Ask yourself where does innovation come from?
Is the answer:
A. The likes of Microsoft at the CES in Las Vegas?
B. The likes of Apple who didn’t bother with Las Vegas?
C. Companies developing products for the developing world first?
D. The likes of OLPC’s Version 3?
E. All of the above?
Photo by Fast Company
News from Xyggy – their patent search service is now live. Forget keywords, this is about item searches.
Strikes me this would be of interest in the medical imaging world. So I tried ‘MRI’ as the item search. Then selected the top of the list return. Usefully the search engine then delivers a list of similar patents, as Xyggy’s Dinesh Vadhia explains:
Imagine you want to find similar patents for a given patent. Now you can with Xyggy Patent. What’s more, you can query with multiple patents (selected by patent number or title) and Xyggy will find all similar patents in ranked order. Go ahead and try it (and its free).
Patent Baristas wrote about Xyggy here and the IPKat said this.
This looks interesting for Drupal enterprise users; wonder if it may include a basic social network analysis element in the future too:
A hosted Search service that can be installed as a module on any Drupal 6 website has been launched by Acquia, the company that offers enterprise support for the open source content management system.
Search was released into beta in March 2009 and provides support for enterprise-scale site indexing and navigation.
By leveraging faceted search navigation, content recommendations and configurable results weighting, Acquia Search creates a rich index of site content and dramatically improves end-user search experience.
Results can be navigated based on date, author, taxonomy, term, content type, or other built-in/customizable categories. Acquia promises search capabilities up to ten times faster than native Drupal search – an increasingly important function as businesses work to keep visitors actively and meaningfully engaged on sites longer.
“Acquia Search provides great value, both for site visitors and administrators, supercharging a Drupal site’s search capabilities and eliminating the drain on infrastructure and administration,” said Dries Buytaert, founder of the Drupal project and Acquia CTO.
“For visitors it all comes down to better user experience; Acquia Search makes it faster and easier to find content on your site, yielding more accurate results and recommendations encouraging visitors to stay longer on the site. For site administrators, Acquia Search offers the enterprise-quality, highly-available, secure, scalable, and fast indexing search solution that Drupal was missing. And because Acquia Search is offered as a hosted solution, it’s simple to install, and requires no expertise to deploy, manage and scale.”
Delivering the capabilities of Lucene and Solr technologies from the Apache project, Acquia Search can be implemented as a web service for Drupal websites of any size. Acquia Search is built on a redundant hosted service infrastructure, with no servers to deploy or manage. The platform actively follows and contributes to the development of the Solr application and manages service performance and backups automatically.
Acquia Search features and functionality include: Faceted search – enable your visitors to find information faster by clicking search filters that refine the search results Results sorting – enable your visitors to sort their search results by date, type, author Results weighting – improve the relevance of search results by weighting certain results higher than others by using fine-grained controls Content recommendations – suggest additional related content alongside of search results and increase visitor time on your site Faster performance – improve site response times and lower abandon rates by offering a faster search experience than Drupal’s built-in search.
A basic level of Acquia Search is included free with any Acquia Network subscription. Additional search capacity is available for purchase.
There is no doubt that social networking has become the phenomenon of the age. It has moved forward with such a pace that users have probably out stripped technology in terms of the number of applications available. Many of the applications available for the iPhone have connectivity to networks such as Facebook and Twitter, but many have only a limited range of functions when compared to the main networks. The iPhone has shown itself to be uniquely placed to move telephone networking forward; however, the applications available do not help it to be fully integrated into the wider world of social networking.
Few of the applications available are ideal. Many of them have limited functions which only work locally, so it is up to the user in the end to choose an application which is going to be of most use to them. Some of the applications, such as Bluepulse are fairly simple applications which are simple and fast, but lack many of the functions users of Facebook and Twitter are used to. Although it has the appearance of a web page, with friends, messaging and status updates, that is about all the application has to offer. Facebook has an application itself, which although functional, is inferior to the real thing. It has e-mail recognition and integrated chat; however the applicati0n does not run in the background which means you have to be logged in. This means that e-mail and chat are not active all the time. The application does not have location awareness, which some of the other applications have. Another application which demonstrates the wide variation in functionality is iFob. This application is fine if you are within a reasonably close proximity, so great if you are in a concert or bar, and may be useful for business networking events. However, you cannot add friends and can only be used locally.
Loopt is an application which has Twitter and Facebook integration, although actually linking up with Facebook friends is not all that easy. People profiles are fairly simple with just a name and picture. Twitterlator may be one of the better applications for Twitter users. With full search and full friend functionality as well as camera, and location integration, it also has an emergency button which can use to alert friends. However this application can be slow at times and still does not run in the background.
