Was war eigentlich Web 1.0, wenn jetzt alle von Web 2.0 sprechen und schreiben? Vermutlich sind wir schon bei Web 9.4. Sehen wir es einfach pragmatsich: Web 2.0 ist eine Art Sammelbegriff für das nochmalige Aufbegehren der Neuen Medien, sozusagen der zweite Anlauf mit zum Teil neuen Technologien und alten Ideen.
Die Speerspitze bildet wohl AJAX, das mittlerweile vielen Menschen ein Begriff ist, allerdings eher, wenn man es an praktischen Beispielen, wie Google Maps festmacht. Einen echten Unterschied zu einer herkömmlichen Webanwendung wird vielen Menschen wohl auch nicht auffallen und doch schickt sich AJAX an, das Internet nachhaltig zu reformieren: Von der Auto-Vervollständigung beim Eintippen von Suchbegriffen oder der Korrektur von Tippfehlern nach dem Motto "Meinten Sie vielleicht ..." bis hin zu Google Maps und WYSIWYG-Editoren mit AJAX-Unterstützung reicht die Bandbreite der dynamischen Helferlein.
Monday, July 31, 2006
Wissensaustausch mit Wikis: Einfach loslegen (contentmanager.de)
Wissensbasen lassen sich nicht nur mit teuren Werkzeugen realisieren, sondern auch mit Wikis. Die wichtigsten Vorteile solcher Implementierungen sind die kostenlose Verwaltung und eine einfache Verlinkung. Auch im Bereich der Technischen Dokumentation sind Wikis für so manche Anwendung die beste Lösung.
Infos über Wiki: http://meta.wikimedia.org Die Erste: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki Doku-Wiki von Comet: http://www.dokupedia.de
07/2006, Prof. Sissi Closs
Prof. Sissi Closs gehört zu den führenden Experten für Online-Dokumentation und XML in Deutschland. Sie ist Mitinhaberin und Geschäftsführerin der Firmen Comet Computer und Comet Communication.
Wiki-Plattformen
- MediaWiki: http://Wikipedia.sourceforge.net
- TWiki: http://www.twiki.org
- PhpWiki: http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net
- Übersicht über Wikis: http://www.wiki.org
Wiki-Anwendungen
07/2006, Prof. Sissi Closs
Prof. Sissi Closs gehört zu den führenden Experten für Online-Dokumentation und XML in Deutschland. Sie ist Mitinhaberin und Geschäftsführerin der Firmen Comet Computer und Comet Communication.
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Autonomy search reaps success (FT)
Autonomy has recorded a sharp increase in profits on the back of growth in the multi-media search market that it dominates.
The $500m (£270m) acquisition in November of Verity, a US rival, and rising demand for companies wanting to sort through unstructured data has given the Cambridge-based company a market share of about 70 per cent, it said yesterday.
Such is Autonomy's grip on the high end of enterprise search that it would struggle to make acquisitions, according to Mike Lynch, chief executive. "I think it's unlikely that we'll do another large transaction because there's not a lot out there," he said.
Mr Lynch said the etalk product - which sorts phone calls into searchable data and is used in call centres - was seeing fast growth. He also highlighted video searching as one focus for development.
Revenues in the first half of the year rose from $39m to $117.1m as Autonomy added companies such as Whirlpool and Rio Tinto to a customer base that already spans the BBC and Nasa.
Pre-tax profit rose in the first-half from $8.2m to $28m; earnings per share doubled from 4 cents to 8 cents.
Technology shares including Autonomy have had a tumultuous time in recent weeks, but Mr Lynch said: "The business hasn't seen any deterioration."
Autonomy's shares - which closed up 6p yesterday at 415p - have now clawed back most of their recent losses. Shore Capital, which has a 425p target price, upgraded its full-year pre-tax profit forecast from $52.4m to $52.9m.
© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd
The $500m (£270m) acquisition in November of Verity, a US rival, and rising demand for companies wanting to sort through unstructured data has given the Cambridge-based company a market share of about 70 per cent, it said yesterday.
Such is Autonomy's grip on the high end of enterprise search that it would struggle to make acquisitions, according to Mike Lynch, chief executive. "I think it's unlikely that we'll do another large transaction because there's not a lot out there," he said.
Mr Lynch said the etalk product - which sorts phone calls into searchable data and is used in call centres - was seeing fast growth. He also highlighted video searching as one focus for development.
Revenues in the first half of the year rose from $39m to $117.1m as Autonomy added companies such as Whirlpool and Rio Tinto to a customer base that already spans the BBC and Nasa.
Pre-tax profit rose in the first-half from $8.2m to $28m; earnings per share doubled from 4 cents to 8 cents.
Technology shares including Autonomy have had a tumultuous time in recent weeks, but Mr Lynch said: "The business hasn't seen any deterioration."
Autonomy's shares - which closed up 6p yesterday at 415p - have now clawed back most of their recent losses. Shore Capital, which has a 425p target price, upgraded its full-year pre-tax profit forecast from $52.4m to $52.9m.
© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd
Autonomy achieves 70% market share (FT)
Autonomy has recorded a sharp increase in profits on the back of growth in the multimedia search market that it dominates.
The $500m acquisition in November of Verity, a US rival, and growing demand for companies wanting to sort through unstructured data, has given the UK group a market share of about 70 per cent, it said yesterday. Such is Autonomy's grip on the high end of enterprise search that it would struggle to make acquisitions, according to Mike Lynch, chief executive. "It's unlikely that we'll do another large transaction," he said.
Revenues in the first half of the year rose from $39m to $117.1m as Autonomy added companies such as Whirlpool and RioTinto to a customer base that already spans the BBC and Nasa.
Pre-tax profit rose in the first half from $8.2m to $28m. Earnings per share doubled from $0.04 to $0.08. Tom Braithwaite, London
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
The $500m acquisition in November of Verity, a US rival, and growing demand for companies wanting to sort through unstructured data, has given the UK group a market share of about 70 per cent, it said yesterday. Such is Autonomy's grip on the high end of enterprise search that it would struggle to make acquisitions, according to Mike Lynch, chief executive. "It's unlikely that we'll do another large transaction," he said.
Revenues in the first half of the year rose from $39m to $117.1m as Autonomy added companies such as Whirlpool and RioTinto to a customer base that already spans the BBC and Nasa.
Pre-tax profit rose in the first half from $8.2m to $28m. Earnings per share doubled from $0.04 to $0.08. Tom Braithwaite, London
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
Monday, July 24, 2006
Ajax scores for web users (FT)
A simple change in how browsers load web pages is heralding a fundamental shift in the way we interact with the internet.
Saturday, July 22, 2006
What is a community of practice? (Tomoye)
Communities of practice are changing the way organizations manage knowledge. Rather than top-down, communities take a peer-driven approach by horizontally connecting all the people, knowledge and conversations that matter to your organization.
Communities of practice are distributed groups of people who share a common concern, problem, mandate, or sense of purpose. The concept of community binds them together.
Communities of practice connect individuals with expert peers and promote collaboration, information exchange, and the sharing of best practices across boundaries of time, distance, and organizational silos.
A Tomoye Community of Practice fosters dynamic, productive communities and therefore enables leaders in knowledge-intensive organizations make the most of their collective know-how.
Rapid deployment, ease of use, decentralized publishing, and cross-referenced knowledge bases are just a few of the advantages of a Tomoye Community of Practice solution.
Beyond technology, Tomoye builds a partnership with every customer. Customer expertise is paired with Tomoye services to create thriving, self-sustaining communities of practice.
What value can your organization expect from a community of practice?
Communities of practice are distributed groups of people who share a common concern, problem, mandate, or sense of purpose. The concept of community binds them together.
Communities of practice connect individuals with expert peers and promote collaboration, information exchange, and the sharing of best practices across boundaries of time, distance, and organizational silos.
A Tomoye Community of Practice fosters dynamic, productive communities and therefore enables leaders in knowledge-intensive organizations make the most of their collective know-how.
Rapid deployment, ease of use, decentralized publishing, and cross-referenced knowledge bases are just a few of the advantages of a Tomoye Community of Practice solution.
Beyond technology, Tomoye builds a partnership with every customer. Customer expertise is paired with Tomoye services to create thriving, self-sustaining communities of practice.
What value can your organization expect from a community of practice?
- You can provide access to relevant, high-quality information and people from both inside and outside of your organization.
- You can capture valuable intellectual capital and offer an environment that stimulates idea-generation.
- You can solve problems and nurture organization-wide learning.
- You can help your people make better, faster decisions.
- You will increase overall efficiency since the availability of best practices leads to cost savings.
How will your community members benefit?
- Community members will be able to connect and build relationships with people who have expertise in a particular domain.
- They can develop best practices by participating in online discussions where they can share ideas.
- They will be able to find out how others have actually solved problems, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel themselves.
- New community members can use it to get up to speed on their own terms and at their own pace.
- They can unlock the knowledge and experience of retired subject matter experts.
They will discover that their Tomoye Community of Practice helps foster a genuine sense of community spirit.
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Companies learn value of blogging (FT)
BT is preparing to launch its own blog in a marketing move that is also a riposte to Carphone Warehouse, its smaller rival.
Corporate blogging is increasingly used by companies to improve both internal and external communications, as well as for sheer promotional reasons.
It can also be a risky strategy – if uncensored comments are allowed – that gives individual employees and customers a new level of influence over a brand.
John Petter, BT’s chief operating officer, will start blogging in the next few weeks. He believes keeping an online journal offers a way to reach customers who are increasingly disillusioned with traditional public relations methods.
“They are suspicious of ‘corporate speak’ and they want it straight from the horse’s mouth,” he says. “Especially in a big company they want to know that someone is taking responsibility.”
