Introducing “Eye on the Cloud”

Posted on September 7, 2008 by dsarna

The GoogleGazer promised to track the comings and goings of Google, its friend, and its enemies. As Google has grown, and its interests have grown, its has become challanging to fulfill that mission in a single blog. Therefore, please welcome the Cloudgazer, and EyeOnTheCloud, which will focus on Cloud Computing, On-Demand Software and Software as a Service. To Subscribe : Posts (Atom) or by email, Subscribe to Eye on the Cloud – On-Demand Software & Cloud Comp by Email.

Filed under: Cloud Computing | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Investment in Cloud Computing, SaaS (On-Demand Software) Accelerating; SalesForce.com Leads the Way in Innovation

Posted on August 31, 2008 by dsarna

A cloud, of course, is a visible mass of droplets or frozen crystals floating in the atmosphere above the surface of the Earth or another planetary body. A cloud is also a visible mass attracted by gravity. Lately, Cloud Computing has been exerting a strong gravitational pull of its own, and has been attracting a whole mass of money. Cloud Computing is often the domicile of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, – applications which run in the Internet “Cloud” – and neither the Enterprise nor its users need worry about “managing” resources to meet fluctuating demand.

After a lot of hype, SaaS is now solidly coming into its own, and is now increasingly being renamed “On Demand” software, which is certainly more euphonious. As we shall see, some of the same types of applications that originally fueled the”time-sharing” boom in the late ’60s and early ’70s are now leading the explosive growth Cloud Computing, but with some important differences.

Allow the curmudgeonly GoogleGazer a short walk down memory lane. As a 19-year old, back when Lyndon Johnson was still president, the GoogleGazer read an article in Business Week which reported that all you needed to do to attract venture capital money was to walk down Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, CA and shout “time-sharing.” Venture money would pour on you. The idea back then was that we all needed slices of computing “on-demand” but only for short bursts of activity. Of course, back then the Teletype Model 33 was the “terminal” of choce, and its speed was limited to about 30 characters per second (300 bps), which certainly limited the use of time-sharing to applications requiring but limited date entry. Payroll data entry from branch offices, sales force management, light accounting and modeling were the prime applications. Ultimately, however, the PC revolution put the kibosh on timesharing, as for a small one-time investment users were no longer tethered to a money-guzzlng mainframe via maddeningly slow lines of communication charged for by the minute.

The concept behind timesharing, “hosted applications,”  had enduring merit. In 2004, when we first started talking about “hosted applications,” Laurie Sullivan noted in Information Week,

Hosted enterprise applications are nothing new. They first emerged as time-sharing apps in the 1960s, when companies rented hardware and software computing resources because they lacked the money and expertise to run applications internally. Among those to first offer such services were IBM (NYSE: IBM) and General Electric. The strategy eventually morphed into the [ASP] application-service-provider model in the late 1990s. The business model for both approaches failed, giving rise to the next iteration of hosted applications.”The hosted, on-demand model is the third wave,” says Jim Shepherd, a senior VP at AMR Research. “The difference is this time, heavy hitters like IBM and Oracle are pushing the concept, so there’s no question as to whether it will survive. … The question now is, how big will it become?”

At the present time, SaaS is still a tiny part of computing, but it is growing rapidly. Customer-relationship-management software offered by vendors NetSuite, RightNow Technologies, and Salesforce.com has been the software most widely adopted. Newer On-Demand vendors with promising futures include Concur, focusing on travel and expense management, Ultimate Software, an established vendor focusing on HR, Payroll, and talent management, SuccessFactors, another experienced vendor of Performance and Talent Management solutions, and DemandTec, offering integrated merchandising and marketing solutions,  The reason for these vendors’ success is that the software was [re]written specifically to function as hosted applications, and it’s all high maintenance and complex, encouraging the notion of “letting George do it.”

While the GoogleGazer is tempted to recite his mantra, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same), there are some notable differences between the limited timesharing offerings and what’s exciting today. SalesForce.com is perhaps the most advanced of all these vendors and not just because it has thoroughly integrated its applications with those of Google (others are doing that also), but because it has followed Google’s lead in making its applications available at the API-level with Force.com, greatly reducing the time and cost of developing new and unique applications that go far beyond SalesForce.coms roots in Customer Relations Management. Their free downloadable book on creating on-demand applications is highly recommended. Register free to download.

