Google and Cracks in Its Armor
March 10, 2010
Short honk: If you want a run down of Google’s weaknesses, navigate to “Criticism of Google”, a Wikipedia article. Interesting although some Googlers may take exception to the some of the items on the list. The number one “criticism” is copyright; number two, privacy. A happy quack to to Google Blogoscoped for this link in its “Criticism of Google at Wikipedia” post.
Stephen E Arnold, March 10, 2010
No one paid me to write this item. I don’t know to whom to report because the US government knows quite a bit about Google and in general has the warm fuzzies for the company. I will report to the next Microsoft person with whom I speak.
YouTube.com Market Share
March 9, 2010
Fast Company ran a snippet in its March 8, 2010 “Today in Most Innovative Companies” column that provides some information about YouTube.com’s market share. Here are the highlights that I marked:
- 40 percent market share (comScore data)
- 12.8 billion videos “compared with Hulu’s 903 million”. (I know this is ambiguous but the delta is interesting)
- Viewers watch 93 videos per month on YouTube.com. Hulu viewers was 23 videos per month.
What’s with Google and video? Is it another missed opportunity like Google’s social media efforts? a similar theme appears in “Nexus One’s Biggest challenge Isn’t iPhone; It’s Google’s Online Only Sales Model?” Frisky stuff.
Stephen E Arnold, March 10, 2010
No one paid me to document these three items. Because I mention television, I think of Newton Minnow, so I will report this lack of payment to Fish & Wildlife. I wonder if Fish & Wildlife are responsible for “vast wastelands”?
JustSystems in Flux?
March 8, 2010
I received a call about JustSystems, the Japanese company that figured out how to enter complex characters using a three digit code from a mobile phone keypad. A deal with a large mobile device company was the firm’s go-to revenue stream. With changes in mobile technology, that revenue began to dwindle. JustSystems turned to software development and consulting, which are difficult businesses to scale. When I visited the company for my key fob I noted that the firm had more than 500 employees in several locations. The information I reviewed this morning suggested that JustSystems had about 900 employees at the end of 2009.
The firm was of interest to me. I received a Japanese dinner and a key fob after giving a briefing to the company’s owners four or five years ago. I also reported in my story “JustSystems ConceptBase” that the company rolled out a search appliance in some sort of tie up with IBM.
I dug through my files and noticed a data point that I wanted to surface. In April 2009, JustSystems became a subsidiary of the Keyence Corporation. (Asiajin reported this story in April 2009.) Keyence makes a wide range of electronic gizmos. JustSystems pushed into search and content processing, purchasing a US content processing company called Clairvoyance, founded by wizard Dr. David A Evans. The push did not work and the company turned to Keyence, which bought 43.96 percent of JustSystems, valued at a about US$50 million. Six months later in 2009, the founders–Kazunori Ukigawa and Hatsuko Ukigawa, a husband and wife team—resigned as chairman and vice chairperson and quit the Board of Directors. Mrs. Unkgawa was one of the most visible female Japanese company heads in a very male Japanese technology sector.
On Friday, I was able to speak to a customer support representative on the firm’s North American hot line. I was not able to get much information about the status of the products, particularly the search appliance. I asked about the office in Pittsburgh, where Clairvoyance was located. I learned that the Pittsburgh office had been closed.
JustSystems is hosting Webinars and publicizing that it is one of the 100 firms identified as a “company that matters” by the prestigious, widely read KMWorld Magazine. The company lists as its customers, Amazon, Thomson, Symantec, Cisco, WIPO, Jaguar, and other high profile firms.
The company’s flagship product is XMetal and the firm offers a “maturity model” for an enterprise “semantic ecosystem.”
Several observations:
- JSERI–the original Claritech – Clairvoyance – JustSystems Evans Research–seems to have shut down. See drakesbaycompany.com/documents/JSERI_ExecSummary.pdf
- The USPTO published in November 2009 US, “Methods and Apparatus for Interactive Document Clustering.” The assignee is JustSystems Evans Research. The Wikipedia entry is here.
- There is no search function on the company’s English language Web site. A quick look at the Japanese site and I was not able to locate a search function. When I search Keyence’s Web site for the ConceptBase I got zero hits. Maybe the appliance is a goner?
To sum up, I don’t know if the ConceptBase appliance is currently for sale. I will keep poking around.
