Camelot to Go Viral
July 15, 2010
A Cambridge based search applications firm has been chosen by the John F Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum and the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation to help provide a search engine experience to go with the late president’s digitized archives.
Endeca Technologies has been hired to work on the project that will launch on January 20, 2011, which will be the 50th anniversary of the inauguration. The idea behind digitizing Camelot is to make the whole array of the JFK archives available to everyone from historians to schoolchildren.
Endeca’s information access solutions have long been helping people and business to explore, analyze, and understand information in a variety of different ways. Their solutions cover a wide variety of areas from retail to media and publishing.
Rob Starr, July 15, 2010
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Facebook Now a Springboard
July 14, 2010
Those us in the Internet marketing aren’t surprised, saw it coming, will all now stand in a line and scream ‘I told you so’ to all those who thought that the social media frenzy might have just been a fad.
According to an article in ReadWriteWeb.com, Gigya, a company that provides social optimization platforms for firms that want to take advantage of these new tools, Facebook is the most common jumping off point for people logging in to other sites from social media. The gap that was widening last January is getting bigger too. Presently Facebook accounts for 46 percent of logins from social media.
Strange how the real competition from Google is coming from social media and not Bing. Maybe it’s time real innovators start targeting that site for some competition since Facebook is the preferred starting point for surfing when it comes to social media.
Rob Starr, July 14, 2010
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Gvoernment Scrapping Sites: Are Traditional Web Methods Dead?
July 13, 2010
What more proof does the average consumer and business person need that the traditional website is antiquated and doesn’t generate the leads and traffic you need than the story in computing.co.uk that appeared recently about the government scrapping websites?
They plan on doing away with 75% of their more than 800 websites. The problems uncovered seem to be in three areas:
- Cost
- Usage
- Resource sharing
It’s clear that a better way is needed. A more cost efficient way to reach the people you want to. The Arnold IT way. Find everything that you need with social networking and the Beyond Search Team. Build your brand, generate leads and/or create a community.
When the UK government starts to worry websites aren’t working, something is wrong. When the government starts scrapping Web sites, is this a signal that new methods of communicating are needed? Is the Google era winding down?
Rob Starr, July 13, 2010
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Oui Oui to Dok Dok
July 13, 2010
It’s no surprise that email is the primary way business shares documents and personal users their information and the attachment is the modern envelope. The paradoxical problem with this method has been numbers and categorizing and there have always been many people working on streamlining this part of the Web experience.
As far as the flow of a typical business day is concerned the Holy Grail of embedded findability as far as attachments were concerned has centered around three areas:
- Verifying the most recent attachment because ( at least where business is concerned) there can be multiple ones from the same source
- Tracking the changes which makes sense where business is concerned
- Sharing changes with others
Those were the goals. And all had to be accomplished without interrupting the flow of a typical business day. This is a lucrative proposition if done right and the Canadians couldn’t ignore the possibilities with their answer called DokDok, which the Quebec firm says is an automatic way for their users to locate, update and share the most recent version of any email attachment.
The Montreal based start up was created in 2009 and they promise that DokDok is not anything like the file sharing applications that are trying to replace email. Of course one of the big questions that any prospects have here will be about security.
People want to know if DokDok will be reading their emails or at least have the ability to do so. To the firm’s credit the answer is no. DokDok only indexes metadata, none of the real content in the actual emails.
You don’t even need to give them your Google Apps password if security is your big issue. Still, nothing’s perfect and there are a few drawbacks to DokDok. It’s important to remember here that the new system works only with Gmail’s web interface and does not work with the standard Gmail account.
However, when they’re out of beta, the firm promises big changes.
It’s good to see that Google understands their services can use improving when a good idea comes along that helps to streamline a business day and increase productivity. That’s why it’s Oui Oui to DokDok.
Rob Starr, July 13, 2010
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Concept Searching Offers Taxonomy Management
July 13, 2010
SharePoint just got better thanks to Concept Searching. They’ve just announced the addition of a Distributed Taxonomy Management feature that will work within the conceptClassifier for SharePoint.
The experts all agree this is a good move, but one that should have been adopted by SharePoint as a foundation for their product. Nevertheless, it’s here now and will be a boon to companies with large document libraries and taxonomy needs.
