Enterprise Alley

July 1st, 2008

Powerset’s smarts are Microsoft’s gain

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 6:24 pm

Categories: Office productivity

Tags: Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., Powerset, Mergers & Acquisitions, Wiki, Speech Recognition, Corporate Law, Groupware, Search, Enterprise Software

Larry Dignan pours lukewarm water on Microsoft’s acquisition of Powerset. Talking about Google’s near monopoly in the search market, Larry says:

Microsoft can reinvent search, but it’s still running up a natural Google monopoly. The analogy here is Windows: Microsoft didn’t have the best operating system on the planet. It just had the best positioned one. In search, the tables are turned in Google’s favor. I don’t see how Powerset will change that equation.

The Techmeme firehose has a party with this one with the likes of Nik Cubrilovic declaring:

Microsoft’s search engine market share is currently at 9%, far behind Google who has 61% of the market. The web division at Microsoft has been performing below expectations since its inception - and with the dominance of Google the challenges facing Microsoft are as big as any the company has ever faced in its history.

Oi! Both posts miss the point in my opinion because they ignore the fact Microsoft remains a business application provider. If Microsoft is really clever about this acquisition then consumer considerations aside, it can wrest the Google Search Appliance market out of Google’s hands. In one deal that I have been involved in the last year, the first thing we did was ditch the crabby appliance. It’s just too inaccurate for serious business use and I make no secret of the fact I think it’s a dumb technology that is not business grade. Given that Microsoft is punting Sharepoint as hard as it can plus the fact Sharepoint in turn is being pitched as a blog/wiki holder, having solid search becomes a natural requirement.

Interestingly, my Irregular colleagues are divided on the issue. Jason Wood whose financial nouse is usually pretty darned good says this in our Google Group conversation:

No one, Microsoft included, is saying they’ve bought the future of search here. What they’re saying is they’ve acquired a quality team of engineers who are working on solving the future of search, and this will be one small step in a long road toward that. Microsoft is spending, what, 22 minutes of free cash flow on this? So by that notion, if this has ANY impact on helping build a credible if not distant #2 to Google over the next five years, how would it not be worth it in spades?

Jeff Nolan on the other hand is skeptical. He sees Powerset as an expensive proof of concept:

I don’t fancy myself an expert in semantic search but I know enough to suggest that doing it in wikipedia doesn’t translate into “now I can do it anywhere” so as a proof of concept I would be a little leery. Now if they have unique IP then that would be something but this area is already pretty rich in IP so not sure that is the case.

I’m happy to be proven wrong but semantic search has about as good a track record for investors as speech recognition in years past so it’s a show me thing as far as I’m concerned.

Ooooh - equating to Lernout & Hauspie? I hope not.

Update: Another Irregular Bruno Haid is thoroughly dismissive:

Basically they’re [Powerset] doing three things:

1.) Let Freebase extract all structured data (categories, sideboxes etc.) from wikipedia and store them in a special format. We paid an undergraduate cs/law student 6000 USD in early 2006 to do this. Freebase value comes from being able to store and query data ’semantically’.
2.) Label this data consisting of triples (WashingtonDC is CapitalOfUSA) as “factz” and present them as search results
3.) Create a simple parser that maps certain manually pre-defined query structures (when, what, where, who … predicate, object) to search queries (mostly labor intense to get the rules right, also done by http://www.presdo.com/ and many others)

Technology bottom line:

- There is no ‘understanding’ happening whatsoever.
- Their approach isn’t really solving the problems like disambiguation or other problems mentioned in the LIVE! post.
- It inherently can’t scale to the web in general, because there’s little to no standardized structured information out there. Yet. But even if the Yahoo SearchMonkey approach seems much more viable.
- The learnings of the past 2 years don’t sacrifice $100m, considering that there are around ~10 university projects on the same technology level in Europe alone.
- Google is already using much more sophisticated approaches like these in their back-ends, but their are labeling and employing them as what they are: Purely statistic / heuristic methods and manual tuning labor. Very harshly put: Peter Norvig could come up with something similar to Powerset with the stuff he has on his notebook in the 10 hours it takes to cross the Atlantic.

Either MS did this to tell a good story to the markets or their text-based search team is far behind their imaging counterparts.

Harsh indeed.

