Visual Data Mapper Quid Raises $39M
April 14, 2015
The article on TechCrunch titled Quid Raises $39M More to Visualize Complex Ideas explains the current direction of Quid. Quid, the business analytics company interested in the work of processing vast amounts of data to build visual maps as well as branding and search, has been developing new paths to funding. The article states,
“When we wrote about the company back in 2010, it was focused on tracking emerging technologies, but it seems to have broadened its scope since then. Quid now says it has signed up 80 clients since launching the current platform at the beginning of last year.The new funding was led by Liberty Interactive Corporation, with participation from ARTIS Ventures, Buchanan Investments, Subtraction Capital, Tiger Partners, Thomas H. Lee Limited Family Partnership II, Quid board member Michael Patsalos-Fox…”
Quid also works with such brands as Hyundai, Samsung and Microsoft, and is considered to be unique in its approach to the big picture of tech trends. The article does not provide much information as to what the money is to be used for, unless it is to do with the changes to the website, which was once called the most pretentious of startup websites for its detailed explanation of its primary and secondary typefaces and array of titular allusions.
Chelsea Kerwin, April 14, 2014
Stephen E Arnold, Publisher of CyberOSINT at www.xenky.com
Google and Metapersonnel Insights
April 6, 2015
Forget Xooglers. The ranks of the former Googlers continue to swell. Focus on the new Googlers. These are the folks eager to join the online advertising, Loon balloon, and Glass is not dead parade. In this article I am going to reference two allegedly factual incidents involving Googlers in the last year or so. You may want to read:
I read “How to Get Ahead at Work: 10 Tips from Google’s Head of HR.” The write up lays out a checklist to help me advance in my career. Spoiler alert: There was not a word about legal hassles, senior management liaisons, or projects that get killed, shelved, or forgotten.
The write up is a happy thing, and it contains some advice I suppose I would follow if I were a precocious 21 year old again. Ah, those were the days. I was impressionable, and I thought that pronouncements from well paid professionals wearing blue jeans were the pinnacle of sartorial savvy.
Let’s look at these “tips.”
The first tip is that I as the callow 21 year old have to give my work meaning. Now I suppose that works like a champ when one is employed at Google. But my first job as a 21 year old was dealing with the Byzantine bureaucracy of the US nuclear establishment. I am into meaning, but what “meaning” is there when smashing atoms and avoiding contamination are daily fare? Oh, a quick question: What is “meaning”? I am baffled still, even at age 70.
The second tip is to trust people. I find this interesting. I recall that a certain senior manager at Google left his wife to interact with a more youthful Googler. Then there was the Googler who died of a controlled substance event in the presence of a person who allegedly rented herself to those with free cash. I wonder how that “trust” thing is working with the wives affected by the alleged behaviors of Googlers?
The third tip is to hire people who are better than I. Okay. I am not sure if I do that. I have a yard crew, assorted failed middle school teachers, a couple of addled 60 year olds, and the odd 20 something wizard. I am just not very good, so I am not sure how to judge if someone on the yard crew is better than I when it comes to analyzing Google’s human resource tips. Does “good” mean smarter, stronger, healthier, better sighted, or more comely? I am not sure what the angle is. In terms of work, there is a task, and I assumed one should hire an individual who can perform that task. The “better” fools me. For example, if I do not cavort with a 20 something while wearing a Google product, does that make me less “better”? I am puzzled.
The fourth tip is also confusing to me: “Don’t confuse development with managing performance?” I assume this is on the job performance, not the extra curricular stuff like the drugs on the yacht or the marketer seeking medical attention. The write up explains:
Even the most successful people fail to learn. And if they can’t learn, what hope is there for the rest of us? It’s not pleasant to confront your own weaknesses. If you marry criticism with consequence, if people feel that a miss means that they will be hurt professionally or economically, they will argue instead of being open to learning and growing. Make developmental conversations safe and productive by having them all the time. Always start with an attitude of “How can I help you be more successful?”
