Amy Wohl's Opinions

Searching for the Right Search Engine

The woods seem to be full of new search engines.  The last time this happened, we tried them all, fooled around with them for a bit, and then quickly chose one -- it was just too much trouble to use different search engines for different purposes.  Who remembers AltaVista, DogPile, or Northern Light?

I wonder if it's a coincidence that search engines seem to come in bunches,or whether it's the lure of economic riches that pulls them into the market simultaneously?

In any case, we have several, quite different ones, that have all gotten my attention in the past few weeks.  In typical fashion I have been fooling around with them, trying to see if one if them is actually a candidate to supplant Google (which I use at least dozens, if not hundreds of times a day).  I've tried:

1. Microsoft's BING -- How could you miss it.  It's clever TV ads are everywhere.  But the ads seems to position it for consumer tasks like shopping.   I mainly use my search engine for finding things.  BING actually works pretty well for that, too.  I like the way it displays the results of searches -- nice eye candy -- but I don't find that it offers me as much information and it's really more for consumer tasks like shopping comparisons.  I may yet try it for that -- if I remember to.
2. Wolfram Alpha -- Isn't that a catchy name?  This is a serious attempt to help you find things from a constructed knowledgebase, using mathematical algorithems, based on those from Wolfram's successful Mathematica product. It does some things very well but it doesn't understand some questions -- which Google gets right away -- at all.   Mysterious.  I suspect they are not in its knowledgebase and this is a question of waiting for it to get built out.  I think I'll check in with it in a month or two and see how it's doing.
3. Hunch -- It isn't a search engine in any traditional sense, but it is in the sense that it will help you find what you're looking for -- anything from what to have for dinner to what kind of $500 purse you'd like and where to buy it.  You can endlessly answer questions to help it know you better (so it will give you more custom answers) -- be careful, it's addictive.  It can't answer some questions at all -- like Wolfram Alpha, it's a matter of what it knows.

Obviously this is an ongoing game.  It's endless fun.  With engines like Bing and Wolfram Alpha I test them against Google, asking the same question and looking at the results:

• How many answers do I get?
• Are they relevant or useful?
• Do I get the answer I'm looking for at the beginning -- thousands of answers aren't helpful if I have to read through hundreds of pages
• Do I like the way the engine presents information?

I test engines that seem to want to help me make decisions (like BING and Hunch) against each other.  They are not at all alike, but it's fun to see what kinds of results they offer and I'm probably going to only use one or the other IRL.

Maybe Bloggers Need Labels?

Recently, I participated in a series of articles and emails over the topic of whether bloggers report the news in a less responsible way than traditional news organizations.  I did this in response to a post to Dave Farber's Interesting People list (favorite reading of mine) by my friend and colleague Jonathan Spira of Basex.  Jonathan was responding to an article in the New York TImes which implied that bloggers can be reckless in their pursuit of new things, often presenting rumors as news.

I have a problem with this.  As I noted in my comments (which you will find with Jonathan's), there are many kinds of bloggers.  Some are gossip columnists, whether they are writing about celebrities or technologists and should be identified as such.  They may know quite a bit about their topic, but they don't follow any traditional journalistic rules about checking sources or identifying when they are providing fact-based information and when they are offering opinions or speculation.  This can lead to confusion and further rumors.

I offer lots of opinions in my blogs, but we try to separate facts (provided by others) from opinions and speculations.  I suggest that we might need labels for both the bloggers (after all we have journalists and gossip columnists and book reviewers and so forth in the traditional press) and for their writings so that when someone wants to mix facts and opinions or speculations (which can be both fun and quite useful), it's clear what's going on.

Suggestions for labels are welcome.

What's in a Name?

It's always hard for a company to know what to do when one of its products becomes a lot better known than the company itself.  The possibilities for confusion are endless.  No one recognizes the company name, but everyone who needs to knows the product.  This happened to WordStar (known as MicroPro) and WordPerfect (Satellite Systems International) in their turns, forcing the product names to eventually become the company identity.

