Half of Online News Produced by Just Ten Publishers
May 19, 2016
The wide-open Internet was supposed to be a counterweight to the consolidation of news media into fewer and fewer hands. Now, though, PublishersDaily reports that “10 Publishers Account for Half of All Online News.” The article cites a recent study from SimilarWeb, which examined 2015’s top online news publishers, on both mobile and desktop platforms. Writer Erik Sass summarizes:
“Overall, the top 10 publishers — together owning around 60 news sites — account for 47% of total online traffic to news content last year, with the next-biggest 140 publishers accounting for most of the other half, SimilarWeb found.
“The biggest online news publisher for the U.S. audience was MSN, owner of MSN.com, with just over 27 billion combined page views across mobile and desktop, followed by Disney Media Networks, owner of ESPN and ABC News, with 25.9 billion.
“Time Warner, owner of CNN and Bleacher Report, had 14.8 billion, followed by Yahoo with 10.3 billion, and Time, Inc. with 10.2 billion.
“A bit further down the totem poll were CBS Corp., owner of Cnet.com, with 9.9 billion combined page views; NBC Universal, with 9.5 billion; Matt Drudge, with 8.5 billion; Advance Publications, with 8 billion; and Fox Entertainment Group, owner of Fox News, with 7.9 billion.”
Sass goes on to cover page views for specific publications and outlines which outfits are leading in mobile. Interestingly, it seems smaller publishers are doing especially well on mobile platforms. See the write-up for more details.
Cynthia Murrell, May 19, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Oren Etzioni on Artificial Intelligence
May 18, 2016
Dr. Etzioni hit my radar with his work in search and content processing. You may be familiar with the Semantic Scholar. Queries elicit this type of output.
I read “Search Needs a Shake Up,” an idea which has appealed to me for many years. Dr. Etzioni is the CEO of a Paul Allen outfit called the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. To demonstrate the firm’s grasp of algebra, the shorthand for the company is AI2.
I wanted to highlight a comment Dr. Etzioni made in “AI2 CEO Oren Etzioni Envisions an Artificial Intelligence ‘Utopia’.” I am not interested in commenting on the concept of an AI utopia which may be dominated by Google ads and IBM Watson’s marketing.
Dr. Etzioni said, according to the article:
“An AI utopia is a place where people have income guaranteed because their machines are working for them. Instead, they focus on activities that they want to do, that are personally meaningful like art or where human creativity still shines, in science. They’re engaged in those activities because of the interaction. Another one would be, of course, interaction between people and not because they need to make a buck.”
I also noted this statement:
“Jobs will be taken away and those people need to be taken care of. People have floated the idea of universal basic income, of negative income tax, of training programs. We have an obligation to figure out how to help people cope with the rapidly changing nature of technology.”
I am okay with smart software. My concern is my tax bill increasing to pay for those unable to find employment in the wonderful world apparently under construction. I have a narrow view. I would be satisfied with having potholes repaired and the grass in the park mowed.
Stephen E Arnold, May 18, 2016
Listen Up. Hear and Know Enables Information Access in an Innovative Way
May 18, 2016
Improbable as it sounds I found myself a short distance from the offices once housing the Exalead search company. Once I used Google Maps to find my way from Opéra to the Rue Royale where Exalead had its office. GPS did not do the job. Exalead was located next to a food shop behind intrepid Parisians who parked their Smart Cars, bicycles, and motos on the sidewalk.
On this trip to Paris I was going to learn about a company with technology that performed some GPS type functions without GPS.
In addition to tracking hardware and firmware, the company called Hear and Know has a database system which sends out emails and SMS alerts to inform the team tracking an object of interest exactly where that said object is in real time. Based on my concerns about the precision of GPS centric systems, I wanted to understand the Hear and Know approach. (Yes, “hear” refers to the company’s approach to capturing audio.)
Instead of search, the company Hear and Know developed systems and methods to have information flow directly to a person who needs to know who, what, where, and when events take place. This is practical, real time, and actionable information. None of that keyword search and fuzzy geo-location implementation.
Like Google, Exalead was anchored in the world of Alta Vista, Hotbot, and Lycos. A failure to recognized the impact of mobility, pervasive connectivity, and an insatiable appetite for gizmos or firmware that leapfrog the keyword approach locked the door on traditional search. At the same time, mobile and wireless kicked open the door to new ways of thinking about information. Here and now, real time, flows, and the potential of embedding smart technology in miniaturized components.
