Musings on Information Understanding

Powerset Factz

2008-06-10T16:03:00.000-07:00

Although I've now left Inxight to join Mu-Gahat (a leading manufacturer of RFID and gaming technologies), I came across an email today mentioning Powerset Factz, which are aggregated from across Wikipedia articles to summarize a topic. When you click a word in Factz, Powerset will show you the sentence it was derived from.

So I tried a few Mu-Gahat-related queries.

For example, the query on Powerset "who invented RFID?" resulted in no Factz, but did inform me that "In 1946 Léon Theremin invented an espionage tool for the Soviet Union which retransmitted incident radio waves with audio information." So not entirely bad.

A query on "playing card" resulted in these Factz:
beat: record.
flip: card.
show: suits.
depict: figures.

Hmm. Not very useful.

However, I then tried a search on everyone's favorite -- Steve Jobs. Jackpot! Over 123 Factz generated including:

introduced: iPod, service, Mac OS X, AirPort, ibook, QuickTime TV, device, iMac, powerbook, suffix, Apple II, generation, mini, computer, duo, iPhone, MacBook Air, application, GarageBand, Macs, original, and Macintosh.
founded: Apple, company, NeXT, Apple Computer, Pixar, markets, and Apple Inc.
announced: music, iPhone, Safari, iPhone, change, widgets, ski, Fi, App Store, charge, device, Developer Transition Kits, plans, partnership, Halo, deal, models, and computer.

So I think this technology shows some promise, but still has a long way to go (introduced suffix? Is that a new OS? )

Oh, and just for fun, I tried one more:

Who is the mole?

Alas, Powerset has not yet developed Poweset Psychicz. Maybe next year.

Welcome Back!

2007-09-27T15:09:00.000-07:00

Welcome back from your summer vacation and welcome back to my blog.

Today's thought is short:

Yahoo!'s mission is to connect people to their passions, their communities and the world's knowledge.
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Business Objects' mission is to transform the way the world works through intelligent information.

Business Objects is the leader in organizing structured information (and, now, with the acquisition of Inxight, becoming capable of organizing text as well). Their new On Demand service? A nice complement to either Google or Yahoo's offerings.

Ergo, Yahoo or Google should merge with Business Objects?

Discuss!

(The views expressed in this blog are my own and not that of my employer)

Searching for A Living?

2007-06-14T14:31:00.000-07:00

I've been doing a lot of searches lately, looking for information and new companies involved in a wide variety of topics (social networking, entity extraction, content policing, business intelligence, etc etc).

Maybe I should go work for Mahalo.

Random Thoughts Again

2007-06-11T14:37:00.000-07:00

1. First off, I was wrong about salesforce.com and google. I guess they were being coy because the announcement they were about to make was so boring.

2. Mark Andreessen makes an excellent point about Microsoft hiring for logic puzzle ability:

For example, a classic Microsoft interview question was: "Why is a manhole cover round?"
The right answer, of course, is, "Who cares? Are we in the manhole business?"

I had a similar experience interviewing at Google, where the question was something about fitting a 2-mile long runway into a city where you'd been told you could only have one mile to put it in. My first response was to figure out why the city would only give me that much, whether there were alternate spots in the city to explore, etc. Then, once they got frustrated with that line, I started thinking up silly ideas like putting the whole runway underground or building an elaborate 'in the sky' structure.

I'm not sure if they didn't hire me because of that non-engineering answer, the fact that the Palm Pilot ("does one thing well") at the time was my favorite product (It was only in an interview several months later that Marissa revealed the correct answer was "swiss army knife"), or the fact that I didn't have a PhD in engineering.

3. My final random thought: The "Attention Crash" gets the attention of Valleywag, Mark Andreessen, and Steve Rubel. "We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing." Oh, so true.

Blogging Peter Norvig's Talk

2007-05-31T16:25:00.000-07:00

I've never done a live blog report before, so I thought I'd try my hand at it. However, I'm not going to do one of those transcript blogs where I try to write down everything that's said, I'll just try to capture what I think is interesting.

I'd first like to point out that the Google conference music is far cooler than the music at the salesforce.com conference .

Poor Peter ended up violating one of Guy Kawasaki's first rules of speaking - try to speak in a tiny room so that the crowd feels more intense. People have started trickling home already, so the crowd is lighter than one would expect.

"Why do you want to go to Google?"
"That's where the data is"

The rise of probability models
Percentage of ACL Papers with statistical/probablistic concepts in the title:
1979: 0%
1989: 6%
2006: 55%

Size of training corpus is far more important than the algorithm applied. Duh.

The LDC corpus contains about 100 gigabytes of speech -- but the internet contains about 100 trillion words (10^14). Google's LDC N-gram corpus contains 1,024,908,267,229 tokens and 95,119,665,584 sentences. It's for sale in a lovely 7 CD set. As I've always said, if anyone is going to make machine learning work for extraction, it'll be Google.

I wonder if one could identify potential terrorists using Google sets...Hmm. A set that starts out with only Osama bin Laden as the root identifies "US Presidential Candidates", "Bill Clinton", "George W. Bush", "Taliban Islamic Movement", "Ayman Al Zawahiri", "Terrorism", "John Gotti", "War", and... "Bob Hope". (When given two names, say, Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri, it did a much better job)

Interesting comparison of most commonly occuring unique terms in particular categories (such as "drugs") vs. most common queries in that category. There is a huge mismatch.

Many things he has spoken about before -- statistical machine translation, human NLP techniques vs machine learning, etc. On machine translation, Chinese is one of the hardest, which is borne out by the ACE test results I've seen. He gave an example showing how incredibly hard translating Chinese is, especially because you need to take into account complex word sequences.