Stephen E Arnold, March 8, 2010
No one paid me to write this. I did get paid to go to Tokyo to get my JustSystems key fob. I suppose that counts for something.
Automated Reports May Squeeze Azure Chip Consultants
March 3, 2010
On Mach 1, 2010, I heard an interesting presentation by Alacra. This company aggregates business information and packages it in an easy-to-read way. The talk focused on Alacra Pulse. The basics of the service as I recorded the speaker’s comments are:
The Alacra Pulse Platform monitors thousands of carefully selected news feeds and blogs and extracts actionable intelligence in near-real-time. Alacra’s Applied Knowledge Extraction turns Web content into an idea generation and current awareness service for financial professionals and corporate executives.
The Pulse service offers a free version and a premium version. I thought the demonstration of the free version was quite good, and it certainly shows how far automated content assembly has come in the last two or three years. You can explore the service yourself. Navigate to http://pulse.alacra.com/analyst-comments to get started.
Right after listening to the Alacra talk, I read a news release about “New Market Report Now Available: Hon Hai Precision Industry Company Limited – SWOT Analysis” from an azure chip outfit called Datamonitor. Now Hon Hai Precision, if I recall correctly, is a unit of Foxconn. Foxconn makes stuff for “hollow manufacturers.” The idea is that a company like Apple or Dell does not have the expertise or cost structure to make things. Foxconn and Hon Hoi do. The buzzword for lacking a core competency in manufacturing is outsourcing in my opinion. Foxconn is interesting because of a glitch in Apple related security and an employee death.
I think I prefer the autogenerated reports from Alacra, thank you. Image sourcehttp://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Hs_cKZPkvaU/Sxshr9-foYI/AAAAAAAAAG4/ZtHNfWYGEIE/s400/sleazy-salesman-thumb.jpg:
The azure chip crowd assembles reports, presumably like the Hon Hoi “SWOT” analysis using basic business school methods, which may or may not be germane to the present financial climate. Here’s what the news release said:
Datamonitor’s Hon Hai Precision Industry Company Limited – SWOT Analysis company profile is the essential source for top-level company data and information. Hon Hai Precision Industry Company Limited – SWOT Analysis examines the company’s key business structure and operations, history and products, and provides summary analysis of its key revenue lines and strategy.
Would you trust your retirement savings to anyone relying upon an off the shelf, MBA’s SWOT analysis in today’s real time world? I would not.
But several more important questions crossed my mind.
First, why would I pay for a profile when I could get the basic information from Alacra? Furthermore, when I get the Alacra report, it is (as I recall the speaker’s saying) generated in real time. No delay between my request and getting the freshest data. I am reasonably capable can can formulate my own views of a company from fresh data if what I saw from Alacra is indicative of what the company provides in its Pulse service.
Second, assume I don’t know about Alacra. Why not use a federating search system such as Devilfinder.com, Ixquick.com, or Vivisimo.com? There are even more interesting federating systems to tap, including Bright Planet and Deep Web Technologies. I understand laziness, but these services can deliver the basic information that provides a manager with direct links to some publicly available, quite useful reports about the company; for example, the Google Finance or the AOL company report.
Third, if I * really * want to do a good job, perhaps my firm should look into industrial strength solutions from Kapow Technologies or Kroll Ontrack? Let’s face it. Buying an off-the-shelf report chock full of business school jargon may not be what’s needed to deal with a business decision in today’s economic climate.
My opinion is that as outfits like Alacra and Google roll out more reports generated by “smart” software, the pressure will mount on the azure chip consulting crowd. Already pressured from below by the likes of Gerson Lehrman Group and from above from the blue chip outfits like McKinsey & Co, the azure chip outfits will be like the cheese and salami in a Panini, feel heat and pressure from two places at once.
My thought is that canny business executives may want to check out services like Pulse, familiarize themselves with federating search systems, consider an industrial strength solution that operates in near real time, or just sign up for a pay as you consulting service from Gerson Lehrman. In short, do something other than buying the Cliff’s Notes for executives who are lazy like this addled goose. In short, the middle may be an uncomfortable place for self appointed experts, poobahs, and mavens writing reports about Chinese businesses using English language sources. Yep, Cliff’s Notes for Harried Executives?