Times change.
On the dot, Jean Philippe Lelièvre, founder of Hear and Know, walked in the door of my so-so hotel not far from the Madeleine metro stop in Paris. M. Lelièvre sat down, ordered a Badoit, and reminded me that he and I had met at a conference in a country soon to be named “Czechia.
With my studied Kentucky suaveness, I asked: “What’s up?”
The answer was that Lelièvre’s company continues to attract customers from government sectors as well as commercial operations. Hear and Know works in the technical space described as “radio solutions for traceability and security.” Founded in 2012, Hear and Know tackled the problem of imprecise location of objects like cargo or persons of interest. GPS is okay for finding one’s way to Opéra from Madeleine to the Sorbonne. For many information tasks more precise geo-location coordinates are necessary. Examples range from tracking shipments of nuclear material, persons of interest, individual packages within containers, fire and rescue, and myriad other use cases. GPS is okay, just not as precise as many assume.
The company’s technology combines a miniature radio transmitter which fulfills requirements of traceability, geolocation, and secure data transmissions by authentication and encryption. The system transmits its ID. The “tag” allows the user to find the asset, the vehicle, the person or the package on which the miniaturized component is attached. The firm’s engineers have designed the device to perform other functions; for example, temperature, pressure, and audio. What makes the hardware interesting is that a Hear and Know device can function as what Lelièvre calls an “effector.” I interpreted the concept as making a Hear and Know device function as an “alarm” or a signaling device for another hardware or software system.
In addition to tracking hardware and firmware, the company called Hear and Know has a database system which sends out emails and SMS alerts to inform the team tracking an object of interest exactly where that said object is in real time. Based on my concerns about the precision of GPS centric systems, I wanted to understand the Hear and Know approach. (Yes, “hear” refers to the company’s approach to capturing audio.)
In my talk with Lelièvre we did not discuss military applications of the company’s technology. During my flight from Paris to Kentucky, I thought about the value of embedding Lelièvre’s devices into weapon systems. If those weapon systems find themselves “out of bounds,” the devices can activate a disabling mechanism of some type. A smart weapon that becomes stupid without the intervention of a human struck me as an application worth moving to a prototype.
Lelièvre described a use case in which Hear and Know’s radios are deployed for a person of interest. The locations and other details flow into the Hear and Know data center and allow an investigator to formulate a statement of fact along the lines:
John Doe was on MM/DD/2016 at HOUR:MINUTE at the address LATITUDE/LONGITUDE.
Another application is the use of the Hear and Know devices to monitor individuals with a medical condition; for example, people with Lyme disease allows the family to know the family member’s location and support them if help is needed.
These data can be displayed on a map in the same way Geofeedia presents tweets or Palantir shows the location of improvised explosive devices. The difference is that Hear and Know provides:
- Nearly undetectable radio form factors
- Adjustable transmission frequencies
- Multi-month operational autonomy
- Email and SMS alerts about location of tracked object or person.
Hear and Know has remarkable technology. At this time, the company is best known in Europe. It customers include:
- Atos
- BPIFrance
- Esiglec
- Mov’eo
- Thales
US law enforcement, intelligence, and commercial enterprisers are wrestling with pinpoint tracking in real time. My view is that the Hear and Know technology might lead to some hefty revenue opportunities. The company has begun to probe the US market. In January 2016 , Hear and Know received a silver medal certificate for innovation at the January 2016 Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas.
Hear and Know will be participating in the Pioneers festival in Vienna May 23 to 25, 2016 and in the Connected Conference in Paris, May 25 to 27, 2016. This summer, their next step will be looking for partners and fundings in the US.
To contact Hear and Know, write sales@hearandknow.eu.
Stephen E Arnold, May 18, 2016
Travel to South Africa Virtually with Googles Mzansi Experience
May 18, 2016
The article on Elle titled Google SA Launches the Mzansi Experience On Maps illustrates the new Google Street View collection for South Africa. For people without the ability to travel, or scared of malaria or Oscar Pistorius, this collection offers an in-depth platform to view some of South Africa’s natural wonders and parks. The article explains,
“Using images collected by the Street View Tripod and Trekker, Google has created 360-degree imagery of some of South Africa’s most beautiful locations, and created virtual tours that enable visitors to see the sights for themselves on their phones, tablets or computers. Visitors will be able to, for the first time, visit a family of elephants in the Kruger National Park, take a virtual walk on Table Mountain, admire Cape Point, or take a walk along Durban’s Golden Mile.”
