Google and Opera Renew Deal for Two More Years
September 6, 2012
Whatever traffic underdog browser Opera represents, it is enough that Google wants to hang onto the relationship. ZDNet announces, “Opera, Google Extend Search Deal for Two Years.” That would be the deal wherein Opera uses Google as its default search engine. The brief write up reveals:
“The deal will see a bevy of Google’s services promoted throughout Opera on both its desktop and mobile browsers. The deal will expire on August 1, 2014.
“The Norway-based browser maker said today its Q2 earnings showed sales were up by 32 percent to $52.1 million, up 32 percent year-on-year, beating analyst expectations by a mere few thousand dollars.
“Opera also said it has 200 million people using its mobile browser, an increase of 47 percent compared to the same quarter a year ago.”
I wonder how much of that growth has anything to do with the Googley association. It can’t be hurting, right? E-marketing firm Net Applications putsOpera‘s desktop market share at just 1.59 percent, but says that Opera Mini for mobile devices has captured a share of 9.32 percent.
Opera’s technology sprang from a 1994 research project undertaken with Telenor, Norway’s leading telecom. The following year, Opera Software ASA launched independently as a development company; it is still headquartered in Norway, but has spread to offices around the world. Opera aims to increase worldwide Web access by crafting a browser compatible with a myriad of platforms, operating systems, and embedded Internet products.
Cynthia Murrell, September 06, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Can Brainware and ISYS Search Get Lexmark Back on Track
September 5, 2012
I was surprised to learn that Lexmark in Lexington, Kentucky, was getting into the search and retrieval, content processing, and indexing business. I had a meeting at a Lexmark facility a couple of years ago, and I was struck by the absence of activity in what was and probably still is a very large building. The meeting was held in the “library” for one of the firm’s units. Quiet. Search was a challenge. I left the meeting wondering how the employees found repair data, training manuals, proposals, and technical reference information.
When I learned that in a short span of time in early 2012, Lexmark purchased Brainware. You may know that Brainware was originally a search vendor. The technology which worked the firm’s retrieval magic was based on trigrams or three letter sequences. The query terms were parsed into three letter groups. Documents with the query’s three letter groups were identified and rank order by trigram match. There are numerous technical details associated with the patented technology. The point is that Brainware got into back office processing and took off. The search and retrieval business supported the paper-to-digital-to-index business. Brainware landed some juicy accounts. I assumed that Oracle would acquire the company, but I was wide of the mark. Heck, I wasn’t even in the same county. You can get some details about the deal in the Brainware news release, “Lexmark Acquires Brainware.” To beef up Brainware’s back office capabilities, Lexmark also bought Nolij.
A few days later, Lexmark purchased the ISYS Search Software company. Like IBM’s magical repositioning of Vivisimo, Lexmark described ISYS as being more than search. Okay. According to the news release about the deal, ISYS’s technology dates from 1988. That works out to almost a quarter century. The ISYS technology will complement Lexmark’s Perceptive Software business. The idea is Perceptive will be better able to compete in process and content management solutions.
With the closing of the ink jet business, Lexmark is going to have to find a way to generate significant revenues from its search enabled applications and its search based businesses.
The question becomes, “Will Lexmark be able to generate significant revenue from search?”
In the annual report for 2005, Lexmark said:
Lexmark makes it easier for businesses and consumers to move information between the digital and paper worlds. Since its inception in 1991, Lexmark has become a leading developer, manufacturer and supplier of printing and imaging solutions for offices and homes. Lexmark’s products include laser printers, inkjet printers, multifunction devices, associated supplies, services and solutions. Lexmark develops and owns most of the technology for its laser and inkjet products and associated supplies, and that differentiates the company from many of its major competitors, including Hewlett-Packard, which purchases its laser engines and cartridges from third-party suppliers. Lexmark also sells dot matrix printers for printing single and multi-part forms by business users and develops, manufactures and markets a broad line of other office imaging products. The company operates in the office products industry. The company is primarily managed along business and consumer market segments.
