Search Sound
November 26, 2011
Lockergnome reported on the evolution of search technology this week in the article “In Search Of Sound With MediaMined.”
As a way to continue to evolve search technology beyond searching for text and images, audio engineers at Imagine Research in San Francisco have been working on what they call “the world’s first sound object recognition Web service.”
The service is called MediaMined , and is driven by artificial intelligence that is able to “listen” to sound files — whether they’re properly labeled, mislabeled, or not labeled at all — and analyze what they actually are.
Writer Robert Glen Fogarty states:
??“Musicians, podcasters, radio broadcasters, and audio engineers would obviously benefit from this kind of technology, but some other unexpected applications could make use of it, as well. Mobile devices could use a MediaMined type of system to detect their surroundings and present new ways to interact with their users based on this incoming data (think augmented reality cranked up to 11). Medical professionals might be able to use this technology in order to gather data based on sounds made by patients — such as sneezing, snoring, coughing, and wheezing — to help with more keenly diagnosing their condition.”
Here at Beyond Search we believe that this new search technology is definitely a step in the right direction.
Jasmine Ashton, November 25, 2011
Mindbreeze Can Stand with World’s Finest CRM
November 18, 2011
Denis Pombriant tips his hat to the ever-popular singing competition and reports on trends in CRM in, “CRM Idol: An insider’s look at the judging process.” CRM Idol was put together by Paul Greenberg and intended to bring attention to the growing field as well as reward those who are excelling in the world of CRM.
Pombriant reports on what he learned about CRM through his analysis of the competition:
“Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the competition for me was just being exposed to CRM from around the world. We often think in terms of English-language applications and perhaps assume that all the good software emanates from the U.S. That’s just not true.”
We agree that some of the best solutions are non-US based. One agile solution that we like is Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Based in Austria, it exhibits the worldly sensibility mentioned above. However, Mindbreeze and its semantic capabilities can adjust to any number of contexts. Furthermore, Mindbreeze is a suite of solutions, offering an answer to all of your needs: mobile, email, and enterprise. Mindbreeze goes beyond a CRM solution, but rather proposes an integrated and holistic application for an entity’s information organization and retrieval needs.
As more independent software vendors (ISVs) hit the market in response to the swelling tide of electronic information, solutions need to be smart and lean in order to be functional. Too much training time or too steep a learning curve, and usability is lost. With Fabasoft Mindbreeze, you get a solution that works without a lot of up-front expense in implementation and training. Take a second look and see if Fabasoft Mindbreeze is the solution for you.
*Disclaimer – Mindbreeze is currently upgrading their website. Links will be checked and if problems arise they will be updated. Thanks for your patience.
Emily Rae Aldridge, November 18, 2011
Oracle Scores with Text Query Functions
October 17, 2011
Save Your Knowledge, an IT knowledge and experience blog, provides a useful how-to with, “Oracle Text: A Simple Way to Implement Scoring Text Search Engine on Oracle DB.” We quite like the allusions to the work of Edward Hopper too.
The author’s English is interesting, but the concept is clear:
In this post I will describe text query functionality. My customer wants search functionality on several database columns, and results must be ordered by their relevance. Using a “like” clause let’s you find results that contains a word but doesn’t say you how much relevant it is. For this purpose you can use Oracle Text extension.
Most licensees of Oracle’s flag ship database will have or be able to get access to the Text functions. Although getting long in the tooth, the system will index what’s in an Oracle table. Performance can be an interesting challenge. Scaling and speeding up the creaking technology of Oracle Text requires expertise and resources; that is, money and time. For more information about Oracle text, click here.
The author goes on to describe how to make this work in various contexts and also provides examples, screenshots, etc. The technique could be a helpful function for users of the Oracle application and is worth a look.
