Convera 3Q 2009 Results
December 20, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to GuruFocus.com’s information about Convera’s third quarter 2009 10-K report. Interesting reading. You can find a summary on the GuruFocus Web site. You can access the full SEC filing here. The news is that Convera is getting smaller like a zip file. I did find one comment that was germane to my work:
As of October 31, 2009, Convera has 60 vertical search websites with 23 separate publishers under contract, with 50 of these vertical search sites in production and 10 of the websites in development awaiting launch. At October 31, 2008, Convera had 82 vertical search websites from 28 publishers under contract, of which 45 were in production and 37 were in development awaiting launch. Despite the overall increase in sites in production on a year over year basis, revenues generated by the sites have declined. This decline is due in part to the renegotiation of contract rates with a major customer as well as reduced ad rates. Our ad share levels have suffered as publisher’s online ad revenues have declined as a result of the current economic downturn.
I noted the “renogotiation”. And this metric is a keeper: 60 Web sites generated in the third quarter a comprehensive loss of $2,324,000 or about a negative $39,000 per Web site. That’s a fine payoff from the Convera vertical search business model. The fact that Convera made sales to publishers makes clear that its customers have a sixth sense for a deal. As I reflect over my general knowledge of Convera, the firm did not make scanning pay off, enterprise search pay off, or government contracting pay off. Little wonder search and content processing has to work hard to get the tune for R-E-S-P_E-C-T out of its sound track.
Stephen E. Arnold, December 21, 2009
Oyez, oyez, I wrote this for free. I want to report this to the SEC because it needs to know that Convera and the addled goose have near zero revenue in common. I am at a loss for words, just not a loss of money.
Reed Elsevier and Trade Newspaper Paywall
December 10, 2009
Reed Elsevier is trying to deal with the digital avalanche that is sweeping down Mount Information. I read in the Straits Times’s “Variety to Begin Charging.”
We fundamentally believe that the readers should pay one price and get all or any of our content,’ said Neil Stiles, president of Variety Group, a unit of London and Amsterdam-based Reed Elsevier Group PLC. ‘If you don’t pay, you don’t get anything.’ While the 104-year-old newspaper expects to lose many of its roughly 2.5 million monthly online visitors, it values more highly the 25,000 subscribers of its daily printed version and 30,000 subscribers of its weekly printed version.
The question is, “Will there be enough Hollywood hungry folks to make the content generate enough revenue to keep the lights on?” My hunch is that there will be some people who will pay, but the margins of the print publication from 10 years ago are not going to be achievable.
What will happen? I anticipate these events:
- Big splash.
- Lousy numbers
- Regrouping
- Relaunch
- Sale of the property.
Don’t get me wrong. Silobreaker’s consumer service is generating cash. That service uses smart software, not humans. AOL and Yahoo offer entertainment sites. I can create a Hollywood feed on Congoo.com with a few mouse clicks. These competitors are not performing equally well. That’s not the point. There are lots of sites that generate Hollywood content. You can download a podcast from KCRW that delivers “the Business.”
Something more than a paywall will be needed to keep Variety healthy. I have some ideas, but these are not for this free, Web log. Get my drift?
Stephen Arnold, December 10, 2009
I feel compelled by the imperative of a 40 page movie script to report to the custodial contractor for the Old Executive Office Building that I was not paid to write this opinion piece. Wow, confession cleans out the doubt.
The Google Gong Rings for ProQuest and Dissertation Content
December 7, 2009
A MOVIE CAMERA BUSINESS TRIES TO ADAPT
In June 1986, I was sold along with the electronic publishing assets of the Courier Journal & Louisville Times Co. to Bell+Howell. B+H owned a new media company, which in the late 1980s did business as University Microfilms with the acronym UMI. At that time, the company’s product line up spanned a number of media. At one end of the spectrum was the original business based on creating microfilm replicas of documents. These microfilms were sold to libraries. Generations of students used technology perfected during World War II for their access to information not in a library’s collection. At the other end were the electronic products from the Courier Journal: ABI/INFORM, Pharmaceutical News Index, and Business Dateline (the first full text local business news database with corrections made when the source updated the story’s facts).