Stephen E Arnold, March 3, 2010
No one paid me to write this. Since I mentioned myself as a lazy goose, I will report non paid writing to Fish & Wildlife, an outfit that does a stellar job scheduling rooms at national parts and monitoring the health of geese in the US.
EasyAsk: NLP, SQL, and MDX
February 25, 2010
A reader sent me a link to DataPrix’s write up about EasyAsk as a business intelligence tool. Now owned by Progress Software, EasyAsk has dropped off my radar. My recollection is that the system supported search, facets, and eCommerce. I did wonder why Endeca did not crack down on EasyAsk’s use of the phrase “guided navigation”, but I may have mixed up which marketer cooked up which phrase. I had pegged as a system for searching structured data. DataPrix’s article positions EasyAsk as a business intelligence tool. The screen shots show the system generating the type of output that I associate with companies such as Megaputer, based on math magic from Moscow-based wizards.
Source: http://www.dataprix.com/node/1068
EasyAsk supports reporting, analysis, and scorecards (dashboards). The user formulates a query and the EasyAsk system retrieves the data and generates an answer. The query can be expressed in natural language, so the EasyAsk approach obviates the need for a goose like me to create a well formed query against a properly formed cube.
The DataPrix write up suggests that EasyAsk can be used to perform search and retrieval plus the more sophisticated queries against large structured data sets. EasyAsk added support for mainstream databases years ago. EasyAsk can also generate a user’s query in MDX (multi dimensional expressions), a favorite of end users who majored in business and then jumped into sales.
DataPrix provided a link to a demonstration of the system with which I was not familiar. You can check it out at http://www.easyask.com/demo.html.
How does EasyAsk stack up against SAS and Megaputer? I don’t know the answer to that question. I quite like Megaputer. Those Russian math dudes are in the flow in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, February 25, 2010
Nope, nope. Not paid. I will report a failure to receive money for this article and its frisky reference to undergrads with degrees in business and extensive sales training. The agency to which I am reporting is the Census Bureau. No explanation needed.
Internet Metrics
February 24, 2010
One of my goslings submitted a write up about Internet Metrics. Here’s his item to me:
*The data came from Defensetech.org, a military.com site about “how technology is shaping how wars are fought, borders are protected, crooks are caught and individual rights are defined.”
In 2009, there were 90 trillion e-mails sent over the Internet with an estimated 81 percent being spam. There were over one trillion unique URLs in Google’s index. YouTube served over one billion videos per day, on average. There were over 47 million new Web sites added.
By the end of 2010, there will be over 1.9 billion Internet users worldwide. The volume of daily email will be greater than 100 billion messages per day. There will be over 3.3 billion cell phones users with Internet access. We sites will jump to more than 265 million. The number of blogs will hit 130 million.
Ignore that, if you can.
The challenges of the internet, its social networking implications and our fast-evolving digital world are more than shared by today’s marketers. They are also a first line of defense concern, as you can imagine. And like a run-away train, it will not be stopped.
That, my friends, is the world we live in. A little scary, isn’t it? But (and I have been waiting so very many years to use this poem that I was forced to memorize as a high school freshman), “If we buckle right in, with a bit of a grin… without any doubting or ‘quit-it. If we tackle this thing that can not be done… we’ll soon be able to say, ‘We did it!’“
So if you need impetus to ‘buckle right in,’ consider yourself pushed.
Jerry Constantino, February 24, 2010
ArnoldIT.com paid Mr. Constantino for his write up.
Twitter and Mining Tweets
February 21, 2010
I must admit. I get confused. There is Twitter, TWIT (a podcast network), TWIST (a podcast from another me-too outfit), and “tweets”. If I am confused, imagine the challenge for text processing and then analyzing short messages.
Without context, a brief text message can be opaque to someone my age; for example, “r u thr”. Other messages say one thing, “at the place, 5” and mean to an insider “Mary’s parents are out of town. The party is at Mary’s house at 5 pm.”
When I read “Twitter’s Plan to Analyze 100 Billion Tweets”, several thoughts struck me:
- What took so long?
- Twitter is venturing into some tricky computational thickets. Analyzing tweets (the word given to 140 character messages sent via Twitter and not to be confused with “twits”, members of the TWIT podcast network) is not easy.
- Non US law enforcement and intelligence professionals will be paying a bit more attention to the Twitter analyses because Twitter’s own outputs may be better, faster, and cheaper than setting up exotic tweet subsystems.
