Idiomax Translation Software
April 17, 2010
Document translation is not a cheap endeavor, but something that almost all organizations need to do at one time or another. IdiomaX has released a translation software package that is efficient and affordable; two things that are always a plus.
Their software suite consists of five products: IdiomaX Translator, IdiomaX Office Translator, IdiomaX E-Mail Translator, IdiomaX Web Translator, and IdiomaX Translation Assistant. All the products can translate in English, Spanish, French and Italian and is downloadable for only $149.95. Even better, they offer a mobile application so you are always prepared regardless of your location. The Nokia smartphone translator package can be downloaded for $59.95.
In specialized businesses, such as healthcare or information technology, there are complex terminologies that are often difficult to understand, even in your first language. The IdiomaX Translation Suite includes specialized medical and computing dictionaries to help navigate those waters as well.
Melody K. Smith, April 17, 2010
Note: Post was not sponsored.
DomainWhiz Identifies Potential Domain Names
April 17, 2010
Need a nifty domain name? You can try DomainWhiz.net’s new search utility. I learned about the system in “DomainWhiz Introduces Doman Name Search Tool.” The idea is that the system makes it easier to locate potential domain names. The write up said:
DomainWhiz’ domain name search technology is supported by Natural Language Processing technology that has the ability to generate alternative names that are either synonymous with or highly relevant to keywords entered by an end user. The technology goes one step further by checking the availability of each alternative name, and notes its availability, expiration date or whether it is up for sale. The service is available now in English and the alternative names that come up are SEO friendly.
You can give the system a test drive at http://domainwhiz.net/. When you locate a suitable name, a click on the “pricing” links sends you to GoDaddy.com.
DomainWhiz says:
DomainWhiz combines the power of machine learning techniques, large natural language databases, and manually crafted linguistic rules to search the vast space of Semantic Network and extract only those domains that the end user intends to search.
Applied Semantics (formerly Oingo) offered similar capabilities to licensees prior to the firm’s acquisition by Google. Other domain registrars offer similar functions; for example, Register.com. If my memory serves me, Oingo / Applied Semantics offered a similar service via its licensees before the company was gobbled by Google and lashed to advertising tasks.
Stephen E Arnold, April 17, 2010
An unsponsored post.
Do Flawed Decisions Flow from Research Methods?
April 16, 2010
“PRWeek/PR Newswire Media Survey Finds Digital Divide Between Journalists and Bloggers” presented some interesting data about online research. For me,the key points were expressed in this passage:
Among the total respondents, the use of blogs and social networks for research increased significantly in 2010 as compared to 2009. However this spike appears to be skewed by online magazine/news reporters and bloggers. While 91 percent of bloggers and 68 percent of online reporters “always” or “sometimes” use blogs for research, only 35 percent of newspaper and 38 percent of print magazine journalists followed suit. This divergence was also seen when using social networks for research. Overall, 33 percent of respondents indicated using such news sources, but 48 percent of bloggers used social networks, compared to just 31 percent of newspaper reporters and 27 percent of print magazine reporters.
What troubles me is that there seems to be little or no interest in traditional library research. Couple these data with the information in “Armed With Information, People Make Poor Choices, Study Finds” and the roots of some of the ungovernable situations may be poking through the cheerleading for “going digital”.
Stephen E Arnold, April 15, 2010
A freebie.
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.
Siri and Its Virtual Assistant
April 16, 2010
The idea of having our own personal assistant to handle all the mundane stuff in life sounds intriguing to most of us. No more flipping through yellow pages, making routine phone calls, or even searching on Google (gasp!) sounds like a fantasy land akin to The Jetsons. However, Siri International has released a new phone application that appears to do all those things and more. “Siri Launches Virtual Personal Assistant for iPhone 3GS” announces the release of their virtual personal assistant that with just a vocal prompt can purchase theatre tickets, call for a taxi or make restaurant reservations. Born out of SRI International’s CALO (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes) project, Siri utilizes advanced technologies to enable an intelligent, context-aware, question-and-answer interaction. The wide variety of Web services and APIs available allows Siri to get things done; things you no longer have to do yourself.