The assumption is that the person “guiding” me is someone who has a character and interpersonal integrity to which I can relate. When that is absent, I am sorry. I do not learn. I am an old fashioned sort tangled in notions of ethical behavior. Again, the tip is falling on my imagined 21 year old deaf ears.
The fifth tip is pretty amazing. The idea is to pay attention to the best employees and the worst employees. That works out in a normal curve to a small percentage of the total employee count. So if a manager has two employees, the tip wants me to pay attention to the two people. Okay, that makes sense. But if I have 150 employees reporting to me as I did when I was at Halliburton Nuclear, that means I ignore that majority of my employees. Hmm. I suppose that is practical, but what if one of the ignored employees has a good idea or decides to photocopy confidential documents and high tail it to another company. As a manager of people, what do I say: “Well, that person was on I ignored”? Sorry. Doesn’t make sense to my job seeking imaginary 21 year old self.
The sixth tip is one of those odd ball catch phrases that don’t make any sense to me: “Be frugal and generous.” Okay, so I don’t want to throw away a sheet of paper with writing on one side. I can use the other side for notes, assuming paper is still in use in the Google HR office. But the notion of penny pinching and being generous is the stuff of Dickens, not my life. The point is to know how to think about a financial issue and make a decision that makes sense. I suppose the largesse of the US Congress buying the Department of Defense tanks the DoD does not want is part of the frugal-generous truism. Perhaps it is the money Google spends on lobbyists in Washington? I am baffled in the way I am when someone tells me, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.”
The seventh tip is fascinating: “Pay unfairly.” Let’s see. I have a small company. I have to keep the lights on, pay taxes, and pay people. The money has to be allocated in a manner which the employees perceive as fair; otherwise, the employee is likely to complain or quit. No good. So the Google HR outfit wants to further the wage gap. In my warped sense of appropriate behavior, I find the idea somewhat disconcerting. I am okay with paying an individual for contributions to the firm. I am not okay with overt discriminatory compensation. But, hey, I am not likely to be the type of candidate who wants his virtual 21 year old self involved with womanizers or drug takers and search results that are neither objective nor particularly relevant to anyone but an advertiser. Bummer.
The eighth tip is nudge. Okay, okay, finally something I understand. One can nudge a pixel in Photoshop and one can nudge a co worker to behave in a manner appropriate to the company, the customer, and the context. But the Google HR view of a nudge is interesting:
Look around you right now and discover how your environment is nudging you and those around you already. Is it easy to see other people and connect? Are the least healthy snacks in your refrigerator at eye level? When you email or text your colleagues and friends, is it to share good news or snark? We are all constantly nudged by our environment and nudging those around us. Use that fact to make yourself and your teams happier and more productive.
If we go back to the womanizing executive and the alleged drug taker with compensated companion examples, I can see how nudges work. I am unfortunately non on board with nudges that become ego satisfying and lead to what I perceive as deleterious behavior. No future for me at the GOOG I suppose.
The ninth tip is an MBAism: “Manage rising expectations.” Now if I pay attention to the losers and the winners, members of each group will perceive themselves as special. The losers will assume I care and won’t fire them. The winners will assume that I will promote them or give them my job. No so fast. I try to avoid what I call the “cliff phenomenon.” The idea is that expectations get built up, like “Starved Rock in Illinois. Then one can either leave the people to die of starvation figuratively or literally or push them off the cliff. I don’t see much support for the notion of keeping folks from getting into a dangerous spot. I am, therefore, ill equipped to manipulate employees in the manner of turning a dial on an old Hewlett Packard wave measurement device.
The last tip is just plain brilliant or incredibly stupid. I am supposed to go back to square one and begin again. I much prefer non circular activities, but, hey, why listen to me. I am not as a virtual 21 year old going to cut it with Google personnel.
Thank heavens for small favors. Did I once cash checks from Google? Nah, must have been an imaginary quirk of time. I would search for more information but I have Google information access syndrome right now.