He discussed all kinds of technical nuances and tricks in terms of bit representations, lexical co-occurrence representations, etc. They did a series of experiments that showed that truncating words at 7-8 characters is almost as good as true stemming. Truncating at 4 characters is actually better than true stemming at capturing meaning. (?!?) That's going to bother me for awhile.

He also discussed that better models would be based both on the writer and the searcher and the interaction between the two. (Of course, Google and the other search engines have the advantage of seeing both.) But he didn't go into this in any more depth than that.

Lots of interesting questions. One of the most interesting for me personally was around whether Google was investigating predictive analytics in terms of, say, "reading" financial information and being able to predict future stock performance. The answer Peter gave was "no", which either means he's being secretive or that Google has missed a really interesting and cool application of technology. This seems to point up that in "organizing the world's information" Google is still not really organizing all of the world's information.

They also were asked about their current focus on organizing and analyzing textual information. Peter indicated that one of their future forays will be in image analysis, both in photo and video, now that they have a huge library of those to work from in doing machine-generated image analysis.

Someone asked if there were plans to produce an open Google API that webmasters could use to automatically stop comment spam. Peter said no, but said he found the idea highly intriguing. So do I; sounds like an interesting viral marketing method "Comments protected by an anti-spam filter powered by XYZ".

Another question was around Google's efforts to measure true user satisfaction - IE, while they can understand whether result #3 got more clickthroughs than result #1, they have no real way of knowing if when I click on result #1, did I really like it when I got there? He said they tried having a Google toolbar that would let you rate the results, but people in general only give rankings when they don't like a result, so that wasn't very useful.

Everything Old is New Again

2007-05-31T15:39:00.000-07:00

Mahalo launched its alpha this week.

"Mahalo is the world's first human-powered search engine."

Uh, isn't this how Yahoo started?

I'm beginning to feel old.

Google Developer Day

2007-05-31T15:09:00.000-07:00

I'm at Google Developer Day and have a few random thoughts thus far:

I never knew there were so many people that were so passionate about maps and mapping technologies.

Between today and last week's salesforce.com developer's conference, I've learned that all the "hard" problems to solve of yesteryear should no longer be hard problems -- between the two vendors, good tools now exist for creating offline access, creating and testing mashups online, building AJAX user interfaces, creating hosted applications, and so forth.

Google's sense of design and branding still rock. Is it a coincidence that both Google and Apple believe in the power of a clean white background?

Sergey Brin is still weird. His talk was mostly about how the internet is making babies that now are creating the internet. "Mosaic started in '93, the first dating sites 2 years later. So the first babies from connections made on those dating sites are now 12 -- old enough to create mashups." Uh, yeah.

Is "Wonder Boy" more or less authoritative than "Sr. Director of Product Management"? And in what contexts?

No matter where I go, I can't avoid running into at least one Inxight partner.

And, the most poignant thing I've taken away thus far?

"Mapplets" is a really fun word to say.

I'm looking forward to Peter Norvig's talk later today.

A Retraction...

2007-05-22T16:36:00.000-07:00

After a few weeks of consideration, I've decided that Business Objects has the best marketing -- ever!

And this has nothing to do with the fact that they've just announced their intent to acquire the company at which I work (Inxight).

Seriously, the marriage should be worthwhile for both companies. I've been touting for awhile the notion that in order to truly organize the world's information, you need both structured data and unstructured data. In order to truly have business intelligence, you can't just look at numbers; otherwise, you'd just have a lot of computers sitting in offices as opposed to highly paid executives. (Hmm...)

If we posit that text analytics (Inxight) organizes the world's unstructured information, and that traditional business intelligence (BOBJ) organizes the world's structured information, what challenge does that open?

Making it accessible and useful.

I'll be thinking about this for awhile. I probably won't be blogging about it for awhile, to prevent revealing information I'm not going to be able to share.

Bring it on!

Salesforce.com and Google?

2007-05-21T16:24:00.000-07:00

Everyone's heard the rumours by now about salesforce.com and google. Although some have surmised some sort of deeper "partnership", Mark Benioff appeared positively giddy at the salesforce.com developer's conference today.

All signals to me point to an out-and-out merger. Combine the largest infrastucture in the world (google) with a world-class applications development environment (Salesforce) with a large quantity of "the world's information" (salesforce) with aspirations to create a wholly scalable hosted database (google and Salesforce) and you open up a whole host of possibilities for both companies that neither could do quite as well on their own.

The question is - will salesforce's search functionality still suck?

A Day In the Information Life

2007-05-21T15:25:00.000-07:00

I thought it might be fun to document a typical day in my information life. Some details have been changed to protect the innocent.

Original goals for today:

Dress appropriately for the weather. Accomplished.
Find a mid-length, A-line, floral cotton lawn skirt. Not accomplished.
Figure out what the heck is going on today with strategic initiative X. Accomplished, I think.
Reorganize files to make it easier to find things – both for myself and others. Accomplished, I hope.
Follow up on two big contracts-in-progress. Accomplished.
Attend BOBJ webex presentation to gather info. Half-accomplished. I got interrupted and have to go visit the site to view an archived version tomorrow, when it’s been posted.
Book hotel and airfare for SLA trip to Denver. Accomplished.

I walked in to overhear our lawyer talking about some problem with distribution that was causing an issue with a contract. I spoke to him and followed up in person with two people, got some information, and walked around and updated two more people. Along the way, I found out more information about the status of the contracts.

