New Florence. New Renaissance.

Baidu’s Battles

Forbes analyzes growing battlegrounds between Baidu and Google – the Chinese broadband consumer, the next huge wave of mobile web customers, the Chinese diaspora around the world. And the growing transaction commerce battle with Alibaba. The stakes in one of the fastest growing markets are huge.

Wolfram Alpha Engine

“The engine is meant to go live in two or three weeks; with it, you'll be able to enter "GDP Germany Japan" and get not a list of Web pages, but comparative charts on the economic output of those two nations. Or you can enter "GATACTTCA" and find the spots on the human genome where that sequence appears. “

What can you tell me about that little supplier in Vietnam?

"The eureka moment came when Green sat down with his friend James Psota, a computer scientist at MIT. Psota felt he could design software that would do for importing what Google has done for the Web: make search smarter. In 2006, the duo founded Panjiva. Starting with the apparel industry, they gathered data from more than 200 sources -- governments, private certifiers, not-for-profits. Then they digitized, cleaned, and collated that data to create detailed snapshots of more than 70,000 suppliers, each rated from 1 to 100, based on criteria such as the supplier's environmental record and experience serving the U.S. market. The company charges for database subscriptions and also sells reports on individual suppliers."

Fast Company

Talk about helping find a needle in a haystack...

A new way to look at Davos

The World Economic Forum - the place to hang out this time of the year. Given the economic climate and scams and meltdowns, the conversations this year will be even more intriguing.

Good friend William Mougayar has been covering various vertical markets with his start-up Eqentia and has a portal on all things WEF.

His technology crawls on an hourly basis 9,500 media sources and picks out relevant articles and links them. Semantic Web mashed up with Vertical Search.

So get all the news and gossip from the event...

Most software downloaded in 24 hours

Guinness Book of World Records is validating but the over 8 million Firefox 3 downloads on day 1 should qualify it. The nice folks at Mozilla are giving out appreciation certificates - like mine below - to those that downloaded.

 

Yahoo! rolls out mobile voice search

"...technology from vlingo, a start-up based in Cambridge, Mass., would allow people who have BlackBerry Curves, Pearls or the 8800 series to scour the Web with their voice, using Yahoo's mobile search engine, known as oneSearch."

San Jose Mercury News

Searching as a team

Next frontier in collaboration?

"People planning travel with their spouses, she says, or students working on research projects with classmates all too often find themselves repeating work others have done or fail to find sites that others have identified. Morris is designing a tool that could begin to help with this problem."

MIT Technology Review

The Customer is Not a Moron. She's your daughter.

Read this blog on Diggnation by Josh Bernoff

How would David Ogilvy go after this new consumer?

And how would he take to the new world of web analytics?

FASTforward '08

I spent a day at the FASTForward conference in Orlando and listen to 4 provocative keynotes. All about Search, as a proxy for web and other analytics. FAST, a Norwegian company in the fast growing enterprise search space, was recently acquired by Microsoft

a) John Hagel, expounded on the work he has been doing over the last few years around "Pull Platforms" - which leverage a new breed of empowered consumers (with search and other information sources) and talent - as against traditional Push Programs which worked in the past as demand was more predictable and processes could be standardized a lot easier.  The biggest threat to most corporations- that these consumers could leverage the talent themselves (or are also the talent themselves) and cut the middleman out.

I talked to him afterwards and he believes the single most important capability for an enterprise is identifying and developing new forms of talent that understand the new consumer. And he is big on networked communities like that of Li and Fung, a Chinese company, which helps apparel designers around the world connect with 10,000 highly specialized providers of production and logistics services. He also cited Cisco Connection On-line with 40,000 partners.

b) Then it was Clare Hart, President of  Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group and she showcased "search without the search box"  Using her Factiva  2.0 tool kit she demoed two roles at a bank - an investment banker, and a wealth management exec - and the analytics they would see driven by an "event" - say missed earnings at a stock. What's impressive is the range of information (from news feeds, blogs, streaming stock information, and proprietary customer and other data) and data types (docs, graphs, videos etc) all customized by role, linked and triggered by event types which have "anticipatory discovery" done ahead of time. So instead of having users run multiple and inconsistent queries seeking such information,  much of it has been thought out and being processed in background. I talk to too many folks who think a better UI to enter transactions or queries is "user empowerment". Giving a user powerful information with little user involvement like Clare showed is a much higher form of user empowerment.

c) Then on to Dave Weinberger, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. His last slide showed a well manicured topiary and next to it a pile of fallen leaves in stunning Fall colors. He loves the disorganized pile and thinks enterprises have tried too hard to organize data into information and made it "soulless" . The web is about links and links should be unpredictable and "messy". Some would call it anarchy, but it was a refreshing perspective on not trying to predefine data models, and instead let communities of internal and external users influence it. They will always bring broader and fresher "tags" than a corporate team can ever think of. 