Now this is an efficient research tool for today’s student. Source: http://www.archivalsuppliers.com/images/Picture%20284.jpg
When I was a student, I did research with microfilm. It was okay but it took a long time to get the reels, get them set up, and reviewed. Getting a hard copy of a document was a hassle. Some of the prints turned black and became unreadable quickly. I once dropped a reel and watched in horror as it unspooled, picked up dirt, and was unusable. I had to pay the library for a replacement. I think in the 1960s, a single reel cost me about $45 which was more than I made in my part time job. I loathed the stuff.
At the recent Online Information 2009 event in London, my colleague Ulla de Stricker was the keynoter for the “Publishers Delivering Value” track on December 3., 2009. In her talk – which she mentioned the Google move into dissertations. Her reference inspired me to write this opinion piece. You can get iinformation about her at DeStricker.com. One of her example was the fact that Stanford University students may now submit their dissertations to Google while it is optional to submit them to ProQuest.
So I wandered over to the exhibit hall to visit with ProQuest, all the while reminiscing about my past experience with that company – known as UMI at the time.
MICROFILM: HARD TO USE, EASY TO DAMAGE AND MISFILE
When I was working on my PhD, I remember my fellow students talking about the costs of getting their dissertations “published” and then included in the Dissertation Abstracts index. I never had this problem because I took a job with the nuclear unit of Halliburton, never bothering to submit my dissertation once I got a real job.
A microfilm readers. Source: http://www.ucar.edu/library/collections/archive/media/photographs/481_1976_microfilm_lg.jpg
The whole system was a money making machine. When a library burned down, backfiles could be acquired when physical copies were not available. When a university got a grant for a new field of study, a collection of journals could be purchased from UMI on microfilm. Bang. Instant academic reference material. I don’t recall how much content the “old” UMI moved to microfilm. My recollection is that there were books, journals, newspaper, and, of course, dissertations. With all this film, I understood why B+H had paid tens of millions for the Courier Journal’s electronic publishing expertise. Buying expertise and using it are two different things, in my opinion.
MECHANICAL PRODUCTION WRONG FOR DIGITAL PRODUCTS
The production process for creating a microfilm was quite complicated and involved specialized cameras, film, and chemicals. The image I have of the UMI facility in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the first time I visited was a modern day castle surrounded by a moat. The castle was a large, one-story building surrounded by a settling pond. The chemicals from the film processing were pumped into the moat in order to separate certain high value residue from other chemicals. UMI processed so much film that the residue silver from the photographic process warranted this recycling effort.
Dinosaurs struggle with the concept of an apocalypse. Adapt or get grilled I suppose.
UMI had a silver mine in its monopoly on certain types of content. My recollection of UMI was that its core product was getting universities to require or maybe strongly recommend that doctoral dissertations had to be “published” by UMI. The microfilm copies of the dissertations were sold back to the doctoral students and to libraries interested in having a compact, relatively easy way to store volumes on a mind boggling range of topics. I did a project that required me to use a microfilm copy of something called the Elisaeis by a wild and crazy religious poet named William Alabaster, and several dissertations written about that nearly forgotten literary work. I also did a project for the Vatican and worked through microfilms of sermons from the middle ages in Latin. Now that was fun! Pretty sporty content to. Nothing like a hot omelie.
Google Cuts Endeca from the Search Herd
December 4, 2009
I saw Dan Tunkelang’s post in the Noisy Channel on November 6, 2009, about his leaving Endeca. Keep in mind that Dan Tunkelang was the firm’s chief technology officer and a critic of Google.
This is my last week at Endeca. The decision to leave has been a heart-wrenching one: not only have the past ten years been the best of my life, but my experiences at Endeca have defined me professionally. Moreover, Endeca is riding a wave of success with recent advances in our products, new relationships with key partners, and fascinating new deployments
The comments in Fierce Content Management in “Daniel Tunkelang Leaving Endeca for Google” seemed to lack context; for example:
It was more than a bit surprising to me that [Dan] Tunkelang would be moving to the consumer side of search, given his background, but it sounds like it was an opportunity that was too good to let pass. I’m sure Endeca is sad to see someone with his level of understanding of its products leave the company.