- Twitter makes clear that it has not analyzed its own data stream, which surprises me. I thought these young wizards were on top of data flows, not sitting back and just reacting to whatever happens.
According to the article, “Twitter is the nervous system of the Web.” This is a hypothetical, and I am not sure I buy that assertion. My view is that Google’s more diverse data flows are more useful. In fact, the metadata generated by observing flows within Buzz and Wave are potentially a leapfrog. Twitter is a bit like one of those Faith Popcorn-type of projects. Sniffing is different from getting the rare sirloin in a three star eatery in Lyon.
The write up points out that Twitter will use open source tools for the job. There are some juicy details of how Twitter will process the traffic.
A useful write up.
Stephen E Arnold, February 22, 2010
No one paid me to write this article. I will report non payment to the Department of Labor, where many are paid for every lick of work.
Global ETM Dives into Enterprise Search Intelligence
February 18, 2010
Stephen E Arnold has entered into an agreement with Global Enterprise Technology Management, an information and professional services company in the UK. Mr. Arnold has created a special focus page about enterprise search on the Global ETM Web site. The page is now available, and it features:
- A summary of the principal market sectors in enterprise search and content processing. More than a dozen sectors are identified. Each sector is plotted in a grid using Mr. Arnold’s Knowledge-Value Methodology. You can see at a glance which search sectors command higher and lower Knowledge Value to organizations. (Some of the Knowledge Value Methodology was described in Martin White’s and Stephen E. Arnold’s 2009 study Successful Enterprise Search Management.
- A table provides a brief description of each of the search market sectors and includes hot links to representative vendors with products and services for that respective market sector. More than 30 vendors are identified in this initial special focus page.
- The page includes a selected list of major trends in enterprise search and content processing.
Mr. Arnold will be adding content to this Web page on a weekly schedule.
Information about GlobalETM is available from the firm’s Web site.
Stuart Schram IV, February 18, 2010
I am paid by ArnoldIT.com, so this is a for-fee post.
Sinequa Cozies Up to Actuaries
February 10, 2010
Short honk: A happy quack to the team at Sinequa. The company landed a deal with the US benefits consulting outfit, Mercer. Chock full of actuaries, Mercer provides benefits-related services, an arcane area that baffles the addled goose. According to the information provided to Beyond Search,
Sinequa Enterprise Search will boost Mercer’s productivity, making employees more efficient by enabling them to quickly find relevant information and leverage intellectual capital across the organization. The initial phase of the project has been deployed in the UK, where Mercer has 3,000 employees and an intellectual capital alone consisting of more than 30 million documents. Mercer had previously implemented both desktop and intranet search solutions. However, these disparate search solutions fueled the need for a single unified enterprise search solution.
You can get more information about Sinequa at http://www.sinequa.com. An interview with the managing director of Sinequa is available in the Search Wizards Speak series.
Facebook Scores Another Gain
February 9, 2010
This Facebook site continues to surprise me. Addled geese do not have too many friends. Our SSN Blog has a Facebook presence, but the addled goose leaves that to a couple of talented goslings; namely, Lauren and Sam. When I read “Facebook Overtakes Google News as Media Site Traffic Driver”, I made a note to myself to ask Lauren and Sam, “What’s with this Facebook craziness?” Publishers have been chasing Google, and now it seems that the Web ecosystem has spawned a more problematic recycling of “real journalism”. Humans. The Google is anchored in numerical recipes. Facebook is anchored in humans. Big difference. In my view, it might prove more challenging to corral people than humans, but I could be wrong.
The most interesting comment in the article in my opinion was:
Facebook was the #4 source of visits to News and Media sites last week, after Google, Yahoo! and msn, according to Hitwise. Google News accounted for 1.39% of visits to News and Media websites, and Facebook accounted for 3.52%. That’s a big shift since last April, when they were about equal.
The article includes a nifty chart and it embeds in its white space this question, “How will publishers deal with a threat from people?” Some of these folks may be the progeny of publishers and real journalists. An issue of interest is this.
Stephen E Arnold, February 9, 2010
No one paid me to write this article. Sigh. I will report non payment to the Department of Commerce which is eager to jump start struggling businesses. Maybe there will be a government subsidy for addled geese.
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