Since the weather is turning warmer for the last two days, I’ve been looking for a mid-length, A-line, floral cotton lawn skirt. Whenever an email comes in to my Yahoo mail account advertising some sale on clothing, I’ve been checking out the site looking forone. As a note, I have never purchased beachwear, formal wear, sleepwear or casual shoes online, so it drives me nuts to see ads on these things. There’s no good way to shop across sites for clothing items I need – Froogle, eBates, nothing works for this. It’s very frustrating. Measure of success: Find whatever clothing item is of interest to me (summer skirts in the spring, sweaters/wool skirts/boots in the fall) and present it to me so I can order and receive!

Interested in keeping tabs on product announcements, M&A activity, customer wins, and executive job changes involving our competitors and the company that is rumored to be buying us. Also interested in learning about new companies entering our space (unstructured data management). Today, I get this information through Google News and Blog alerts – keywords with names of our competitors and also the phrases “entity extraction” and “unstructured data management”. Sometimes if information is new and exciting, I email it to our “market watch” and/or “exec staff” mailing lists through Outlook. Today I visited the google blog, google enterprise blog, and google tech blog. Nothing of interest there.

I visited the ClearForest site yesterday to see if I could learn more about the Reuters acquisition. (I have a standing Google alert for ClearForest). I also did a google Blogs search, since I don’t have the blogs set to search (I should fix that).

I also comb through sites of our competitors sometimes to see if they have new product data sheets, webinars, white papers, etc. This is tedious, and I’m lucky if I remember to do it once every few weeks, when I have spare time. Some I have on a “page watch” from SD Awareness Server. If I find a new one, I download it, read it, and file it on pubshare for others to see.

Sometimes I annotate them using Adobe Acrobat Pro before I save them. Same for analyst reports of interest (which I generally get forwarded to me from our PR person, who has the analyst login information)

Want to know what accounts our sales team is working on most frenetically, pipeline status, etc. I check this through salesforce.com. Sometimes I cross check salesforce when I get a news alert on an “unstructured data” company – to see if we’re already calling on them or not. When I find an overlap, I email the appropriate salesperson.

In response to a late-night email sent by our CEO, I had to do a call with three execs today. One of them was in the office, the other two weren’t. I could find one guy’s cell but not his home number in Outlook, so I called his cell and then he gave me his home number. The other guy had to give me an alternate land line number, which I wrote on a sticky note. I took notes on that call in my paper notebook, then emailed a summary to them. Later, I had a physical meeting with two other people about it, took more notes in my notebook, and emailed the others about the discussion later. I also worked on revising a presentation related to this area and emailed that presentation to the execs. In a related development, I then visited the Basis, Teragram, Attensity, and ClearForest sites to see if they have offerings for this initative. I copied and pasted the relevant information into an email and sent out.

As another followup, I needed to know what verticals/applications each of their stage 2-5 accounts were in. Some of them were already in salesforce, but for a lot, I had to copy and paste the name of the company into Google, find the company website, and read what they were involved in. I put this information into an excel spreadsheet I was putting together (I had exported the original info from salesforce), but I didn’t actually enter it into the right fields in salesforce; would have taken too long to do that. Wouldn’t it be nice if somehow that field would auto-populate based on the “about” information on their website or something.

I visited expedia to check on airfares to Denver and then booked my flight directly through United.com (after checking out iflyswa.com. I thought maybe Southwest would be cheaper, but no) I then went back to expedia to look up hotels, found a few, went to Trip Advisor to read reviews on them, and then booked a hotel directly with Fairfield Inns. Back to expedia again to check rental car rates, ended up booking directly on Avis.com. This sort of pattern happens every time I plan a trip, usually once or twice a month.

There are a bunch of mails flying into my Outlook today with people complaining about a listserv that I am on being newly “membership restricted”. I should really set an auto-delete on these today, since I keep deleting them without reading them, but I’m too lazy to set that up.

I also spent a lot of time today reorganizing my files in an attempt to make them easier to find. All Inxight-related artwork in one folder, all data sheet source files in another, all presentations in a third. I started out organizing things by topic, but I find more and more that I tend to think of things in terms of filetype first, then topic. Too bad no search engine I have does a good job of finding things. Outlook search is hopeless, and for some reason my Google Desktop search won’t find emails newer than last November. I played around with Koral desktop for awhile; I thought it might be cool, but now that they’ve been bought by salesforce, I’m less enthusiastic. Plus, the free version didn’t have auto-tagging, I had to manually tag. I also reorganized the same fileset on pubshare, making sure to duplicate a lot of stuff on my hard drive that no one else has access to.

I listen to Pandora every day, which recommends new music to me on-the-fly based on what I thumbs-up or down.

I evaluated the UI of an application we’re developing (got a notice in my outlook of its location). Then wrote down my comments in outlook and emailed them to the lead engineer and lead PM.

I also read on Guy Kawasaki’s blog about a new book by Seth Godin about “The Dip”, so I had to go to Amazon.com to buy that. Guy also wrote about a presentation contest on Slideshare.net. I had to go check out the winners, and after seeing the techniques they used, went into powerpoint and reworked my whole presentation to be more “cool” looking.

Oh, and our DirecTivo went belly up last night, so I helped the spousal unit look up error codes. He ended up buying a refurb unit from weaknees. He was going to buy from eBay (where I have standing searches for Disneyland memorabilia, James Foley poetry, and other silly things), but it would have taken too long for the auction to close and then get delivery.

Every day, I go to mercurynews.com to read three comics: Dilbert, For Better or For Worse, and Luann. I visit uexpress.com to read Dear Abby most days, and “Focus on the Family” once a week. I also stumbled on an ethics column there I think I will read every week as well.

