Friday, April 27, 2007
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Autonomy says 1st-quarter profit more than doubled - International Herald Tribune
Autonomy says 1st-quarter profit more than doubled - International Herald Tribune
LONDON: Britain's Autonomy Corp., a maker of software to track computer data, said Wednesday that first-quarter profit more than doubled after the company won new business.
Net income rose to US$11 million (€8.1 million) in the three months through March 31, from US$4.8 million in the same period a year earlier, the company said in a statement. Sales gained 17 percent to US$65.5 million (€48.2 million).
"The combination of strong organic revenue growth and operational gearing ... resulted in continued growth in operating margins and bottom line profitability," Chief Executive Mike Lynch said.
Autonomy's customers include BAE Systems PLC, Ford Motor Co. and Nestle SA.
Shares in the company surged 9.2 percent to 763 pence (US$15.26; €12.34) on the London Stock Exchange.
The Associated Press Published: April 25, 2007
LONDON: Britain's Autonomy Corp., a maker of software to track computer data, said Wednesday that first-quarter profit more than doubled after the company won new business.
Net income rose to US$11 million (€8.1 million) in the three months through March 31, from US$4.8 million in the same period a year earlier, the company said in a statement. Sales gained 17 percent to US$65.5 million (€48.2 million).
"The combination of strong organic revenue growth and operational gearing ... resulted in continued growth in operating margins and bottom line profitability," Chief Executive Mike Lynch said.
Autonomy's customers include BAE Systems PLC, Ford Motor Co. and Nestle SA.
Shares in the company surged 9.2 percent to 763 pence (US$15.26; €12.34) on the London Stock Exchange.
The Associated Press Published: April 25, 2007
FT.com / Companies / IT - Autonomy to spin off consumer arm
FT.com / Companies / IT - Autonomy to spin off consumer arm
Autonomy to spin off consumer arm
By Maija Palmer, IT Correspondent
Published: April 25 2007 08:20 | Last updated: April 25 2007 08:20
Autonomy, the Cambridge-based search software company, on Wednesday announced plans to demerge and float its consumer division, with allows people to search internet TV and video clips.
The consumer division will be renamed Blinkx, and listed on London’s AIM exchange for growth stocks in May. Autonomy will retain around 10 per cent of the shares following the float.
The company is considering issuing new shares at the time of the float to provide funding for the new business, which is expected to be initially lossmaking.
Blinkx is looking to create an advertising-funded business, along the lines of the Google business model.
Autonomy creates software that can search unstructured information, such as emails and pictures. It is used by a hundreds of large companies to track and organise corporate data.
Autonomy has struggled to enter the consumer market, however. It launched a consumer internet search technology in 2000 but was dwarfed by rival search engines such as Yahoo and Google, and quietly withdrew the product.
In 2005 the company re-entered the consumer sector, when it began a joint venture with China Netcom, the telecommunications operator, called OpenV, to provide a internet video search for Chinese consumers.
Mike Lynch, chief executive, has always maintained that Autonomy’s search technology is ideally suited to help consumers search internet television, video clips and other online entertainment, which has become increasingly popular in the last few years.
Unlike Google and Yahoo’s search engines, Autonomy’s technology does not rely on text and keywords, but uses mathematical formulae to detect patterns in any type of information, including pictures and sounds. The technology is used by the BBC, for example, to search and organise its archives.
The demerger of the consumer business is a complex transaction, in which Autonomy will first take ownership of Blinkx, a separate company founded by Autonomy’s former US chief technology officer, Suranga Chandratillake, which already uses Autonomy’s consumer search technology. In exchange Blinkx will be given exclusive rights to the technology, everywhere outside China. Then the Blinkx business will be demerged again and floated.
Autonomy shareholders will be given shares in Blinkx in lieu of a dividend, which the company has do date never paid.
The Chinese OpenV joint venture will not be part of the Blinkx group, and will maintain exclusive rights to the technology in China.
The news of the demerger came as Autonomy announced record first quarter results, which saw adjusted pre-tax profits nearly doubled to $19.5m from$10.3m in the same period last year.
Revenues for the first quarter rose 17 per cent from $56.1m to $65.5m, thanks to new corporate customer wins, including SFR and the Shanghai Stock Exchange, and increasing adoption of the software by technology partners such as IBM, Oracle and Symantec, who are integrating it into their own products and services.
Earnings per share increased to 7 cents from 4 cents last time.
Shares in Autonomy, which have increased 37 per cent in value since the start of the year, rose nearly 9 per cent to 760p in early trade.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Autonomy to spin off consumer arm
By Maija Palmer, IT Correspondent
Published: April 25 2007 08:20 | Last updated: April 25 2007 08:20
Autonomy, the Cambridge-based search software company, on Wednesday announced plans to demerge and float its consumer division, with allows people to search internet TV and video clips.