For South Africa, this initiative might spark increased tourism once people realize just how much the country has to offer. So many of the images of Africa that we are exposed to in the US are reductive and patronizing, like those ceaseless commercials depicting all of Africa as a small, poverty-stricken village. Google’s new collection helps to promote a more diverse and appealing look at one African country: South Africa. Whether you want to go in person or virtually, this is worth checking out!
Chelsea Kerwin, May 18, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Tech Savvy Users Turn to DuckDuckGo
May 18, 2016
A recent report from SimilarWeb tells us what sorts of people turn to Internet search engine DuckDuckGo, which protects users’ privacy, over a more prominent engine, Microsoft’s Bing. The Search Engine Journal summarizes the results in, “New Research Reveals Who is Using DuckDuckGo and Why.”
The study drew its conclusions by looking at the top five destinations of DuckDuckGo users: Whitehatsec.com, Github.com, NYtimes.com, 4chan.org, and YCombinator.com. Note that four of these five sites have pretty specific audiences, and compare them to the top five, more widely used, sites accessed through Bing: MSN.com, Amazon.com, Reddit.com, Google.com, and Baidu.com.
Writer Matt Southern observes:
“DuckDuckGo users also like to engage with their search engine of choice for longer periods of time — averaging 9.38 minutes spent on DuckDuckGo vs. Bing.
“Despite its growth over the past year, DuckDuckGo faces a considerable challenge when it comes to getting found by new users. Data shows the people using DuckDuckGo are those who already know about the search engine, with 93% of its traffic coming from direct visits. Only 1.5% of its traffic comes from organic search.
“Roy Hinkis of SimilarWeb concludes by saying the loyal users of DuckDuckGo are those who love tech, and they use they use DuckDuckGo as an alternative because they’re concerned about having their privacy protected while they search online.”
Though Southern agrees DuckDuckGo needs to do some targeted marketing, he notes traffic to the site has been rising by 22% per year. It is telling that the privacy-protecting engine is most popular among those who understand the technology.
Cynthia Murrell, May 18, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Enterprise Search: The Valiant Fight On
May 17, 2016
I read “VirtualWorks and Language Tools Announce Merger.” I ran across Language Tools several years ago. The company was working to create components for ElasticSearch’s burgeoning user base. The firm espoused natural language processing as a core technology. NLP is useful, but it imposes some computational burdens on some content processing functions. ElasticSearch works pretty well, and there are a number of companies optimizing, integrating, and creating widgets to make life with ElasticSearch better, faster, and presumably more impressive than the open source system is.
This news release highlights the fact that VirtualWorks and Language Tools have merged. The financial details are not explicit, and it appears that a company founded by a wizard from Citrix will make Language Tools’ R&D hub for the Florida-based VirtualWorks’ operation.
According to the story:
The combined organization brings together best of breed core technologies in the areas of enterprise search, data management, text analytics, discovery techniques and analytics to enable the development of new and exciting next generation applications in the business intelligence space.
VirtualWorks is or was a SharePoint centric solution. Like other search vendors, the company uses connectors to suck data into a central indexing point. Users then search the content and have access to the content without having to query separate systems.
This idea has fueled enterprise search since the days of Verity, Autonomy, Fast Search, Convera, et al. The real money today seems to be in the consulting and engineering services required to make enterprise search useful.
SharePoint is certainly widely used, and it is fraught with interesting challenges. Will the lash up of these two firms generate the type of revenue once associated with Autonomy and Fast Search & Transfer?
My hunch is that enterprise search continues to be a tough market. There are functional solutions to locating information available as open source or at comparatively modest license fees. I am thinking of dtSearch and Maxxcat. Both of these work well within Microsoft centric environments.
Stephen E Arnold, May 17, 2016
Affinio and the Differences between Useful Data and Fanciful Data
May 17, 2016
I read “Understanding the Cultural Differences Between NASCAR and Formula One Fans [Analysis].” The write up is in a blog post from Affinio. The company describes itself in this way:
Marketing Intelligence that leverages the social graph to understand today’s customer.
The information in the write up presents clusters of interest between the two fan bases for each of these motor sports. F1 consists of clusters labeled this way:
To illustrate the differences, Affinio presents a visualization of the Nascar audience:
The labels strike me as unhelpful; for example, Cluster 14, Cluster 6, etc.
The top interests of the two audiences consist of a collage of small images. I am not sure what each image represents.
