Microsoft Bing Brings in the PR SWAT Team
July 30, 2012
Apparently a SWAT Team is just what the doctor ordered in the case of Microsoft’s consumer initiatives.
Microsoft is calling upon former Clinton advisor and PR maven Mark Penn to lead a “SWAT Team” focused on consumer initiatives and developing strategic development and branding to meet consumers’ changing needs. The first target of the team will be Microsoft’s search engine, Bing.
A recent article on ReadWriteWeb, “Microsoft Assembling “SWAT Team” to Boost Bing,” tells us more about Microsoft’s decision and Penn’s focus in the company. The article reports:
“‘Mark has an incredible background in research, demographics, marketing and positioning and a proven history in developing unique insights that drive success,’ [Microsoft CEO Steve] Ballmer said in a statement. ‘With a strong set of products and an exciting pipeline for the next year, Mark’s experience and out-of-the-box thinking will help us more effectively reach new consumers and grow market share.’
Despite Microsoft’s best efforts, Bing is still holding steady at second in popularity to search king Google. Searching has become synonymous with “Googling,” and Penn has his work cut out for him. I wonder if someone in Microsoft management used a decision engine to answer the question, “How do we catch Google in search?” Perhaps Penn will be the answer.
Andrea Hayden, July 30, 2012
Sponsored by IKANOW
Autonomy Founder Surfaces
July 30, 2012
By now we should all be familiar with HP’s purchase of big data company Autonomy that occurred last year. Some of us have also been following what HP seems to be planning for its property. But what about Autonomy’s founder? What has he been up to since the lucrative deal went through? Business Insider reports, “Looks Like Autonomy Founder Mike Lynch Will Become a Big-Shot London VC.” Writer Julie Bort tells us:
“Mike Lynch, the British founder of big-data company Autonomy is about to fire up a tech venture fund in London, Bloomberg reports. . . .
“Autonomy’s founder and CEO Mike Lynch joined HP at [the time of the acquisition]. But in May, during the company’s last quarterly earnings call, current CEO Meg Whitman said that Autonomy’s sales had been ‘disappointing’ and that Lynch was leaving HP.
“We haven’t heard much about Lynch since.”
Bort notes that, long before HP, Lynch was named Britain’s first software billionaire in 2000. The life of a technology venture capitalist seems like a natural extension of that title, she observes.
Autonomy was founded in 1996, with technology that evolved from research originally performed at Cambridge University. The company maintains dual headquarters in Cambridge, UK, and San Francisco, with satellite offices worldwide.
Cynthia Murrell, July 30, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
A View from Mindbreeze Management
July 30, 2012
KM World highlights the leadership of Daniel Fallman as managing director of Austrian based Fabasoft Mindbreeze in, “Mindbreeze, Daniel Fallmann Managing Director: View From the Top.” KM World is a respected authority in content, document, and knowledge management as well as all things enterprise.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze has been making headway in the American enterprise market, having already made a name for itself in European sectors.
Fallman highlights some of his company’s latest news in the above KM World piece:
The aim of Mindbreeze is to ensure the maximum possible reduction of manual effort in delivering pinpoint accurate information to the user-eliminating the search process to be replaced with an instant finding experience. Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite is a Cloud service that delegates the searching to an invisible dynamic background process-via semantics and information pairing. The user is simply presented with relevant knowledge. Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise consolidates data from enterprise and Cloud sources. The aim of providing an unprecedented level of information is fulfilled by hybrid scenarios that combine enterprise and Cloud information stores.
For SharePoint users who are hesitate about the upcoming 2013 migration, consider a smart third party solution like Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise. Instead of spending time on advanced customization, and money on developers to do just that, invest in an efficient and intuitive enterprise option.
Emily Rae Aldridge, July 30, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Integware Offers New Solutions for More Industries
July 30, 2012
The medical industry has long benefitted from data management solutions and Integware has long provided some of the leading solutions. Now, the company is branching out to other industries as explained in the Melodika article, “Integware, the Leader in Deploying PLM Services and Solutions for the Medical Device Industry, Today”.