Read more: http://www.fiercecontentmanagement.com/story/danel-tunkelang-leaving-endeca-google/2009-11-11#ixzz0Yc34unSH
When I saw Endeca’s search evangelist on Tuesday, December 1, 2009, I sat quietly and let the Endeca professional lead the conversation. No comment about Dan Tunkelang, so I assumed that the company did not consider the departure material.
Yesterday I had a conversation with a search vendor who asked me what I thought. I replied that the Google is where the action is and anyone wanting to keep the search career chugging along would be crazy to ignore Googzilla’s blandishments.
i think there are several angles that I want to watch in the weeks and months ahead:
First, the Google is into commerce search and Dan Tunkelang knows about the use of search and facets in helping merchants make sales. I wonder if there is a connection between Endeca’s success in ecommerce and Dan Tunkelang’s joining the Google. Maybe it is a coincidence?
Second, Endeca without Dan Tunkelang is a bit like a wagon without a wheel. With care, the wagon works reasonably well. Get the load off balance and the wagon tips over. Is Endeca now vulnerable in a way that it has not been since its founding?
Third, where is Endeca going to go? The company’s push for partners and its shifting of security functions to some of the partners who provide such features and content connectors is interesting to me. The information I have is inconclusive, but unless Endeca can respond to some of the challenges that I see surfacing from a number of interesting companies such as Exalead to name just one example, I ask, “Can Endeca get on the growth track and generate the sort of revenues that make companies like the much loved Autonomy the talk of the investment crowd?
My thought this morning is that Google may be using surgical precision to isolate certain vendors from their core capabilities. Once isolated like a lion’s prey in the wild, then it is a matter of time. Am I seeing an example of a “cutting off from the herd” tactic?
Stephen Arnold, December 3, 2009
Important disclaimer: I want to alert the Fish & Wildlife Department that I was not paid to write about the behavior of predators in such countries as South Africa. A freebie for sure.
Cicumvallation: Reed Elsevier and Thomson as Vercingetorix
November 27, 2009
Google Scholar Gets Smart in Legal Information
One turkey received a presidential pardon. Other turkeys may not be so lucky on November 26, 2009, when the US celebrates Thanksgiving. I am befuddled about this holiday. There are not too many farmers in Harrod’s Creek. The fields contain the abandoned foundations of McMansions that the present economic meltdown have left like Shelly’s statue of Ozymandius. The “half buried in the sand” becomes half built homes in the horse farm.
As Kentuckians in my hollow give thanks for a day off from job hunting,, I am sitting by the goose pond trying to remember what I read in my copy of Caesar’s De Bello Gallico. I know Caesar did not write this memoir, but his PR bunnies did a pretty good job. I awoke this morning thinking about the connection between the battle of Alesia and what is now happening to the publishing giants Reed-Elsevier and Thomson Reuters. The trigger for this mental exercise was Google’s announcement that it had added legal content to Google Scholar.
What’s Vercingetorix got to do with Google, Lexis, and Westlaw? Think military strategy. Starvation, death, surrender, and ritual killing. Just what today’s business giants relish.
Google has added the full text of US federal cases and state cases. The coverage of the federal cases, district and appellate, is from 1924 to the present. US state cases cover 1950 to the present. Additional content will be added; for example, I have one source that suggested that the Commonwealth of Virginia Supreme Court will provide Google with CD ROMs of cases back to 1924. Google, according to this source, is talking with other sources of US legal information and may provide access to additional legal information as well. What are these sources? Possibly
Public.Resource.Org and possibly Justia.org, among others.
The present service includes:
- The full text of the legal document
- Footnotes in the legal document
- Page numbers in the legal document
- Page breaks in the legal document
- Hyperlinks in the legal document to cases
- A tab to show how the case was cited in other documents
- Links to non legal documents that cite a case.