The GoogleGazer believes that the type of cloud-based offerings epitomized by Google and Force.com get us ever closer, tantalizingly close, to the holy grail of computing:  building blocks of robust, reliable and updatable software, all hosted in the Internet Cloud, allowing all of us to stand on the tall shoulders of others while quickly creating totally unique, high-volume, industrial-strength applications that were heretofore the exclusive province of the exceedingly well-to-do big businesses (the Goldman Sachs “money is no object” kind). Throughout history, and certainly since the industrial revolution, the “democratization” that brings formerly one-of-a-kind, expensive widgets (be they tailored suites, custom-built carriages, automobiles, mainframe computing or whatnot) within reach of everyone has created new jobs, and improved the standard of living around the globe.

Previously, we mentioned Hummer Winblad as a VC in the forefront of funding Cloud-based solutions, and we wrote about Elastra, a company that they funded and which shows much promise. Their portfolio discloses many other interesting SaaS and Cloud-based investments, some of which we hope to cover in future posts. Many other VCs and hedge funds are entering the fray on a daily basis. As with anything s that is new and has modest barriers to entry, there will be many entrants, and not all will succeed.

For now, however, the visible clouds out there are all Cumulus humilis (what is commonly referred to as “fair weather cumulus“) clouds (the “what a beautiful day” kind). They are formed by rising warm air that has been heated by the ground, which in turn has been heated by the sun. They have a limited depth.

For now, this too defines On-Demand software, but like the weather, that can soon change.

Related articles by Zemanta
Enhanced by Zemanta

Filed under: Cloud Computing, Developer Tools, Elastra, Google, SAAS, Salesforce.com, Software as Services, Technology, disruptive technology | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Back to the Future – With Midori is Microsoft Aiming to Deliver “Cairo” for Cloud Computing?

Posted on August 6, 2008 by dsarna

It’s “Back to the Future” time at Microsoft, folks. In 1992 the GoogleGazer wrote a long piece on ‘The Road to Cairo” about Microsoft’s plans for an Object File Store (OFS) an object-oriented database designed to make it easy to search documents and other structured data by content no matter where located. It was announced by Jim Allchin in 1991and planned for release in 1993. Ten years later, in 2002 Computerworld reported that “Windows remains uncontaminated by many of the features originally slated for Windows NT and Cairo, including OFS.” While some of Cairo made it out the door as Windows NT 4.0, its charter to build technologies for a next generation operating system that would fulfill Bill Gates‘ vision of “information at your fingertips” promulgated in 1994 and made into a book published in 1995 called The Road Ahead , was, sadly, never fulfilled.

Why not?

Simply put, the infrastructure and technology just was not there yet. Moore’’s Law, famously first stated in 1965 predicts that the number of transistors on a chip will double about every two years, a prediction that has held true for over 40 years now. Indeed, computers today are 128 times more powerful than they were back then, at least. The average connection speed over the Internet has increased at least 25-fold, and Google gives each (free) user of Google Apps 7 GB of managed network storage, so we’ve made great strides in the past 14 years in these areas.

Windows has not kept pace.  Its kernel has accumulated too much baggage. Windows has gotten overly complex, and scalability is a serious issue with it. Vista is acknowledged by all to be a failure. Mean time, Linus and Open Source have blossomed, and have matured to the point that venerable IBM announced at LinuxWorld that In a new partnership with Red Hat, Novell, and Canonical IBM will offer “Microsoft-free” personal computers with IBM’s Lotus Notes and Lotus Symphony software. The Linux desktop computer comes fully equipped and sells for 30% less. The goal is to provide a preintegrated stack that can serve as a complete alternative to Windows and Microsoft Office. As Microsoft was forced to acknowledge in its  SEC filings, Linux and Open Source pose a significant threat to Microsoft’s long period of domination and control of the operating system and desktop.