I visited MSNBC.com to check up on the latest news. This augments my Google news headlines gadget that I have on my iGoogle page. Although I also have a weather gadget, since my home machine doesn’t auto-login, I don’t use it at night to check the weather. I go to weather.com every night if the weather seems unsettled (ie, not in the middle of summer, but most other times), so I can pick out what clothes I want to wear the next day.

Interesting factoid – I almost never use bookmarks. I either type from memory or use Google to find something again.

I needed to find out how long it would take my mother-in-law to drive from her house to mine, since she was supposed to be at my house at 6 and when I called her at 5:30 she hadn’t left yet. Google maps told me I had nothing to worry about.

My husband IM’d me using Yahoo about car repairs he had done today.

I got a Yahoo IM from a former colleague today asking me if I was free for lunch; I checked my Outlook calendar and I wasn’t, so we scheduled a follow-up phone call instead. It reminded me that I hadn’t checked out his blog in awhile, so I checked it out. Then that reminded me of another blog I hadn’t looked at in a while (Mark Logic CEO blog), so I went and looked at that. Then I read Valleywag, learned about yet another search engine company, and went to go look at their beta site as well as looking at Techcrunch, which was also mentioned in the article.

Later that day, the colleague called me and we chatted for about 40 minutes about a book he’d given me to read and about future opportunities. I took notes in my paper notebook.

I got a Yahoo mail instant alert that an email had come in (I get these alerts every time an email comes in). I glanced at it, saw that it was from my older son’s school, and clicked on it to read it. The email was about participating in a parade that Saturday, so I IM’d my husband to remind me to ask them if they wanted to participate.

Every Thursday, I get a Yahoo email from the public library telling me what library books are due on Saturday. They also alert me when a book I have on hold (which I have to reserve directly thru their website) comes in.

Whew!

iSyndicate Lives! (Sort of)

2007-05-18T14:19:00.000-07:00

I was surprised today to discover Mochila.

Mochila is an online content marketplace for publishers, editors, creators and advertisers. Designed to be first to market, Mochila leverages the power of the Internet to facilitate the acquisition and sale of high quality content that includes articles, photography and soon video and audio.

First to market?

From 1998 (courtesy of the Wayback machine): "iSyndicate is the Internet's first true content marketplace."

Everything old is new again.

iGoogle

2007-05-09T15:46:00.000-07:00

Customizing my iGoogle page has become a little too much fun these days. I finally switched from my fox tea house topper to the Google seasonal topper, since I think I've seen everything the fox does a dozen times over.

I've got news from too many sources (BBC, SFGate, CNN, Mountain View Voice), a daily reminder of what happened on this day in history, an earthquake watch, the daily weather (in case I can't look out my window), Bay Area traffic, a daily devotional, links to my gmail...

The portal is back, baby!

BOBJ and Random Thoughts

2007-05-04T11:05:00.000-07:00

Business Objects now posts on its site a new tile (Guess they must have taken note of Valleywag). However, I'm still not sure Light is contagious is quite right either (achoo!) Why not just put the tagline (Let There Be Light) on the tile and leave it at that?

As a follow-up to yesterday's comment of mine (the BOBJ globe should assemble from facets), I stumbled on this today. So I guess that's already been done by someone else.

I decided my goal for the day would be to find out what firm was responsible for BOBJ's new image. In discovering that Eleven Inc did "Think Liquid", I can see a lot of parallels between the campaigns (and not just in Marge's participation in both). I'll let you know if I find out!

By the way, why pay for expensive consultants or marketing classes when you can get everything you need to know about brand identity in a one-minute snippet?

Mickey and Minnie now feature animatronic heads. I'm having a debate with a friend on whether it's pre-synched to the vocal track or whether the performer controls them. They seem to move their hands (thumb and forefinger) in sync with the mouth, so maybe it's controlled by the performer? It's very, very cool, but a little unnerving.

My next holy grail of search is having my search engine check the weather, note that it's trending warmer, and go out and discover the perfect cotton lawn a-line skirt for me.

The rumour is going around again that Microsoft is looking at Yahoo! Googlezon 2015 just gets closer and closer to reality...

What is Business Objects Smoking?

2007-05-03T15:51:00.000-07:00

Business Objects' recent efforts to enliven their brand are laudable. While it is rather Dilbert-esque to say "we're not a business intelligence company -- we're in the business of making companies more intelligent", I get what they're saying. I'm sure Marge "Think Liquid" Breya had an uphill battle internally. It's always hard transforming a technology company into a "real" company.

But I'd have to turn in my marketing hat if I didn't point out several things could use some refinement.

First off, when I saw the new website, the first thing that came to my mind is exactly what Valleywag said a day later -- "No Light. No Vision" is not the first thing you want people to associate your brand with.

Also, what's up with the logo's "ball and circa-1999 swoosh" combination? And why does the ball have facets anyway? If you're going to do that, at least animate the facets coming together to make up the whole -- don't just fly the ball in. Have the guts to lose the old swoosh. Lose the ball. And then you have a classic (albeit boring) logo. Then you can start over again.

For a really cool modern logo and marketing, I like Silverlight.

PS - For a fun drinking game, try taking a shot every time someone in the BOBJ video says "bold". Note to companies everywhere: If you have to say you're bold, you're not. And, honestly, I think only we marketing people would "notice the thin line, the spectrum". At least the camera doesn't dodge all around like in those 1990's "edgy" videos.

Book Notes

2007-04-03T13:13:00.000-07:00

I've been reading three books simultaneously: Intelligence Analysis by Robert M. Clark, The Geek Gap by Bill Pfleging and Minda Zetlin, and Whose Bible Is It? by Jaroslav Pelikan.

All three touch on information understanding -- Intelligence Analysis focuses on new ways our intelligence community can better share informaiton, The Geek Gap focuses on the gaps in communication between "geeks" and "suits", and Whose Bible Is It? focuses on how the Bible has changed through translation and technology.