June 25th, 2008

RightScale cloud management extends to MySQL

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 4:59 pm

Categories: Development tools

Tags: MySQL, Cloud Computing, Databases, Storage, Open Source, Enterprise Software, Software, Data Management, Hardware, Dennis Howlett

RightScale, which specializes in cloud computing management for the Amazon Web Services platform today announced support for MySQL Enterprise. The service, which goes live July 1, provides automated deployment, management and scaling, coupled with MySQL Enterprise premium-level support for large database applications.

The RightScale Manager for MySQL Enterprise will deliver pre-configured templates for all the components needed to provide high performance, reliable database operation that is fully backed by MySQL Enterprise software and support.

According to the blurbs, the solution provides:

• Rapid deployment into the cloud:  In a matter of hours, customers can get up and running on a cloud computing infrastructure using pre-packaged components, services and expertise.
• Dynamically scalable infrastructure: RightScale unique auto-scaling feature enables applications to scale both up and down seamlessly in the cloud infrastructure to dynamically meet varying traffic and loads.
• Minimal resources needed to deploy and manage a cloud infrastructure — allowing organizations to focus on core competencies.Automated, replicated set-ups; lifecycle development tools; a centralized dashboard.

Pricing runs from $500 per month with an initial  $2,500 upfront license fee.

Today, RightScale is focusing its attention on startup businesses that are using cloud computing as the basis for service provision. Early customers include Animoto (which I discussed yesterday) and ForeclosureRadar. This announcement should make it attractive to on demand service providers that are scaling rapidly or have significant compute and database requirements.

June 25th, 2008

Utterz changes put it into enterprise land

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 12:41 pm

Categories: Social computing

Tags: Message, Service, Utterz, E-mail, Advertising & Promotion, Cellular Phones, Telecom & Utilities, Online Communications, Marketing, Consumer Electronics

A couple of weeks ago, I briefly met with Simeon Margolis, co-founder of Utterz. While I like the service as a consumer I said I believed there would be significant business interest if the service allowed for sending Utterz messages direct to preferred groups that could in turn be embedded in community services like Clearspace. At the time, Simeon merely winked saying: “Watch this space.” Today, Utterz has gone part way towards what I am looking for in this service.

Today, Utterz announced that users can:

• Send utters privately or publicly directly ‘@’ friends. Just write @username in the text of an utter or select them online from the drop-down. Send messages to either go@utterz.com for public messages or private@utterz.com for private messages.
• Personal URL: utterz.com/username
• Find your twitter and pownce friends on Utterz
• Use the new notifications to reply to utters from your mobile phone or e-mail. Set the up here
• New organization for your utters. Check out All, Recent, Inbox and Sent utters

Impressed? I am.

June 24th, 2008

Animoto goes commercial

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 10:11 am

Categories: Office productivity

Tags: Animation, Animoto, Dennis Howlett

It’s only a couple of weeks ago that Neville Hobson introduced me to Animoto. Like he, I made the impulse upgrade to the then premium version. At $30 a year, it’s a no brainer for the person who does the occasional presentation or just wants to spice up a blog post. What’s the attraction? Animoto makes the grade for offering a service that turns people with zero artistic ability into animation rockstars with a combination of clever animation techniques and accompanying music tracks.

Then low and behold, today, Animoto goes commercial offering the business the licensing and quality assurances it needs for more professional styles of presentation. Pricing is in the ‘petty cash/cab fare’ range with a three month contract weighing in at $99 and a year at $249.

These are the kinds of service that any business can afford and which, when used carefully, will provide instant value.

The animation shown here is a mashup of photos I took of taxis in Copenhagen late last year with some dodgy music that was offered by Animoto.

June 23rd, 2008

Ruby on Rails: scaling to 1 billion page views per month

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 9:03 am

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: LinkedIn, Ruby, Joyent, Ruby On Rails, Software/Web Development, Web Development, Dennis Howlett

While a lot of attention has been focused on Twitter with questions about whether Ruby on Rails scales, LinkedIn has been quietly running a RoR application on Facebook that is beating down around 1 billion page view per month. Bumpersticker, a relatively trivial Facebook application that allows you to create a cartoon that you can put on your Facebook friends’ sites.