Emily Rae Aldridge, October 17, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
New Kindle Fire Continues to Burn Book Retailers and Now Libraries
October 7, 2011
When Amazon first came out with the Kindle there were concerns that e-books would take the place of paper books and would force book stores to close their doors. It’s safe to say that these concerns were valid as Barnes and Noble and other book retailers are slowly going out of business despite attempts to hop on the e-book bandwagon. Now the impending release of the Kindle Fire, a $199 Android-based 7-inch touchscreen device, this week may be the nail in the coffin for our public libraries as well.
In addition to all of it’s exciting new apps, streaming, web access, and cross-platform compatibility, one of the Kindle Fire’s biggest selling points may be the rumored unlimited access to an e-book library (for $80 a year) which would include free access to over 3,000 Fox TV shows and free two day shipping.
In the article, The Birth of the Kindle Fire and the Death of the Public Library Sebastian Anthony says of the Kindle Fire e-book library feature:
This maneuver is as close to perfect as it gets. It has already overcome the biggest stumbling block to digital e-books — coming to terms with never holding/fingering/sniffing a paper book ever again — and now it’s moving in for the coup de grâce. The Kindle has flown off the shelves since its release in 2007, and while exact figures aren’t given, there could be 10 to 20 million Kindle users — and every single one of them would kill for an Amazon Digital Library. After all, even when you buy an e-book, you never really owned the book — Amazon can remotely delete books from your Kindle at any time — so why not rent?
While $199 purchasing cost and $80 yearly rental fees are a great deal, no amount of convenience can beat something that’s free.
Jasmine Ashton, October 7, 2011
Study Sets Stage for Vapor Niches
October 7, 2011
The global market intelligence firm International Data Corporation (IDC) has published a new vendor assessment profiling the leading providers in the worldwide standalone early case assessment (ECA) applications market which is currently an undeveloped niche. This report rigorously scores current search software providers and predicts their market capabilities and strategies.
The Sept 19 news release IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Standalone Early Case Assessment Applications 2011 Vendor Analysis reveals leaders in a hitherto unknown niche. The release states:
DC sized the revenue for the standalone ECA applications market at $281 million in 2010. The top 5 vendors, by revenue, accounted for 71% of total revenue during this period. Given the reported revenue growth of the market leaders in the first half of 2011, IDC forecasts revenue for the standalone ECA applications market will total $400.8 million in 2011 and will reach $857.0 million in 2015,” said Vivian Tero, program director, Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) Infrastructure at IDC.
Consultants and advisors continue to struggle to get their arms around vendors who are changing direction without logic, notice or much reason. Consultants who fail to recognize this run the risk of creating “vapor niches”.
Jasmine Ashton, Sept 24, 2011
Autonomy Wins Augmented Reality Accolade
September 29, 2011
Autonomy’s Aurasma is a British application that is the first augmented reality (the overlaying of digital data on the real world) browser of its kind. It recognizes images from a camera the same way that search engines recognize words.
So-called “Auras” are then created, sometimes even in 3D, for objects. While other apps such as Layar have attempted to achieve the feat, Aurasma is the first to really do it properly.
Since the app’s launch in June 2011, Aurasma has already achieved two million downloads and has received some recognition. According to the business weekly article Aurasma Wins $1M Media Prize in Silicon Valley, Aurasma was named the DEMOgod Award winner and also voted the People’s Choice Award winner after demonstrating its newest 3D interactive technology at DEMO in Silicon Valley. Matt Mills, director of Aurasma, said in the article:
Aurasma is about to change the way we see and interact with the world by merging the physical with the virtual world. That’s a big message to communicate to the DEMO audience in only six minutes, so we purposely chose ordinary objects as the triggers – a newspaper, a wireless router and a floor plan.
This product is definitely worth keeping an eye on. I’m interested to see how Aurasma impacts the evolution of augmented reality software. If the deal with Hewlett Packard goes through, augmented reality may add some functionality to HP’s services unit’s US government work.