Suffering from acute Billionaire’s Agita, Steve Ballmer saw that he needed to do something radical. He seems to have turned to a veteran Microsoftie, Eric Rudder, senior vice president for technical strategy, who worked closely with Bill Gates, and headed the Servers and Tools group until 2005. His mission, and he has accepted it, is to “incubate” a project called Singularity that came out of Microsoft Research and to turn it into into Midori, a scalable, saleable product for Cloud Computing that is unburdened with the accumulated baggage of Microsoft Windows.  Ballmer chose well. Rudder is an out-of-the-box thinker. The GoogleGazer first met him shortly after Eric joined Microsoft in 1988. He is not only a clear-thinking, very smart and hard-working fellow, he is one of a handful of really nice people in the senior ranks of Microsoft. He is rumored to be Ballmer’s ultimate successor, when the time comes (really, he would be Bill’s successor). The affable and usually talkative Rudder was absolutely tight lipped about Midori, and when I asked him for comment, he first said, “I’m currently out of the country (he was in the UK); Frank should be able to make sure you get a reply for your blog,” handing me off to  Waggoner Edstrom PR flak Frank X. Shaw. The best Frank could come up with was,

Sorry that I don’t have more for you – Microsoft not really saying much about Midori:

  • Microsoft is always thinking about and exploring innovative ways for people to use technology.
  • Midori is one of many incubation projects underway at Microsoft, as such we are not talking about it at this time.

On the other hand while Shaw was not talking, some hard-working journalists seem to have gotten their hands on the real poop. David Worthington at SD Times writes that he has seen the Midori documents. He says,

Building Midori from the ground up to be connected underscores how much computing has changed since Microsoft’s engineers first designed Windows; there was no Internet as we understand it today, the PC was the user’s sole device and concurrency was a research topic.

Today, users move across multiple devices, consume and share resources remotely, and the applications that they use are a composite of local and remote components and services. To that end, Midori will focus on concurrency, both for distributed applications and local ones.

According to the documentation, Midori will be built with an asynchronous-only architecture that is built for task concurrency and parallel use of local and distributed resources, with a distributed component-based and data-driven application model, and dynamic management of power and other resources.

In Midori, concurrency (vital to support Cloud Computing) is a basic design principle.The technically inclined reader can work through this paper from Microsoft Research for some insight: “SCOPE: Easy and Efficient Parallel Processing of Massive Data Sets,”

While the GoogleGazer thought he was alone in observing the similarities to Cairo (which at one time employed over 1,000 developers), Mary Jo Foley of ZD Net seems to have found some other old geezers with long memories. We all see Cairo written all over Midori.

Everyone agrees that Midori is critical to Microsoft’s long-term health, but everyone also agrees that its delivery date is still off in the future. Ms. Foley writes:

[I]t’s likely to be launched sooner than a typical Microsoft Research project, but not so soon as to obviate the need for Windows 7 and Windows 8. In other words, we’re looking at a new non-Windows operating system to debut some time before CEO Steve Ballmer retires (a date Ballmer has said is nine or so years away), but not before late 2009/early 2010 (the target date for Windows 7).

The GoogleGazer sold his Microsoft stock at its peak years ago (one of the few times that he got it right). Present Microsoft shareholders fervently hope that Eric can pull off getting Midori to market sooner rather than later.

Filed under: Cloud Computing, Microsoft, Midori | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Elastra Brings Virtual Mainframe to Cloud Computing

Posted on August 4, 2008 by dsarna

Elastra is a company with a neat kind of Cloud-based middleware. The GoogleGazer expects we’ll see more of them, and more like them. Founded by serial entrepreneur Kirill Sheynkman, who successfully sold companies to IBM and to BEA.  Elastra is funded by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, an experienced VC who invests almost exclusively in software and middleware, and lately has been investing heavily in Software As A Service (SAAS) and in Cloud Computing. John Hummer sits on their board.

Elastra aims to help you easily overcome the challenges of scalability in the Cloud, by making it seem almost transparent to you. Their “White Paper” is a good read, and discusses the problems of scaling as well as Elastra’s solutions.The following two pictures, taken from Elastra’s website summarize what they accomplish.