Melody K. Smith, April 16, 2010
Two Acquisitions: Divvyshot and Episodic
April 14, 2010
While on travel on Saturday, I read two separate news items about two competitors’ acquisitions. Facebook purchased a photo sharing outfit called Divvyshot. I had never heard of it. To my added goose eye, the Divvyshot service looks like Flickr with the requisite search and social functions that make venture capitalists drool. The service makes it easy to create a collection of images, which Divvyshot calls events. This is in line with the type of thinking I heard described years ago when a Microsoft researcher was explaining how people think about information; for example, the letter I received when I got engaged.” This is the “hook” approach to content organization.
The Google purchase delivered an outfit that is able to stream live video. YouTube.com has its own streaming video technology. Episodic is able to stream and it includes a package of services; that is, instead of an invention, Episodic has a more or less complete service, including a function that makes flash videos work on the Apple iPhone and presumably the iPad. See “Episodic Makes Flash Videos iPhone Friendly”.)
Several observations:
First, the Facebook acquisition goes into the guts of what Facebook users are now doing. Facebook is one of the largest photo repositories in the social media space. Divvyshot is likely to make existing customers happier because Facebook is not particularly good at certain types of content organization. The company is improving, but there are some constraints that madden users like me. The Google acquisition is more a product and people deal. Google can do specific inventions, but Episodic puts different things together in a reasonably coherent package.
Second, the Facebook deal is about addressing a “now” problem. The Google buy seems to be part of a build out strategy for rich media at Google. What strikes me is that Facebook is chugging along and taking steps to “me too” service functions available elsewhere just not within the Facebook walled garden. Google is trying to short cut product development. Which is the better strategy? I don’t know.
Third, both companies are buying as well as investing in their own technologies. Facebook is more of a tactical move. Google seems to be evidencing some impatience with its own line up of video inventions, products, and services. Is Google also buying staff in order to accelerate the company’s role in rich media.
I want to see how these two companies interact. Right now, Facebook seems less pressured in the rich media space that Google. Google, on the other hand, may find itself falling further behind leaders in rich media. Search and text advertising just may be losing their turbo charging capability. Quite a surprise if this assertion is accurate.
You can request a free sample chapter from Google Beyond Text, my new study of Google’s infrastructure, by navigating to http://www.theseed2020.com/gbt/. I explore rich media as an opportunity for Google to grow or for rich media to gum up the Google F 1 race car engine.
Stephen E Arnold, April 14, 2010
No one paid me to write this.
Arnold Column Added to Information Today
April 14, 2010
Stephen E. Arnold, an expert in search, content processing, and online systems, and author of “Google: The Digital Gutenberg” (Infonortics, 2009) and three other significant Google studies, will be writing a column for the information industry’s trade paper, Information Today.
The column will focus on new directions in search and content processing, and themes from “Successful Enterprise Search Marketing,” which Arnold co-authored with Martin White of Intranet Solutions.
“I want to document the rapid changes now taking place in the way users interact with search systems. The era of the desktop PC is ending and new devices with new form factors mean major changes in search and retrieval,” Arnold said. Arnold has worked in the search and content processing field for more than ten years. He also writes columns for the Smart Business Network, Information World Review, and KMWorld.
More information about Arnold and his strategic information consulting business is available at http://www.arnoldit.com/sitemap.html. He also supports two blogs: Beyond Search, http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/, focuses on next generation search issues, and the Strategic Social Networking Blog, http://www.SSNBlog.com, addresses trends and current events in social media for business. His Google studies are available at http://www.infonortics.com/publications/google/google-trilogy.html.