Stephen E Arnold, September 29, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
The 2011 Search Trends from Forrester
September 12, 2011
The wave which was supposed to be a tsunami seemed to become one of the lapping ripples that my goose pond enjoys. Slap, slap, slap. No roar, crash, thunder. Just slap, slap, slap. Boring.
Bill Ives’ Portals and KM blog examines a new report in “Forrester on Enterprise Search Trends.” The report was, as the title suggests, put out by Forrester and examines “six key trends to watch” in enterprise search. We monitor the trends in enterprise search here at the goose pond in Harrod’s Creek, and we take an interest in what the poobahs, pundits, wizards, and unemployed English majors generate in their “real” reports.
The six “trends” examined in the report strike us as similar to vanilla wafer cookies. You decide because we are biased toward our own work in this unusual enterprise software sector. Each of the Forrester trends seems to us to be an extension of existing directions. For example, “search managers will initiate business conversations, not gather requirements.” Is that such a seismic shift? I’d bet a list of “requirements” will still be in that IT worker’s notes at the end of that meeting. Then there’s, “business leaders will dictate the scope of search.” Well, sort of. There is the commoditizing angle and the search enabled application movement. But business leaders are important if these management wizards pay attention to finding information within their organization. See the article for the other “trends.”
The write up observes:
As the industry standards for search evolve, the report predicts that vendors will change their products to adapt to new customer investment trends with changes in semantics capabilities and increased usage of search-based applications (SBA).
Well, that’s just business, isn’t it? Any company which fails to adapt is out of luck. Just because something has evolved doesn’t make it a new craze. We wonder: do some azure chip consultants recycle what’s in the Beyond Search blog? Please let us know if you spot any examples to sit along side the comment made to our beloved goose Stephen E Arnold about a certain azure chip consulting firm enjoining its new hires to read the free information available at ArnoldIT.com as prep for these talented art history majors’ advisory career in search technology.
Cynthia Murrell, September 12, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, an company in Oslo, Norway that published Stephen E Arnold’s most recent monograph about enterprise search, The New Landscape of Enterprise Search. No trends it that report, however. Mr. Arnold confines himself to an analysis of what the six leading vendors’ search systems actually deliver. Which is the best? Mr. Arnold favors Exalead in his new Search 2012: The Incredible Shrinking Market for Search, available on site or via a webinar.
Data Fusion: A Source of Contention?
June 29, 2011
Research. is reporting that Kantar and TRA are doing battle over intellectual property. In their article, “Kantar and TRA at Loggerheads over Data Fusion Patent” they report that Kantar and Cavendish have filed a joint complaint as a pre-emptive strike against TRA who is threatening to sue them over patent right infringement.
According to Kantar and Cavendish, TRA claims that Kantar’s RapidView-Retail product encroaches on its patent. The product marries TV audience data and purchase behaviour data with a view to better targeting ad spend. The case is unusual as Kantar has been a long-time investor in TRA, and Sheila Spence, a WPP and Cavendish executive, sits on the TRA board – though she is alleged to have been excluded from a recent board meeting and may also be excluded from another upcoming meeting.
Let’s think about this. Will a patent spat about data fusion in the ad world trigger potential downstream issues in other market sectors. On the surface, a person might say, “No.” However, with the surprises the US legal system can spring, I am not so sure. My view is that patent litigation can spill over and take out the entrepreneurial Minots and Fargos. There is considerable risk in certain legal matters. Data fusion is the issue but the problem is the advertising. Some folks care a great deal about advertising. My yellow warning lights are now flashing.
Stephen E Arnold, June 29, 2011
You can read more about enterprise search and retrieval in The New Landscape of Enterprise Search, published my Pandia in Oslo, Norway, in June 2011.
Laurent Couillard, CEO, Dassault Exalead: Exclusive Interview
June 28, 2011
Exalead caught my attention many years ago. Exalead’s Cloudview approach allowed licensees to tap into Exalead’s traditional Web and enterprise functions via on premises installations, a cloud implementation, or a hybrid approach. Today, a number of companies are working to offer these options. Exalead’s approach is stable and provides a licensee with platform flexibility as well as mobile search, mash ups, and inclusion of Exalead technology into existing enterprise applications. For organizations fed up with seven figure licensing fees for content processing systems that “never seem to arrive”, Exalead has provided a fresh approach.