Now the success of Zoho, with more than a million users, has convinced its parent company AdventNet, to change its name to ZOHO Corporation, tucking its other divisions, such as ManageEngine, into the newly named ZOHO.  As far as we know this is the first time this has occurred with a web-based software product, although if I'm wrong, I'm sure we'll get corrections from our readers.

Zoho, the product, if you're not familiar with it, is a portfolio of more than 20 office productivity and collaboration applications and utilities, all available as free downloads.

Searching for the Right Answer

I have been avidly following the run up to the announcement of the Wolfram Alpha search engine.  This is a new search engine which is designed to be much more powerful than Google because it includes both curated data and a vast and growing library of mathematical algorithims (brought to you by Mathematica, from whence it comes).   It also has a high degree of language understanding, particularly within subjects and something called "computational aesthetics" which means it presents the resuts as a custom page of clearly presented knowledge.  That, in my brief experience of testing the search engine, is true. 

I could spend a lot of time telling you about the source of the engine -- it'ds based on Stephen Wolfram's research and Mathematica technology.  But you can read all of that on the Wolfram Alpha site, together with lots of links to Mathematica, Stephen Wolfram and his book, and the engine.

I've been testing it out with a simple idea, putting the same query into both Google (it's competitor) and Wolfram Alpha to see what I'd get.  In most cases I get an answer from both, but Wolfram Alpha gives me more information and it's very nicely presented.

On the other hand, I've easily stumped it with questions I was sure it could answer.  So, for example, it can tell you the GNP of any single country, and it can give you information about recognized groups of countries like the EU, but when I asked it for the GNP of the EU, even when I tried to tell it the countries in the EU, it didn't get it.  Of course, Google didn't get it either.

I'm sure I will be going back to this engine again and again (it's irrestible), but I'm not sure it's replacing Google as my "use it a hundred times a day" standard way of searching.  I guess we'll see.

But you should try it yourself.  It's free -- and lots of fun.

The Sun will Shine on Oracle

So the deal has been done and it's Oracle, not IBM that will be buying Sun (which has needed to bought for some time).  This is a much tidier deal, not from a financial point of view -- Oracle paid only 10 cents a share more($9.50 for a total of $7.4 billion or $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt) than IBM ultimately was willing to offer -- but there are likely to be few if any legal impediments to the Sun/Oracle arrangements. 

An IBM/Sun would have owned 42% of the server market, a concentration that might have attracted the SEC (and no one knows yet how this President and his government will view antitrust matters).  

An Oracle/Sun offers no such problems.  Oracle is a new player in the hardware market and Oracle and Sun have few strong overlaps in software. 

Sun also brings Oracle an operating system (Solaris), and development tools (Java), new arenas for Oracle. 

• It brings the open source MySQL data base to the strongest data base player, but there are enough other data base players for this to be unlikely to be a problem; Oracle could always send MySQL out to a community project if need be. 
• Oracle is unlikely to be interested in the applications Sun brings from its association with AOL (and AOL's with Netscape); they have never attracted a major following. 
• Oracle will have to decide whether it wants to continue to sell Sun's Open Office distribution, StarOffice, but the underlying code is already a community Open Source project.  The interesting thing is that IBM offers another version of it as the free Symphony product.  

Oracle expects its acquisition to be immediately accretive to revenue; we expect that means they will be doing some major trimming pretty quickly.  Sun's hardware is built for them so Oracle has only to decide whether to continue marketing it or not (no factories to close down).  On the software side, there will be major decisions about products and research to continue and who will do what marketing.  We suspect a lot of Sun is going to set.  It's been a fine run, but the times have changed and perhaps Sun's assets will do better under Oracle's management.