You can read various pundits, mavens, and azure=chip consultants’ comments on this Google action at this link.
You may want to listen to a podcast called TWIL and listened to the November 23, 2009, show on which Google Scholar was discussed for about a half hour. You can find that discussion on iTunes. Just search for TWIL and download the program “Social Lubricants and Frictions.”
On the surface, the Google push into legal information is a modest amount of data in terms of Google’s daily petabyte flows. The service is easy to use, but the engineering required to provide access to the content strikes me as non-trivial. Content transformation is an expensive proposition, and the cost of fiddling with legal information is one of the primary reasons commercial online services have had to charges hefty fees to look at what amounts to taxpayer supported, public information.
The good news is that the information is free, easily accessible even from an iPhone or other mobile device. The Google service does the standard Google animal tricks of linking, displaying content with minimal latency, and updating new content in a a minute or so that content becoming available to Google software Dyson vacuum cleaner.
So what?
This service is similar to others I have written about in my three Google monographs. Be aware. My studies are not Sergey-and-Larry-eat-pizza books. I look at the Google open source technical and business information. I ignore most of what Google’s wizards “say” in public. These folks are “running the game plan” and add little useful information for my line of work. Your mileage may differ. If so, stop reading this blog post and hunt down a cheerful non-fiction Google book by a real live journalist. That’s not my game. I am an addled goose.
Now let me answer the “so what”.
First, the Google legal content is an incremental effort for the Google. This means that Google’s existing infrastructure, staff, and software can handle the content transformation, parsing, indexing, and serving. No additional big-buck investment is needed. In fact, I have heard that the legal content project, like Google News, was accomplished in the free time for play that Google makes available to its full time professionals. A bit of thought should make clear to you that commercial outfits who have to invest to handle legal content in a Google manner have a cost problem right out of the starting blocks.
Second, Google is doing content processing that should be the responsibility of the US government. I know. I know. The US government wants to create information and not compete with commercial outfits. But the outfits manipulating legal information have priced it so that most everyday Trents and Whitneys cannot afford to use these commercial services. Even some law firms cannot afford these services. Pro bono attorneys don’t have enough money to buy yellow pads to help their clients. Even kind hearted attorneys have to eat before they pay a couple a hundred bucks to run a query on the commercial online services from publicly traded companies out to make their shareholders have a great big financial payday. Google is operating like a government when it processes legal information and makes it available without direct charge to the user. The monetization takes place but on a different business model foundation. That also spells T-R-O-U-B-L-E for the commercial online services like Lexis and Westlaw.
Exalead and Real Travel
November 21, 2009
I noted “Real Travel Chooses Exalead CloudView Search” in the SEO Journal. I have been a fan of the Exalead technology for a number of years. You can read an exclusive interview with Exalead’s founder in my Search Wizards Speak series. The last time I was in Paris, one of the Exalead engineers took me to Tennessee Fried Chicken for some “real southern” fried cooking.
The news is that Real Travel will “will use Exalead CloudView to deliver a ‘smart’ search-based application designed specifically for the travel industry.”
According to the Ulitzer, Inc. story:
“We [Real Travel] needed a powerful search solution that could scale with us and effectively integrate traditional travel data with unstructured web information,” said Ken Leeder, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Real Travel. “After a thorough review, our search and data architects concluded that a partnership with Exalead would enable us to accelerate our development efforts and provide travel shoppers with the rich information they need to plan their next trip.”
A happy quack to the Exalead team. Oh, Tennessee is noted for its Bar-B-Que and whiskey. Kentucky is horses, bourbon, and KFC.
Stephen Arnold, November 21, 2009
To the Department of Agriculture: I was not paid in comestibles or cash to write this article about Exalead.
Hotel Search from Roomatlas
November 17, 2009
I had a conversation today (November 16, 2009) about augmentation and mash ups. The idea is that a map can display overlays. Combined with interactivity, not much searching is necessary to locate information on a specific topic. In the good old days, this type of narrow content focus would be a variant of “vertical search”. I received a link from one of the people with whom I spoke with a suggestion to look at the service.