Exalead provides high-performance search and semantic processing to organizations worldwide. Exalead specializes in taking a company’s data “from virtually any source, in any format” and transforming it into a search-enabled application. The firm’s technology, Exalead CloudView, represents the implementation of next-generation computing technology available for on-premises installation and from hosted or cloud services. Petascale content volume and mobile support are two CloudView capabilities. Exalead’s architecture makes integration and customization almost friction-free. The reason for the firm’s surge in the last two years has been its push into the enterprise with its search-based applications.
The idea of an enterprise application built upon a framework that can seamlessly integrate structured and unstructured data is one of the most important innovations in enterprise search. Only Google, Microsoft, and Exalead can boast commercial books about their search and content processing technology.
In 2010, Exalead’s market success triggered action on the part of one of the world’s leading engineering firms, Dassault Systèmes. Instead of licensing Exalead’s technology, the firm acquired Exalead and aggressively expanded the firm’s research, development, and marketing activities. Exalead’s approach enables more than 300 organizations to break the chains of the “key word search box” and has provided Dassault with a competitive advantage in next-generation information processing. In addition to mobile and rich media processing, Exalead is working to present integrated displays of real time information that add value to a wide range of business functions. These include traditional engineering to finding a restaurant on an iPhone.
Laurent Couillard, Chief Dassault Exalead
With the purchase of Exalead, Dassault appointed Laurent Couillard as Exalead’s chief executive officer. Mr. Couillard joined Dassault Systèmes as an application engineer in 1996, most recently serving as Vice-President Sales and Distribution for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In that post, he played a central role in the sales transformation of 3DS, establishing a powerful reseller channel for all PLM brands and contracting with more than 140 companies. As CEO of EXALEAD, his mission is to accelerate the market penetration of applications based on search technologies. Mr. Couillard holds an M.S. from Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace, a preeminent institution in Toulouse, France.
I asked him what was capturing his attention. He told me:
We are devoting more energy to developing packaged business applications or SBAs built on this foundation. That’s a mission right up my alley. And I intend to apply all my experience in sales and partner network development to this mission as well. That’s my charge from Dassault: To use my dual technology/sales background to develop Exalead and to penetrate new markets with SBAs, while preserving all the qualities that make Exalead so unique in this market. I’m fortunate to be in a position to leverage the full knowledge, resources, geographical coverage and expertise of the Dassault group to make this happen.
I probed for the reasons behind Dassault’s purchase of Exalead in 2010, a move which caught many analysts by surprise. He said:
Dassault saw first-hand how search-based applications based on Exalead’s systems and methods solved some of its clients’ long-standing, mission-critical business challenges quickly, painlessly and inexpensively. Dassault’s management understood–based on technical, financial, and performance facts—that Exalead’s search-based applications were a prime reason why search was, and is forecast to remain, an exceptional performer in the information technology software market. Because Dassault was seeking to diversify its content processing offerings, search in general and search based applications technology in particular were obviously an appealing choice. Dassault is, therefore, developing SBAs as one of its three core activities.
We discussed the challenges facing most of the traditional key word search and content processing systems. He noted:
You have to remember Exalead’s always understood search is sometimes something you do, and other times something you consume. In other words, sometimes it’s a search text box, and sometimes it’s the silent enabler beneath a business application, or even an entire information ecosystem.
You can read the full text of my interview with Mr. Couillard in the ArnoldIT.com Search Wizards Speak collection. The interview is located at this link.
Stephen E Arnold, June 28, 2011
Freebie from the leading vertical file service for search and content processing.
Protected: Steps to Improve SharePoint 2010 Search Methods
May 27, 2011
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