With this shift, Lexmark is going in a different direction; that is, buying technology instead of developing it. The announcement that Lexmark was terminating more than 1,000 employees with about half located less than an hour from my goose pond in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky, was bad news in a state with lots of bad
How will that work out?
My view is that Lexmark is likely to experience some unwelcome surprises. As you may recall, Hewlett Packard was shocked at Autonomy’s performance once the company was on board. With the departure of a number of key Autonomy executives, including Mike Lynch, Hewlett Packard has become quiet about Autonomy. I assume that the massive write off of the EDS business is occupying the senior managers. Lexmark may be headed for some cost surprises; for example:
- Brainware incurs some labor costs with its back office sales. Oracle and other companies want to get into this “old fashioned” business, so the marketing costs are likely to go up. How much of a spike will be determined by the appetite of hospitals and other paper centric operations in a lousy economy and the uncontrollable actions of companies like Oracle.
- ISYS costs are likely to be a shock as well. ISYS is similar to Fast Search & Transfer, just older. As a result, the cost to keep the system current are likely to grow over time. The fancy new features like text mining are easy to talk about. To build out systems which can compete with services from Digital Reasoning and Quid is another level of investment entirely.
- Support costs in the search enable applications sector are tough to control. A major company may not tolerate a filtering call handled in India and then a wait for an engineer to get involved. Perhaps Lexmark will use ISYS for customer support?
But what could Lexmark do?
Printing is environmentally unacceptable to many people. In addition, a PDF file can be emailed more quickly and cheaply than sending a document via FedEx. With iPads in the hands of executives, a digital version of a document is good enough.
Like HP, Lexmark is going to have to work some marketing, cost control, and management miracles to get back on the growth path with generous margins. Is it too late for Lexmark to return to revenue glory in the Bluegrass State? Well, I am not willing to go out a limb. Let’s just watch.
Stephen E Arnold, September 5, 2012
Sponsored by Augmentext
Facebook and Its Management Challenge
September 5, 2012
In New York, I answered questions about the Facebook IPO. A week before the much ballyhooed event, some Wall Street mavens wanted information, including the insights of an ageing goose in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky.
I made three points:
First, Facebook would not go away, but our research indicated that buying Facebook was more prudent after the IPO and the almost inevitable fall in the share price. The hype about the social media revolution was fascinating, particularly to those who know little about the revolution’s fatigue factor.
Second, Facebook had to find a way to monetize its traffic. The ad thing echoes Google, so ads got the focus. However, to make ads work, Facebook had to do some work with search, tagging content, and then integrating search ads with other types of ads. Facebook has allowed some third parties to index the Facebook content, but on the whole, those systems are not widely used and the content presented is often fragmentary and confusing.
Third, Facebook has to kick the “we are Googley” style of management. Google-style management works because Google has tons of cash sloshing around. Outside of Google, Google-style management can be a problem. Example: AOL. Facebook has some management challenges. You can read about one in “David Ebersman, the Man behind Facebook’s IPO Debacle.” I don’t think Mr. Ebersman is the management problem. I think he is an executive who has the dubious honor of getting hooked to the problem. There are lots of Googlers at Facebook, including Sheryl Sandberg, among others.
In an IPO, there is no single person who is responsible. There is a herd of people, and they stampede. A running cow does not do too much thinking in my experience. The write up says:
Mr. Ebersman’s name, however, is mentioned only occasionally, usually in passing and typically only among Silicon Valley’s cognoscenti. And yet if there is one single individual more responsible than any other for the staggering mispricing of Facebook’s I.P.O., it is Mr. Ebersman. He signed off on the ever-increasing offer price, which ended up at $38 after the company had originally planned a price range of $29 to $34. He — almost alone — pushed to flood the market with 25 percent more shares than originally planned in the final days before the offering. And since then, as the point person for investors, he has done little to articulate how or why the company’s strategy will lift the stock price any time soon. At a time when investors are looking for some semblance of accountability on Wall Street and in corporate America, it is remarkable that nobody — no bankers, no one at Nasdaq, no one at Facebook — has been fired for botching the offering.
