FoxTrot Professional Search
April 17, 2010
CTM Development has released FoxTrot Professional Search 2.6, a 64-bit performance and feature-rich update to their popular document indexing and retrieval solution for Mac OS X. This release is perfect for anyone who works with files saved for future reference. As reported by macnn.com in “CTM Development Launches FoxTrot Professional Search 2.6” FoxTrot Professional Search helps locate documents and their contents using multiple categorizations of search results, ranked by relevance. This product is popular with legal (law firm and courts) and media (newsrooms researchers, ad agencies and editors) due to the precision tools it offers for finding content directly within PDF, HTML, word processing, e-mail and multimedia content and metadata. FoxTrot Professional Search 2.6 is compatible with Mac OS X 10.4.11 or later and is a free update for current licensed owners. More information is available from the CTMDev.com Web site.
Melody K. Smith, April 17, 2010
Note: Post was not sponsored.
A-Life NLP Renew Medical Automation Deal
April 17, 2010
A-Life Medical, Inc., a leading provider of computer-assisted coding (CAC) products and services to the healthcare industry, announced today the renewal of an extensive contract with Associated Billing Services, Inc. “Associated Billing Services Renews Extensive Agreement with A-Life Medical” The computerized coding and workflow management product that leverages A-Life’s proprietary and patented technology, LifeCode ® appears to be the source of reaping the cost-savings benefits and efficiencies key to a successful business.
According to Associated Billing Services’ vice president, Matthew Frick:
“We have built a long-standing relationship with A-Life based on the benefits of the company’s patented NLP technology. Its accuracy rate and ability to appropriately code quickly, seamlessly and efficiently, has helped us to significantly reduce turnaround time, labor costs and accounts receivable days of services outstanding.”
Using NLP technology, A-Life deciphers electronic transcribed patient encounters via the Internet through its data center, which are then appropriately coded for reimbursement purposes.
Melody K. Smith, April 17, 2010
Note: Post was not sponsored.
Wither Nervana?
April 16, 2010
I received a call about a company in the Seattle area. The firm is Nervana, founded in 2001, and if you are one of the lucky folks attending the Gilbane conference in San Francisco, you can hear a talk by Nervana’s founder, Nosa Omoigui. Nervana focused on semantics and natural language processing. My Overflight files has a meaty collection of information about this company’s technology. The firm received funding and ramped up its marketing in 2006. The firm pushed into the processing of health and medical content. Then the firm refocused its efforts on the processing of résumés. The firm’s Web site is online at www.nervana.com, but the news section has not been updated since November 2006. I continue to track the firm because Mr. Omoigui is involved with Youth for Technology Foundation which has a presence in Louisville, Kentucky.
What’s important about Nervana is that the company’s trajectory shows how a very bright entrepreneur in the field of content processing has positioned what is, in my opinion, a quite interesting technical system. The firm’s technology is anchored in “a unique technology that allows knowledge workers to ask questions naturally within the context of their meanings.” A LinkedIn description adds:
“Nervana, Inc. provides knowledge discovery solutions for companies. Its solutions enable knowledge based workers to find, correlate, and retrieve the information from repositories both inside and outside their enterprise. The company’s products include Drug Discovery that provides Medline, life sciences news, and life sciences Web content for research and development teams; Business Discovery, which offers Medline, life sciences news, general news, patents, and life sciences Web; IP Discovery that enables users to discover and retrieve information from the United States, European, Japanese, and other worldwide patents; and Premium Discovery for enterprise customers to manage their in-house information. It also offers project management, logistics, pre-configuration, onsite installation, informatics consulting, and documentation services. Nervana was founded in 2001 and is headquartered in Seattle, Washington.”
My notes show that one of the sources of funding is now involved in a company that seems to use the original Nervana logo. This firm is Dipiti. SeattlePI in February 2008 ran a story “Dipiti, a Search Engine for Message Boards.” Dipiti seems to have gone off line and now redirects to Hot Shopper.
What’s interesting is that the trajectory of Nervana shows that next generation content processing has huge potential. Management and investors tried a number of different markets. The other thought that struck me is the words and phrases used to describe the firm’s technology are as fresh today as they were in the firm’s marketing push in 2006. Next generation content processing evokes considerable market interest. Nervana, shortly before it repositioned, was named a “Hot 100” company and touted some major clients, including Procter & Gamble. (Lists of “hot” companies may not be valid indicators of a firm’s health in my opinion.)