The article explains how the latest software will benefit many industries including manufacturing:
“Integware’s GxP solutions and services have been deployed in some of the largest manufacturing companies in the world. These solutions enable compliance with regulations, decrease time-to-market with a focus on ROI and efficiency, and reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).”
Chris Kay, CEO of Integware, was quoted as saying
“Customers don’t want to adopt another technology or install another piece of software that helps them solve a single problem; they want to transform the way they do business by having traceability between all key product-related processes. Our customers want to increase their margins, while at the same time improving speed, quality, and compliance…”
Integware is not alone in trying to create more efficient PLM solutions for non-traditional industries. Inforbix, another leader in the field, works well with almost any industry because of their devotion to new data management solutions. Through their solutions employees can save time and eliminate duplication of files all while finding, reusing and sharing data with ease.
Catherine Lamsfuss, July 30, 2012
Search for Year One Tweets
July 30, 2012
TechCrunch recently reported on the launch of a new Twitter search engine founded by Kellan Elliott McCrea in the article “OldTweets Reveals Twitter Founders’ First Tweets, And Yours Too (Wow They Were Boring.”
According the article, OldTweets is a tool allows users to access the 20,000,000 tweets from Twitter’s first year up and running from 2006 to 2007.
After poking fun of Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, the article states:
“What does OldTweets tell us? Well, mainly that we were super-dull people on Twitter at first. (Maybe we still are, but have lost our sense of self-awareness?). Yes, we were tweeting the mundane details of our lives back then. As TechCrunch blogger-turned-VC MG Siegler notes of the early tweets, ‘my god they were boring.’ (One of his first, appropriately: ‘writing a blog post.’)”
Lucky for us, after SXSW 2007, the rate of tweeting across the United States increased dramatically and so too did the creativity of the content.
Jasmine Ashton, July 30, 2012
Sponsored by IKANOW
Insight Into the Future of Search
July 30, 2012
As technology progresses, we are becoming more and more reliant on our mobile devices, really the apps on those devices, to get the job done. Nir Eyal of the Nir & Far behavior engineering blog recently published an article that breaks down the way modern apps are being developed, called “Stop Building Apps and Start Building Behaviors.”
According to the article, app developers are currently using interaction design and psychology to create products that will work with your brain in mind. There are three qualities that modern apps need in order to achieve this: be a feature, build it easier, and make it a habit.
When explaining the importance of building a simple yet engaging app, Eyal looks into the future:
“The next wave in mobile computing will move beyond the phone. Several companies are anticipating a world where users wear devices to make difficult behaviors much easier.LumoBack, a company now money on Kickstarter, has built a new way to improve users’ posture. [Disclosure: LumoBack co-founder Charles Wang is a close friend.] A device, worn like a belt around the waste, sends data to an avatar named Lumo on the user’s phone. When he or she slouches, so does Lumo, providing immediate, actionable feedback.”
So, the future of app development really has very little to do with designing overly ornate apps that meet your every need, but rather focusing on simplicity and elegance.
Jasmine Ashton, July 30, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Does the Wealth of Google Presage Stagnation?
July 29, 2012
Is Google’s cash a fat spare tire for management? That seems to be the view of a prominent entrepreneur who recently debated the issue with Google’s Eric Schmidt, as revealed in reason’s “Is Google’s Cash Pile a Sign of the End of Technological Progress? Peter Thiel Says Yes.”
Thiel is famous for co-founding PayPal, investing very early in Facebook, and avidly supporting Libertarian candidates and ideals. His small-government stance was evident in his discussion with Schmidt, in which he insisted that government has “basically outlawed everything having to do with the world of stuff, and the only thing you’re allowed to do is in the world of bits.” Therefore, he insists, Google has nothing new it can invest in because everything except what it has already perfected is illegal. Huh?
Thiel goes on:
“The intellectually honest thing to do would be to say that Google is no longer a technology company, that is it basically ?? it’s a search engine. The search technology was developed a decade ago. It is a bet that there will be no one else who will come up with a better search technology. So, you invest in Google, because you’re betting against technological innovation in search. And it’s like a bank that generates enormous cash flows every year, but you can’t issue a dividend, because the day you take that $30 billion and send it back to people you’re admitting that you’re no longer a technology company.”
