Archive for October, 2011
by Bill Ives
October 28, 2011 at 4:36 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
Semantic technology differs from most computing as it learns on the job. This can provide great benefits but it can also be time consuming. I recently talked with Jeff Catlin, CEO of Lexalytics, about what they’re doing with their recent upgrade of their product, Salience 5.0. They came up with a clever idea to reduce the learning curve. They had their semantic engine digest Wikipedia to gain an understanding of human thought and build their Concept Matrices™. This allows it to do things that most computer technology would struggle with such as understanding that pizza is a food even though the word food was never associated with pizza in the text it was looking at.
While the Wikipedia content is freely reusable under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, Jeff said that they made sure the Wikipedia people were comfortable with what they are doing without asking for a formal endorsement.
These associations are established through concept matrixes. Salience 5.0 will also knows that cat is more associated with lion than with hippo. Most semantic engines required extensive training to be able to reach these conclusions. Devouring Wikipedia gives Salience 5.0 an “out-of-the box” categorization system. You can then add your own categories to extend the system and Salience will know where to put stuff it encounters. Wikipedia was a good choice since it is the work of many people and is constantly refined so there is a “wisdom of crowds” component to its content.
For example, the screen below shows the results of a concept topic run for the text “I like chicken”. Notice that the selected topic is Food (which looks about right). Notice on the far right that the highlighted definition of Food doesn’t talk about chicken anywhere. The system managed to figure out that chicken is a type of food.
The system can adapt to subtle changes. For example, the screen below shows the results when the text is changed to “I like chickens”. Now we get Agriculture as a topic, which makes more sense for liking chickens. Again notice that Agriculture doesn’t talk about chickens, the system managed to figure out that chickens are typically talked about around agriculture, whereas chicken is usually talked about around food.
Lexalytics generally partners with other firms to provide their semantic engine as a component to comprehensive solutions. For example, they are the text analytics engine within Endeca (see my review: Endeca Moves Beyond Deterministic BI Reporting). Other partners include Radian6 and TripAdvisor (see also my review – Radian6 – Monitoring Social Media). There are also several large organizations such as Microsoft and Cisco that directly use Lexalytics.
I really like what they did and can see why it is being adopted by a number of partners.
by Bill Ives
October 25, 2011 at 4:46 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
Evri is a news aggregator and discovery app that allows users build their own news experience from millions of topic choices, while also including top news, social feeds and a number of complementary features. I recently spoke with Evri CEO, Will Hunsinger about this release. Will explained that Evri provides this new discovery capability through a semantic technology engine that constantly indexes over 15,000 of the Web’s best content sources into 2.5 million (and growing) topic channels.
By organizing around topics rather than sources, Evri allows users to explore the depth and breadth of content in an immersive and personal way that is a useful app for the capabilities of the iPad. It incorporates content from traditional media sources, the Web’s top blogs, and social channels like Twitter, delivering all content on any of several million topics in one package.
Evri works off of RSS feeds to gather its content. Then it reformats it to better fit the iPad screen and provide more interesting visualizations. Evri looks for the popularity of a topic, its velocity, and the popularity of people connected with the topic. You can drill down into more extensive coverage on the topic and see related topics and people. The iPad app is free and is available through the iTunes store. Below is a sample screen, the Sports Canvas, showing the main view of trending topics in sports.
Evri for iPad also integrates with Twitter, Facebook, Instapaper, Read It Later and a number of other complementary apps to provide a comprehensive, single source for users. For example, you can also use Evri to look at Twitter and unpack articles that are linked to within tweets as shown below. You can also use Evri to filter your Twitter feed to just get news or tweets with a content link.
You can also follow topics to stay current on your areas of interest. By enabling users to identify what they individually are passionate about, while also delivering the top news from across the web, Evri strikes a balance between personalized news feeds and serendipitous discovery. See a sample view of followed topics below.
Users can search over 2.5 million topics in Evri’s index and follow any topic to get the latest news on their favorite things in the app’s personalized ‘Now Following’ section. See a sample search screen below.
Will said they had 100,000 down loads in the first three weeks of the release. Evri’s app technology approach is hybrid, utilizing a native iOS framework while also leveraging HTML5 for content presentation – and ease of future portability to other devices. They are continuously building a knowledge base to disambiguate topics and entities (people, places, things) in content such as which is the correct Will Smith, the actor or the sports star, or someone else as shown in the topic search screen above.