Elastra provides:

Industry-standard database and application infrastructure in the Cloud that is:

  • Easily architected, configured and deployed in a complete, clustered, run-time environment
  • Elastically scaled with automated system monitoring and management
  • Priced pay-for-use
  • Delivered on-demand

Right now, Elastra runs on Amazon’s infrastructure, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, which provides scalability within minutes on a pay-as-you-go basis, as well as its Amazon Simple Storage Service. It would not surprise the GoogleGazer to see Elastra support some of the other platforms that we mentioned in our previous post. Mean time, they have been garnering an impressive array of clients, and support PostgreSQL, the world’s most advanced open source database, and MySQL (now owned by Sun). Besides Amazon, Elastra partners with EnterpriseDB, the world’s leading provider of enterprise-class products and services based on PostgreSQL, Postgres Plus and Postgres Plus Advanced Server.

Expect to hear more about them.

Filed under: Amazon, Cloud Computing, Cloud Middleware, Elastra, Software As A Service (SAAS), disruptive technology | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Cloud Computing – Is It Old Mainframe Bess in a New Dress?

Posted on August 3, 2008 by dsarna

“Cloud Computing is all the rage,” says InfoWeek. “Some analysts and vendors,” they say, “define cloud computing narrowly as an updated version of utility computing: basically virtual servers available over the Internet. Others go very broad, arguing anything you consume outside the firewall is “in the cloud,” including conventional outsourcing,” the article goes on to say. Those who don’t have a Cloud Computing offering, but still want to be considered chic go with the InfoWeek’s broader definition.

The GoogleGazer prefers to define Cloud Computing as highly scalable distributed services, available on a “pay-as-you-go” basis, what we like to call “Rent-a-cloud.”

The idea of Cloud Computing is certainly not new. In his autobiography, Dr. Jack B. Dennis, Emeritus Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT (and MIT Class of ‘53), and a pioneer in the development of computer science wrote in 2003:

In 1960 Professor John McCarthy, now at Stanford University and known for his contributions to artificial intelligence, led the “Long Range Computer Study Group” (LRCSG) which proposed objectives for MIT’s future computer systems. I had the privilege of participating in the work of the LRCSG, which led to Project MAC and the Multics computer and operating system, under the organizational leadership of Prof. Robert Fano and the technical guidance of Prof. Fernando Corbat.

At this time Prof. Fano had a vision of the Computer Utility  the concept of the computer system as a repository for the knowledge of a community data and procedures in a form that could be readily shared a repository that could be built upon to create ever more powerful procedures, services, and active knowledge from those already in place. Prof. Corbat’s goal was to provide the kind of central computer installation and operating system that could make this vision a reality. With funding from DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the result was Multics.

For those under sixty, and probably not old enough to remember, MULTICS (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) was an extremely influential early time-sharing operating system, started in 1964. It proved that [mainframe-based] computing could serve many people in remote locations at the same time. It set creative minds to thinking about a generally available computer utility, connected to your house through a cable. The GoogleGazer still has an original copy of Fred Gruenberger’s influential book, Computers and Communications; Toward a Computer Utility, which he read when it first appeared in 1968, back when the GoogleGazer was an undergraduate and bra-burning and anti-Vietnam demonstrations preoccupied the college campuses, and nearly all computing was based on mainframes and batch processing. Gruenberger posited a “computing utility” which would operate much like an electrical utility, letting you draw as much or as little as you need, while paying only for what you use was articulated in detail.

Back to InfoWeek.

Utility computing, InfoWeek goes on to say,

is a [type of Cloud Computing that provides a] way to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software. Cloud computing encompasses any subscription-based or pay-per-use service that, in real time over the Internet, extends IT’s existing capabilities.

Sure sounds like Gruenberger’s computer utility to the GoogleGazer.

This form of rent-a-cloud, as we noted earlier, is offered commercially by Amazon.com, Google, Sun (zembly.com for creating and hosting social applications, and Network.com for pay-as-you-go computing), IBM, and others who now offer storage and virtual servers that IT can access on demand. In InfoWeeks’s view, “Early enterprise adopters mainly use utility computing for supplemental, non-mission-critical needs, but one day, they may replace parts of the datacenter.” However, the GoogleGazer knows that many smaller, fast-growing high-tech outfits run their entire business off of the “Cloud” of one of these major vendors, and by all reports, reliability exceeds that of most IT shops.