A scapegoat satisfies a human’s need for a fall guy. However, the responsibility of the Facebook IPO rests on the shoulders of many folks. The problem may be growing worse after a summer of inaction. The next four months will be fascinating to watch from my intellectual hollow in rural Kentucky.
Stephen E Arnold, September 4, 2012
Sponsored by Augmentext
For SharePoint 2013 Less Might be More
September 5, 2012
As the discussion continues surrounding the new features rolled out in SharePoint 2013, an interesting conversation is taking place. Many experts believe that SharePoint is drowning its users in too many options. Chris Wright at CMS Wire continues this conversation in his article, “SharePoint 2013 Needs Less Features, Not More.”
Wright begins:
SharePoint 2013 is packed with lots of new and exciting features.
Users can experience the revamped MySites, with FaceBook style activity feeds and the ability to ‘follow’ pretty much anything. Developers have ‘apps’ to get their teeth into, allowing them to create SharePoint components in pretty much any language they wish . . . The list of new features goes on and on . . . All of these new features are very exciting, but what do end users make of it all? Will they actually notice? Will they get a better experience? I’m not so sure.
Wright states that there are lots of things that SharePoint 2013 does well, yet wading through all the unnecessary options is daunting. For small to medium size organizations, it might be worthwhile to invest in a smart third party solution. Investing in something like Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise can intuitively customize your existing enterprise infrastructure in one swift motion, avoiding costly detailed customization.
Emily Rae Aldridge, September 5, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
Honk is Another Golden Egg for ArnoldIT
September 5, 2012
Indulge me, if you will, as I crow about our new Honk, a free, opt-in, targeted newsletter featuring online search and analytics from the editors of Beyond Search and Open Search News. The brainchild of our beloved leader, technology and financial analyst Stephen E. Arnold, Honk includes frank assessments of important trends in content processing and information retrieval. Sign up is available by e-mailing thehonk@yandex.com. Those requesting the weekly newsletter will receive, without charge, a copy of Stephen’s most recent insightful study, The New Landscape of Enterprise Search, published in 2011 by Pandia in Oslo, Norway.
Honk features original material about the online search industry not available in other ArnoldIT products and blogs, as well as six to eight stories with supporting data about the lead article’s topic. Honk accepts advertising directly related to the content included in the newsletter.
Note that Honk also serves as a demonstration project. The ArnoldIT team will provide turn-key email newsletter writing and distribution services to organizations that require a regular, professional presence. ArnoldIT provides strategic information services to organizations worldwide and is well-known for its search and analytics services, including Augmentext, a content marketing system developed by Mr. Arnold.
Stephen E. Arnold has racked up over thirty years of experience as a technology and financial analyst. In addition to “Google: The Digital Gutenberg,” he is the author of more than 50 journal articles and a number of other books, including “Internet 2000” and the first three editions of the 600-page encyclopedia of search called “The Enterprise Search Report.”
You can friend Honk and Stephen E. Arnold on Facebook here, or click this link to follow Honk on Twitter. I may be biased, but I find the newsletter to be most informative and entertaining. Don’t miss out on this valuable resource!
Cynthia Murrell,September 05, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
SharePoint Feels the Heat
September 4, 2012
I know there are quite a few companies who depend upon, integrate with, and otherwise cheerlead for Microsoft SharePoint. Heck, there are consultants a-plenty who tout their “expertise” with SharePoint. The problem is that some folks are not taking advantage of SharePoint’s glories. There are also some, if the data in “Most Popular Content Management Systems by Country” are accurate, who may never embrace SharePoint’s wonderfulness.