Navigate to Roomatlas, and enter a city. The system displays a map with hotel rooms and their cost per night displayed. Here’s a screen shot of the results for my query “Washington DC”.
I liked this service.
Stephen Arnold, November 17, 2009
The Housing Office (HUD) will hear from me that I was not paid for this article. I have to pay for DC hotels, however.
Google Pressures eCommerce Search Vendors
November 6, 2009
Companies like Dieselpoint, Endeca, and Omniture Mercado face a new competitor. The Google has, according to Internet News, “launched Commerce Search, a cloud-based enterprise search application for e-tailers that promises to improve sales conversion rates and simplify the online shopping experience for their customers.” For me the most significant passage in the write up was:
Commerce Search not only integrates the data submitted to Google’s Product Center and Merchant Center but also ties into its popular Google Analytics application, giving e-tailers an opportunity to not only track customer behavior but the effectiveness of the customized search application. Once an e-tailer has decided to give Commerce Search a shot, it uploads an API with all its product catalog, descriptions and customization requirements and then Google shoots back an API with those specifications that’s installed on the Web site. Google also offers a marketing and administration consultation to highlight a particular brand of camera or T-shirt that the retailer wants to prominently place on its now customized search results. It also gives e-tailers full control to create their own merchandising rules so that it can, for example, always display Canon cameras at the top of its digital camera search results or list its latest seasonal items by descending price order.
Google’s technical investments in its programmable search engine, context server, and shopping cart service chug along within this new service. Google’s system promises to be fast. Most online shopping services are sluggish. Google knows how to deliver high speed performance. Combining Google’s semantic wizardry with low latency results puts some of the leading eCommerce vendors in a technology arm lock.
Some eCommerce vendors have relied on Intel to provide faster CPUs to add vigor to older eCommerce architectures. There are some speed gains, but Google delivers speed plus important semantic enhancements that offer other performance benefits. One example is content processing. Once changes are pushed to Google or spidered by Google from content exposed to Google, the indexes update quickly. Instead of asking a licensee of a traditional eCommerce system to throw hardware at a performance bottleneck or pay for special system tuning, the Google just delivers speed for structured content processed from the Google platform.
In my opinion, competitors will point out that Google is inexperienced in eCommerce. Google may appear to be a beginner in this important search sector. Looking more deeply into the engineering resources responsible for Commerce Search one finds that Google has depth. I hate to keep mentioning folks like Ramanathan Guha, but he is one touchstone whose deep commercial experience has influenced this Google product.
How will competitors like Dieselpoint, Endeca, and Omniture Mercado respond? The first step will be to downplay the importance of this Google initiative. Next I expect to learn that Microsoft Fast ESP has a better, faster, and cheaper eCommerce solution that plays well with SharePoint and Microsoft’s own commerce server technology. Finally, search leaders such as Autonomy will find a marketing angle to leave Google in the shadow of clever positioning. But within a year, my hunch is that Google’s Commerce Search will have helped reshape the landscape for eCommerce search. Google may not be perfect, but its products are often good enough, fast, and much loved by those who cannot imaging life without Google.
Stephen Arnold, November 6, 2009
I want to disclose to the Department of the Navy that none of these vendors offered me so much as a how de doo to write this article.
Google on Path to Becoming the Internet
September 28, 2009
I thought I made Google’s intent clear in Google Version 2.0. The company provides a user with access to content within the Google index. The inventions reviewed briefly in The Google Legacy and in greater detail in Google Version 2.0 explain that information within the Google data management system can be sliced, diced, remixed, and output as new information objects. The analogy is similar to what an MBA does at Booz, McKinsey, or any other rental firm for semi-wizards. Intakes become high value outputs. I was delighted to read Erick Schonfeld’s “With Google Places, Concerns Rise that Google Just Wants to Link to Its Own Content.” The story makes clear that folks are now beginning to see that Google is a digital Gutenberg and is a different type of information company. Mr. Schonfeld wrote:
The concerns arise, however, back on Google’s main search page, where Google is indexing these Places pages. Since Google controls its own search index, it can push Google Places more prominently if it so desires. There isn’t a heck of a lot of evidence that Google is doing this yet, but the mere fact that Google is indexing these Places pages has the SEO world in a tizzy. And Google is indexing them, despite assurances to the contrary. If you do a search for the Burdick Chocolate Cafe in Boston, for instance, the Google Places page is the sixth result, above results from Yelp, Yahoo Travel, and New York Times Travel. This wouldn’t be so bad if Google wasn’t already linking to itself in the top “one Box” result, which shows a detail from Google Maps. So within the top ten results, two of them link back to Google content.