Software As A Service (SAAS) is a type of cloud computing that delivers a single application through the browser to thousands of customers using a multitenant architecture. On the customer side, it means no upfront investment in servers or software licensing; on the provider side, with just one app to maintain, costs are low compared to conventional hosting. Salesforce.com, according to InfoWeek,  is by far the best-known example among enterprise applications, but SaaS is also common for HR applications and is also used in ERP applications from vendors such as Workday. More recently, as we have noted,  SaaS applications, such as Google Apps and Zoho Office are causing Billionaire’s Agita to Steve Ballmer and his competitors, as they are encroaching on ground long firmly held by Microsoft Office (a risk Microsoft was forced to disclose in its SEC filings). APIs are also increasingly available in the Cloud that enable developers to exploit functionality of others over the Internet, rather than developing, hosting, and delivering it themselves. These range from providers offering discrete business services — such as Strike Iron and Xignite – to the full range of APIs offered by Google Maps, Yahoo BOSS. The U.S. Postal Service, Bloomberg, and even online banking and conventional credit card processing services are headed in this direction.

So while the technology may be different, updated, and certainly faster, cheaper, more pervasive, and much more scalable, at the end of the day, Cloud Computing is a centralized mainframe-like core with distributed nodes, in a prettier, sexier new miniskirt. But hey, we like the pretty dress, and the GoogleGazer believes that Cloud Computing not only is not a fad, but it presages a fundamental paradigm shift that will have as powerful an effect on society as the Internet itself, and will turn out to be truly disruptive technology.

“Strong words,” you say? Well stay tuned for further proof as Cloud Computing matures over the next five years. Remember, you heard it first from the GoogleGazer.

Filed under: Amazon, Cloud Computing, Google, Google Maps, IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Social Networking, Software As A Service (SAAS), Technology, Yahoo, disruptive technology | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments »

They’re All Up in the Clouds: Amazon, Google, IBM, and Now Intel, Microsoft and Yahoo All Want In

Posted on July 30, 2008 by dsarna

While the air is thinner up in the clouds, airspace in the Internet Cloud is definitely getting more crowded. As cloud computing races towards becoming mainstream (if it’s not already), and more and more folks want to become the Levi’s of Cloud Computing, supplying Cloud Computing infrastructure to all the would-be enterprises and entrepreneurs prospectors staking claims for their piece of this new land grab, the big guys are all buying chips at the high-stakes Poker table.

Jeff Bezos’ Amazon was the first to realize the potential for offering rent-a-cloud service on the massive Cloud that Amazon maintains. Its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, provides scalability within minutes on a pay-as-you-go basis, as addition to its Amazon Simple Storage Service for renting storage space in the Cloud. Recently, In a series of announcements, Amazon released a set of hosted e-commerce payment services, as well as an update to its Mechanical Turk service. The payment service, Checkout by Amazon, will allow online retailers to use Amazon’s one-click checkout system, calculate shipping costs and tax, as well as allow their customers to track shipments. The updates to the Mechanical Turk are mostly meant to streamline the creation of new tasks by guiding businesses through the process more efficiently.

Amazon’s rent-a-cloud service was quickly followed, as we reported earlier, by Google. Then, in October 2007, Google and IBM announced a collaberation with major universities UW (the University of Washington), Carnegie-Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Maryland to further the development of cloud computing technology. Not to be outdone, HP, Intel and Yahoo jumped on the band wagon and are are teaming up with some lesser ranked groups, the most prominent of whom are the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany, according to a report in eWeek and its related Google Watch blog.

Earlier, we reported that Adobe’s AIR may pose competition to Google in this space. VMware too is now focusing on virtualization in the Cloud.

Cloud Computing, as powerful as it is, is still very young and immature. It presents development challenges not present with classical software development. We, the consumers can therefore expect to be the ultimate beneficiaries of the research coming out of these competing development efforts. May the best team win!

A word to wise would-be developers of Cloud Computing infrastructure (not applicable to software tool developers supporting Cloud Computing): When the GoogleGazer observes all the big players converging at the high-stakes Poker table, he heads off to the $2 Blackjack tables, where he can hope to compete. You have been duly warned.