The write up appeared in W3Tech and makes clear that the top dog in content management is WordPress, followed by Joomla. Both of these are open source systems. The article asserts:
WordPress, as the most popular CMS overall, also dominates this picture. It is the number one system in most countries in North and South America, Europe and Oceania, many countries in Asia including Russia and India, and surprisingly few countries in Africa. Joomla dominates a fair number of countries in Africa, for example Algeria, Morocco and Nigeria, several countries in Central and South America, such as Venezuela, Ecuador and Cuba, two countries in Europe, Greece and Bosnia, as well as Afghanistan and a number of other countries in Asia.
Are SharePoint centric vendors ignoring the market shifts in content management and search?
So where is SharePoint popular? Where do companies like BA Insight, Concept Searching, dtSearch, Recommind, SurfRay, and dozens upon dozens of other SharePoint supporters need to focus their sales efforts? According to W3Techs:
SharePoint is the number one system in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar and Lebanon as well as on .mil sites, which again don’t show up as separate country in our chart.
And China? Bad news. W3Tech says:
Discuz is a Chinese system that dominates its home market with 49% market share, but is not so much used outside China.
Thank goodness for Skype and Webex. A sales call and conference visit in these countries can whack an expense budget.
Many stakeholders in search and content processing companies believe that SharePoint as a market will keep on growing and growing. That may indeed happen. However, SharePoint centric vendors are likely to find themselves forced to pivot. At this time, a couple of search and content processing vendors have begun the process. Many have not, and I think that as the cost of sales and marketing rises, investors will want to learn about “life after SharePoint.”
How quickly will this message disseminate? Paddling around in Harrod’s Creek, I think that some companies will continue to ride the SharePoint bandwagon. That’s okay, but the “sudden pivot” which Vivisimo is trying to pull off with its “big data” positioning can leave some people confused.
SharePoint has been a money machine for third parties and consultants for a long time. The history of SharePoint is rarely discussed. The focus is on making the system work. That approach was a money maker when there was strong cash flow and liberal credit. As organizations look for ways to cut costs, open source content management systems seem to be taking hold. We are now tracking these important market shifts in our new service Text Radar.
If the W3Tech data are incorrect, the SharePoint vendors with their assertions about smart algorithms and seamless integration will blast past Autonomy’s record search revenues of almost $1 billion. But most search vendors are not Autonomy and are likely to be mired in the $3 to $15 million range where the vast majority of search and content processing vendors dwell.
Could the future be open source and high value, for fee add ons that deliver a solid punch for licensees? We have analyzed the open source search and content processing sector for IDC, and open source as an alternative to SharePoint content management, content processing, and search may have some wind in its sales. How many SharePoint centric vendors will generate a hundred million in revenue this year? Perhaps zero?
Stephen E Arnold, September 4, 2012
Sponsored by Augmentext
Mindbreeze InSite Wins KMWorld Trendsetting Product Award
September 4, 2012
KMWorld has just announced the 2012 winners of their highly coveted Trendsetting Product Award and Mindbreeze yet again makes the prestigious list. The September 3rd press release begins:
Mindbreeze receives the prestigious KMWorld Award for Mindbreeze InSite. The ‘Trend-Setting Products 2012’ were selected from more than 700 entries. KMWorld is the leading magazine for Knowledge Management Systems and Content and Document Management in the US. Mindbreeze scored highly yet again with the KMWorld jury, receiving the prestigious KMWorld Award for Mindbreeze InSite. The “Trend-Setting Products 2012” were selected from more than 700 entries. KMWorld is the leading magazine for Knowledge Management Systems and Content and Document Management in the US. It is the fifth time in succession that Mindbreeze has won this award.
Mindbreeze has been awarded a KMWorld Trendsetting Product Award five years in a row. While Mindbreeze is grounded on the strength of its enterprise search offering, Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise, InSite meets a new niche as organizations realize the importance of their public facing Web sites. Bring the same intuitive search to your public facing Web presence that organizations have used for years to control their internal enterprise search. In doing so your organization will join the ranks of other InSite users who can measure how often content is searched for, therefore maximizing content to increase sales and customer satisfaction.