Mr Petter’s blog is partly inspired by that of Charles Dunstone, chief executive of Carphone Warehouse, who started blogging to promote the launch of his company’s new “free” broadband package for TalkTalk, its consumer brand.
Since April, Mr Dunstone has given an account of the struggle to respond to the interest the new product generated.
Sometimes frank but mainly promotional, he tells readers about floods that disrupted his Mumbai call centre and does not pass up the opportunity to takes a pop at his rival.
“We have already had the inevitable grumblings from BT, suggesting to people that it isn’t really free, and to check the small print,” he wrote. “My response is: ‘do the maths, BT.’ ”
BT, which has recently launched a new high-end broadband package, insists its blog will be an authentic personal account. “If it reads like something that had a whole department manufacturing it then it simply wouldn’t work,” Mr Petter says.
Corporate blogging can be a marketing tool, a new approach to collaborative working or simply a way to free computer resources.
Richard Charkin, chief executive of Macmillan, the publisher, has been blogging since December after his IT department complained that his e-mail newsletter was slowing the company’s system.
Switching to a web-based blog let him solve this problem and try to establish Macmillan as a publisher embracing the digital world.
“I think it’s important for a company to have an image which is forward-looking rather than backward-looking,” he says.
Mr Charkin now claims a readership of more than 20,000 and his insights on the difficulty of marketing non-fiction books and tales of burglars urinating in one of his bookshops are eagerly read in the publishing world.
Even the most secretive professions are embracing blogs, if only for internal communications. JP Rangaswami was instrumental in introducing blogging to Dresdner Kleinwort, the investment bank, where he is head of alternative market models, to give different teams the possibility to share ideas.
“There are still a number of objectors,” he says. “It didn’t sound like work.”
But Mr Rangaswami claims that the introduction of blogs and “wikis” – tools that allow collaboration on writing online – have replaced much of the bank’s corporate intranet and increased efficiency.
He now advises other companies on starting blogs and wikis. “The first fear factor seems to be about loss of control; and my claim is what they perceive as their form of control has already been lost,” he says.
“The relationship genie has got out of the bottle. Twenty years ago somebody might have been [protesting] in front of a bank with a placard – that’s quite expensive in terms of human time and effort. Now you can reach 100,000 people [with a blog].”
Lawyers have also started to embrace online journals in spite of the dangers of breaching client confidentiality. Ruth Ward, head of knowledge systems at Allen & Overy, has introduced internal blogs to the law firm and next month will launch a wiki for collaboration with small groups of external clients.
“It really seems to speak to people very powerfully . . . people who found traditional computer systems such as intranets quite hard work both bureaucratically and in terms of technology,” she says.
But she acknowledges that – like banking – not everyone in the legal profession is comfortable with more open access to information.
“In other law firms where it’s very much dog-eat-dog, the last thing people would want to do is post something that could allow someone else to steal their clients,” she says.
The riskiest area to companies harnessing the power of the internet involves “user-generated content”.
In March, General Motors, the US carmaker, invited users of its website to produce 30-second video adverts for the Chevy Tahoe, its new sports utility vehicle.
Companies that have enjoyed the success of such “viral marketing” have seen positive, often humorous, commercials for their product spread around the internet at no cost to their brand or balance sheet.
But GM’s openness led to thousands of ads attacking the company’s SUVs for their impact on the environment.
In the UK, a spoof blog set up last year by “Barry Scott”, a fictional character created to sell Reckitt Benckiser’s Cillit Bang household cleaner, backfired after the top web searches for “Cillit Bang” produced only bloggers attacking the campaign.
Manipulation of a medium that is seen as inherently authentic is a risky step.
“I’m sure people will try but I think very often they will be found out,” says Ms Ward. “There seem to be an awful lot of people who police the internet.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
Corporate blogging is increasingly used by companies to improve both internal and external communications, as well as for sheer promotional reasons.
It can also be a risky strategy – if uncensored comments are allowed – that gives individual employees and customers a new level of influence over a brand.
John Petter, BT’s chief operating officer, will start blogging in the next few weeks. He believes keeping an online journal offers a way to reach customers who are increasingly disillusioned with traditional public relations methods.
“They are suspicious of ‘corporate speak’ and they want it straight from the horse’s mouth,” he says. “Especially in a big company they want to know that someone is taking responsibility.”
Mr Petter’s blog is partly inspired by that of Charles Dunstone, chief executive of Carphone Warehouse, who started blogging to promote the launch of his company’s new “free” broadband package for TalkTalk, its consumer brand.
Since April, Mr Dunstone has given an account of the struggle to respond to the interest the new product generated.
Sometimes frank but mainly promotional, he tells readers about floods that disrupted his Mumbai call centre and does not pass up the opportunity to takes a pop at his rival.
“We have already had the inevitable grumblings from BT, suggesting to people that it isn’t really free, and to check the small print,” he wrote. “My response is: ‘do the maths, BT.’ ”
BT, which has recently launched a new high-end broadband package, insists its blog will be an authentic personal account. “If it reads like something that had a whole department manufacturing it then it simply wouldn’t work,” Mr Petter says.