Directories are variants of vertical search. Google is much more than rich directory listings.
Let me give one example, and you are welcome to snag a copy of my three Google monographs for more examples.
Consider a deal between Google and a mobile telephone company. The users of the mobile telco’s service run a query. The deal makes it possible for the telco to use the content in the Google system. No query goes into the “world beyond Google”. The reason is that Google and the telco gain control over latency, content, and advertising. This makes sense. Let’s assume that this is a deal that Google crafts with an outfit like T Mobile. Remember: this is a hypothetical example. When I use my T Mobile device to get access to the T Mobile Internet service, the content comes from Google with its caches, distributed data centers, and proprietary methods for speeding results to a device. In this example, as a user, I just want fast access to content that is pretty routine; for example, traffic, weather, flight schedules. I don’t do much heavy lifting from my flakey BlackBerry or old person hostile iPhone / iTouch device. Google uses its magical ability to predict, slice, and dice to put what I want in my personal queue so it is ready before I know I need the info. Think “I am feeling doubly lucky”, a “real” patent application by the way. T Mobile wins. The user wins. The Google wins. The stuff not in the Google system loses.
Interesting? I think so. But the system goes well beyond directory listings. I have been writing about Dr. Guha, Simon Tong, Jeff Dean, and the Halevy team for a while. The inventions, systems and methods from this group have revolutionized information access in ways that reach well beyond local directory listings.
The Google has been pecking away for 11 years and I am pleased that some influential journalists / analysts are beginning to see the shape of the world’s first trans national information access company. Google is the digital Gutenberg and well into the process of moving info and data into a hyper state. Google is becoming the Internet. If one is not “in” Google, one may not exist for a certain sector of the Google user community. Googleo ergo sum.
Stephen Arnold, September 28, 2009
IBM Software License Search
September 4, 2009
I do not know which vendor or software system provides the search plumbing for the IBM Software License Search system I stumbled upon today. I own a couple of ageing NetFinity servers, and I wanted to know if there were license agreements for the pre-loaded software on these once-high value servers. I located a software license “vertical” search service that contains only IBM licenses. This is a mixed blessing because I wanted to skip search from the licenses to the referenced component. I had to do this by opening another browser window and using the general purpose IBM search service which is not too hot in my opinion.
I ran a number of queries for NetFinity servers and discovered four hits from year 2000. I did not recognize any of the software descriptions as what came on or with my servers. My recollection was that I had Lotus Notes, a version of DB2, and several other products including the often flakey ServeRAID software. No joy.
I ran queries for proprietary, confidential, and software. I got zero hits on the word proprietary and zero hits for the word confidential. I ran a query for the word software, assuming I would get a set of results that would give me an idea about how many documents were in the vertical file. I got 193 hits. That seems small to me.
I ran a query for OmniFind and got 30 hits. The most recent was August 2008. This fact suggests to me that OmniFind like Oracle’s SES10g is getting ready for the rendering plant. I selected a hit about OmniFind. I did not get the license document. I got this page:
I made more selections and finally I got an unformatted text dump of the legal text. I found it very difficult to read with my 65 year old eyes. Instead of delivering a readable version of the document, IBM assumed that I could copy the document from the browser window, open Word or Framemaker, and insert the text and format it to my liking. Wrong.
I wrote this review. I can see that IBM has tried to deliver a subset within its almost unworkable full IBM wide search system. But good effort doesn’t earn an A in my search class.
Stephen Arnold, September 4, 2009
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