Filed under: Adobe AIR, Amazon, Cloud Computing, Google, Microsoft, VMware, Yahoo | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Premature Reports of the Death of Web 2.0

Posted on July 30, 2008 by dsarna

Is Web 2.0 and the really useful free services we have come to depend on over? Is the “free is good” rapid growth period coming to an end? The really well-written ReadWriteWeb blog, which covers Web 2.0 quotes Chris Shipley in Demo.com as opining that the Web 2.0 cycle has come to a close. In her own blog, she goes on to say,

Unlike the Dot Com cycle before it, the Web 2.0 phase hasn’t created tremendous business value for entrepreneurs or their investors. But the social Web – the true definition, we think, of this most recent wave – has sparked tremendous innovation. It has given us the “operating systems” for social networks, the culture of conversation and engagement, the discipline of rapid and disruptive development, and the technology basis on which to build reliable, scalable Web applications. In short, it’s delivered a platform on which to build the next phase of the Web.

Welcome to the Distributed Web. If Web 2.0 established the infrastructure and culture of the social Web, the next cycle will be all about delivering Web content and applications to the point of consumption. This next phase is not about aggregating content or visitors to a single Web site; it’s about disseminating information and applications to the users where ever they may be – another Web site, a mobile device, a consumer electronics gadget.

The Distributed Web changes the game for content creators, Web advertisers and marketers, media sites, and consumers. As content and application providers focus on serving consumers where ever they are, they will need new techniques to syndicate content and audit their audience.

The GoogleGazer affirms in part and dissents in part, and is too old to have an opinion, in part . He agrees that Web 2.0 has not [yet] lived up to its hype, and certainly concurs that the “distributed web” is the “next big thing” as usage migrates from  Microsoft-taxed desktop domination to a plethora of distributed devices and technologies. The GoogleGazer does not believe, however, that free is dead or that Software As A Service (SAAS) has peaked at all. On the impact of social computing, the GoogleGazer’s three adult children assure him that social computing networks will continue to grow like topsey, notwithstanding all of the privacy concerns inherent in the whole world knowing all you do all the time. He is just too old to get it, and as an only occasional-participant, he doesn’t feel qualified to have an opinion.

In general, however, the GoogleGazer is reminded of Samuel Clemens’  (Mark Twain) famous statement upon reading his prematurely printed obituary. In the New York Journal, in 1897, Twain said “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”; it was also thirteen years premature. Somehow, pundits are always rushing trends along, and have but limited attention spans. The GoogleGazer believes that for Web 2.0, the best is yet to come.

Filed under: Social Networking, Software As A Service (SAAS), Software as Services, Web 2.0, disruptive technology | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Cuil Looks Cool; A Useful Search Engine It’s Not

Posted on July 28, 2008 by dsarna

Wired was gushing about the well-pedigreed Cuil general purpose search engine, live today, which aims to knock Google off its perch at the top of the search engine heap.

I had to try it out, and the first impression, which was visual,  was good. The interface looks visually more like a three-column newspaper than the familiar stack of links.

Ciel claims to be “the world’s biggest search engine” It says it “searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.”  Dem’s fighting words, man, so the GoogleGazer needed to put Cuil to the test.

It failed.

A search engine should be timely and comprehensive, and ought try to understand your query and offer meaningful results.

With great humility, the GoogleGazer first searched Cuil for the obscure. He typed GoogleGazer as his first search argument. Cuil claimed 32 results and displayed only nine, While it alleged to put the GoggleGazer’s home page at the top of the list, it actually linked to an obscure broken proxy link “http://www2.riccruz.com:83/proxy/index.php?q=aHR0cDovL2dvb2dsZWdhemVyLmNvbQ==” . In contrast, Google listed the GoogleGazer’s home page first, along with 551 citations all of which were viewable and relevant.

While this flattered the GoogleGazer’s ego, he, ever the dispassionate scientist, next decided to test something timely and in the news. The GoogleGazer hunted and pecked in “Obama Wall Note Prayer” as a search argument, having in mind Senator Obama’s visit to the Wailing Wall and his leaving a prayer note there that was subsequently stolen and made public. Cuil had but one hit, and it was a “miss.” The best it could do was offer an article from the Daily News about Obama running ahead of McCain in the polls. In contrast, Google had dozens of relevant stories leading with the Los Angeles’ Times story “Obama Western Wall prayer note is filched.”

