging along and closing some deals based on their know how. When does open source become a source of revenue and when is it a PR play?
Stephen E Arnold, March 2, 2016
Stolen Online Account Info Now More Valuable than Stolen Credit Card Details
March 2, 2016
You should be aware that criminals are now less interested in your credit cards and other “personally identifiable information” and more keen on exploiting your online accounts. As security firm Tripwire informs us in their State of Security blog, “Stolen Uber, PayPal Accounts More Coveted than Credit Cards on the Dark Web.” Writer Maritza Santillan explains:
“The price of these stolen identifiers on the underground marketplace, or ‘the Dark Web,’ shows the value of credit cards has declined in the last year, according to security firm Trend Micro. Last week, stolen Uber account information could be found on underground marketplaces for an average of $3.78 per account, while personally identifiable information, such as Social Security Numbers or dates of birth, ranged from $1 to $3.30 on average – down from $4 per record in 2014, reported CNBC. Furthermore, PayPal accounts – with a guaranteed balance of $500 –were found to have an average selling price of $6.43. Facebook logins sold for an average of $3.02, while Netflix credentials sold for about 76 cents. By contrast, U.S.-issued credit card information, which is sold in bundles, was listed for no more than 22 cents each, said CNBC.”
The article goes on to describe a few ways criminals can leverage these accounts, like booking Uber “ghost rides,” or assembling personal details for a very thorough identity theft. Pros say the trend means service providers to pay closer attention to usage patterns, and to beef up their authentication processes. Specifically, says Forrester’s Andras Cser, it is time to move beyond passwords; instead, he proposes, companies should look for changes in biometric data, like phone position and finger pressure, which would be communicated back to them by our mobile devices. So we’re about to be even more closely monitored by the companies we give our money to. All for our own good, of course.
Cynthia Murrell, March 2, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
No Search Just Browse Images on FindA.Photo
March 2, 2016
The search engine FindA.Photo proves itself to be a useful resource for browsing images based on any number of markers. The site offers a general search by terms, or the option of browsing images by color, collection (for example, “wild animals,” or “reflections”) or source. The developer of the site, David Barker, described his goals for the services on Product Hunt,
“I wanted to make a search for all of the CC0 image sites that are available. I know there are already a few search sites out there, but I specifically wanted to create one that was: simple and fast (and I’m working on making it faster), powerful (you can add options to your search for things like predominant colors and image size with just text), and something that could have contributions from anyone (via GitHub pull requests).”
My first click on a swatch of royal blue delivered 651 images of oceans, skies, panoramas of oceans and skies, jellyfish ballooning underwater, seagulls soaring etc. That may be my own fault for choosing such a clichéd color, but you get the idea. I had better (more various) results through the collections search, which includes “action,” “long-exposure,” “technology,” “light rays,” and “landmarks,” the last of which I immediately clicked for a collage of photos of the Eiffel Tower, Louvre, Big Ben, and the Great Wall of China.
Chelsea Kerwin, March 2, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Online Translation: Google or Microsoft?
March 1, 2016
HI have solved the translation problem. I live in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky. Folks here speak Kentucky. No other language needed. However, gentle reader, you may want to venture into lands where one’s native language is not spoken or written. You will need online translation.
Should I forget Systran and other industrial strength solutions of yesteryear. Today the choice is Google or Microsoft if I understand “2 Main Reasons Why Google Translate Is Ahead of Microsoft and Skype.” (The link worked on February 22, 2016. If it does not work when you read this blog post, you may have to root around. That’s life in the zip zip world today.)
Reason one is that Google supports more languages than Microsoft. The total is 100 plus. The write up is sufficiently amazed to describe the language support of the Alphabet Google thing as “mind blowing.” Okay.
Reason two is that Google’s translation function works on smartphone. The write up points out:
You can hand-write, speak, type, or even take a picture of a given language and Google Translate will translate it for you. Not only this but on Android, some of the translation features are available offline. So, some features are accessible even if you do not have access to the internet.
The write up does not dig too deeply into Microsoft’s translation capability. If you are interested in Microsoft’s quite capable and useful services, navigate to the Microsoft Language Portal. Google is okay, but one service may not do the job a person who does not speak Kentucky requires.
Stephen E Arnold, February 27, 2016
A Yahoo Google Analysis Which Misses One Obviously Irrelevant Fact
March 1, 2016
I love it when with it universities analyze businesses. Universities are loan factories, have some exciting management methods in their athletic departments, and dabble in foundations plays to generate some financial loyalty.
Why would a university not be a source of expertise in the analysis of digital businesses?
I read “A Tale of Two Brands: yahoo’s Mistakes vs Google’s Mastery.” The write up is clear and marches through the analysis like General Sherman on his way to Atlanta. Like General Sherman, the march was not exactly what it seemed.
I learned that Google is just a lot better than Yahoo. No disagreement from me. Yahoo’s former chief technology officer complained that I did not have enough appreciation for the work flowing from Yahoo’s research and development units. He was right. I didn’t. I don’t hear from that Yahooligan since he got a job at Google. There is apparently no need to be defensive when one is a Googler.
The write up points out these flaws in Yahoo’s management which look really awful when compared to the wonderfulness of Google’s management:
- Google operates with clarity; Yahoo has an identity crisis
- Google anticipates; Yahoo reacts
- Google has substance; Yahoo is a fashion week poster child.
The problem is that the write up misses one probably irrelevant fact about the Google and its performance.
When Google did not have a revenue business model, the Googlers looked around for a way to make money from search. The answer it found was online advertising. Prior to the IPO, the Googlers settled Yahoo’s patent suit. Yahoo took the money and found itself struggling to serve ads from its ageing infrastructure. The Google had a brand new, nifty infrastructure courtesy of some of the hires from AltaVista’s outfit.
Google’s system served ads more effectively. With more traffic, the Google ad system became a money trickle and then a money gusher.
Poor Yahoo watched as its methods were put to good use on a more efficient ad serving system. End of Yahoo. The company almost immediately began its death march to irrelevancy.
Google’s virtues are easy to see if one overlooks the one tiny fact of Google’s me-too approach to revenue. Clever seemed to be more effective than “management”, but that’s just my opinion.
The university analysis is okay, just not in line with the key event which made Google the one trick pony it is today. More significantly, that trick was someone else’s innovation via the Overture.com (GoTo.com) method.
Refresh your memory is this okay write up from 2004: “Google Settles Yahoo Patent Suit in Anticipation of IPO.”
In this context, the academic write up strikes me as baloney.
Stephen E Arnold, March 1, 2016
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