This is an interesting case example of the challenges facing some types of technologies.
Stephen E Arnold, April 16, 2010
A freebie.
IBM and Open Source
April 16, 2010
The idea that IBM was an open source outfit struck me as silly when I first heard about its 2005 patent pledge. I enjoyed the excellent article “IBM Breaks the Taboo and Betrays Its Promise to the FOSS Community”. You will want to read Florian Mueller’s write up and make up your own mind. The information presented does not surprise me. IBM has big revenue and may be one of the “too big to fail” outfits. The company has shifted from software to consulting and it is now traveling well worn paths in its online ambitions, deals with telecommunication companies, and baloney about the economics of mainframes. This passage caught my attention:
This proves that IBM’s love for free and open source software ends where its business interests begin. In market segments where IBM has nothing to lose, open source comes in handy and the developer community is courted and cherished. In an area in which IBM generates massive revenues (an estimated $25 billion annually just on mainframe software sales!), any weapon will be brought into position against open source. Even patents, which represent to open source what nuclear arms are in the physical world.
I think open source is one of the important trends in play at this time. Companies have wrapped themselves in open source robes. Beneath the robes is the same old entity. Same motives. Same goals. Same belief that marketing can create a corporate reality. Well, maybe IBM is protecting its mainframe assets and still loves open source?
Stephen E Arnold, April 16, 2010
A freebie.
Operational Intelligence, the New Enterprise Search
April 14, 2010
Worlds are colliding. Business intelligence, search, analytics, and business process are hurtling toward one another. No collider is needed. The impetus comes from managers who are struggling to keep their firms above water. Make no mistake about it. The economic climate may be improving based on government data and the self serving reports from global financial powerhouses. But just look at the number of empty buildings, the fraying infrastructure, and the desperation in the eyes of most employees in North America.
For those lucky enough to be thriving in a world gone mad for sending ads to individuals, life may be good. For people who are in more traditional jobs, the notion of finding information is an everyday struggle. Without the right information at the moment it is needed, organizations can make costly mistakes. These are not errors of judgment like magazine publishers who see the iPad as the font of new revenue or the dew eyed MBA looking for a job with a third string consulting firm. Nope. These visages reflect the person who cannot explain to a customer why an order was lost or an automobile was delivered with a faulty electronic gizmo. In fact, I see the effects of downsizing, the need to squeeze extra money from every transaction, and crazy decisions made by committees everywhere I look, regardless of the country.
What’s the answer? According to a sponsored white paper from the consulting outfit IDC, Teradata has the fix. Now you may not think that even bigger piles of data will help your business. I admit that I don’t believe the premise either. You can get the story in “Real-Time Operational Intelligence Gains Momentum in Europe: Teradata-sponsored business survey shows adoption details for ‘Active Data Warehousing’” and make up your own mind. Big data means big costs in my experience.
What I liked about this write up was the phrase “real time operational intelligence”. True, the acronym RTOI is a bit clumsy, but I think the phrase points to an important shift in search and content processing. RTOI delivers what many of the people with whom I speak perceive enterprise search delivering. The idea is that the information in an organization is available when needed to help people answer questions and make decisions. Hopefully the decision makers did well in school and have a modicum of common sense.
After thinking about this phrase and the acronym RTOI, I had several thoughts:
- Vendors of enterprise search may want to make this phrase their own. It is a heck of lot more compelling than “putting information at your fingertips” or “dashboard”
- Search, in this phrase’s embrace, becomes an enabler. Search becomes like butter in a recipe. Without the ingredient the dish does not work. Many vendors of search see themselves as the fish, vegetables, and spices in the meal. RTOI makes search an essential but supporting ingredient.
- The conceptual outcome of RTOI may be consolidation of what now are marketed as separate systems. For RTOI to work, an organization needs an integrated approach. Data are not enough. The various features and functions of analytics, retrieval, report generation, and business processes must be woven together into one coherent, affordable system.