Um. . . yeah. Blogger Brian Doherty seems as dissatisfied with this logic as I am, and thinks Schmidt did a poor job at refuting Thiel’s argument. Since he doesn’t reproduce Schmidt’s response, I can’t evaluate that conclusion. However, I think the holes in Thiel’s argument speak for themselves.
Cynthia Murrell, July 29, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Oracle Text Makes Search Scores Adjustable
July 29, 2012
Oracle Text Search lets you sort search result by score according to IT Newscast’s
article, “Adjusting the Score on Oracle Text search results.”
They explain the process in laymen’s terms as:
“In theory, the more relevant the search term is to the document, the higher ranked Score it should receive. But in practice, the relevancy score can seem somewhat of a mystery. It’s not entirely clear how it ranks the importance of some documents over others based on the search term. And often times, once a word appears a certain number of times within a document, the Score simply maxes out at 100 and the top results can be difficult to discern from one another.”
To index, search and analyze text both in the Oracle database and on the web, Oracle Text uses standard SQL. This software is capable of utilizing keyword search, context queries, Boolean operations, mixed thematic queries, HTML/XML and more.
It can also perform linguistic analysis and support multiple languages with their advanced relevance ranking technology. There are additional features available for those who need even more advanced search methods like clustering and classification.
Oracle has been a leader in database software for more than three and a half decades. Their knowledge on adjusting search results should not come as a shock. Oracle is one company that will probably remain on top with enterprise grade applications and platform services.
Jennifer Shockley, July 29, 2012
Google Versus Bing
July 28, 2012
In the battle between Google and Bing, who will come out on top? Makeuseof presents, “Infographic: Can Bing Knock Out the Champ?” The site’s managing editor Mark O’Neill acknowledges that Google is currently way, way ahead of the game, but that:
“. . .one search engine, despite operating at a loss, is making themselves a continual irritant, and an obstacle to Google’s aim of total Internet domination. That search engine is of course Microsoft’s Bing.
“The constant attempts to one-up each other means that they are constantly innovating, and that is good for the end user (that’s you by the way). But with all the changes that occur on both sites, which search engine is actually the best?”
To help readers answer that question, O’Neill presents a well-organized infographic. We are not sure what this data ultimately means, but someone put a great deal of work into this comparison of Bing and Google. For example, it shows each system’s market share growth (along with Yahoo‘s) over the last three years. The graphic also presents side-by-side lists of other sites whose embedded searches are powered by each of the two platforms.
Though it does not offer any conclusions, this source is a good place to turn if you are curious about some of the stats behind the struggle.
Cynthia Murrell, July 28, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Too Many Cooks in the SharePoint Kitchen
July 27, 2012
Bjorn Furuknap brings us another irreverent look at the world of SharePoint, this time focusing on the quantity of SharePoint developers. In Furuknap’s SharePoint Corner, he brings us this entry, “How Many SharePoint Developers Are There Really?”
In its publicity for its purchase of Yammer, Microsoft boasts of how many developers they have building on SharePoint.
Furuknap states:
What’s very odd, though, is that Microsoft claims there are 700,000 ‘developers building on the platform’. With these numbers, that means that for every SharePoint customer, there are over 10 developers. Read that again: For every SharePoint customer, there are more than 10 developers . . . It can mean one of two things: 1) There are far too many developers out there and a lot of them are unemployed. Good for businesses, if true. 2) SharePoint is a platform so complex that you need to pay, on average, ten people to do nothing but develop on SharePoint. Bad for SharePoint, if true.
Let’s go with the idea that SharePoint may be too complex for its own good. What is to be done? Most organizations cannot afford a herd of developers to customize SharePoint into a usable infrastructure. For organizations in that situation we recommend exploring a smart third party solution like Fabasoft Mindbreee Enterprise. Working as a standalone solution, or in conjunction with an existing SharePoint infrastructure, Fabasoft Mindbreeze not only streamlines your enterprise needs, but also integrates the rest of your electronic data repositories via Connectors.
Do not let the complexities of SharePoint bankrupt your IT department. See a high return on your investment by choosing Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
Emily Rae Aldridge, July 27, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
