LucidWorks Receives High Honor
April 24, 2013
LucidWorks, a company focused on providing open source enterprise search solutions for the enterprise, is used to receiving accolades. To add to their growing collection, LucidWorks has now received a placement on the CRN 2013 Big Data 100 list. Read all the details in the press release, “LucidWorks Named to Inaugural CRN Big Data 100.”
The statement begins:
“LucidWorks, the company transforming the way people access information, announced it was recently honored by being named to UBM Tech Channel’s CRN 2013 Big Data 100 list. The inaugural list recognizes innovative technology vendors that offer products and services to help businesses manage ‘Big Data’ – the rapidly increasing volume, speed and variety of information being generated today. The list covers three categories: business analytics, data management, infrastructure and services.”
LucidWorks Big Data is changing the way that enterprises deal with their Big Data needs. However, LucidWorks Search is also an option for organizations that have a lighter data load. No matter the size of your enterprise or the type of information needs present, LucidWorks makes a fully-supported solution to meet those needs.
Emily Rae Aldridge, April 24, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Swinging for the Fences and Search
April 22, 2013
I have been reading—actually time traveling to an economics class in graduate school—David Stockman’s The Great Deformation. I follow the argument. No problem, but I am skeptical of blame from those who were involved in the events. I have been in quite a few crazy meetings, and I avoid discussing the subjects of most of those stories for two reasons: [a] In the midst of events, I had zero clue about the larger, political forces at work in which the meeting was a grain of sand in the larger dust storm and [b] I focus on search and retrieval, a subject definitely not part of the more interesting meetings in which I have participated over the last 40 years.
What impact does the “big bet” approach to investing have on search, content, and analytics vendors?
However, the “deformation” arguments triggered some thinking after I read “Google Investors Say Yes to Big Bets.” I have been looking at some of the reviews of the book. In the Kirkus Review a theme surfaced:
fiscal math hit the shoals,” leaving a legacy of permanent “massive deficit finance” and the legend that “deficits didn’t matter.”
What’s this have to do with search? Well, that is a good question. I took a moment and looked up the venture money which has flowed into a handful of search and content processing companies. Here’s the table in which I captured my result. The link points to the source (maybe a good source, maybe a lousy source).
| Company | Venture Funding | Year Founded |
| Attivio | $48.2 million | 2007 |
| BA Insight | $10.5 million | 2004 |
| Coveo | $34.7 million | 2004 |
| Digital Reasoning* | $5.2 million | 2000 |
| Palantir ** | $301 million | 2004 |
| Vivisimo | $4 million | 2008 |
* The Digital Reasoning number includes In-Q-Tel funding excludes friends, angels, and family funding
** I included Palantir because in one briefing the system was presented as having a robust search function available to analyst users.
If I total these numbers, I get $403.6 million. Tossing out the astounding $301 million for Palantir, the more “searchy” vendors’ funding in this sample total $102.6 million.
Several questions rose in my mind:
First, in today’s economy, how will these firms return to investors their money, interest, and a profit?
Lexmark Allegedly Paid $148 Million for Brainware
April 21, 2013
A happy quack to the researcher who sent me a link to “Lexmark Pays $148 Million for Brainware Data Capture Platform.” The write up published in March 2012 asserts:
Lexmark International, Inc. (NYSE: LXK) today announced the acquisition of Luxembourg-based BDGB Enterprise, including its U.S. subsidiary Brainware, Inc., a Vista Equity Partners portfolio company, for a cash purchase price of approximately $148 million.
I tracked Brainware because of its trigram technology which was used in the Brainware search system. What’s interesting is the positioning of Brainware in this write up. Here’s the portion I noticed:
“With the acquisition of Brainware, Lexmark is further strengthening and differentiating our industry-leading managed print services offerings and our end-to-end business process solutions,” said Paul Rooke, Lexmark’s chairman and chief executive officer. “Brainware’s innovative intelligent data capture technology will be attractive to our customers across the globe.” Brainware’s intelligent data capture platform, Brainware Distiller™, accurately extracts critical information from paper and electronic documents, validates the extracted data and passes it to customers’ data management systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and/or financial management systems. Brainware Distiller™ enables customers to more efficiently process invoices, fulfill customer orders, balance remittances, index documents, process loan applications, and perform other document-intensive processes. This high growth market is closely adjacent to both Lexmark’s customer solutions and Perceptive Software’s expanding enterprise content management (ECM) and business process management (BPM) businesses.
Search? Is it just a utility within the larger paper workflow service.
Stephen E Arnold, April 21, 2013
Sponsored by Augmentext
Samuru from Stremor
April 20, 2013
We learned about Samuru, a new Web search systems. You can use the system by navigating to www.samuru.com.