Developed by LinkedIn’s Light Engineering Development team, the service was designed to help LinkedIn clearly understand the viral growth vectors that impact a web application. Jim Meyer, manager of LED says that Rails scales like any other web application: “That is to say you need to take into account all the components from the moment the request is received at the load balancer all the way down and all the way back again.” Meyer identifies three basic design guidelines in all cases that give customers a better and faster experience that in turn increases the likelihood they will use the application:

• Talking to spindles is bad - talking to file systems and databases has to be minimized
• Dynamic content is your enemy. Anything you can turn into static, including periodic re-caching should be removed.
• Push everything you possibly can to the client to reduce the amount of traffic going over the network no matter where the client is.

According to Meyer, the net result is that the more time people can play with an application, the more likely they are to pull people in which helps make applications viral. Bumpersticker averages 1.4 million daily users, peeking at 1.7 million and each use includes around 2o page views. That calculates out to around 1 billion page views per month. Joyent, which provides LinkeIn’s cloud computing environment claims this amounts to transfer rates of 1 gigabit per second sustained transfer rate and around 100TB per month of data transferred. LinkedIn achieves this by throwing as much content as possible at Joyent’s F5 load balancers.

Rod Boothby, evangelist for Joyent says the secret to making applicaitons of this kind work is Joyent’s own distribution of Solaris which includes DTrace: “It helps you instrument every piece of an application so you can see where bottlenecks occur, quickly fix them and scale upwards. Just as important, the key for enterprise is to have a data center that includes everything with which you are already familiar. With Amazon you have to make material changes, with Google, you pretty much have to change everything.”

Given that Bumpersticker is relatively trival, I asked Boothby what’s the point? “It has allowed LinkedIn to perfect a new way of fast tracking the development of new applications, edge cases if you will that need to scale quickly and reliably. LinkedIn is for example using Joyent’s cloud to work on LinkedIn mobile (currently in beta) applications that will need to work anywhere in the world.”

Update: Joyent has a video in which LinkedIn explains what they did.

June 20th, 2008

Seesmic raises another $6 million. Why?

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 10:00 am

Categories: Video

Tags: Mobile, Money, Seesmic, Advertising & Promotion, Marketing, Dennis Howlett

TechCrunch mentions the fact Seesmic has raised another $6 million. My question is why? In a Skype conversation with Loic LeMeur, Seesmic’s CEO I asked whether the company had burned through the first $6 million. The answer a flat no.

I then recalled a conversation we had a while back where LeMeur had recommended attracting ‘rock star’ investors in the Series A round to attract the really big hitters in later rounds. I asked that if that remained true then why not a Bessemer or Sequoia? His response: “Getting someone like Pierre to help you has nothing to do with money Dennis. I did not need the money, but I really wanted him on board. What he and Eric bring is worth the dilution.”

Asked what the fresh money is for, LeMeur then talked about wanting to become a global brand but also said:

1. increase development on mobile
2. get early internationalization
3. grow our platform already supported by 1500 sites

I commented that mobile has been languishing in recent months. He agreed, saying there will be a new mobile version in the next six weeks. On the international front, Seesmic wants to be truly localized. LeMeur also said that as the company is scaling up, it needs high end hosting of the kind offered by Akamai, hinting at ‘big media deals’ to be announced over the next few weeks.

June 20th, 2008

Seesmic launches threadable embedded player: sparks row

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 6:25 am

Categories: Video

Tags: Video, Seesmic, Kosso, Phreadz, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Dennis Howlett

Seesmic, the ‘video conversation’ service now includes threaded conversations in its embeddable player. When a person grabs the embed code of a Seesmic video for inclusion on another site, it automatically includes all the ‘replies’ to that video. You see those replies when you mouse over the lower area of the video. The only problem is that this new addition would appear to break its own terms of service. In the interests of caution I am not including a video here but can point readers to Loic LeMeur’s site 

During the video, LeMeur, CEO at Seesmic says: “You can embed the player anywhere you like, on MySpace, Facebook, Facebook?, like anywhere you can put an embeddable player.”

In Seesmic’s terms of service, it says: “You may not download, print, make commercial use of or otherwise use User-Generated Content that you do not own without prior written approval from the owner(s) of the User-Generated Content in question.”