Jessica West Bratcher, April 14, 2010
Cpedia Previews the Future of Content Assembly
April 13, 2010
There are two services that anticipate some interesting future search methods. One company is Kosmix and the other is Cuil.com, the much maligned search service from Anna Patterson (former Googler) and Tom Costello (former IBMer). The folks behind Cuil.com have released Cpedia. According to GigaOM’s “Cuil Failed at Search, Now Fails to Copy Wikipedia”:
Cpedia launched last week with a blog post from Cuil co-founder and former IBM staffer Tom Costello, who described a meeting he had with Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy when Costello and his wife Anna Patterson (a former Googler) were trying to raise money for Cuil. Joy told Costello that people didn’t need a new search engine that just returned a list of results, they needed something that would write an article based on a search. A note on Cpedia topic pages reads: “We find everything on the Web about your topic, remove all the duplication and put the information on one page.”
I have documented a couple of Google patent documents that describe somewhat similar ideas, although the Google systems and methods are tailored to the Google platform’s specific requirements for scale, cross processing, and optimizing performance among Google’s many different “flavors” of servers.
My view of Cpedia is somewhat less harsh than this statement in the GigaOM publication:
Unfortunately, being new and different doesn’t necessarily mean that it is either good or useful. Other users who have tried it out describe it as “sentence after sentence of automated nonsense,” and Tumblr and Instapaper developer Marco Arment says that “if this feature is meant to become a serious product, I truly feel bad for them.”
My view is:
- Conceptual slicing and dicing is a particularly interesting content processing problem. The Cuil method does yield some unusual outputs but for topics like “Julius Caesar”, I found the results in line with outputs from other systems we have reviewed. One can argue that the Cuil method does not produce outputs in line with what a college educated person might assemble after scanning six or seven sources, but the Cpedia results were in the ballpark compared to some of the wackiness we have seen in the past
- The computational load for this type of processing is quite high. Our tests showed that for high frequency queries like prominent topics and major historical figures, results were displayed quickly.
- The inclusion of real time results struck me as one step in providing the much needed context for information pulled from Twitter and Facebook. Too often, real time items are disembodied and make little or no sense. Maybe the Cuil.com approach is not the perfect answer, but I find the inclusion of real time results within a content centric context an improvement over a Collecta box showing items in a stream. (See http://ssnblog.com for an example of the Collecta stream.)
Our tests of Cuil.com continue, and we find that the service has been improving. Cpedia keeps the ball rolling.
Stephen E Arnold, April 13, 2010
Unsponsored post.
IBM and Verizon Team for Search Storage
April 13, 2010
Short honk: I read “IBM and Verizon Look to Draw Large Enterprises to Cloud Data Backup—Search Storage” in File Recovery. The pairing strikes me as one more attempt by IBM to hit a home run in a market sector that is beginning to get some traction. The optimists say an economic recovery is underway. Those in some big companies may be somewhat more cautious. The cloud appears to offer some ways to slash costs, but the idea that a service from two giants like IBM and Verizon will save money strikes me as a proposition that needs some supporting facts. The “search storage” phrase puzzles me. Hosted search works in some situations and it doesn’t in others. More information needed, but the tie up is fascinating.
Stephen E Arnold, April 13, 2010
Nope, a news item written for no dough.
Google Snags Programmable Search Engine Patent
April 11, 2010
Short honk: The programmable search engine invention has been granted a US patent. Filed in august 2005 and published in February 2007, the PSE provides a glimpse of the Google’s systems and methods for performing sophisticated content processing. Dr. Ramanathan Guha, inventor of the PSE, has a deep interest in data management, the semantic Web and context tagging. You can download a copy of US7693830 from the USPTO. There were four other PSE patent applications published on the same day in February 2007, which is a testament to Dr. Guha’s ability to invent and write complex patent applications in a remarkable period of time. The PSE is quite important with elements of the invention visible in today’s Google shopping service, among others.
Stephen E Arnold, April 9, 2010
Unsponsored post.
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