This is an exciting app and another reason to get an iPad. Will said that they have thousands of active daily users. Their audience tends to double on the weekends. I can see how it can become addictive.
by Bill Ives
October 21, 2011 at 8:30 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
I recently attended Forrester’s Content & Collaboration Forum 2011. The Forum explored what the “current demand for more portable, social workplace experiences means for your workplace strategy.” It shared the “latest trends in technology adoption and how firms forge better business outcomes from a more mobile, social, and virtual workforce.” I had a chance to speak one on one with Leslie Owens. She spoke at this event the next day and here are my session notes (Forrester’s Leslie Owens on Harnessing the Voice of the Employee). Leslie’s expertise includes: enterprise search, semantic tools, information classification, and taxonomies and I have covered her work before (see for example, Forrester on Enterprise Search Trends).
We first discussed looking into the voice of the employee, the topic covered in her talk and recorded in my session notes above. I will not repeat the parts she covered in her talk. Leslie noted in our conversation that the enterprise is a bounded community. You know all about the participants who engage in conversations within the enterprise social media platforms. You know much more about them than the customers or prospects who participate in social media on the Web. I think that many of the applications of social media such as wikis and activity streams can have even greater value within trusted communities within the enterprise. In this case I am not suggesting that listening to the voice of the employee is of higher value than the listening to the voice of the customer. They complement each other. On some issues employee conversations may help better explain what is being discussed by customers and visa versa.
We also discussed the privacy issue a bit more. People objected to data mining emails because the expectation was that they are private. Personally, I think this is mistaken assumption. They are certainly discoverable in a legal action. It is my understanding that most company email systems indicate that they can be monitored for inappropriate actions. However, emails are not immediately transparent to everyone so there is some expectation for privacy.
With social computing inside the enterprise the expectation is transparency. It is actually seen as one of the benefits. So looking at the voice of employee with better analytic tools is simply doing a better job of maximizing this opportunity and increasing the return on investment in social tools. It is doing what they are designed to do. People still need a secure place to communicate but permission levels can be established. There are also other channels outside social media. Privacy is important and there is too much invasion of it today but enterprise social media is the place for transparency within a trusted group, either the whole enterprise or a subgroup within in it.
We also briefly touched on some of the current trends in enterprise search. Call center support is one area of innovation. Custom searches for call center agents bring in relevant content from diverse sources. This is a much-needed improvement. I have done a lot of work with knowledge support for call centers. One agent in the UK said to me that one of the most important skills was the ability to engage the caller in amusing chat will you frantically searched through multiple databases for the answers to their questions.
This unified search is also extended to customer facing web sites (see for example; Coveo Customer Information Access Solutions (CIAS) Moves to Version 2.0). Here is an excellent report that Leslie and her colleagues did, Site Search Evolves from Technical Feature to Customer Touchpoint, and here is my commentary on the report - Evolution of Site Search.
There is also much work being done in federated search going across structured and unstructured data. Here is a conversation I had with Sid Probstein, CTO at Attivio, a firm focused on this issue. I started by asking Sid about the opportunity within enterprise 2.0 to take advantage of looking at the unstructured data to determine the pulse of the enterprise. Sid responded and also showed me a demo of how Attivio can pull unstructured content from product review sites on the Web and index it along with structured data from a CRM system. Here is an earlier review of their work (Attivio Tightly Integrates Structured Data and Unstructured Content for a New Approach to Information Access).
Leslie added that enterprise search is behind Web search on a number of issues beyond the voice of the customer/employee issue. Personalization and making effective use of past search behavior are areas where enterprise needs to catch up. There are great opportunities to provide more individual relevance within the enterprise. The rise of enterprise social media should help accommodate this need by providing more context to aid search engines, just as it is doing on the Web.
by Bill Ives
October 17, 2011 at 7:56 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
Convofy is a new collaboration tool that I am using myself with my colleagues at Darwin Ecosystem. It builds on the micro-blogging activity stream but adds additional features to enable more comprehensive collaboration. Convofy works within the privacy and security of a company network and, as the web site says it, “promotes a culture of sharing and open discussion which fosters deeper engagement by everyone involved.” This has also been my experience.
Recently, I spoke with Tad Staley, their VP of Business Development to better understand the firm and their offering. The firm behind Convofy is Scrybe founded in 2005 and funded by Adobe Ventures. The initial product was a calendaring and personal productivity suite that was one of the first web apps that also worked offline.
Scrybe launched Convofy in April 2011 after more than three years of development. It is built on the Adobe platform and integrates two distinct realms: person and group-centered social networks and collaboration on digital content. This integration allows for more comprehensive collaboration. You can post a document in PDF format within the Convofy activity stream and then add on page markup, annotation, and notification as shown below.