Transparency for the end user is one of the special features of this application and a central server coordinates all the locking and unlocking of the nodes.
The whole idea that Concept Searching offers Taxonomy Management is of little surprise to an industry familiar with their work. When it comes to statistical metadata generation, this is the only classification software company in the world using concept extraction and compound term processing to provide access to information. The company founded in 2002.
Rob Starr, July 13, 2010
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Autonomy: A Real Success. CMSWatch: Maybe Another Real Miss?
July 12, 2010
In Harrod’s Creek, I can easily spot the real squirrel hunters. They have food. Mostly laconic, these hunters have a big pile of dead squirrels as proof of their competence. There is also the smell of fresh burgoo wafting from their log cabins. I can smell ability from my goose pond.
Lousy hunters have empty gun belts and squirrels shot when snacking on store bought food used to lure the critters. That’s a real danger — cheap tricks or just shooting wildly, often putting bird shot in an innocent’s backsides or the face like the 2006 incident between Vice President Dick Cheney and Texas lawyer Harry Whittington. Some faux hunters have just shot themselves in the foot. Ouch!
Azure chip consultants is a synonym for “bad hunter” in my opinion. Source: http://api.ning.com/files/LCP2NCaWo-ptCqGncB3hGsX8vuh8dnDzSJ0iLnkibas_/18holeinhandG.jpg
One of my two or three readers sent me a link to a write up called “Don’t Ogle Search If You Really Want Content Management”. In my opinion, the write up relies on insinuation, not facts. (I think that some folks are immune to facts, but I find facts useful.) In the article’s headline, the word “ogle”, for example, is one I don’t associate with information retrieval. (The publisher of this “ogle” opinion piece caught my attention in July 2008 with its similar assault on Attivio. My response to that misleading article is here.)
Yet another example of factless criticism of a vendor appears in this segment of the “ogle” write up about Autonomy, one of a very small number of search and content processing vendors with a consistent track record of technical breadth, sales, revenue, and profit:
From an initial focus on enterprise search tools, Autonomy has become a roll-up vendor after acquiring a variety of other information management suppliers such as Interwoven. As a financial strategy this can be successful, and investors seem to cotton to Autonomy. As a technology strategy, vendor roll-ups are problematic. Autonomy’s technology strategy is to rip legacy search subsystems from acquired products, replace them with some pieces from its own IDOL toolset, and then promote its particular approach to search as a distinct advantage for you. Specifically, Autonomy will try to sell you on the value of “meaning-based computing.” Even if you can get your mind around what meaning-based means, you should remain skeptical that Autonomy has technically spectacular or original services here. More importantly, you risk getting sidetracked from your original goal of, say, creating a user-friendly repository for your 50,000 Office documents.
These statements are presented without verifiable foundation to support the allegations in my opinion.
Autonomy is on track to hit $1.0 billion by the end of calendar 2010. The company has a proven track record of improving the performance of the companies it acquires. Autonomy’s management has demonstrated its ability to integrate quickly its acquired products with IDOL (the firm’s integrated data operating layer). The result is Autonomy’s knack of transforming the acquired companies’ position in their markets.
But there are other data that shed light on Autonomy’s track record, which I have documented Autonomy’s technology in my writings such as Beyond Search (Gilbane, 2009), the Enterprise Search Report (CMSWatch.com, 2004-2006), and Successful Enterprise Search Management (Galatea, 2009). Here are three points that must not be overlooked:
- Autonomy has 20,000 plus customers plus around 1,000 licensees of its technologies for use in other enterprise software and systems
- Autonomy has made intelligent acquisitions that has given the firm a strong presence in eDiscovery, rich media, and fraud detection. Autonomy has recently pushed into online marketing using capabilities from Ineterwoven and its IDOL framework. My research reveals that Autonomy has acquired companies to bring its technology to new markets so more content can be understood.
- Autonomy has grown its revenues and generated a profit, making it possible for other UK based technology companies to ride the Autonomy horse in the race for government and venture funding.