Stephen E Arnold, April 5, 2015
SharePoint Problems Chocked Up to Management
March 10, 2015
A large percentage of SharePoint installations are reported to have stalled or not lived up to expectations. Despite those numbers, approximately 75% of organizations report that they will stay with SharePoint, regardless. They are committed to making it work and looking for solutions. CMS Wire gives more details in their article, “Blame the C-Suite for Your Failed SharePoint Project.”
The article begins:
“About two out of three organizations complain their SharePoint projects have stalled (26 percent) or failed to live up to their expectations (37 percent). And it gets worse, according to new AIIM research. A majority of respondents blame those SharePoint failures on lack of support from senior management.”
For those organizations and users who feel stuck in an ineffective or stalled installation, outside resources are invaluable. Stephen E. Arnold offers a helpful collection of resources on his Web site ArnoldIT.com. His dedicated SharePoint feed features the latest tips, tricks, and news regarding Office 365 and SharePoint specifically.
Emily Rae Aldridge, March 10, 2015
Hewlett Packard: The Dodge Em Method
February 27, 2015
I read an interesting article called “Hewlett Packard Tries to Duck Investors with Virtual Meeting.” I thought it was hip to do meetings via Skype and the plug in on my Xenky.com Web site. Guess not.
The write up makes a point that I don’t consider when firing up the tele-meeting software. Here’s the passage I noted:
Hewlett Packard’s recent decision to ditch its annual shareholder meeting in favor of a virtual one is just bad corporate governance. The forum gives ordinary shareholders their one chance each year to directly question and even confront the CEO and board of directors. And when it comes to HP, investors should be asking plenty of questions.
Ah, corporate governance. I thought this was an area reserved for Wharton business school instructors. You know, Wharton, one of the fonts of management perspicuity for eager consultants and CEOs to be. (I wonder what “governance” means: Good decision making, prudent use of financial resources, innovating, generating sustainable revenue?)
The article points out the MBA type reasoning that HP management seems to be using. There’s a reference to the Autonomy flap, cost savings, and, of course, the somewhat lackluster financial performance.
I don’t agree with this statement:
Under Whitman, a former eBay CEO, HP has stabilized.
Like IBM, these large “information technology” companies are a bit like a whale stuck in a small bay. Everyone arrives to help, but in most cases, there is not much to be done. A confused whale is pretty much a challenge for everyone involved. When a whale thrashes before its death, I want to be standing well away from the creature.
I suppose that’s why I am confused about what HP is doing with the Autonomy technology. Some of the zeros and ones date from the mid 1990s. I don’t drive a 25 year old automobile. HP apparently plans to sell some.
Stephen E Arnold, February 27, 2015
Google and Decision Making
February 27, 2015
Well, guess what? I read an allegedly true story. Google has changed its management mind about the type of images permissible on Blogger. Navigate to “Google Won’t Ban Adult Content on Blogger after All.” Here’s the passage I noted:
“This week, we announced a change to Blogger’s porn policy. We’ve had a ton of feedback, in particular about the introduction of a retroactive change (some people have had accounts for 10+ years), but also about the negative impact on individuals who post sexually explicit content to express their identities,” says Jessica Pelegio, Social Product Support Manager at Google. “Blog owners should continue to mark any blogs containing sexually explicit content as “adult” so that they can be placed behind an ‘adult content’ warning page.”
Google is free to do what it wants unless a nation state does some saber rattling and discriminatory legislative actions.
For me, the important point is the speed with which a decision is made and then reversed. I assume this type of fluid problem solving is one of the reasons that Google is a shape shifter when it comes to Google Plus, which seems to be undergoing disaggregation. Note Google Plus is the future of Google, but disaggregation is the way to handle the alleged Facebook-type service.
Agile is as agile does.
Stephen E Arnold, February 27, 2015
Google: Circling the Semi Virtual Wagons
February 26, 2015
Google has an interesting track record with nation states, supra national agencies, and regulators.