When you click on the annotated image in the activity stream it will take you directly to the point in the document where the annotation was made. Then you can start a chat session with others that is held within the specific space as shown below.
We have found this to be a great boost to online collaboration around documents. The same can be done with video. You can add a note to video and a snap shot of the video can be attached to the activity stream. Clicking on this image will then take you and/or others back to that spot in the time stamp of the video to see your mark. Below you see the video in the activity stream.
Here is the video itself as seen within Convofy and the associated chat.
You can even collaborate on a web site. Clicking on a link in the activity stream takes you to the actual web page in Convofy’s built-in web browser. Here again, a discussion or chat session can be started in this context as shown below.
I have written before that I think the activity stream is one of the biggest innovations in the new social enterprise tools. This collection of features built on top of an activity stream brings enhanced collaboration into the activity stream capability.
Convofy also offers unlimited storage for files and images. You can delegate, assign and manage projects with task lists and milestones. There are also employee profiles. When you have someone in your chat window, Convofy posts their profile info and suggests your conversation partner’s most relevant groups.
Permission levels allow you to have control over who sees the content you share. You can create private groups for teams, projects and topics and invite relevant coworkers. You can also invite people who are external to your organization to join a group. This allows cross-organization collaboration. These external people can’t see or participate in activities elsewhere in your organization’s network, but have full sharing and collaboration functionality within the group.
There is also a presence indicator within the chat feature described above so you can easily find who is online and chat with them or you can send them offline chat messages. You can start a private chat with one person or, when you want to discuss work with all the people involved, you can chat within a post, as mentioned above, so all coworkers are on the same page.
There are usage metrics as the presence indicator size reveals how active your coworkers are; the more they contribute, the bigger the indicator next to their name will be. Your contacts and groups are ordered based on their relevance to you.
There is also mobile, as Convofy works well on popular phones like your iPhone, Android and Blackberry and is designed to work on any modern device. All networks are SSL protected (the same as online banks). You can also restrict usage to an IP ranges, or restrict guest domains. You can also customize password and usage policies.
I am really enjoying our use of Convofy. It has improved our intra-company awareness and collaboration. I recommend that you check it out. There is both a free version and an enhanced licensed version.
by Bill Ives
October 7, 2011 at 5:47 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
I have admired the capabilities within Socialtext for some time. It was one of the early enterprise 2.0 providers, well before the term was coined. They began with a wiki base and have added capability over time to build a comprehensive platform. A couple of years ago they added Socialtext Signals, one of the first enterprise micro-blogging tools. A wrote about them a year ago on this blog (see Socialtext Adds Micro-messaging and Goes Mobile). Recently, I spoke with their CEO, Eugene Lee, on their latest offerings.
Eugene said that when Socialtext Signals and its microblogging capability, was introduced in 2008 the focus was on integration from the start. They were likely the first to provide a microblogging capability within a collaboration suite and now many of the others have made this move. Socialtext wanted to enable more than water cooler chat. They wanted make it easy to create activity feeds with a specific focus like a project.
As I wrote in my 2010 interview with Ross Mayfield, it is fully integrated with the complete Socialtext platform. You can filter activities by people or the type of event. Events within other systems such as CRM tools can be included in the activity stream through the Socialtext REST API. This is an excellent feature as it can avoid the information silos that can develop with independent enterprise 2.0 tools. I recently added in a post, Putting Social Media to Work, this integration is what enterprise 2.0 needs to do to move beyond Web 2.0 in the enterprise.
The platforms that Socialtext can easily integrate with include SharePoint and Salesforce.com. These are good choices. In my view SharePoint, and other document management systems, should be treated like other enterprise applications of record in the same way as an ERP or CRM system is being treated. Socialtext can then help increase engagement with these systems. As Eugene said, it is people who do the work so you need to push social tools more into the workflow where people actually work.
Eugene added that organizations need to enable people who are not normally working in an enterprise app such as a CRM system to get involved to bring their expertise to bear on the issues at hand. I think this is great. It was the vision some of us had in the early days on knowledge management but did not have the tools for. Now you can bring issues form the CRM tool into Socialtext to generate more engagement and more focus. You can also attach metadata to the issue as it enters the activity stream, to instantaneously provide more context, and further enhance this focus.
This increased connection and engagement can pay dividends. Eugene mentioned how the customer service department of an accounting consulting firm has cut in half the time it takes to respond to difficult customer questions since implementing Socialtext. In another example, a UK railroad has significantly reduced delays in getting the right equipment to the right location by making the right people aware of the problems earlier.