Corporate blogging can be a marketing tool, a new approach to collaborative working or simply a way to free computer resources.
Richard Charkin, chief executive of Macmillan, the publisher, has been blogging since December after his IT department complained that his e-mail newsletter was slowing the company’s system.
Switching to a web-based blog let him solve this problem and try to establish Macmillan as a publisher embracing the digital world.
“I think it’s important for a company to have an image which is forward-looking rather than backward-looking,” he says.
Mr Charkin now claims a readership of more than 20,000 and his insights on the difficulty of marketing non-fiction books and tales of burglars urinating in one of his bookshops are eagerly read in the publishing world.
Even the most secretive professions are embracing blogs, if only for internal communications. JP Rangaswami was instrumental in introducing blogging to Dresdner Kleinwort, the investment bank, where he is head of alternative market models, to give different teams the possibility to share ideas.
“There are still a number of objectors,” he says. “It didn’t sound like work.”
But Mr Rangaswami claims that the introduction of blogs and “wikis” – tools that allow collaboration on writing online – have replaced much of the bank’s corporate intranet and increased efficiency.
He now advises other companies on starting blogs and wikis. “The first fear factor seems to be about loss of control; and my claim is what they perceive as their form of control has already been lost,” he says.
“The relationship genie has got out of the bottle. Twenty years ago somebody might have been [protesting] in front of a bank with a placard – that’s quite expensive in terms of human time and effort. Now you can reach 100,000 people [with a blog].”
Lawyers have also started to embrace online journals in spite of the dangers of breaching client confidentiality. Ruth Ward, head of knowledge systems at Allen & Overy, has introduced internal blogs to the law firm and next month will launch a wiki for collaboration with small groups of external clients.
“It really seems to speak to people very powerfully . . . people who found traditional computer systems such as intranets quite hard work both bureaucratically and in terms of technology,” she says.
But she acknowledges that – like banking – not everyone in the legal profession is comfortable with more open access to information.
“In other law firms where it’s very much dog-eat-dog, the last thing people would want to do is post something that could allow someone else to steal their clients,” she says.
The riskiest area to companies harnessing the power of the internet involves “user-generated content”.
In March, General Motors, the US carmaker, invited users of its website to produce 30-second video adverts for the Chevy Tahoe, its new sports utility vehicle.
Companies that have enjoyed the success of such “viral marketing” have seen positive, often humorous, commercials for their product spread around the internet at no cost to their brand or balance sheet.
But GM’s openness led to thousands of ads attacking the company’s SUVs for their impact on the environment.
In the UK, a spoof blog set up last year by “Barry Scott”, a fictional character created to sell Reckitt Benckiser’s Cillit Bang household cleaner, backfired after the top web searches for “Cillit Bang” produced only bloggers attacking the campaign.
Manipulation of a medium that is seen as inherently authentic is a risky step.
“I’m sure people will try but I think very often they will be found out,” says Ms Ward. “There seem to be an awful lot of people who police the internet.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
Friday, July 14, 2006
EMC cuts outlook for year (FT)
EMC, the world’s biggest maker of corporate data storage equipment and software, cut its full-year outlook on Friday in the wake of a profits warning earler in the week.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
Open Text Bids for Hummingbird as Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP Target ECM (AMR)
Open Text is acquiring enterprise content management (ECM) rival Hummingbird, in a rapid response to an earlier bid by private equity firm Symphony Technology Group. At $1 per share above the Symphony offer, the Open Text bid is valued at $483.5M and will likely get the support of Hummingbird shareholders, though the board recommendations so far advise them to “take no action.”
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
A New Perspective On Information Management (Forrester)
Information management is becoming a hot topic as firms struggle to deal with disparate databases and content repositories spread throughout their organizations. While technologies like database management systems, data warehousing, data integration, and enterprise content management have assisted firms in bringing some semblance of order to the information throughout their organizations, most enterprises struggle to use that information efficiently to optimize their operations. To leverage the benefits that information can provide, firms must manage both data and content in such a way that business processes and functions can consume data, content, or a combination of both as needed.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Microsoft Shrewdly Funds Open XML Translator Project (Gartner)
Microsoft is taking an unusual approach to OpenDocument support for Office by enabling other companies and the open-source community to do the work. This is a good move that will help diffuse criticism of Office 2007.
Autonomy predicts record results with increasing demand for data searching (FT)
The challenge faced by companies in dealing with a growing deluge of digitally formatted information has prompted Autonomy, the world's biggest search software company, to predict record results.
The upbeat trading update sent shares in Autonomy 19¾p higher at 428½p.
Some analysts ascribed the positive update to a successful integration of Verity, a US rival bought for $500m last December.
But Mike Lynch, founder and chief executive of Autonomy, said the most important factor was an increased need for companies to sort through a growing amount of unstructured data such as e-mails, video and phone calls.