Google has a new Euro boss, Matt Brittin. According to “Here’s Everything We Know about Google’s new European Boss Matt Brittin,” he is tall and:
Born in 1968 in Walton-on-Thames in Surrey, England, he was educated at Hampton School and Robinson College before leaving home to study at Cambridge University, where he earned a Master of Arts in Land Economy and Geography.
Also, according to “Google Shakes Up European Units in Face of Tougher Rules,” the GOOG is following in Yahoo’s footsteps by trying to get organized in Europe. You may have to pay to access the Financial Times’ article.
Net net: After 15 or so years in business, the lads in Mountain View are circling their virtual wagons in EC land.
Will the shift be enough to satisfy the regulators presiding over a somewhat shaky financial and political tie up? My hunch is that regulators will regulate. Perhaps some juicy penalties or taxation fast dancing will be announced.
Exciting for Google which is facing push back about its real estate dreams in Mountain View, annoyances in China, and the on going European saber rattling.
Google will have to stand tall. The new GOOG Euro boss should be able to see over the well coiffed heads of the regulators.
Stephen E Arnold, February 26, 2015
Palantir Gets Some Publicity
February 16, 2015
Short honk: The New York Times publishes a weekly magazine. I have a tough time figuring out what the publication covers. I noted a long article on Sunday, February 15, 2015, “The Undergraduate and the Mentor.” The cover of the magazine carried the title “The Accusation.” I was confused, but the NYT magazine is a baffler I ignore when it arrives. You may be able to access the article at this link, but don’t complain to me if the NYT wants money from you. I just want to document that the mentor was a founder of Palantir. The company is described this way:
With early funding from the C.I.A., Lonsdale helped Thiel and others start Palantir. Named for the “seeing stones” in “The Lord of the Rings,” the company developed powerful data-mining software for surveillance and won contracts with hundreds of law-enforcement agencies, including the National Security Agency and the Defense Department. In 2009, Lonsdale went on to other ventures but retained a stake in Palantir, whose value would climb to more than $9 billion. In 2011, with a small group of partners, some of whom had close ties to Asia, Lonsdale started the venture-capital fund Formation 8, named for a lucky number in China. Along with starting and financing companies, he has continued to embrace libertarian causes and recently joined the finance team for Senator Rand Paul’s possible Republican presidential campaign. And he sometimes can’t resist showing off his newfound wealth: For a viewing party of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” last year, Lonsdale bought a $30,000 replica of the show’s iron throne, posing on it like the show’s line of blustering and sadistic kings.
I made a list of some of the loaded words used in the write up to bring the former Palantir founder into more vivid relief:
- “hard time making eye contact”. The Palantir person would not look at an interlocutor.
- “condescending.” Word used to describe the Palantir person’s attitude
- “broke the rules”. Phrase used to describe Palantir person’s behavior at a swimming pool
The author of the write up paints a word picture of the Palantir person which I did not find positive. If you are curious about alleged improper interpersonal behaviors, the NYT magazine may interest you.
For me, it is one more dreary Stanford University/Silicon Valley dust up. I assume the rules are different in the go go world of high tech. Innovating in content processing could, I suppose, husband more ambitious pursuits.
Stephen E Arnold, February 16, 2015
IBM and Layoffs: Watson, Watson, Where Are You?
February 4, 2015
For months I have been commenting about the increasingly weird marketing pitches for IBM Watson. This is the Lucene and home grown script system positioned as the next big thing in information retrieval. The financial goals for this system were crazy. My recollection is that IBM wanted to generate a billion in revenue from open source search and bits and pieces of the IBM technology lumber.
Impossible. Having a system ingest bounded content and then answer “questions” about that content is neither new, remarkable, or particularly interesting to me. When the system is presented as a way to solve the problem of cancer and generate barbeque sauce with tamarind, the silliness points to desperation.
IBM marketers were trying everything to make open source search into a billion dollar baby and pull of the stunt quickly. Keep in mind that Autonomy required 15 years and a number of pretty savvy acquisitions to nose into the $700 million range.