But today, I'm focusing on an element of The Geek Gap that struck me as I read it at lunch today.

The Geek Gap reminded me that creators of technology see their "product" as art, laboriously created with love in an intricate process. For those of us tasked with sometimes killing (or changing) products for business reasons, it can often seem inscrutable as to why engineers take these changes so seriously. But when you look at the lines of code as carefully placed brushstrokes, it becomes even more imperative to make sure that what you have asked the engineer to paint is what you really want. And it's equally imperative to specify the audience, mood, and subject of the portrait, but then to trust the artist (engineer) to create in the order s/he sees fit, and to shape the brushstrokes in their own ways.

I can't tell you how many product managers I have seen who insist that, in effect, the face be painted first, then the arms, then the background, and who insist on micromanaging the engineering team as to whether this exact shade of red is the right one. One needs to trust in the artist (engineer) to do what will fullfill your original specification and that the picture will come out all right in the end.

What we, as product managers must do, is to help the engineer by explaining our audience. "We need a portrait of a young lady, completed by the end of the year. It will go in an elegant salon frequented by all ages, from children to grandmothers. We want people to see how gentle the lady is, and we want them to come away from viewing the portrait feeling happy and calm. There is another portrait in the room which is primarily painted in shades of blue. You can see a picture of that portrait here. We've also found out that most of the people who will be looking at the painting have a distinct dislike of Picasso. They find his work jarring and unharmonious."

Just as in painting, you shouldn't switch painters around midstream (imagine Picasso being asked to complete a piece by Raphael! Both very good painters, but you won't get the results you expected). You shouldn't complain in the middle of the project that you don't like blondes, or that now you think an old man should be the subject. And you shouldn't hang out every day fretting that a particular shadow looks off, or that the background looks muddy. Wait, trust, and see what happens.

Musings on 8 Years of Information Understanding

2007-03-29T10:23:00.000-07:00

This week marks my 4th year with Inxight. I was mulling this thought over, and then I got nostalgic and went to look at our old iSyndicate ad.

After years of working to help people connect chips to boards, the last 8 years of my work life been devoted to connecting people with information.

At iSyndicate, it was all about hooking up individual content creators with a market for their content -- and hooking up website owners with the content their viewers wanted to read.

At Kovair, it was about hooking up strategic account managers with information about what was going on within their accounts -- who was talking with whom, what the latest news was, etc.

At Butterfly, it was all about teaching administrators about security threats. Our product not only blocked incoming threats, but was the first one designed to educate the administrator about the history and nature of the threat.

And at Inxight, it's all about a computer "reading" and automatically tagging content so that you can find what you're looking for more effectively -- helping to hook up content creators with markets, account managers with information about their accounts, administrators with information...

Sometimes I worry that what I have been doing isn't noble enough -- that I should be trying to design a better electric car, figuring out a way to save the polar bears, or fighting global terrorism.

But sophisticated dissemination of information on a global scale is what sets us apart from all others. By helping others share information effectively, maybe I will help other bright people design a better electric car, save the polar bears, stop a terrorist in his tracks.

En arche en ho logos, kai ho logos en pros ton theon, kai theos en ho logos.
"In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God." (John 1:1).

Oracle vs. SAP

2007-03-23T11:10:00.000-07:00

Dave Kellogg, CEO of MarkLogic, generally writes an interesting blog. A couple of days ago, he wrote about a recent Oracle-SAP suit that reads like an exciting crime novel. Check it out!

Would GOOG ever buy BOBJ?

2007-03-21T16:13:00.000-07:00

The Oracle-Hyperion purchase has sent the world into a tizzy about the remaining players (BOBJ and Cognos). While both IBM and HP have been proposed as potential buyers, I can't help but wonder... Would Google ever buy its way into this market?

Think about it. You're not really doing "Business Intelligence" unless you take all information into account -- not just the sales figures and the inventory levels, but the information trapped in emails, analyst and news reports, and blogs like this one. And you're not really "organizing the world's information" if all you're doing is manually OneBoxing your way into the world of structured data.

Think of a Google Analytics/Crystal Decisions Mashup for getting graphical views of related actions - not just your website traffic, but how that traffic translated into regional sales.
Think of having a BOBJ report being automatically suggested as you're putting together a presentation about inventory levels in Japan.
Think of expanding Google Apps to go beyond email, word processing and spreadsheets – encompassing SaaS business intelligence applications.

With Google's NIH policy, it's unlikely.

But FAST is already tiptoeing around this by saying it's moving into BI from the aspect of search. Google could totally own this if they ever decided they were about more than just advertising.

I'm just sayin'...

Locator Beacons

2007-02-20T11:18:00.000-08:00

In reading this NYT article about Mountain Locator Beacons making a difference on Mt. Hood, the question nags: Why aren't Personal Locator Beacons getting more mainstream press right now? For $500 retail, people like James Kim, Kelly James, and Jim Grey might have survived. (OK, so Jim's not necessarily dead... we all hope he's whooping it up in Mexico somewhere)

I don't own one myself yet, but since we're starting to do more adventurous travel, I'm thinking about buying one and keeping it in our SUV... just in case.

(As a side note, I am sure conspiracy theorists are trying to figure out why 3 prominent "James" variants have perished lately. I wonder if the popularity of the name as a baby name is crashing...)

Two Random Recommendations

2007-02-15T22:28:00.000-08:00

Quite possibly one of the funniest videos to come out of SNL since the last "Falconer" episode: http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=1852107168

On a non-related note, I read a book called "Not A Box" the other day. It's advertised as a kids' book, but it should resonate with anyone who's had an insanely great vision for their business that goes beyond the surface view.