More importantly, we will now have to entirely rethink the upper echelon of the computerr industry.  It is no longer IBM vs HP or perhaps IBM vs HP and Sun, but rather IBM vs HP vs Oracle.  Notice that Microsoft seems not to figure in this game.  We would not deem them irrelevant yet, but wonder whether they can provide the high-end consulting and integration that enterprise customers increasingly demand and that Oracle, with this acquisition, will try to provide, putting them in direct competition with HP and IBM. 

The Lure of Netbooks

Following a rumor in the Wall Street Journal that Apple CEO (and marketing genius) Steve Jobs was working on a netbook project, writers have been speculating on what Apple might be up to.  More to the point, the users have been speculating, too.  I've also been following dozens of comments on TechCrunch, following the news that the popular technology blog had decided to build a prototype netboook.

It's very clear that while some folks are using netbooks and some more folks want to buy one now or soon, others have stretched their expectations about what a netbook should be, should include, or should cost to impossible dimensions.  For example:

• Trying to include in netbooks hw features that won't fit either with the slim dimensions that make a netbook a netbook or with the price points (typically $300-500) that make them compelling.
• Making operating systems a big issue.  Netbooks are intended mainly for surfing the web and doing email -- applications for which an OS is largely irrelevant.  I don't care what the OS is -- as long as I don't have to see it (think of your Smartphone).  I've had one netbook that's been unusable -- off being fixed -- for months, because something didn't work out of the box and I didn't have the familiarity with the OS to figure out what to do.  Netbooks need to be consumer appliances.
• Size really counts.  Make netbooks bigger to accomodate a bigger screen or a DVD drive (nice features on a notebook) and it is isn't a netbook.  I want it to be small enough that I take it everywhere without ever considering its size a burden -- like my  phone.

But there are design issues that will differentiate netbooks and perhaps provide the opportunity for the premiun prices Apple likes to command.

• Sleek design, that Apple trademark.  Remember, it's a consumer appliance -- looks matter.
• A touchscreen interface.  I have a pre-order in for a French netbook (due in June) that has both a touchscreen and an optional keyboard.  Very nice.Nice enough to get lots of attention at DEMO.

• A real keyboard for those who write lots of emails or drafts on their netbooks.

Netbooks are already a successful market and will continue to grow in the places where they are compelling -- not by making them little notebooks but by making them a new class of computers, between Smartphones and Notebooks.  Think:

• In emerging countries as a first computer, provided they have the required communications infrastructure.
• In places like the U.S. as a second or third computer -- or a first computer for a kid -- something to carry everywhere.

Cloud Multiplying

I am in the midst of writing two big articles on Cloud Computing -- too big to post on a blog -- and I can't quite get them finished because every day brings new revelations.  Everyone wants to be part of the cloud as a platform provider or a cloud application or a user.

Do we know where this will end?  We can probably project its reasonable ending.  Too many vendors without the right experience or resources will enter the market and not all of them will succeed.  Too many ISVs will try to field applications and only some of them will be real winners.  And some customers will learn (once again) that nothing is the solution to everything.  Of course, we don't know when this will happen or who the winners and losers will be, so in the mean time it's going to be a lot of fun trying to sort it out.

In the meantime, I'm going to lots of webinars and conferences trying to meet new players and sniff the sea breeze to see where we are on the curve. 

A conference I'm looking forward to is Under the Radar's Cloud Computing eventon April 24 in Mountain View -- a single day filled with products and demos and sharp questions.  I encourage you to join me; I've been there before and it's definitely worth the trip.

I'll also be speaking about SaaS and Cloud Computing at the Uptime Institute's Symposium 2009 in New York City on April 16 and at IBM's IMPACT conference in Las Vegas on May 6.

In the meantime, enjoy the clouds -- in this case they are not an omen of bad weather, but rather part of a sunny new computing future. 