There is no doubt that there is huge potential for social networking applications, and companies are probably still at the stage where we are gathering information. There are a number of business networks starting to spring up which will link people with similar status or positions within companies so that ideas can be exchanged. Almost fifty per cent of iPhone users access social networking sites on iPhone, which is almost twelve times the market average, so the phone and it`s demographic are ideally placed for a bright future in social networking. For up to date iPhone news, go to apple iphone
A while back I wrote a post on 10 ways to convince CEO’s to get blogging. Today I saw a tweet from Euan Semple reflecting on a point by Lee Bryant at the Corporate Social Networking Conference:
@euan Agreeing with @leebryant that it takes years to really get social stuff going in a business.
So what advice would I give if a CEO put me on the spot and asked for my ‘cheats’ way of advancing social media in the enterprise? Talking to Rachel Happe at the Community Roundtable I better understand there’s a lot to be gained from using your online community, firmly embedded in your organisation, to drive this forward. The danger is community manger burnout. But maybe a properly managed CM strategy is a direct route to socializing the enterprise? After all shouldn’t I know by now, that was partly my role at the ICAEW; it even says so on my LinkedIn recommendation:
“When implementing a community based software inside a corporate ecosphere, the biggest challenge of all is the cultural change. Stuart is the answer.” April 10, 2008. Bozhidar Zashev , Commercial Manager, Consultcommerce Ltd.
If that’s of interest check out Dennis Howlett’s recent interview with ICAEW’s John Pearce, Director of Digital Communications, where he explains the role of cultural change in the online communities in this short video: “It’s a learning curve,and a cultural change, and (in response to a follow-up question from Dennis) …we are not frightened to fail”.
I believe Wolfram|Alpha launched via webinar last night (GMT speaking). Not being a search engine geek I thought I’d just quote the tweet from CannonGod:
CannonGod Wolfram|Alpha Feedback: ‘No Result’ page needs to lead to similar queries/simple results. Users are getting frustrated hitting a brick wall.
Just for fun then I tried looking up data on medical imaging; the results page returned a message to say it was under investigation, and gave the option to leave my email to register my interest: so not so bad a verdict from me!
A mild-mannered British physicist is trying to render Google irrelevant. Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Mathematica, a grandiosely ambitious piece of software, has come up with Wolfram Alpha, a grandiosely ambitious engine of knowledge.
Grandiosely ambitious, and grandiosely inexplicable. Put simply, Wolfram Alpha, due to launch in May, will “compute” answers to questions, where Google and other search engines merely trawl the Web for pages which might hold the answer.
To do this, Wolfram has had a small army of researchers working on systematically analyzing and structuring the corpus of human knowledge so that a computer might be able to answer questions with concrete answers, such as, “How far will the Earth be from the Sun tomorrow?”, a question Google completely fails to answer.
Er, this human-centred extract from Valleywag reminds me of a quote from Wolfram ‘A New Kind of Science’ from 2002 which I used in a short paper I wrote on the fight against terrorism:
“For our everyday experience has led us to expect that an object that looks complicated must have been constructed in a complicated way…(but) at least sometimes such an assumption can be completely wrong…unlike engineering nature operates under no such constraint.”
Hence humans (complex) vs computer algorithms (complicated) alright? The joke is I actually met some guy at Jane’s Information Group and tried to convince him of the power of complexity; I’m not sure he was that impressed but it was good of him to hear me out;-)
PS: C1E8844DA8344058820E1B0044CB5042
Xyggy item based search snapshot
Received this intriguing note from Dinesh Vadhia recently on a new item-based search service, Xyggy:
It occurred to me that a basic effor/time saving principle of agile project management is that you don’t try to plan everything up front, because you don’t need to!
The fact that for example getting a site live ready by a certain date requires a change to the URL pointing means you only need to worry about it when you get close to the event, as each event is connected in reality to another (‘one thing leads to another’ to slice the folk wisdom). Call it ‘managing complexity’ if you like.
Did you know that you could support Dr. King’s dream with every Internet search you do? The Washington, DC Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation has now made this possible with the creation of the MLK Toolbar! Every time you perform a search using the MLK toolbar, five cents will be donated to the Foundation.
If it sounds easy, that’s because it is! Download your MLK toolbar today. The toolbar is easy to install and is safe and secure: no spyware, pop-ups or adware. You can also invite friends once it’s installed.