So far so bad.

Time to do a little little real research. The GoogleGazer is looking into Tulipmania, the speculative tulip bubble that peaked around 1636. In Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (2007), Anne Goldgar, who teaches at Kings College in London University, has debunked the accepted wisdom that these bulbs changed hands hundreds of times in a single day, and that some bulbs, sold and resold for thousands of guilders, never even existed. Tulipmania has been seen as an example of the gullibility of crowds and the dangers of financial speculation. If fact, “most of what we have heard of [tulipmania] is not true,” Ms. Goldgar proves. In a search for Tulipmania, Cuil did a little bit better, but not much. It led with a short blog review by Steve Goddard of Ms. Goldgar’s book. Google led with a comprehensive Wikipedia article and then an in-depth overview and book review from Business Week. Neither of these made it to Cuil’s first page.

An important element in Google’s ranking is how often the source is referred to by others, on the assumption that citations are a good predictor of authoritativeness. Cuil says,

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. With Cuil, your search history is always private.

Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil.

Ann Paterson, an ex-Google search engineer, backed by $33 million in venture capital, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers – Russell Power and Louis Monier – searched for better ways to search. From what the GoogleGazer has seen, they have some promising ideas but as Gartner Inc. analyst Allen Weiner was quoted as saying in Wired, “I doubt (Cuil) will be keeping anyone at Google awake at night.”

Filed under: Business, Cuil, Google, Microsoft, Technology | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Google Shows How Life Imitates Art With Compelling Demonstration of Natural Speech Recognition Technology

Posted on July 15, 2008 by dsarna

The browser as we know it will play a less important part in the Internet life of the future. As we noted earlier,  this transition is giving agita to the billionaires that run Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, as it disrupts the existing order. But change is necessary. The Browser / keyboard cum mouse input/output trio is just very limiting for many applications. For years the Yellow Pages advertised “Let Your Fingers Do the Walking.” But fingers are an imperfect input/output device, and pecking a keyboard and clicking or double-clicking a mouse are even worse. Natural speech, of course, is the way humankind  naturally communicates. But for humans to communicate with computers via natural speech requires a high degree of perfection in two technologies, speech synthesis and speech recognition. Speech synthesis has been the [relatively] easy part. It was first demonstrated at the 1939 World’s Fair. Text to speech was first popularized on a large scale with the Speak-n-Spell toy first sold in 1978. The technology has improved steadily to the point that it is recognizable, usuable, oft-times maddening (”For Claims, dial 1, for Returns, dial 2…”) , and perfectly understandable (”In 1.2 miles, exit onto Highway US 4″) if not perfectly natural. Speech recognition has been a  real challenge, one that that some thought was well-nigh impossible. Pioneered by Drs. Jim and Janet Baker in the 1970s, limited speech recognition (”what do you want to do?,” “‘Say ’ship a package,’ ‘track a shipment’, etc.”) has come a long way is now a business with sales of over $5 billion annually, according to LumenVox. It has been most successful in applications with a constrained vocabulary or where the computer has been trained to recognize a specific speaker. The “holy grail” of recognizing unconstrained free speech uttered by the “general public” has been elusive.

Google has quietly been demonstrating lately that it’s made serious progress towards achieving this goal. First, it began offering its free Goog411 directory assistance service (try it – call 1-800-GOOG411). Now, it’s made available the Google Elections Video Search Gadget. This gadget allows you to type in a query, and Google will – lickety split – search all the utterances of the major polititians that have been uploaded to YouTube (and trust me, that’s a lot of words), and get back what they actually said, in their own words, by playing the relavent video segment for you. What it’s doing under the covers is creating a rough, but “good enough” transcript of each video, using its own natural speech to text conversion technology, then indexing this transcript in the usual way, and finally linking the text of the transcript to the related video footage. While quite remarkable by itself (Google’s announcement characterizes it as a “modest contribution”), it’s certainly a harbinger of what’s to come, when your mouth will become the primary communications device for “speaking” to a computer. Of course, this brings to mind Stanley Kubrick’s famous 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odessey, proving once again that life can imitate art, but also reminds us of the admonition of King Solomon, that “Life and death are in the hands of the tongue” (Proverbs 18:21).