DEMO 09 Part Two

So much to see.  Even with a much smaller set of demonstrators and announcements, there's still a lot to see, perhaps balanced by the higher quality of the announcements.  A lot of the sillier WEB 2.0 clutter -- just a feature or two, not a real product, no business model, a product in search of a market -- is gone.  Thank goodness!  (Not all of it, of course.  Remaining unnamed will be a product designed to help you pick up girls in bars and a social blogging site, designed to let people you'd never want to talk to exchange thoughts like how drunk was I last night.)  I don't feel much need to cover laser-etched personalized phone covers, either, although I guess some folks might like them.

I can't possibly cover it all, but here are some highlights:

Ontier's Pixetell  lets users annotate documents, spreadsheets, drawings, with screen recordings, attachments, and annotations.  It could be a convenient way to allow members of a remote team to keep a project moving along.

Transformyx RallyPoint is designed to let a city, police department, hospital, or business discover the location of its employees/customers/suppliers in an emergency.  Created in the aftermath of the Katerina hurricane by a Baton Royge company, it clearly could be used by cities and companies in many locales.  Its portal provides an authenticated way to communicate when the system has been compromised.  Each member carries a simple laminated card with numbers to call in an emergency.  A console provides information for each manager to track his peopole. 

Technicopia's gwabbit does something simple but very useful.  It takes contact information from emails in Outlook and moves them into the Outlook address book, saving a user about a minute for each new address stored.

Zipadi is a SaaS offering which can take existing paper catalogs and repurpose them into web-based content, adding interactive content, where desired, and embedding e-commerce.   It allows traditional direct mail marketers to quickly enter the Internet market. 

Always Innovating, a French company, presented a hardware offering, rare in a tough market (because hardware products require significant investments and longer times to market),  It's a touch book, a 2-pound machine which can be used as a touch-interface netbook, or a removeable keyboard may be added.  It uses the ARM processor which allows it to omit a fan (light and cool and instant on).  It's an open system, delivered with AI's own Linux.   And run it does -- the battery lasts 10-15 hours.  The system can support a number of USB's (including two internal ones) for additional storage.  What did I think?  I just preordered one for June delivery at $399 ($299 without the keyboard).

Qualcomm was showing their concept  low-energy Mirasol Display which uses reflective technology and tiny cells to create displays that can be used in bright sunlight and offer full color.  They use no power when the display is not being changed.  This is an enabling technology for a new round of products.  It could (we asked) be used for a color Kindle.  It's likely to be used for Smartphones and Netbooks.

At the beginning of the second day of DEMO, a number of products that looked at Smarter Search and personalization were presented.  Ensembli Relevance picks stories fron the web based on your interests.  It starts with a list of your interests and improves its selection criteria based on your selections.  Evri makes content recommendations that are relevant to content on a web page;  it can create a collection on a topic with recommendations to add more,  A new Evri toolbar allows the user to get information while on any webpage or go to the Evri page for additional information. Xmarks is a bookmark powered web discovery service which synchs bookmarks and finds great sites based on what people are bookmarking.

How Simple wants to make your information relevant, organized, and controlled by making it into a series of queues and displaying it in queues and windowpanes (up to 35 at a time, which I personally found to be too many).  It can also create a new queue from hyperlinks, allowing you to make your research on a topic into a new queue.

Primal fusion is a little freaky.  Its AI thought networking software will propose many related topics for any topic you identify,  If you pick some, it will then look at popular sources like Wikipedia, Flickr, etc. and/or your favorite sources for information on the topics you selected.  Everything you remember is saved as semantic data and connected together.  You can create a website, an RSS feed, or a document based on your thoughts.   I signed up for the Alpha so I'll let you know about it later.

Xandros, whom I associate mainly with Linux has a great new product for Windows machines.  Presto will let any Windows machine boot up much faster -- typically in 8-10 seconds after the BIOS loads as compared to the usual 90 to 120 seconds.  Yeah!!!  You can use the machine to browse the web, look at documents, and open some applications.

Symantec Project Guru is a SaaS service that lets the family tech expert get some support for supporting everyone else's systems.  Afer signing up and inviting those to be supported via email, resources are available for the Guru to use remote support through the Guru service center.  Additional resources are available for techies and the Guru can hand off a problem to Symantec techs for a fee.