Google TV is a reality

2007-02-15T09:42:00.000-08:00

Everyone knows about the Google TV hoax. But Google is, indeed, getting into television.

Software Engineer, Television Technology - Mountain View
Multiple positions available in Mountain View, CA.
Television remains the single most important source of information and entertainment for billions of people around the world. We are hiring Software Engineers to bring Google technology to this vital medium worldwide. Requirements include:

Experience designing, developing, and deploying either applications for high-volume consumer devices (mobile, TV, or games) or distributed server systems that support millions of clients.
Experience with emerging TV standards such as DVB, MHP, OCAP and DOCSIS would be an advantage, as would direct experience deploying applications with cable or telecommunications partners across the world.
Knowledge of the end-to-end television broadcast, cable, satellite, or IPTV infrastructure would be useful, as would experience of TV set-top box operating systems and middleware solutions.
Experience with user interface development for content-rich applications and digital video technology in embedded systems a plus.

This all makes sense when you realize Google already owns three of the major time-wasters in the world: Blogger, YouTube, and Google.com.

Be a Mind-Sticker

2007-02-14T09:49:00.000-08:00

All advertising, even business-to-business advertising, preys on four basic principles:

Fear of losing (desire to win).
Fear of not being rich (desire to be rich)
Fear of not being attractive to your gender of choice (desire to be attractive).
Fear of the world falling apart (desire to make the world a better place).

On that note, the efffect of advertising on people's body images has been in the news a lot lately. But it's nothing new. Check out this Tab ad if you don't believe me.

More happy?

2007-02-12T15:11:00.000-08:00

Although the execution of this Pepsi ad is a little menacing as opposed to "fun", it tries to give the same "I'd like to buy the world a Coke" warm fuzzies. The world would be a lot better if we'd launch beach balls instead of bombs.

As for the second ad in the series... I have to admit, I've had days like this in San Francisco. But I'm not sure "More happy" is how I'd describe the experience.

Four Days, No Internet

2007-02-09T15:09:00.000-08:00

Just got back from four days up in a cabin in the Sierras. No TV, no internet - just me, my family, and lots of snow. I highly recommend such an experience for any "plugged in" person.

Oh, no! We broke the Earth! (snif)

2007-02-02T14:33:00.000-08:00

You know that feeling you get when you break your favorite toy and you just know there's probably no way it will ever be the same again?

The world's leading climate scientists said today in a UN Report that global warming has begun, is over 90% likely caused by man, and will be unstoppable for centuries, no matter how much humans control their pollution. Our global temperature could increase as much as 11 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100....with more droughts, floods, and hurricanes on the way, and many popular sites completely covered by water.

Guilt, guilt, guilt. My Audi S4 will be a lot less fun to drive home today...

Waiting for Dino...

2007-02-02T11:20:00.000-08:00

Pleo is being delayed again.

Its eyes are being redone to look as realistic and life-like as possible.
The skin is being refined. Features that are currently painted on will be replaced with sculpted details that will give the impression of muscle tissue under the skin.
The number of sounds Pleo can make is being expanded.
The speaker is upgraded to make Pleo's voice much more realistic.
A chin sensor is being added so scratching Pleo under the chin gets a fun, playful reaction.

As a product manager, I have to wonder... Is he an insane perfectionist or just on a quest to create more buzz? There comes a time when you just have to let version 1.0 out the door.

Welcome Pleo!

2007-02-01T13:15:00.000-08:00

Well, we're only two days away from the official Pleo pre-sale.

I've been following this one for quite some time, although originally I (like others) thought Pleo would be a bit less...demanding.

Pleo is a one-week old infant Camarasaurus from the Jurassic period. He has an amazing set of features and astounding mobility -- not quite Asimo, but he doesn't come with a huge price tag, either. Pleo eventually exhibits a unique personality. Or, as the Wired magazine article says:

Be nice to it and it will become mellow and friendly; mistreat it and you will evolve a bitter, annoyed robot.

I don't think it'll do that well in the United States. Americans generally don't want to have to take care of (what essentially is) an expensive toy and have it turn out all messed up if they don't. They should make 2 versions - one that learns (expensive memory card) and one that doesn't.

Still, as an original ERS-110 Aibo owner, I've gotta have one.

Now if only I could plug my iPod into it, and if it could answer my iPhone...

The End of File Folders?

2007-02-01T10:15:00.000-08:00

I'm testing a new product from Koral -- "content management for the rest of us". Basically, it's a very simple (to use) system designed to compete with Sharepoint, Documentum, and other document management systems.

One of the most interesting things about it is that it doesn't support a file folder structure (although it will allow for the importation of a company controlled vocabulary in the paid version).

Instead, it operates on the principle of an assisted folksonomy -- it suggests tags and allows users to tag their documents manually, and also includes a search function. Their theory is that, although everyone has the best of intentions in setting up folders, it just makes things cumbersome. People always resort to just using the 'search' function.

I do always use Google desktop to find things and my desktop is a terrible mess, but I wonder if more organized people will rebel against this enforced chaos (you can't create folders, only separate workspaces)

Anyway, try it out. It's pretty nifty. It'd be niftier with Inxight's autotagging, though (shameless plug!)

Microsoft, Meet the Year 2007

2007-01-30T14:16:00.000-08:00

As I was emailing someone about my blog, I noticed that Outlook thinks "blog" is misspelled. It thinks the word should be bog (am I writing about Scotland?), bloc (folks, the Wall fell years ago), blot (I can't think of the last time I used "blot" in a sentence. Oh, wait, I just did), blob (databases strike again) or blow (now I think it's just getting personal about my writing style!)