This has sparked a row between LeMeur and Kosso, the inventor of Phreadz. (currently in closed alpha) In direct message Twitter conversations, between the two, LeMeur alleged that Kosso had ’stolen’ his content since he’d not asked LeMeur’s permission to use his image and had downloaded the offending Seesmic video which he then re-uploaded to Phreadz. LeMeur demanded that it be taken down. I found out about it when the row spilled out into the public Twitter timeline.

I contacted LeMeur who said that using his image without permission is something about which he cares. “My content is mine,” he said over a Skype conversation. He also said that while he has no problem with embedding, which keeps the user within the originating site, downloading and then effectively repurposing is something that Seesmic, along with YouTube and others forbid.

This morning (UK time), I contacted Kosso. He is adamant that Phreadz has not stolen anything but has used the Seesmic API to provide an embed of Seesmic videos to the Phreadz site. He added: “We also provide a direct link so that people can punch out directly to the Seesmic site if they so wish. As to the video issue that Loi raised, I deleted the one he is concerned about and all the threads that go with it.” A more detailed explanation is available on this video, shot by Christian Payne this morning and recorded on Qik. (Warning, some of the language is not work safe.)

Regardless of this spat, including replies into the Seesmic embeddable player seems to create a similar problem of potential copyright infringement because of the words: “or otherwise use User-Generated Content that you do not own without prior written approval from the owner(s) of the User-Generated Content in question.”

The row raises a fundamental question about the issue of ’sharing’ in an open API world and ‘ownership’ where third parties are concerned. Kosso says that in the future, users will have the option to restrict re-distribution or offer a Creative Commons license. LeMeur says his company is “working on it.” Over at TechCrunch, Erick Schonfeld picks up the issue albeit from a different angle:

If content was king in old media, conversation is king on the Web. That is why everybody wants to control the conversation. Video commenting startup Seesmic is no exception…

It is a pretty cool feature, but it creates a conflict with all the sites that have embedded Seesmic functionality, such as TechCrunch. We love it when people use Seesmic to comment on posts, and there is certainly something to say for threaded comments. Sometimes you want to respond to comment No. 15, but you are comment No. 74. But if these responses become swallowed within the Seesmic player itself, then it effectively gets taken out of the comment stream of that particular post. (Yes, the responses are still accessible, but people will really have to hunt for them).

Of course, comments have already left the building, so to speak. Many of the most interesting comments about a blog post may occur on Twitter or FriendFeed or some other service. Now Seesmic joins that trend.

Unsurprisingly, LeMeur thinks TechCrunch is wrong.

This kind of problem will not go away any time soon. If anything, the complexity of services now offered would seem to exacerbate a latent issue that will certainly bring problems for enterprises seeking to use these new media. Unlike consumers who blithely give away copyright, enterprise has to consider the risks of taking content. Seesmic doesn’t have a business model but as and when it does, then it will need to think these issues through very carefully. Phreadz on the other hand does have a nascent business model. That’s why they’re looking at the licensing question early in their development.

Most recently I was asked to sign a release form for a video created by SAP’s business process expert community. At the time I didn’t think anything of it. Now I see why.

June 18th, 2008

LinkedIn, Technorati, FireFox 3 and Slideshare: we all fall down

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 7:37 am

Categories: Social computing

Tags: Mozilla Firefox 3.0, Mozilla Firefox, LinkedIn, Technorati, Twitter, Web Browsers, Internet, Dennis Howlett

To Zoli Erdos’ tongue in cheek crack at LinkedIn, Technorati and FireFox failures I can confidently add Slideshare. Although it doesn’t make the cut for speed of failure following funding, ($3 million raised in May), it is behaving very badly today.

I have a penchant for crashing applications but on this occasion I checked with my Twitter friends and sure enough, Slideshare is failing to load or is, at best, s-l-o-w.

On the other hand, I am pleased to report that Twitter is behaving rather well. For a change. :) That will please my friend David Terrar who just Tweeted to say he visited a prospect that has a couple of restaurants. They use Twitter for staff communications. Brave edglings.

June 5th, 2008

Will Enterprise 2.0 be a wash?

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 2:44 am

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Dennis Howlett

Next week sees the start of Enterprise 2.0 in Boston. You’d think that given the line up of rock star speakers that it would be a magnet for eager buyers looking to find out what’s likely to be new, fresh and shiny in the wonderful world of all things social. Not if you read what my colleague Jevon MacDonald has to say about the event:

Those customers who are actually making purchases right now are a little timid and not sure exactly what to expect, and usually it was a friend who took them out to the party.