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Yahoo’s BOSS Open Search Initiative Unlikely to Keep it Independent, But Will Google Respond?

Posted on July 13, 2008 by dsarna

Yahoo launched its “Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS)“  which essentially allows developers to create a mashup using Yahoo’s APIs and leveraging Yahoo’s search engine with their own assets. Scott Loganbill writing in WebMonkey, discussed the announcement and noted,

BOSS will allow developers who sign up for a public API key to manipulate rankings and the overall appearance of the search pages, as well as create mashups of the data with other data sources.

Yahoo is obviously feeling the pinch to compete more fiercely with Google for developers. The company is facing a buyout threat from Microsoft, as well as criticism for its over-diversification and concentration on non-search products. In a sense, BOSS signals a move back to the basics for the company, as it zeros in on what was once its strongest product — a better search engine.

There are few restrictions on use of the BOSS API. An unlimited number of queries per day is allowed; there are no restrictions on presentation, reordering is allowed, as is blending of proprietary and Yahoo! Search content . It can also be offered “white-label.”

Examples of search engines that already deploy the BOSS technology are:

hakia, a leading semantic search engine, which uses Yahoo! Search BOSS to accelerate its semantic analysis of the Web by accessing the Yahoo’s index of web documents.

Me.dium Search combined the BOSS API with its insight into the real time surfing activity of the crowds to build a unique “Crowd-Powered” social search engine prototype.

Daylife To-Go is a new self-service, hosted publishing platform which nyone can use to automatically generate customizable pages and widgets. Daylife To-Go uses the BOSS API platform to power its Web search module.

Cluuz generates easier to understand search results through patent pending semantic cluster graphs, image extraction, and tag clouds. The Cluuz analysis is performed in real-time on results returned from BOSS API.

Clint Bolton, writing in Google Watch says,

“I’ve been enamored of Yahoo’s Open Strategy since CTO Ari Balogh announced it at Web 2.0 in April.

Unfortunately, it’s probably too late at this stage in the game. Microsoft and breakup investor Carl Icahn have fashioned quite a pincer move on Yahoo.

Icahn in the last few weeks has dangled the Yahoo carrot in front of Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, enough so that the software giant appears interested once again in buying all or some of the company.

Microsoft tried itself to gain Yahoo and failed. Then Icahn entered the picture while Microsoft acted like it didn’t care, and drummed up enough support so that shareholders are calling for the Yahoo board to vanish. Now Microsoft has returned to the table, indicating renewed interest in dealing for Yahoo when and if the current board vacates the company.

My Microsoft Watch colleague Joe Wilcox hinted that Icahn may have contacted Microsoft to persuade it to come back to the table.

I’ll go so far as to say that I’m quite sure Icahn was whispering in Ballmer’s ear all along, fervently invoking the now Gates-less leader to take another crack at Yahoo. Either way, Microsoft can win a bit by taking out a rival or using it to attack the Moby Dick of the Search Ocean.

I’m guessing Icahn and Microsoft will get their wish at the Aug. 1 shareholders’ meeting. I don’t see how the current disenchanted shareholders will let Yahoo continue as it is, particularly in the wake of losing more than 100 talented executives and engineers, and watching the stock wane”.

The GoogleGazer previously reached the same conclusion.

One interesting, obvious, and open question is whether Google will follow Yahoo’s lead, essentially neutralizing Yahoo’s advantage. Google has been actively luring developers, is a leader in supporting Open Source, has recently put “Protocol Buffers” into the public domain as an Open Source high-speed data interchange format, and earlier put huge chucks of its code into the public domain, including Google Gears, as we noted in an earlier post this month. Still it remains to be seen if Google is ready to open up its crown jewels. The GoogleGazer’s prediction: Google will release a comprehensive API that will allow mashups,  but only in a fashion that includes monetization (something Yahoo’s initiative presently lacks), and a revenue-sharing arrangement with Google. Remember, you read the prediction here first.

Filed under: Google, Microsoft, Open Source, Search, Yahoo | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Next Page »