The search system is powered by Liquid Helium, a language heuristics engine for the future of content. The company which developed Samuru is Stremor, whose tag line is “comprehending language.” The company asserts that it offers a “foundation layer that interprets language to evaluate content context, value, authority, sentiment, meaning, and relationships. Instead of text search, the system “enables the future of online media.”
According to the Stremor Web site, Liquid Helium is Stremor’s:
language heuristics engine. The first language analysis engine of its kind. It converts written content into mathematical values and algorithms for predictable analysis, extraction, and manipulation. Liquid Helium factors information about sentence and paragraph structure, word usage, parts of speech, grammar, writing style, punctuation, and inherent bias through a vast collection of proprietary rules, filters, and custom language libraries. As overwhelming as this may sound, Stremor has injected this technology into simple, approachable consumer offerings that demonstrate the ability of Liquid Helium to close the gap between information and knowledge in three verticals: content discovery, creation, and consumption.
The company offers a product sheet which provides more information. The product sheet reveals that Stremor “was created to provide technology solutions that enable content platforms to effectively support the evolution of online media towards an array of connected devices and systems.”
The product sheet says:
An intelligent content-aware foundation is necessary for the needs of multiple screens in varying contexts and use-cases. To this end, we raised capital at an $8M valuation in March 2012.
- The management consists of: Bill Irvine, CEO, “a successful entrepreneur in the fields of digital marketing emerging media, and online community”
- Stephen Melzer, CFO, “a finance professional with deep startup and fundraising experience
- Brandon Wirtz, CTO, “a pioneer in video analysis, search engine exploitation, and content development”
- Greg Rewis, VP of User Experience, who is “a Web standards guru, published author, veteran creator of Web technologies, and former chief evangelist for Adobe.”
We will run queries and monitor the firm.
Stephen E Arnold, April 20, 2013
Sponsored by Augmentext
Video Search: Will It Get Better Post Viacom?
April 19, 2013
I know there’s a push to make sense out of Twitter. I know that millions of people post updates to Facebook. I know about text. Searching for text is pretty lousy, but it is trivial compared to video search. Even the remarkable micro-electronics of Glass are child’s play compared to making sense out of digital video flooding the “inner tubes” of the Internet.
This issue is addressed in part in “Why Video Discovery Startups Fail.” Startup video search and discovery systems do face challenges. The broader question is, “Why doesn’t video search work better on well funded services such as Google YouTube or in governmental systems where “finding” a video needle in a digital hay stack is very important?”
The article says:
Video discovery startups are flawed products and even worse businesses. Why? Because they don’t fit into a consumer’s mental model.
The article identifies some challenges. These range from notions I don’t understand like “context” to concepts I partially grasp; namely, monetization.
My list of reasons video search and discovery fails includes:
- The cost of processing large volumes of data
- The lack of software which minimizes false drops
- The time required for humans to review what automated systems do
- The need for humans to cope with problematic videos due to resolution issues
- The financial costs of collection, pre processing, processing, and managing the video flows.
What happens is that eager folks and high rollers believe the hype. Video search and indexing is a problem. If we can’t do text, video remains a problem for the future. Viacom decision or no Viacom decision video search is a reminder that finding information in digitized video is a tough problem which becomes more problematic as the volume of digitized video increases.
Stephen E Arnold, April 19, 2013
Sponsored by Augmentext
Google Outperforms Bing and Others in Blocking Malware
April 19, 2013
Oh, my. PCMag declares, “Bing Delivers Five Times as Many Malicious Websites as Google.” The charges stem from an 18-month study [PDF] by security firm AV-Test. Google emerged as the safest Internet search option, with Yandex and Bing the worst offenders (in that order), in a field that also included Blekko, Faroo, Teoma, and Baidu.
Though all of these engines take measures to keep malware-infested sites out of their top rankings, the villains make headway using methods perfected by others. Writer Max Eddy explains:
“To move their malware-ridden spawn to the top of Google’s search results, the bad guys are using tried and true search engine optimization tactics—the very same used by corporations and bloggers. According to AV-Test, the attackers use a very simple trick, ‘they first create a multitude of small websites and blogs before selecting the most frequently used search terms from top news stories and using backlinks to optimise these terms for search engines.’
“The study went on to say that users ‘are the least suspicious’ when they see a search result attached to a hot news story. More troublingly, AV-Test reports that sites with Trojans or other malware are returned as ‘top’ results.”
If these results are accurate, we wonder whether a shift to a “walled garden” approach to the Internet might be a solution. The article does note that, whichever search engine you use, your chances of suffering a malware attack through it are slim. Still, it is wise to be careful what you click on, even in top results from trusted search engines. Eddy also recommends a measure many of us wouldn’t leave our routers without—security software. Even the anti-malware measures in the latest browsers, he says, can help.