Is RTOT the future? I am willing to float a tentative, “Yes.” Fragmented information centric systems are now a cost and resource challenge for many organizations. The time is ripe for a new approach. Maybe it will be fueled by open source software like Lucene? Maybe it will be the use of a system like Google’s? Maybe it will be a roll up following the trajectory of Autonomy or OpenText.
The status quo is not delivering and change may be coming. Teradata may not be the winner, but it has contributed a useful catch phrase in my opinion. The phrase “enterprise search” could be put to rest which would be a step forward in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, April 14, 2010
Unsponsored post.
Autonomy Amps Social and Rich Media
April 14, 2010
At the National Association of Broadcasters conference, Autonomy announced enhancements to the Virage MediaBin platform. The latest version of MediaBin “automatically forms a conceptual understanding of all rich media assets located in any internal or external repository, including social media, blogs, and videos.” Autonomy’s “meaning based computing” makes sense out of non text content. The firm said:
Autonomy Virage’s solution overcomes these challenges by enabling businesses to automatically understand the value of all digital assets created both inside and outside an organization, and dynamically deliver the right content to the right customer, every time. At the core of Autonomy’s Virage MediaBin platform is the Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) which allows businesses to automate the processing of all rich media assets. IDOL forms a conceptual understanding that allows marketers to automatically tag and classify any rich media asset, regardless of format or language. Virage MediaBin applies this intelligence to deliver advanced analytics, automatic categorization, summarization, concept clouds, dynamic content associations, content hyperlinking and automation of business processes and workflow.
In addition, the new release:
provides enhanced innovations to “watch and listen” to video. The product automatically converts video to text and time synchronizes with a preview of the content. Video assets can be quickly and easily found with pinpoint accuracy to the exact location within a video where a word or phrase is spoken. This is dynamically associated with other critical digital assets.
You can get more information about MediaBin at www.autonomy.com/dam.
Stephen E Arnold, April 14, 2010
Unsponsored post.
Trade Association Defines Search Its Way
April 12, 2010
I don’t know much about the Technology Services Industry Association. Most associations serve the narrow requirements of a select membership. Some “associations” are not really associations. I learned that the outfit called the “National Association of Photoshop Professionals” is a company that owns an association, a magazine to which I subscribed once, and a string of expensive “how to” conferences. TSIA may be like the American Bar Association or it could be like the NAPP outfit.
What caught my attention was a news story that we snagged in the Overflight system. The headline was “TSIA’s “Intelligent Search Market Overview” Report Identifies Innovative Criteria for Search Technology Selection.”
Reports about members are bread-and-butter activities in some “associations.” I don’t have a problem with a member profile write up but I did stumble on this passage in the news story:
The following search specialists participated in the study: Attensity, Baynote, Clarabridge, Consona CRM, Coveo, InQuira, KANA, nGenera CIM, Q-go, and RightNow.
So what’s the big deal? Well, for the addled goose, this listing of companies as “search specialists” is one of the most egregious examples of confusing an enterprise procurement team I have encountered. Tossing in the word “intelligent” just plain flummoxed me.
Let’s look at this line up of “search specialists”.
First, there’s Attensity. This is a deep extraction content processing firm. Recently the company has moved from the intelligence market sector into advertising, sentiment analysis, and other markets. The company’s technology processes content and generates a range of outputs that can used to figure out whether email is positive or negative. The firm provides basic search functionality, but the company is a vendor that adds metadata to content objects. Those metadata can be manipulated in a number of ways. One of the uses is to locate documents tagged in a consistent manner by the Attensity system. This is impressive technology, but it is a component of search, not a search system along the lines of the Autonomy, Exalead, or Google offerings. This is an error of confusing the parts with the whole, and it is a serious logical flaw in the TSIA write up.
Second, there is Baynote. This is a company that offers a “recommendation engine.” Think of Baynote as a more robust, more configurable version of the Amazon system. The idea is that the firm’s technology can process information about a Web site visitor and then generate outputs that reveal intent and context. Again, this is powerful technology, but it is not search. Baynote supplements more comprehensive search-and-retrieval systems. Baynote is what it says it is, a recommendation engine. Why label it a search system? (I think it is to create a report for which inclusion was advertising and revenue perhaps?)