When the lights go down and the drinks start flowing however, things aren’t as clear as they were before and it isn’t always obvious who you are getting in bed with.

The Drag Queens of Enterprise 2.0 are those old Enterprise software vendors who haven’t done anything to change their products, but instead they went out and have bought a nice dress and have put some eye shadow on their football player physiques.

Ouch! I’m not going to name names but just check out the Diamond sponsor list. My firend and colleague Vinnie Mirchandani is more to the point:

 ”Drag Queens”

fellow EI Jevon McDonald uses that term to describe “old enterprise companies dressing up like a pretty E2.0 babe”

Against that background I read a Sandhill piece on Jesper Andersen of Oracle and its plans to become a “2.0 babe”

Oracle is hosting a dinner for several EIs at next week’s Enterprise 2.0 conference.

Wonder what the dress code is? :)

Eeek! Every felt you’ve just been hit over the head by a cluestick?

In the meantime every man and his dog wants to pitch their shiny new stuff at me. I guess that’s because I’m on the ‘media’ list. I’m not sure how that happened but hey ho, even if I have yet to see a single approach that bears even a passing resemblance to the so-called ‘new’ social media.

But then I’m also chairing a panel about microblogging. You all know what I think about Twitter so I couldn’t resist adding Loren Feldman. His understanding of Twitter is up there with my cynical enterprisey friends. I have a feeling that sock puppets might be involved. Whatever happens and given we’ve got the gravyard slot - last panel on the last day etc - I’m sure the three or four folk who turn up will be entertained. That’s my expectation.

June 4th, 2008

Quirky Plurk: another microblogging time sink

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 8:34 am

Categories: Social computing

Tags: Web Browser, Twitter, Plurk, Web Browsers, Cyberthreats, Spam, Internet, Security, Spam And Phishing, Dennis Howlett

The other evening I started to receive unsolicited (aka spam) requests to hook up with people on Plurk. Spam might be too strong a word since the requests were coming from people with whom I’m already connected through other services.

I’ve had my head down with and turned off both Twitter and FriendFeed while I get work done so hadn’t heard about this latest desktop toy. Being a sucker for punishment I had to give it a go. In its current iteration, I wish I hadn’t bothered. Plurk is a quirky time sink that will struggle to find acceptance in any business environment.

Duncan Riley over at Inquisitr describes the timeline presentation interface:

The layout shakes up the staid microblogging format Twitter popularized, and yet it may take some getting use to as I’m not a huge fan so far.

Check out the image above to see what he/I mean. Chris Dalby found an entertaining use case, noting that one user has started a sort of chain story. Amusing, but of almost zero value to me as a business person. Unless I could find a use for effectively running the equivalent of GTalk in a dedicated browser window that includes the other paraphernalia that comes with Plurk. Why would I do that?

I see other problems with this timeline arrangement. Novel though it may be, any business use would require the immediate creation of groups (cliques in Plurk parlance) in order to manage the potential firehose. Robert Scoble, with his current body count of 495 ‘friends’ will almost certainly hate the mess it makes of his screen. I’m not alone in my thinking. Craig Cmehil believes this is a problem that will turn people away.

The timeline doesn’t render with FireFox 3 RC1 running on my MacBook Pro. I had to fire up Safari before it started to make sense. Regardless of what you think about Firefox’s latest browser iteration, that’s a big black mark in my book.

The other main problem with Plurk is its waste of screen real estate for the remainder of what it does which is to provide what I call admin services. It has a weird sort of rating system that ascribes ‘Karma’ points to users. How that’s calculated is anyone’s guess but seems to have something to do with the frequency of posting and whether you invite others to join Plurk.

But its biggest drawback is the requirement to stay within the service in order to know what’s going on. That makes it an immediate time sink. It is possible to get updates via GTalk but that reduces its designed utility to near zero. Without an API (there doesn’t appear to be one) against which clients like Twhirl can be developed, users are unlikely to give it more than scant attention.

Stuart Schroeder’s ringing endorsement for Plurk has attracted plenty of comparative comment about Twitter. That’s inevitable at a time when Twitter is attracting all the wrong kind of attention. Even so, I have to think about services from a business perspective and right now, Plurk is a fail.