Welcome Back!

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)

A Retraction...

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!

The End of File Folders?

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!)

Today...A Change

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.