Third, Clarabridge is a company that, at one time, had some of the good old MicroStrategy DNA. The system can process the type of data collected in a traditional structured business intelligence system and perform additional functions. Instead of coding a report, a client can use the Clarabridge system to frame a Google-style query and get a report out. Recently Clarabridge has embraced the Attensity approach of pushing into customer support and other allied market sectors. There’s good business logic behind this shift, but Clarabridge is not a vendor of search-and-retrieval technology. In fact, one might need both Clarabridge and a more robust text processing system to get most users comfortable with the outputs in a business application. This is a repositioning of Clarabridge from business intelligence to a specific vertical application. Okay with me but misleading in my opini0on.
Consona CRM is just what the name says. Customer relationship management. The company includes a basic search system with its software, but the core competency of the company is in supporting a call center application. Try to extend the system over the full spectrum of potentially relevant content in an organization, and you will find the need to look for other bits and pieces. This is a naming error because CRM is not search. Search is a utility within CRM in my opinion.
Coveo is a vendor of search and content processing. Unlike the other firms, Coveo started with a search system and has now created a solution that fits into a customer support application. Coveo’s platform makes possible more than customer support. While it is important to explain how Coveo’s customer support solution delivers call center features, it is a disservice to Coveo to position the company narrowly.
InQuira is a company formed by fusing two other firms. The company has natural language processing technology which is sold as an engine for self-help systems. The firm can deliver a broader search solution, but I think of the company as a niche player in the customer support sector. I don’t think of InQuira in the same way I perceive the Microsoft Fast type of solution. In my experience, there are some interesting parallels in the trajectories of the two firms that merged to create InQuira and the fusion of Microsoft and Fast Search & Transfer. InQuira, therefore, is a search system but it is one that has been shaped to somewhat special purposes.
KANA is a help desk vendor. In a meeting with the firm years ago, I was told that KANA had state of the art search technology. The demo showed that a customer support rep could enter a product name and see information about that product from different repositories. This is indeed search. In my opinion, it was primitive but it worked. Since that demo, I have not considered KANA a search vendor. In fact, I have resisted KANA as a vendor of knowledge management solutions. The firm builds and maintains customer support system for a large number of companies. Some of these companies have multiple search and retrieval systems plus KANA.
nGenera says that it is a vendor with systems that power “the collaborative enterprise.” One function of some nGenera applications is search. Search is like the hubcap on a Hummer, and I am not sure that nGenera itself would describe the company a search vendor. The company says, “Our solutions combine strategic insight, onsite services and the most comprehensive suite of collaborative applications on the market.” I have no problem with nGenera, but I think that describing this firm’s products and services as “search” is just misleading.
Q-Go says that it delivers “relevant online answers, better customer service.” I suppose I could interpret this phrase as meaning enterprise search or an Intranet and Web combined search, but I think that would be a real stretch. The company, like others in this list, focuses on customer support. Search is one facet, but it is not the complete system the firm delivers. In fact, the company asserts, “Q-Go guarantees a six month return on investment. Not many search vendors can make this type of statement in my opinion.
RightNow, a TSIA silver partner, is a customer support platform vendor. The company has moved into cloud computing and includes a search and retrieval function in its products. As one of the leaders in call center and related functions, search is important, but RightNow is not a vendor of enterprise search solutions. Maybe the company is moving into this sector? I know that when I hear “RightNow”, I think of the company’s push for “customer experience.” In my files I had a clipping that addressed the function of indexing a Web site with RightNow. The answer in the 2007 item here was that the Web indexer was a separate component. But since 2007, I haven’t seen much about the RightNow search system in the enterprise. Labeling RightNow as a search vendor seems to be a stretch. In 2007, a change to an indexed article required an index rebuild to pick up the change. Not exactly what I prefer.
My view is that the term “search” is used as an umbrella to cover a report about customer support vendors. Some of the vendors deliver full service solutions with search as an after through. Some deliver a specific type of content processing. Some deliver a package search solution tailored to the needs of customer support.
It is confusing to me and probably some potential customers to slap the word “search” on these vendors. Perhaps the report would be more compelling if a more informative title and description were used? Perhaps some of the vendors are stretching their own capabilities to cover this lucrative market for reducing the cost of providing customer service?
Stephen E Arnold, April 12, 2010
A freebie.