"They're being forced to deal with it because of regulation and compliance," he said. "Our area is growing much faster than the background IT [market]."
Autonomy said second-quarter revenue would be in line with analysts' estimates of $60.7m (£32.8m) and pre-tax profit would be above a consensus of $15.1m.
George O'Connor, an analyst at Shore Capital, said: "This is the sixth consecutive quarter of record results and, in our opinion, Autonomy, post-Verity, has entered a halcyon trading period." He added that Autonomy now had "gorilla status" compared with smaller competitors in its specialist sector.
The Cambridge-based company, which includes IBM, Boeing, the US Army and Britain's Metropolitan Police among its clients, supplies software that conducts searches based on themes. It works with images and videos as well as text.
Google, the market leader in internet-based search, is turning its attention to the enterprise market that Autonomy serves with a hardware device that can search through swathes of companies' data.
But Mr O'Connor said he saw commoditisation of search tools as the key business risk to Autonomy rather than the challenge from Google. Mr Lynchsaid Google's push into the enterprise market "makes almost no difference" as it was offering a lower-end product.
Autonomy is due to post results for the six months to the end of June on July 26.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
The upbeat trading update sent shares in Autonomy 19¾p higher at 428½p.
Some analysts ascribed the positive update to a successful integration of Verity, a US rival bought for $500m last December.
But Mike Lynch, founder and chief executive of Autonomy, said the most important factor was an increased need for companies to sort through a growing amount of unstructured data such as e-mails, video and phone calls.
"They're being forced to deal with it because of regulation and compliance," he said. "Our area is growing much faster than the background IT [market]."
Autonomy said second-quarter revenue would be in line with analysts' estimates of $60.7m (£32.8m) and pre-tax profit would be above a consensus of $15.1m.
George O'Connor, an analyst at Shore Capital, said: "This is the sixth consecutive quarter of record results and, in our opinion, Autonomy, post-Verity, has entered a halcyon trading period." He added that Autonomy now had "gorilla status" compared with smaller competitors in its specialist sector.
The Cambridge-based company, which includes IBM, Boeing, the US Army and Britain's Metropolitan Police among its clients, supplies software that conducts searches based on themes. It works with images and videos as well as text.
Google, the market leader in internet-based search, is turning its attention to the enterprise market that Autonomy serves with a hardware device that can search through swathes of companies' data.
But Mr O'Connor said he saw commoditisation of search tools as the key business risk to Autonomy rather than the challenge from Google. Mr Lynchsaid Google's push into the enterprise market "makes almost no difference" as it was offering a lower-end product.
Autonomy is due to post results for the six months to the end of June on July 26.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
Chris Nuttall: To boldly go beyond search (FT)
What has Google done for the enterprise lately?
Sadly, not a lot – its mission seems more aligned with the Starship Enterprise than business needs. It is interested in space – Google Mars for instance – the final frontier of capturing all the world’s information and boldly going where no search engine company has gone before.
Sadly, not a lot – its mission seems more aligned with the Starship Enterprise than business needs. It is interested in space – Google Mars for instance – the final frontier of capturing all the world’s information and boldly going where no search engine company has gone before.
Audio files: no longer too big to store nor too hard to search (FT)
We talk far more than we type. Podcasts, online video, internet radio, recordings of meetings and phone conversations – so much information today is contained in audio files. But how to index it, search it and access it?
Far from perfect, voice recognition is good enough to make audio searching a possibility.
The Blinkx search engine uses technology developed by Autonomy to index audio and video from podcasts, internet sites, broadcast television and radio; more than 4m hours of audio. As well as generating a phonetic transcript, it uses information including metadata (like the page title), words already recognised and other contextual details to improve the index. The search engine can also take the context of your search terms into account, to see if they suggest a new interpretation of a recording.
According to Suranga Chandratillake, Blinkx chief executive, accuracy varies: “It’s anything from 60 per cent to 95 per cent depending less on the accent and more on the quality of the signal. Background music is bad, fuzzy recordings are bad. Our best results are from professionally recorded, professional speakers in a studio (for example, a newscaster on bbc.co.uk), our worst from amateurs with poor audio quality and music playing in the background.”
Microsoft’s OneNote application already records audio and synchronises it with typed or handwritten notes, so users can click on what they have written to hear what was going on when they wrote it (ideal for checking whether they wrote something down correctly).
OneNote 2007, due out early next year, allows searching of audio recordings directly. It does not do voice recognition, although the speech recognition built into Windows XP Tablet Edition can be used to transcribe recordings into OneNote. Instead it converts audio to phonemes, converts search terms into phoneme equivalents and looks for a match.
The technology is not perfect, especially with low-fidelity recordings, but lead program manager Owen Braun believes it is good enough to be useful. “People have meetings and conversations every day where having an exact record would be hugely valuable, but most assume audio is too hard to capture, too big to store, and too hard to mine later for the valuable bits. With OneNote 2007 and a recent-model computer, these things simply aren’t true anymore.”