Emily Rae Aldridge, September 4, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
Swiftype Needs Engineers for Modern Site Search
September 4, 2012
Have you ever been frustrated by site searches? Do you happen to be a “full stack” engineer? Well, you just might be in luck because Swiftype recently posted a jobs ad on ycombinator.com in need of help for the development of a new site search to be used on a variety of sites. The Hacker News posting, Swiftype (YC W12) is hiring full-stack engineers to build better search software, claims their new software offers:
“An API and dashboard built with Rails 3, Rails Metal, MongoDB, Redis and Lucene. A high performance crawler capable of spidering millions of pages per hour. An easy-to-install search box with modern features like autocomplete. Search analytics and results re-ordering. An intelligent page-content analysis system for parsing websites automatically. Client libraries for Ruby, Python, PHP and jQuery. Horizontally scalable Infrastructure. A lot of happy customers.”
If you are in need of a job and think you might qualify for the position, check out the post. If it works smoothly the new site search should be a much-needed update to the many crummy site searches out there today. However, nothing is free and an update of this kind is not going to be cheap. How much will this puppy cost?
Edie Marie, September 04, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Ohloh Code Enhances Koders.com Search Technology
September 4, 2012
Big news from Black Duck brought to you by the goose pond: Ohloh has enhanced Koders.com.
Ohloh Code, a publicly available, free code search site, has made it possible for users to immediately browse the code of projects, search for particular methods, and see Ohloh commit and LOC information all in the same place. This is an improvement upon Koders.com, which lacked an automated way to let users add and update projects or view sources and parent projects. An announcement post made on Ohloh, “Ohloh + Code = Ohloh Code,” informs us of the changes:
“The Ohloh Code search database is populated and updated from a new, automated integration with Ohloh’s project list. We’ve rebuilt the code search engine (also available for private code search: Code Sight) as an upgrade from Koders.com. We’ve migrated the entire code base from .NET to Java (our team’s language of choice).[…]
To sum up…
Ohloh (ohloh.net) + Ohloh Code (code.ohloh.net) = our vision to create the most comprehensive and free resource for developers to find and explore open source projects and code.”
We think code searchers will be pleased with Ohloh Code’s results and the enhanced technology. Kudos to the team for integrating more languages, filtering and faceting search results, including preservation of the underscore in search results, and enhancing scalability for indexing and searching. Head on over to Ohloh to learn about more of the changes.
Andrea Hayden, September 04, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Financial Services Staff Addition at Attivio Predicts Growth
September 4, 2012
An exciting staff addition at Attivio has been announced which, according to the company, will better help its banking, insurance, credit, and investment customers address financial data problems.
Attivio, a leading unified information access software provider, has named Julio Gomez, founder of Gomez Inc., the new General Manager of Financial Services. A recent article from the The Business Journals, “Attivio Appoints Julio Gomez as GM of Financial Services,” tells us more about the company’s addition. In his new role, Gomez will work with global financial institutions to extend the company’s customer base and develop the company’s technology and financial solutions.
In the article, Gomez comments on his new role:
“Having experienced the challenges of capturing, managing and deriving insight and value from the varied forms of enterprise data, I could not be more excited to play a key role in expanding Attivio’s presence in the market. Financial institutions crave elegant solutions to prickly data problems that come up in every major initiative, from cloud computing, to big data to customer experience management. Attivio offers the level of sophistication and flexibility necessary for the highly complex, demanding and large-scale data environments in this industry.”
The article also reveals that Gomez was ranked in Time Magazine’s “Fifty Most Important People Shaping Technology” and Institutional Investor’s “Fifty Most Influential People on Wall Street.” We predict the experience Gomez brings will contribute to the continued growth of Attivio, improving customer satisfaction and investment performance.
Andrea Hayden, September 04, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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