MarkLogic and the American Institute of Physics
April 9, 2010
MarkLogic, fresh from nailing the University of Virginia account, reported that “American Institute of Physics Utilizes Mark Logic to Launch Publishing Platform.” MarkLogic Server is a software system that can give information-centric organizations a versatile tool for accessing, processing, and repurposing content. According to the write up:
the American Institute of Physics (AIP), a non-profit scholarly publisher, used MarkLogic Server to build its next-generation platform for hosting online publications, Scitation C3. AIP has moved its 12 archival journals to the MarkLogic-based Scitation C3 platform, which hosts 2,000,000 articles from more than 200 science-related publications.
The article continued:
… Scitation C3 features include full-article HTML rendering, improved visual presentation of inline math, and in-context links to references, figures, and tables. AIP now offers “Smart ToCs” that allow users to further customize listings with abstract previews and the ability to hide non-relevant content. AIP has also added more search options and controls to explore content based on article type, topic, author, keyword, PACS, journal, and publication year. In addition, researchers can find information faster by highlighting a term within an article to produce a list of related content.
For more information about Mark Logic, navigate to www.marklogic.com. I will be one of the participants in the upcoming Mark Logic User Conference. Information about that event is available at http://www.marklogic.com/UserConference2010/.
Stephen E Arnold, April 9, 2010
A freebie publicizing my participation in a user conference.
Index Engines Reveals Appliance Costs Savings
April 7, 2010
I am on the look out for information about metrics in enterprise search. I received the Index Engines’ newsletter “Index Engines Update April 2010”. The lead item “Did you know?” contained this set of statements:
Index Engines’ partner, Integreon, recently realized dramatic reduction of 75% cost and 50% time in processing an ESI collection project for their client. Read the white paper and learn how they processed a backup tape collection in 2005 using PowerControls and then again in 2009 using Index Engines. This paper compares the two technologies and presents the impressive cost and time savings.
I could not locate a link to see the access from the company’s Web site. Index Engines has a Web log, but it does not contain the same information that appears in the newsletter.
To get more detail, you can obtain a white paper here.
Stephen E Arnold, April 7, 2010
The post is not sponsored.
Akibot: Enterprise Microblogging with NLP
April 7, 2010
We received a question about Akibot, a stealth start up in private beta. We have not been able to use the system, but I wanted to snag what information I have in our Overflight system before I head to the airport. Fact is, we don’t know too much about this Twitter-influenced service.
Akibot is a company using smart software to generate business intelligence. The company’s Web site does not contain much information. Here’s the splash screen:
One phrase in “Collaboration with Akibot” provides a good summary of the company’s focus:
Akibot is the first semantic actionable micro-blogging platform for the enterprise. Akibot not only allows real-time group collaboration and awareness through short, instant messages (like a Twitter for the company), but it also understands those messages and, if applicable, takes action.
A July 2009 story in ReadWriteWeb, “Akibot: An Enterprise Twitter Clone Infused with AI” reported:
At first glance, Akibot may look very much like your typical Twitter clone, but it does something very different: it combines the collective intelligence provided by microblogging with an artificial intelligence engine that lets the service take action on the messages posted.
Overflight snared the Akibot Web log at http://akibot.blogspot.com/. The activity on the blog is modest with the most recent post appearing on February 11, 2010. The story “Yet Another New Version” pointed to an article about Akibot by Martin Bohringer, “Ubiquitous Microblogging”. He wrote:
The approach of ubiquitous microblogging has much to do with the search for enterprise use cases of microblogging and a rising number of researchers is thinking about this topic. Michael Rosemann from Queensland University of Technology described how microblogging could be used for business process management. Alexander Dreiling from SAP shows a prototype for collaborative modelling with Google Wave (is Wave microblogging? I am going to discuss this question in a future posting). But the other way round is also possible, as the guys from Akibot show with their microblogging bot using NLP (Natural Language Processing). And finally, our research group is currently involved in several microblogging projects including ‘microblogging for logistics’ (think of tweeting RFID chips). To implement a full ubiquitous microblogging scenario, still lots of work has to be done.
The question asked by Smarter Technology in July 2009 is difficult to answer: “Is there a business purpose for microblogging?” We won’t go beyond, “Stay tuned.”
Stephen E Arnold, April 7, 2010
A freebie.
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