As well as making recordings in OneNote, people can import existing audio. All they need to record phone conversations is a cheap cable (and the permission of the people they are talking to). They can add call recording to a company PBX for around £2,000 with a system such as Storacall’s Intro. And if they use Skype they can record calls as MP3 files that are stored in Outlook folders with an add-in called Skylook (http://www.skylook.biz/).
Recording in OneNote means carrying a laptop or tablet PC (although Braun hopes to be able to search audio recorded on mobile phones in a future release). Luis Elizalde, a design engineer with IBM Design Consulting Services, thinks users will want much more portable devices to record almost everything.
“With all the information I have to keep up with every day, with e-mail and meetings, my social life is shrinking. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could go back in time and replay what somebody said in a meeting, replay that telephone number somebody gave me at the club the other night that I didn’t write down.”
His concept audio recorder, Magic Block, would record weeks or months of conversations on to flash memory and recognise it with IBM’s ViaVoice software. On top of that, it can learn individual voices to search for who was speaking, Elizalde suggests: “You could ask it to find everything that Jane said between June 3 and July 5, then look for keywords and keep dissecting that information.” Recordings would also preserve the emphasis and emotions lost in transcriptions.
Such a device would raise issues of privacy and confidentiality, so the Magic Block concept has a fingerprint scanner to keep recordings secure. IBM does not currently plan to manufacture the Magic Block, but Elizalde believes recording, playback, recognition and search technologies are mature enough to produce a record or to add recording and recognition features to something we already carry: the mobile phone.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
Far from perfect, voice recognition is good enough to make audio searching a possibility.
The Blinkx search engine uses technology developed by Autonomy to index audio and video from podcasts, internet sites, broadcast television and radio; more than 4m hours of audio. As well as generating a phonetic transcript, it uses information including metadata (like the page title), words already recognised and other contextual details to improve the index. The search engine can also take the context of your search terms into account, to see if they suggest a new interpretation of a recording.
According to Suranga Chandratillake, Blinkx chief executive, accuracy varies: “It’s anything from 60 per cent to 95 per cent depending less on the accent and more on the quality of the signal. Background music is bad, fuzzy recordings are bad. Our best results are from professionally recorded, professional speakers in a studio (for example, a newscaster on bbc.co.uk), our worst from amateurs with poor audio quality and music playing in the background.”
Microsoft’s OneNote application already records audio and synchronises it with typed or handwritten notes, so users can click on what they have written to hear what was going on when they wrote it (ideal for checking whether they wrote something down correctly).
OneNote 2007, due out early next year, allows searching of audio recordings directly. It does not do voice recognition, although the speech recognition built into Windows XP Tablet Edition can be used to transcribe recordings into OneNote. Instead it converts audio to phonemes, converts search terms into phoneme equivalents and looks for a match.
The technology is not perfect, especially with low-fidelity recordings, but lead program manager Owen Braun believes it is good enough to be useful. “People have meetings and conversations every day where having an exact record would be hugely valuable, but most assume audio is too hard to capture, too big to store, and too hard to mine later for the valuable bits. With OneNote 2007 and a recent-model computer, these things simply aren’t true anymore.”
As well as making recordings in OneNote, people can import existing audio. All they need to record phone conversations is a cheap cable (and the permission of the people they are talking to). They can add call recording to a company PBX for around £2,000 with a system such as Storacall’s Intro. And if they use Skype they can record calls as MP3 files that are stored in Outlook folders with an add-in called Skylook (http://www.skylook.biz/).
Recording in OneNote means carrying a laptop or tablet PC (although Braun hopes to be able to search audio recorded on mobile phones in a future release). Luis Elizalde, a design engineer with IBM Design Consulting Services, thinks users will want much more portable devices to record almost everything.
“With all the information I have to keep up with every day, with e-mail and meetings, my social life is shrinking. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could go back in time and replay what somebody said in a meeting, replay that telephone number somebody gave me at the club the other night that I didn’t write down.”
His concept audio recorder, Magic Block, would record weeks or months of conversations on to flash memory and recognise it with IBM’s ViaVoice software. On top of that, it can learn individual voices to search for who was speaking, Elizalde suggests: “You could ask it to find everything that Jane said between June 3 and July 5, then look for keywords and keep dissecting that information.” Recordings would also preserve the emphasis and emotions lost in transcriptions.
Such a device would raise issues of privacy and confidentiality, so the Magic Block concept has a fingerprint scanner to keep recordings secure. IBM does not currently plan to manufacture the Magic Block, but Elizalde believes recording, playback, recognition and search technologies are mature enough to produce a record or to add recording and recognition features to something we already carry: the mobile phone.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
Friday, July 07, 2006
The leading windows on the web receive a fresh polish (FT)
Remember the web browser wars? In the mid-1990s Microsoft and Netscape raced to add features to their respective browsers. Their rivalry and the race to attract "user eyeballs" led to rapid-fire advances in both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.