In December a year or so ago, at the International Online Conference, in my for-fee, end note debate, I challenged Andrew Kanter (Autonomy), Charlie Hull (Lemur Consulting), and Dr. Charles Oppenheim (Loughborough University) about their views of search, content processing, and related fields. In front of an audience of about 300 search professionals, I pointed out that key word search was dead. I pointed out that most search systems did not understand the meaning of processed information. Autonomy’s Andrew Kanter strongly and politely disagreed with me. As I recall, he said to the audience and me:
Autonomy IDOL is the only product in the market that can understand the meaning and concepts of all information in any language, including audio and video. This has big implications for the content management market as no other vendor can do this.
I demanded some concrete examples to support his position. Mr. Kanter without missing a beat gave me four concrete examples drawn from Autonomy’s work in intelligence, search enabled applications, fraud detection, and rich media.
What did I do?
Amateur Sleuthing: Looking behind an Email Address?
July 12, 2010
Short honk: I am not endorsing the method disclosed in “How To: Find the Person Behind an Email Address.” You may find the techniques useful. Enjoy being Dick Tracy. Don’t forget your wrist radio.
Stephen E Arnold, July 12, 2010
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Cyberthreats: Real or Disinformation?
July 12, 2010
A real case can be made for the fact the military is taking a page from 1984 and banging the drums of our fears. That according to Bruce Schneier in a recent column on the CNN Opinion page.
He makes a case the military and government are fighting a seesaw battle over all the hyperbole surrounding the misuse of the prefix ‘cyber’. Schneier provides a few convincing examples making us wonder if in the case of ‘cyber security’ Orwell was right.
The case is made terms like cyber Armageddon and cyber war are inflammatory and nothing to worry about . At least not right now. To quote the article. “ Words have meaning and metaphors matter.”
Can anyone else remember before the military was prompting us with cyber war and the agenda was being controlled, a time when another fine piece of writing warned us about the dangers of believing ‘War is Peace?’ and similar philosophies? Information or disinformation?
Rob Starr, July 12, 2010
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Autonomy, CA, and Enterprise Message Manager
July 12, 2010
Your weekly dose of Autonomy goodness follows:
Message Manager, the popular enterprise search engine, just boosted its capabilities when it was snapped up by Autonomy Corporation. Red Orbit announced this leap forward in a recent article, “Autonomy Announces Availability of Idol-Based CA Message Manager,” and showcased the ways IDOL, its meaning based search platform, will enhance Message Manager.
“The integration of Autonomy IDOL into Message Manager brings advanced automation to information governance tasks based on IDOL’s ability to understand the meaning of information,” the article says. “This significantly reduces the levels of manual effort for classifying, monitoring and managing large and growing volumes of data.”
In addition, current Message Manger users will receive an upgrade of sorts, including, “access to more than 400 connectors and over 1,000 file types, including text, audio and video.”
We see more and more mergers like this, which clearly points toward the growing power of searches.
Pat Roland, July 12, 2010
Freebie but the goose wants some stale bread for writing so much news about the Cambridge kids.
Germany Dings Facebook
July 11, 2010
Maybe Germany has lost its patience with American companies. First, the country failed to see the innocence of the Googlers who were suck down broadcast Wi Fi data. Now Facebook is in the barrel. “German Officials Launch Legal Action against Facebook” makes clear that German authorities are not amused by Facebook. For me, the key passage in the write up was:
“We consider the saving of data from third parties, in this context, to be against data privacy laws,” said Johannes Caspar, head of Hamburg’s Data Protection Authority. Mr Caspar said he had received a number of complaints from people who had not signed up to Facebook, but whose details had been added to the site by friends. He accused Facebook of saving private data of non-members without their permission, to be used for marketing purposes.
Fun loving Californians often find their Bay to Breakers enthusiasm inappropriate for some folks. Like Google, Facebook will have to deal with what probably looks like an annoyance from Silicon Valley.
Good Bullenbeisser. Good boy.
In my experience, German officials may demonstrate some of the characteristics of the Bullenbeisser. Under slung jaw. Tenacious grip. Single mindedness. Oh, stubborn. Sometimes mean. Probably indifferent to adults running naked in the California sun.
Stephen E Arnold, July 11, 2010
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