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'...

Locator Beacons

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

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

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

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

1. Fear of losing (desire to win).
2. Fear of not being rich (desire to be rich)
3. Fear of not being attractive to your gender of choice (desire to be attractive).
4. 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?

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

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)

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...

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!

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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.