Maybe I need to upgrade to Vista. Everybody's doing it.

But will its tapes play in my VCR? I think not.

Today...A Change

2007-01-29T12:49:00.000-08:00

Today, I decided to expand my blog to cover more than just what Google needs to do to make itself better. Although I do spend an inordinate amount of time using Google and its products, things like Pandora are also a big part of my life.

Most of the time, I'll still stick to talking about the general field of information understanding and the role technology plays in making information more accessible and, more importantly, more useful. But sometimes you'll see me rant about something unrelated.

Like today.

I wanted to comment about something Mark Benioff said in his recent Forbes interview. He mentioned that before you really create your business, you need to create your metaphor.

"Salesforce.com's AppExchange is the eBay of enterprise software; AppStore is the iTunes. Early on, Salesforce.com was Amazon.com meets Siebel Systems."

The potential for Dilbertisms is definitely there. I'm not sure saying "Inxight is the Oracle of unstructured data" ("grey is the new black?" "Zune is the new Edsel?") quite does it for me...although he does make a point that it's a good sound bite to a journalist. But human beings do seem to latch onto concrete metaphors or at least some way of relating something new to something old.

For example, I always describe my company, Inxight, as making software that "reads" electronic text and describe all the relevant people, companies, places, events, and other information hidden in there.

Nowhere do I discuss "natural language processing", "linguistic analysis", "meaning-based computing", or other common industry buzzwords. If your grandmother can't understand it, you're doing something wrong.

All I want to know is what does it do...and, more importantly, what can it do for me?

So, in the aforementioned Inxight example, I'll add a second, user-specific sentence. Inxight's software "reads" electronic text and finds all the relevant people, companies, places, events, and other information hidden in there so you can discover answers to things like "what companies are mentioned most often in conjunction with mine?"

I still haven't figured out what our software can do for my grandmother. But that's ok, since she doesn't have a budget to spend anyway.

Google's Secret Plot

2006-12-21T10:53:00.000-08:00

So, after writing 5 data sheets in 24 hours, I thought I'd head over to You Tube for a little R&R. 20 minutes of videos (and complete non-productivity) later, I've come to realize that Google's secret plot to take over the world is entirely based on its ability to bring worker productivity to a screeching halt.

First, there was Google search. The ability to turn an innocent search like "unstructured data management" into a 3-hour boondoggle involving elephants and hot travel spots in Pakistan.

Then there was Google news. This enables me to get, in my email box, hot news updates every day on AS MANY TOPICS as I like. Even news stories that are 3 years old get follow ups. (Anyone remember the poor woman who got beaned on the head by a wayward Macy's parade balloon?)

Now, Google's bought You Tube...by far the most devilish time waster yet.

When are you going to buy eBay?

FREE Inxight Search Extender for Google Desktop

2006-09-22T09:23:00.000-07:00

If you've stumbled on this, I’d like to welcome you to be one of the first people to try out our new FREE product – Inxight Search Extender for Google Desktop.

Powered by Inxight's award-winning extraction technology, Inxight Search Extender for Google Desktop is an easy-to-install application that extends Google Desktop to "go the extra mile" -- helping users find documents faster and locate hidden information in document sets and individual documents.

Search results from Google Desktop are automatically clustered on-the-fly, enabling users to filter their results sets by the people, companies, places, concepts and other information contained within them.

Keyword-in-context summaries are enhanced by an automated "Top Mentions" list, revealing the most important people, places, companies and other information contained within the full text of a document - helping users quickly get a better sense of the true content of a document.

An automated document index makes it easy to see what key information is contained within documents, making it easier to locate that one mention of a potential new competitor within a large pdf file.

You can download the product by visiting http://www.inxight.com/products/se_google/registration.php .

It’s a 64MB download, and requires Google Desktop (available from Google) and the Microsoft .NET framework (included in the zip file – “dotnetfx.exe”) to run.

Let us know what you think of it by emailing ise at inxight dot com. We’ll be officially publicizing it the first week of October.

Making Sense of the Masses

2006-08-03T13:53:00.000-07:00

Way back in 99, I used to work for a company called iSyndicate, which made a product called Express, geared toward helping individual content creators (columnists, cartoonists, etc) distribute their content.

I still believe in the dream (and apparently, so does The Colbert Report) - where the masses can freely share information, ideas, research, and so forth. The problem these days (for most of the developed world) is no longer that there is not enough content, but that it's nearly impossible to make sense of it all and find anything actually useful.

Ever try Google blog search? The number of blogsites that pick up pieces of every release known to man in order to drive traffic is astonishing. My favorite one was when we had a product release about a "Search Extender for Google"...which was dutifully appended and retitled "Inxight adds Google Search (Penis extender) to discovery platform". I kid you not.

So how do we expect some cancer researcher to know about some important paper that's been published without having to wade through 10 million Viagra (in various "tricky" spelling variant) websites?

That's my rant. I'd like to posit that Inxight's entity and fact extraction would solve the whole problem, but it won't -- not alone and not without support from some large organization to help us continue to develop and evangelize the solution -- and not without more people rising up to say how unhappy they really are with search today.

Hello? Who wants to dive in?

Will a Search Engine Provider PLEASE make these enhancements?

2006-06-22T15:12:00.000-07:00

I'd even switch from my beloved Google if they happened. And I'm not just saying this because we (Inxight) have the technology to make it happen. I'm saying it as an avid web searcher.

1. An automated index in the cached view. It's hell trying to find any information in long documents. I want an index on the left-hand side which shows me the key people, companies, etc., mentioned in the document. Then I can just click on one of them and it would take me to where the first occurence of that "entity" is...and highlight them for me.