I spent a few minutes with him later and you can see the man's bright lights - though on his blog he describes himself tongue-in-cheek as "a Ph.D in philosophy that entitles him to affect an air of smug obscurity whenever he chooses"

d) Dave was followed by Tom Davenport, who, of course has written many books on analytics. Tom's presentation was as much about disciplined analytical rigor as Dave's was about enjoying the messiness that comes from the web. Tom's presentation focused on companies like Harrah's and Progressive which have for long known the value of mining intelligence from mountain of data. He updated that with newer examples of  analytics the web is facilitating from recommendation engines at NetFlix to better customer experiences at Careerbuilder.com as it optimizes across millions of job searches.

I spent a day at the FASTForward conference in Orlando and listen to 4 provocative keynotes. All about Search, as a proxy for web and other analytics. FAST, a Norwegian company in the fast growing enterprise search space, was recently acquired by Microsoft

a) John Hagel, expounded on the work he has been doing over the last few years around "Pull Platforms" - which leverage a new breed of empowered consumers (with search and other information sources) and talent - as against traditional Push Programs which worked in the past as demand was more predictable and processes could be standardized a lot easier.  The biggest threat to most corporations- that these consumers could leverage the talent themselves (or are also the talent themselves) and cut the middleman out.

I talked to him afterwards and he believes the single most important capability for an enterprise is identifying and developing new forms of talent that understand the new consumer. And he is big on networked communities like that of Li and Fung, a Chinese company, which helps apparel designers around the world connect with 10,000 highly specialized providers of production and logistics services. He also cited Cisco Connection On-line with 40,000 partners.

b) Then it was Clare Hart, President of  Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group and she showcased "search without the search box"  Using her Factiva  2.0 tool kit she demoed two roles at a bank - an investment banker, and a wealth management exec - and the analytics they would see driven by an "event" - say missed earnings at a stock. What's impressive is the range of information (from news feeds, blogs, streaming stock information, and proprietary customer and other data) and data types (docs, graphs, videos etc) all customized by role, linked and triggered by event types which have "anticipatory discovery" done ahead of time. So instead of having users run multiple and inconsistent queries seeking such information,  much of it has been thought out and being processed in background. I talk to too many folks who think a better UI to enter transactions or queries is "user empowerment". Giving a user powerful information with little user involvement like Clare showed is a much higher form of user empowerment.

c) Then on to Dave Weinberger, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. His last slide showed a well manicured topiary and next to it a pile of fallen leaves in stunning Fall colors. He loves the disorganized pile and thinks enterprises have tried too hard to organize data into information and made it "soulless" . The web is about links and links should be unpredictable and "messy". Some would call it anarchy, but it was a refreshing perspective on not trying to predefine data models, and instead let communities of internal and external users influence it. They will always bring broader and fresher "tags" than a corporate team can ever think of. 

I spent a few minutes with him later and you can see the man's bright lights - though on his blog he describes himself tongue-in-cheek as "a Ph.D in philosophy that entitles him to affect an air of smug obscurity whenever he chooses"

d) Dave was followed by Tom Davenport, who, of course has written many books on analytics. Tom's presentation was as much about disciplined analytical rigor as Dave's was about enjoying the messiness that comes from the web. Tom's presentation focused on companies like Harrah's and Progressive which have for long known the value of mining intelligence from mountain of data. He updated that with newer examples of  analytics the web is facilitating from recommendation engines at NetFlix to better customer experiences at Careerbuilder.com as it optimizes across millions of job searches.

"Search for a hotel room which is X and has Y"

"Circo lets users search for any qualities they’re interested in. The engine then grades and ranks the results by each quality on an “A” through “F” scale based on how well the description fits for reviewers. For example, a hotel reviewers feel is spacious would rate highly if searching for openness, but poorly if you’re looking for a tiny room...

Circos is categorized under the ever expanding umbrella of semantic search engines, which currently includes the likes of Hakia, PowerSet, Kosmix, SemantiNet, Quintura, and TrueKnowledge. However, the engine is most like Kango, which has also taken on the task of categorizing hotels based on user reviews. VibeAgent also has a search engine for its own site that will search hotels based on qualities."

TechCrunch