Microsoft triumphed by bundling Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system but prompted the US government's landmark antitrust suit against the software giant.
A decade later an ageing Internet Explorer 6 still dominates but has seen its market share slip by about 10 points in the face of new competition from Mozilla's Firefox, an "open source" browser, and an updated version of Opera, another free rival browser.
Firefox in particular has won plaudits for its innovative approach to browsing, including a new "tabbed page" interface and built-in features such as search window, pop-up blockers and improved security.
These features helped Firefox capture about 9 per cent of the browser market - quite an achievement when nearly every personal computer sold comes with Internet Explorer installed along with Windows and users must download and install Firefox. The current version of Firefox - version 1.5.0.1 - is solid, fast and reliable. My favourite so far, it comes in versions that run on Windows-based PCs, Apple Macs and Linux machines.
However, the latest version of Opera's browser (Opera 9) comes with several advanced features only available in Firefox as add-ons and missing from the current version of Internet Explorer.
Now, almost five years after Internet Explorer 6 became available, Microsoft is readying its successor - the third beta (test) version of Internet Explorer (IE 7) was released last week and is available for download.
In fact, all the leading browsers - including Firefox - are due for facelifts over the next few months. These are designed to make them more flexible, secure and better able to handle the expanding range of business transactions and software applications over the internet. So I decided to take a closer look at the latest batch of browsers and how they compare.
Microsoft's update is the most eagerly awaited (www.microsoft.com). While its new browser has already been criticised by some who characterise it as a "catch-up exercise", it still represents a significant and worthwhile upgrade that will be built into Microsoft's next generation Vista operating system, due for launch later this year.
Among the new features, IE 7 includes tabbed browsing (address-book style tabs to help switch between web pages) for the first time, support for RSS (really simple syndication) technology, which delivers news feeds directly to the user's desktop, and a built-in search box on a much more attractive and streamlined toolbar. Perhaps most important, IE 7 boasts improved security including new anti-phishing technology that visually alerts users when they visit dubious "spoofed" websites.
I found the beta software easy to download and install. It imports settings, including favourites, automatically from previous versions of Internet Explorer. I would not recommend installing beta software on any mission-critical PC, but I encountered no problems with this latest "feature complete" trial version on my IBM ThinkPad portable. Note, however, that the PC must be running a valid version of Windows XP with SP2 (Service Pack 2) installed (downloads are also available for the 64-bit versions of Windows and versions of Windows Server 2003). IE 7 allows users to change the order of open page tabs just by dragging and dropping and to view thumbnail previews of open tabbed web pages. RSS feeds can now be updated all in one go.
Overall, IE 7 does a good job of catching up with its rivals and, while it lacks truly innovative features, it meets the requirements of the evolving dynamic and transaction-intensive web.
The new Opera 9 browser (www.opera.com) goes a step further by integrating Apple Mac and Yahoo-style "widgets" - small web-based applications that run within the browser but appear detached as standalone tools. Aside from standard features such as built-in search box and tabbed pages, the new browser also supports a file-sharing download technology called BitTorrent and lets users customise a wide range of personal preferences.
BitTorrent support enables savvy P2P (peer-to-peer) users who do not want to launch a separate external application to search for files on the BitTorrent network through integrated search functionality, and then use Opera's built-in transfer manager software to handle the download.
My favourite new features include the ability to delete individual cookies - bits of code that identify users when they revisit websites - and a single click option called "delete private data" that makes it easier to protect your identity while surfing the web.
Other features include integrated e-mail technology that lets users quickly send and receive e-mail without leaving the browser, and built-in support for RSS and Atom 1.0 (a newer protocol similar to RSS) newsfeeds. Another plus: Opera 9 supports 25 languages and runs on a wide range of Windows, Linux and Mac OS X-based machines where it poses a challenge to Apple's beautifully crafted Safari browser. Overall, Opera 9 is impressive and a worthy challenger for both Internet Explorer and the current version of Firefox. A beta version of Firefox 2 is due soon with a full version expected later this year.
Among its new features will be anti-phishing technology and tools that will automatically restore web pages should the browser crash or require a restart. Other features are expected to include a more advanced search box that will suggest queries as users type.
Mozilla's open source developers are already working on Firefox 3, which is due to launch next year and will enable users to run online applications without a live internet connection.
Such developments could enable Firefox to remain one step ahead of the rivals and continue to eat into Internet Explorer's dominant market position.
For most users the new IE 7 will meet most of their requirements. If not, both Firefox and Opera 9 are worth a look.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
Microsoft triumphed by bundling Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system but prompted the US government's landmark antitrust suit against the software giant.
A decade later an ageing Internet Explorer 6 still dominates but has seen its market share slip by about 10 points in the face of new competition from Mozilla's Firefox, an "open source" browser, and an updated version of Opera, another free rival browser.
Firefox in particular has won plaudits for its innovative approach to browsing, including a new "tabbed page" interface and built-in features such as search window, pop-up blockers and improved security.