2. Page watch built into the system. I want to be able to tell the system to watch a particular page for changes and tell me when something's changed. It'd also be cool to be able to be notified every time a new document was added to the Google index about "Inxight" (or some other term). I use this in news.google.com all the time, but I want to know about more than just news. Both of these are features in Inxight's Awareness Server...

3. "Top mentions" in summaries and a way to filter results (like what Vivisimo does...Inxight does this, too)

4. The ability to make more intelligent queries like "Inxight and any mentioned within a sentence"

That's all for now!

Take Search the Extra Mile

2006-06-06T16:04:00.000-07:00

Extending Enterprise Search with Google and Inxight

Thursday, June 15, 2006
11 AM PDT / 2 PM EDT
To register, visit
https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/onstage/tool/enrollee/register.php?ConfID=240452151&Rnd=24640300

Google and Inxight Software have teamed up to make it even easier to find documents, discover trends and find information within documents in the enterprise. Join us for a free webinar, hosted by Google and Inxight, in which we’ll demonstrate the combination of the Google Search Appliance and Inxight’s new Search Extender for Google.

In this webinar, we’ll demonstrate how the Google Search Appliance combined with Inxight’s Search Extender for Google can help you get more value from your information. The Google Search Appliance provides Google-quality search across your Web servers, file systems, portals, content management systems and relational databases. The Inxight Search Extender for Google integrates with the Google Search Appliance to enable users to filter search results sets and more easily navigate through documents, seeing at-a-glance automatically extracted people, companies, places, and other information.

Google...The Kleenex of Maps

2006-06-05T20:07:00.000-07:00

Well, it finally happened today. Instead of telling someone "let me Mapquest that for you" I actually used the phrase "let me Google map that for you". I haven't used Mapquest in ages, but it remained as a residual phrase for me (ala "Kleenex" for facial tissue) until now.

Congrats to making it into that corner of my brain, Google!

Hey Google! Save Hangar One!

2006-05-22T20:50:00.000-07:00

It would be a drop in the bucket for Google to pay to clean up Hangar One at Moffett Field...and they could slap a big Gooooogle logo on it. Very visible from the air, and would be a gift to the Mountain View/Sunnyvale era.

If Google doesn't do it, maybe Yahoo! will...

http://www.nuqu.org/

Save Hangar One!

Walking Directions on Google Maps

2006-05-19T14:39:00.000-07:00

I'm going to basically copy here what another blogger has requested -- a "walking" option for Google maps... (http://www.bradlands.com/weblog/archives/2005/04/maps_made_for_w.shtml)

"I want a mapping and directions service that lets me choose between driving directions and walking directions. I most often make use of sites like Google Maps when I'm in a strange city or headed for an unfamiliar destination, but won't be taking a private car.

If I plug in a start point and destination, most map sites will give me directions that are perfectly logical for a driver, but don't allow for the fact that someone on foot can go places a car can't -- both ways on the sidewalks along a one-way street, for example. I was trying to put together directions for a friend to reach a hotel I'd recommended to them in Chicago, but both Mapquest and Google Maps would have me send them on a six-block roundabout route along Lake Shore Drive, when they could simply schlep their suitcase two blocks by turning onto a one-way street."

A Kudo This Time

2006-05-04T08:35:00.000-07:00

This one's not a suggestion - it's a kudo! One of the hardest things to do with Google.com is to find the actual "real" hotel site for a New York hotel. When you query on the name, you're far more likely to find 3-4 pages of results from resellers.

However, when you do a search for the address on maps.google.com, you can click on the resulting pinpoint and it will give you the actual hotel URL. Bravo!

"Top Mentions" to Augment Google Keyword-In-Context Summaries

2006-04-18T11:20:00.000-07:00

At Inxight, we have a Google add-on product that, among other things, can provide insight into the full-text content of documents at the summary stage.

It shows you the most relevant people, companies, places, etc., that are mentioned in the full text of the document.

This provides a better preview into the document's true contents. It lets me do several tasks more effectively, like competitive research and expert location.

For example, a typical Google keyword-in-context summary (Google desktop search for "linguist" looks like this:

Linguistics Symposium in 14th year.doc
said Davis. We are not just grammarians. While you certainly have to have an appreciation for many languages, being a linguist doesn’t mean knowing many

An Inxight-enhanced summary looks like this:

Linguistics Symposium in 14th year.doc
said Davis. We are not just grammarians. While you certainly have to have an appreciation for many languages, being a linguist doesn’t mean knowing many
Top Mentions: Alan Kaye; Colleen Davis; Elizabeth Closs Traugott; Stanford University; Stefanie Calvillo

How do we do this? Inxight has software that "reads" text in 32 different languages and, based on linguistics and patterns, can detect 35 different "entities" in that text -- people, companies, organizations, dates, currencies, concepts (like "unstructured data" or "global piracy"), etc.

I think it's pretty neat, and although it's not perfect, I'm still impressed by it daily.

Finding Greek Easter Bread

2006-04-18T11:05:00.000-07:00

I'm a huge fan of Google and my company, Inxight, is a Google Enterprise partner. I was prompted to begin this blog because I thought it would be interesting to keep track of my "failed" searches and other musings on Google.

Today, I was unable to find a local purveyor of Greek Easter Bread (I would also have settled for Italian Easter Bread). While I did find a couple of Italian bakeries (search local: Italian Bakery), none of them had their offerings online, so I would have had to (gasp!) call to find out if they had Easter Bread. And I found some online purveyors, but I wanted the bread for tomorrow and didn't want to pay for FedEx.

So, I'll have to resort to the phone or my own oven to find some!