Appzero is an application to help enterprises move their applications into the cloud or from cloud to cloud.  It does this by making the \enterprise application into an appliance (which takes several hours) and then moving it into a cloud (which takes a minute).  It's quite impressive.  I have plans to get to know these guys better.

The last session is this afternoon.  I'll let you know if there are more goodies to be seen,  Part of the fun, by the way, is that DEMO is being broadcast via BitGravity and about 60k people, world-wide, are listening in.  Some of them are on Facebook, as are some of us in the room.  A thoroughly modern conference.

Welcome to DEMO 09

"There's nothing like a recession to clear out the clutter," said Chris Shipley, Conference organizer, pointing out that there are 39 companies presenting this year, rather than the 60-70 we have come to expect.  All of them have real business models she claims -- I'll believe that when I see and hear it.

Perhaps more important, more than half the presenters, for the first time, come from outside the Silicon Valley, many from outside the U.S.

There is an emphasis on companies that will benefit the world as well as the entrepreneurs that found them.

There is a clear advantage for me.  It was never possible to really see 60 companies in two days -- or even the 25-30 of the 60 I was really interested in.  I bet I'll easily navigate the 15-20 out of the 40 here I want to see. I've already talked to three of them, gathering info to write in more detail.

This morning, of the presenters I saw, the ones I liked best were Bit Gravity and Home-Account.

Bit Gravity offers high definition (HD) streaming video without the high price.  The user requires only an inexpensive HD Video camera ($600) and a Mac Pro with a card to adjust the video feed (cards range in price up to a Black Magic card, from $350 to 1200).  The feed is delivered in nearly real time.  Bit Gravity makes its money by selling you the service that delivers the feed, which it makes available in North America, Europe, Asia, India, Australia, and Latin America.  Prices vary (with discounts for volume) but a starting user might pay $500-1,000 per month for perhaps 500 hours of service.  Users can also avoid set up costs.  I watched BitGravity set up the system in less than 2 minutes; it's very user friendly.  Expect to see lots more HD video courtesy of BitGravity, everywhere from local high school sports to HD on YouTube to corporate events and web sites.

Home-Account is a new kind of finanancial service, designed to replace the mortgage broker.  It evaluates your finances, recommends ways to make them better, and then recommends a mortgage refinancing for your home.  The service costs $9.95 per month; founder Mark Goldstein claims the average user can save $165 per month in mortgage payments.  Clearly a timely annoucement. 

There is no Free Money

My esteemed colleague Phil Wainewright certainly stirred up a mess of posting when he commented on a post by a VC remarking on the entirely unremarkable fact that revenue minus costs equals profits.  You must read the post and at least some of the comments (there were nearly 200 the last time I looked). 

Phil was simply commenting that things had come to a low state if such an entirely simple and well-accepted comment could make people who should know better so upset.  I second his remarks (I posted on that subject as a comment, too).

Money does not grow on trees.  When we act like it does, it means something silly is going on and it will be self-limiting (that's what a bubble is).  Web sites that offer something for advertising are not offering it for free, they are offering it in return for your attention.  If they succeed, they can become very rich.

Otherwise, you must be doing it as hobby (like my food blog -- but not like these blogs, which are designed to communicate with my industry colleagues and customers).

I am fascinated by some of the posts Phil attracted.  Spending money on jobs and infrastructure during a recession is not socialism -- and I taught economic systems at the graduate level.  Because the Treasury prints money during a recession to fund government spending does not mean that inflation will occur -- only that it might occur if the printing is done without thoughtfulness. We're a long way from that. 

Please note that more than 90% of the people in this country who want to work are currently employed, that mass foreclosures are occuring mainly in areas of the country where real estate values were hyperinflated -- and many people accepted mortgages they were unlikely to be able to repay unless the value of their home continued to go up. 

We all got into this together and we all will get out of it together -- with a little patience.