Musings on 8 Years of Information Understanding

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

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?

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'...