These features helped Firefox capture about 9 per cent of the browser market - quite an achievement when nearly every personal computer sold comes with Internet Explorer installed along with Windows and users must download and install Firefox. The current version of Firefox - version 1.5.0.1 - is solid, fast and reliable. My favourite so far, it comes in versions that run on Windows-based PCs, Apple Macs and Linux machines.
However, the latest version of Opera's browser (Opera 9) comes with several advanced features only available in Firefox as add-ons and missing from the current version of Internet Explorer.
Now, almost five years after Internet Explorer 6 became available, Microsoft is readying its successor - the third beta (test) version of Internet Explorer (IE 7) was released last week and is available for download.
In fact, all the leading browsers - including Firefox - are due for facelifts over the next few months. These are designed to make them more flexible, secure and better able to handle the expanding range of business transactions and software applications over the internet. So I decided to take a closer look at the latest batch of browsers and how they compare.
Microsoft's update is the most eagerly awaited (www.microsoft.com). While its new browser has already been criticised by some who characterise it as a "catch-up exercise", it still represents a significant and worthwhile upgrade that will be built into Microsoft's next generation Vista operating system, due for launch later this year.
Among the new features, IE 7 includes tabbed browsing (address-book style tabs to help switch between web pages) for the first time, support for RSS (really simple syndication) technology, which delivers news feeds directly to the user's desktop, and a built-in search box on a much more attractive and streamlined toolbar. Perhaps most important, IE 7 boasts improved security including new anti-phishing technology that visually alerts users when they visit dubious "spoofed" websites.
I found the beta software easy to download and install. It imports settings, including favourites, automatically from previous versions of Internet Explorer. I would not recommend installing beta software on any mission-critical PC, but I encountered no problems with this latest "feature complete" trial version on my IBM ThinkPad portable. Note, however, that the PC must be running a valid version of Windows XP with SP2 (Service Pack 2) installed (downloads are also available for the 64-bit versions of Windows and versions of Windows Server 2003). IE 7 allows users to change the order of open page tabs just by dragging and dropping and to view thumbnail previews of open tabbed web pages. RSS feeds can now be updated all in one go.
Overall, IE 7 does a good job of catching up with its rivals and, while it lacks truly innovative features, it meets the requirements of the evolving dynamic and transaction-intensive web.
The new Opera 9 browser (www.opera.com) goes a step further by integrating Apple Mac and Yahoo-style "widgets" - small web-based applications that run within the browser but appear detached as standalone tools. Aside from standard features such as built-in search box and tabbed pages, the new browser also supports a file-sharing download technology called BitTorrent and lets users customise a wide range of personal preferences.
BitTorrent support enables savvy P2P (peer-to-peer) users who do not want to launch a separate external application to search for files on the BitTorrent network through integrated search functionality, and then use Opera's built-in transfer manager software to handle the download.
My favourite new features include the ability to delete individual cookies - bits of code that identify users when they revisit websites - and a single click option called "delete private data" that makes it easier to protect your identity while surfing the web.
Other features include integrated e-mail technology that lets users quickly send and receive e-mail without leaving the browser, and built-in support for RSS and Atom 1.0 (a newer protocol similar to RSS) newsfeeds. Another plus: Opera 9 supports 25 languages and runs on a wide range of Windows, Linux and Mac OS X-based machines where it poses a challenge to Apple's beautifully crafted Safari browser. Overall, Opera 9 is impressive and a worthy challenger for both Internet Explorer and the current version of Firefox. A beta version of Firefox 2 is due soon with a full version expected later this year.
Among its new features will be anti-phishing technology and tools that will automatically restore web pages should the browser crash or require a restart. Other features are expected to include a more advanced search box that will suggest queries as users type.
Mozilla's open source developers are already working on Firefox 3, which is due to launch next year and will enable users to run online applications without a live internet connection.
Such developments could enable Firefox to remain one step ahead of the rivals and continue to eat into Internet Explorer's dominant market position.
For most users the new IE 7 will meet most of their requirements. If not, both Firefox and Opera 9 are worth a look.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
Thursday, July 06, 2006
The Web Grows Up: What It Means for Your Enterprise (AMR)
Not so long ago, companies around the world flung open their traditional IT budgets to take advantage of the burgeoning web. This money was not always well spent. Along comes Web 2.0, and companies, jaded with the experience of the last several years, are understandably suspicious about the hype and skeptical about the impact to their business. There’s no question, though, that change has been happening under our noses. Businesses have to find fruitful ways to take advantage.
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
Monday, July 03, 2006
IBM Targets Microsoft Office Users With Sametime (Gartner)
IBM seeks to attract Microsoft Office users by broadening the target market for Sametime instant messaging and Web conferencing beyond the base of Lotus users.
State of the Portal Market 2006 - Part III (Line56/Portals.Mag.com/BEA)
Portals and the New Wisdom of the Enterprise - A Synthesis of New Original Survey Results and Recent Analyst Research on the Portal Market
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