IBM, in its confused state, believed that it could do the trick in a fraction of the time. IBM apparently was unaware of the erratic thinking at Hewlett Packard that spent $11 billion for Autonomy and wanted to generate billions from that system at the same time IBM was going to collect a billion or more from the same market.
Both of these companies, dazed by a long term struggle with spreadsheet fever, were ignoring or simply did not understand the doldrums of the enterprise information access market. Big companies were quite happy to give open source solutions a try. Vendors of proprietary systems were pitching their keyword systems as everything from customer support “solutions” to business intelligence systems that would “predict” what the company should know.
Yep, right.
I read with some sadness the posts at Alliance@IBM. The viewpoint is not that of IBM management which is now firing or resource allocating its way people. I am not sure how many folks are going to be terminated, but the comments in this series of IBM employee comments suggest that the staff are unhappy. Some may not go gentle into that good night.
The point is that the underlying problems at IBM were evident in the silly Watson marketing. An organization that can with a straight face suggest that a next generation information access system can discover a new recipe provides a glimpse into an organization’s disconnect at a fundamental level.
Too bad. The stock buybacks, the sale of manufacturing assets, and the assertions that a mainframe is a mobile platform tells me that IBM stockholders may want to reevaluate those holdings.
If IBM asked Watson, I question the outputs.
Stephen E Arnold, February 4, 2015
Google Fails: Is Google in for a Tough Year?
January 7, 2015
I don’t think too much about Google. The ad crazy search system does not output the type of results I want. But there are many Google cheerleaders in the thriving world of 2015. But there are some quasi doubters. My view is that every year has been a tough one for Google. With a single revenue stream, Google is saddled with the “one trick pony” label.
“Why Betting on Google Is Risky Business” raises mostly old concerns about the company. The write up mentions a number of Google’s flops. Any of you remember Orkut or Wave? There is some hope for Google Glass, but the write up sees Glass as evidence of a larger problem at the GOOG.
Here’s the passage I noted:
Nick Selby, a police detective and CEO of StreetCred Software, says he invested a “few thousand bucks” on Google Glass as a law enforcement tool before his team eventually decided it would never go anywhere. “All I got out of it was a very expensive paperweight and some snickering friends,” Selby says. “A lot of companies were considering law enforcement applications for Glass,” Selby says. “Since our product ranks the likelihood of finding and capturing fugitives, and provides situational awareness for officers that can be easily expressed geospatially, our thought was that we might use Glass to project attributes onto buildings.” Selby’s optimism toward Glass quickly diminished the minute he tried on a pair. “In our experience the technology both wasn’t ready and wouldn’t likely be ready for the kind of nuanced display and interactivity we would require to make this useful and cop-proof.”
Glass is a bit of an aberration. The story of its beginning and slow end have more to do with interpersonal activities mixing with half baked ideas. Too bad the write up does not dig into a story that features mobile devices, the ministrations of a psychiatrist, and the exit of a high profile wizard to Amazon.
Yep, there’s more to the story, but I am not sure this write up is anywhere near the target zone.
Stephen E Arnold, January 7, 2014
Did Hewlett Packard Overpay for Autonomy?
December 12, 2014
The Economist, the British magazine that calls itself a newspaper, published “The Dozy Watchdogs.” Well, okay. The write up does contain an interesting nugget along the lines of “when you are out you are in and when you are in you are out.” Take that cricket fans.
The snippet in the article that I noted was this bit:
In 2012 Hewlett-Packard wrote off 80% of its $10.3 billion purchase of Autonomy, a software company, after accusing the firm of counting forecast subscriptions as current sales (Autonomy pleads innocence).
What’s 80 percent of $11 billion? In Harrod’s Creek, that’s a big management mistake. HP wrote a check and drove the vehicle off the lot. Yep, let’s blame the auditors, the dozy ones.
Stephen E Arnold, December 12, 2014
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