Cynthia Murrell, April 19, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Comperio 2013 SharePoint Seminar to Charge Extra for No Shows
April 17, 2013
Held in Oslo, Norway, this year’s Enterprise Social and Search with SharePoint seminar promises its usual diverse audience and tech-based discussions. It will take place on May 14, 2013 from 9:00-11:30. Although official events begin at 9:00, show up early for breakfast and networking at 8:30.
The seminar is free, unless, of course you do not show up without providing advanced notice.
According to the seminars registration page, the audience will include the following:
“CIOs, IT Directors, Collaboration Leads, SharePoint Leads, Social Networking Leads, Enterprise Search Leads, Big Data Leads, Business Intelligence Leads, Communication Directors, HR Directors.”
Technology discussed includes SharePoint 2010 and 2013, FAST Search for SharePoint, Comperio FRONT, Hadoop, HD Insight, and Yammer.
Not a bad line up for a free seminar in Oslo. However, those who register but do not attend (and do not provide notice) will be charged a fee of kr. 200, or about $30 US dollars. Considering the expenses Comperio will shell out for each attendee, this no-show charge is an interesting approach to guaranteeing attendance and accounting for wasted expenses.
Samantha Plappert, April 17, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Google Dominance May Be Waning
April 11, 2013
Google is the reigning king of search, but some say that may be changing. After all-time highs in March, Google stock has slipped in early April. Chris Crum, in his article, “Will Google Ever Stop Dominating Search?” addresses some of the reasons for the subtle decline.
He says:
“Forbes, for example, has a piece out today called ‘Four Reasons Google’s Stock Is Slowing Down.’ The first two reasons listed in this article are directly related to this issue: 1. Losing search market share and 2. Shift to mobile search. The author references a New York Times article making the rounds today, in which the case is made that people, particularly on mobile, are choosing other services first, based on the type of information they’re looking for.”
Some predict that a combination of smaller specialized services will eventually take Google’s place, particularly on mobile. And while Google is not going anywhere anytime soon, it is a sign that the landscape of search is changing. One of the areas where a specialized service makes sense is enterprise search. A solution like LucidWorks is much better suited to the subtleties of the enterprise than a generic mega-solution like Google Analytics or SharePoint.
Emily Rae Aldridge, April 11, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Elasticsearch Joins Fog Creek
April 8, 2013
Elasticsearch is trying to expand its reach by partnering with other trendy tech services. It is definitely getting some headlines. The most recent headline is detailed by Market Watch in their article, “Fog Creek Selects Elasticsearch to Search and Analyze Terabytes of Data.”
“Elasticsearch, the company behind the popular real-time search and analytics open source project, today announced that Fog Creek has selected Elasticsearch to provide instant search capabilities within Kiln, its software development product. Kiln is designed to support and simplify development workflow for users searching more than 100,000 source code repositories. Elasticsearch is now a critical ingredient of Kiln, providing instant search for 300,000,000 requests across 40 billion lines of code to improve overall performance, reliability and user experience.”
Elasticsearch is known for collaboration with leading edge products, but it is not without its controversies as well. GitHub recently reached out to Elasticsearch to develop its new search infrastructure, but the service quickly exposed security concerns and then crashed. So when it comes to a search infrastructure that goes beyond trends, trust an industry standard. Do not assume that every search application will be safe enough for the enterprise. For instance, consider LucidWorks. They are built on open source Lucene/Solr, employ one quarter of the Core Committers on that project, and are optimized for the enterprise. Choose industry confidence, not trends.
Emily Rae Aldridge, April 8, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
All About Solr
April 8, 2013
Apache Solr has already claimed the role of one of the most popular and sought after search applications currently on the market. The Apache Solr platform uses Lucene to power its indexing and querying abilities. The Eventbrite article “Solr Unleashed SC” which was translated using Google translator gives details about the upcoming Solr Unleashed training class on June 13, 2013 in Brazil.
“Solr Unleashed is a complete training, hands-on, facing the Solr 4, or SolrCloud. The SolrCloud is a complete change of structure of Solr to facilitate installations of Big Data. Allows indexing distributed beyond search distributed, eliminating the need for master-slave configuration.”
The course will be spread out over two 8-hour days. Students will need to bring their own computer and will get the chance to develop a complete application. This application will actually be a real search prototype and students will learn it so that it can potentially be used for future projects. In addition students will also get an official certification of LucidWorks and will be given a digital copy of all the course material. The actual material will be in English but the course will be taught in Portuguese. Semantix, a LucidWorks partner company, will be giving the class. During the class students will not only get an in depth introduction to Solr but they will also get an up close and personal look at the new open source search system Solr 4. It’s great to see Solr growing and transcending to other languages. Looks like regardless of the language, search is where it’s at.
April Holmes, April 08, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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