Some firms are now deploying Socialtext as the start page on their intranet with Signals in the forefront. You can also add Google gadgets to the intranet through Socialtext. This deployment has increased intranet usage and made it more focused on work issues. Socialtext operates in a SaaS model with the ability to have private hosting within and outside the enterprise.
Socialtext 5.0 is about to be released. It includes a simplified user experience, as well as several functional enhancements including a new editor, task management, page creation and tracking capabilities, as well as a theme selector that enables the administrative user to quickly and easily customize and brand their environment.
They also announced the availability of Socialtext Radar, a people recommendation engine that allows employees to create rich profiles by describing their experience, interests, passions and other configurable dimensions, and uses that data to identify the most relevant people to connect with and solve business challenges together in real-time.
I really like their focus on integration and their emphasis on connecting with work processes. It is great to see Socialtext continue to evolve in the right directions.
by Bill Ives
October 4, 2011 at 4:45 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
IBM Rational is an open software development platform that supports sharing and interactions among software and systems design and development teams. Recently, I spoke with Gina Poole, Vice President, Marketing, IBM Rational. Gina has been with IBM for over 25 years. She began as a developer and has moved through strategy and operations. Before her current assignment she led the IBM Worldwide University Relations and Innovation Program.
Gina began by noting that software development is a very social business and collaborative is key for success. It enables innovation, reduces risks, and drives down costs. I agree completely and it is the basis for the current forms of software development, such as Agile. To enable this collaboration on a continuous and comprehensive basis, Rational supports the entire software lifecycle. In the past the development life cycle was often disconnected and supported by siloed tool sets. Now Rational enables the integration of both people and tools across the entire lifecycle.
The integration of collaboration capabilities within the development tool set is aligned with IBM’s focus on integrating social business tools with work processes that I saw presented at Lotussphere this year. I agree with this move and think it is essential for enterprise 2.0 to become more than simply using disconnected Web 2.0 tools within the enterprise. Gina noted that this integration helps break down barriers because conversations are held within the common tool set. One group can easily pick up where another left off. This is especially important with global teams collaborating around the clock. It can also bring products to market faster. This collaboration can also occur beyond the enterprise. IBM DeveloperWorks has over 8 million members with over 4 million in action in any given month.
Rational offers products that leverage Jazz, IBM’s open software development platform. Jazz.net is a community and online venue for open commercial development of Jazz-based products. It is a scalable, extensible team collaboration platform build using open specifications from the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration community (OSLC). OSLC is an open community that is seeking to standardize the way tools share information such as requirements, tests, work items, change requests and designs with one another. Here are some of the components of Rational
Collaborative Design Management: Enables teams to integrate designs seamlessly with other development tasks and information, such as requirements, code, and quality management assets. This is achieved through a central design hub where designs can be stored, maintained, and referenced for future reuse, documentation and compliance.
Collaborative Lifecycle Management: Encourages cross-functional collaboration. It brings together IBM Rational Requirements Composer, IBM Rational Team Concert and IBM Rational Quality Manager in a unified development platform. New integrations between IBM Connections social networking software for business and IBM Rational Team Concert allow software developers to use social networking to find experts within an organization and help collaborate with stakeholders on software development projects.
Collaborative Development and Operations: Enables organizations to reduce reworking projects through standardized processes and allows automation for deploying software. Existing development assets can be reused, regardless of whether they reside on the cloud or on-site servers. To improve the identification and remediation of potential problems and issues, IBM has developed an OSLC-based integration between the IT operations ticketing system, Tivoli Service Request Manager, and the development team solution, Rational Team Concert.
We next discussed Agile, which was first created to support co-located teams. Gina mentioned a successful experiment that looked at the use of Agile by distributed teams. Five university students from the US (Pace University), India (University of Delhi) and Senegal (Ecole Supérieure Polytechnique), the students used the IBM Rational Jazz community to build the mobile application and implement it in the classroom. The result of 9 weeks effort was “Target First Grade,” an application aimed to help school children in Senegal practice their math, reading and writing skills on a mobile device, with the results of each lesson being texted to both the instructor and parents. Here are several screen shots of the application.
Here is a paper describing the project in more detail, Transitioning to Distributed Development in Students’ Global Software Development Projects. This effort has been expanded into the IBM Software for a Cause Program and a great service. I like what they are doing with Rational. It is a great example of putting social software to work by integrating it with work process and initiatives.
Thought...