Equally unhelpful is the word clouds for each of the audiences; for example:
The map showing the geographic area where F1 is popular focuses on a global scale with a centroid in Western Europe. The absence of a hot spot in the Middle East was puzzling. Is Australia as large an F1 market as the UAE in terms of money spent on F1 activities?
The map for the Nascar market depicts only the US of A. My question, “Why not show a global map?”
Thinking about this analysis, I have several questions:
- A list of dot points would get the message across in a more efficient, possibly less confusing way would it not?
- What is analyzed? It seems that the single actionable fact is that the F1 market is global and the Nascar market is local.
- What are the data sets used for the analysis?
- Why are terms like “Cluster 14” used instead of words?
The most important data from my uninformed vantage point is the money generated by the two types of motor racing.
My hunch is that the Affino write up wanted to show off visualizations, not substantive and actionable data analysis. In short, is this marketing or is it substance? I will leave the answer to you, gentle reader.
Stephen E Arnold, May 17, 2016
Google Moonshot Targets Disease Management, but Might Face Obstacle with Google Management Methods
May 17, 2016
The article on STAT titled Google’s Bold Bid to Transform Medicine Hits Turbulence Under a Divisive CEO explores Google management methods for one of its “moonshot” projects. Namely, the massive company has directed its considerable resources toward overhauling medicine. Verily Life Sciences is the three year-old startup with a mysterious mission and a controversial leader in Andrew Conrad. So far, roughly a dozen Verily players have abandoned the project.
“But “if they are getting off the roller coaster before it gets to the first dip,” something looks seriously wrong, said Rob Enderle, a technology analyst who has tracked Google since its inception. Those who depart well-financed startups usually forsake potential financial windfalls down the line, which further suggests that the people leaving Verily “are losing confidence in the leadership,” he said. No similar brain drain has occurred at Calico, another ambitious Google spinoff, which is focused on increasing the human lifespan.”
Given the scope of the Verily project, which Sergey Brin, Google co-founder, announced that he hoped would significantly change the way we identify, avoid, and handle illness, perhaps Conrad is cracking under the stress. He has maintained complete radio silence and rumors abound that his employees operate under threat of termination for speaking to a reporter.
Chelsea Kerwin, May 17, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Extensive Cultural Resources Available at Europeana Collections
May 17, 2016
Check out this valuable cultural archive, highlighted by Open Culture in the piece, “Discover Europeana Collections, a Portal of 48 Million Free Artworks, Books, Videos, Artifacts & Sounds from across Europe.” Writer Josh Jones is clearly excited about the Internet’s ability to place information and artifacts at our fingertips, and he cites the Europeana Collections as the most extensive archive he’s discovered yet. He tells us the works are:
“… sourced from well over 100 institutions such as The European Library, Europhoto, the National Library of Finland, University College Dublin, Museo Galileo, and many, many more, including contributions from the public at large. Where does one begin?
“In such an enormous warehouse of cultural history, one could begin anywhere and in an instant come across something of interest, such as the the stunning collection of Art Nouveau posters like that fine example at the top, ‘Cercle Artstique de Schaerbeek,’ by Henri Privat-Livemont (from the Plandiura Collection, courtesy of Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalynya, Barcelona). One might enter any one of the available interactive lessons and courses on the history of World War I or visit some of the many exhibits on the period, with letters, diaries, photographs, films, official documents, and war propaganda. One might stop by the virtual exhibit, ‘Photography on a Silver Plate,’ a fascinating history of the medium from 1839-1860, or ‘Recording and Playing Machines,’ a history of exactly what it sounds like, or a gallery of the work of Swiss painter Jean Antoine Linck. All of the artifacts have source and licensing information clearly indicated.”
Jones mentions the archive might be considered “endless,” since content is being added faster than anyone could hope to keep up with. While such a wealth of information and images could easily overwhelm a visitor, he advises us to look at it as an opportunity for discovery. We concur.
Cynthia Murrell, May 17, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Google and Its Priorities: Painting Data Centers
May 16, 2016
Google is innovating again. Perhaps the company will boost its revenues with a new line of T shirts. An outfit like Tauck Tours might pay to show the well heeled traveler real data center art?
See the original art in this YouTube video.
My thought is to reduce overhead and concentrate on products and services which generate meaningful revenue. Will other cloud centric outfits spring for wraps or pimping their industrial facilities?
Stephen E Arnold, May 16, 2016
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