The consumer division will be renamed Blinkx, and listed on London’s AIM exchange for growth stocks in May. Autonomy will retain around 10 per cent of the shares following the float.
The company is considering issuing new shares at the time of the float to provide funding for the new business, which is expected to be initially lossmaking.
Blinkx is looking to create an advertising-funded business, along the lines of the Google business model.
Autonomy creates software that can search unstructured information, such as emails and pictures. It is used by a hundreds of large companies to track and organise corporate data.
Autonomy has struggled to enter the consumer market, however. It launched a consumer internet search technology in 2000 but was dwarfed by rival search engines such as Yahoo and Google, and quietly withdrew the product.
In 2005 the company re-entered the consumer sector, when it began a joint venture with China Netcom, the telecommunications operator, called OpenV, to provide a internet video search for Chinese consumers.
Mike Lynch, chief executive, has always maintained that Autonomy’s search technology is ideally suited to help consumers search internet television, video clips and other online entertainment, which has become increasingly popular in the last few years.
Unlike Google and Yahoo’s search engines, Autonomy’s technology does not rely on text and keywords, but uses mathematical formulae to detect patterns in any type of information, including pictures and sounds. The technology is used by the BBC, for example, to search and organise its archives.
The demerger of the consumer business is a complex transaction, in which Autonomy will first take ownership of Blinkx, a separate company founded by Autonomy’s former US chief technology officer, Suranga Chandratillake, which already uses Autonomy’s consumer search technology. In exchange Blinkx will be given exclusive rights to the technology, everywhere outside China. Then the Blinkx business will be demerged again and floated.
Autonomy shareholders will be given shares in Blinkx in lieu of a dividend, which the company has do date never paid.
The Chinese OpenV joint venture will not be part of the Blinkx group, and will maintain exclusive rights to the technology in China.
The news of the demerger came as Autonomy announced record first quarter results, which saw adjusted pre-tax profits nearly doubled to $19.5m from$10.3m in the same period last year.
Revenues for the first quarter rose 17 per cent from $56.1m to $65.5m, thanks to new corporate customer wins, including SFR and the Shanghai Stock Exchange, and increasing adoption of the software by technology partners such as IBM, Oracle and Symantec, who are integrating it into their own products and services.
Earnings per share increased to 7 cents from 4 cents last time.
Shares in Autonomy, which have increased 37 per cent in value since the start of the year, rose nearly 9 per cent to 760p in early trade.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Google's Expanded Workplace Products Won't Usurp Office Yet
Google's Expanded Workplace Products Won't Usurp Office Yet
With the Tonic Systems acquisition, Google continues to widen its offerings into a full collaboration suite. Adding presentation features takes it closer to competing with Microsoft Office.
With the Tonic Systems acquisition, Google continues to widen its offerings into a full collaboration suite. Adding presentation features takes it closer to competing with Microsoft Office.
Monday, April 23, 2007
Enterprise Content Management Marketplace: Opportunities and Risks -- CMS Watch
Enterprise Content Management Marketplace: Opportunities and Risks -- CMS Watch
Enterprise Content Management Marketplace: Opportunities and Risks
by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
23-Apr-2007
Enteprise Content Management (ECM) technologies can have a huge impact on your business. So naturally, buyers will do well to carefully assess both ECM products and the vendors that sell them.
It is all too easy to select vendors for your short list based on their supposed “leadership” status in the market – status given either by analyst firms or by the vendors themselves. As our ECM Suites Report amply describes, ECM represents a very wide range of technologies to solve an equally wide range of business problems. Your challenge becomes making the right “fit” for your specific needs.
Once you have identified toolsets that meet your requirements, you also need to consider the vendors. Again “leadership” status in a top right quadrant on an analyst chart does little more than tell you who has the biggest revenues in the sector, along with the widest array of technology to offer. It does not tell you whether the vendor’s corporate status is in state of flux, or whether the product set is currently undergoing an overhaul, or whether both are in the process of becoming somewhat irrelevant in the marketplace due to a lack of innovation and investment.
Major ECM vendors will gladly dazzle, and wine and dine your team, but though they may appear to be a safe and conservative choice, in fact today many are ironically higher-risk partners.
All of these factors involve risk to you, the buyer. So we'd like to provide you with some key indicators to recognize and weigh those risks. Interestingly, you'll see that major brands that would appear a safe and conservative choice actually, in some circumstances, represent higher-risk choices.
To gain maximum value from this analysis you need to consider two key factors: Your enterprise and the ECM marketplace. Each buying organization is different. What represents a high risk to one may represent a chance for innovation and a competitive advantage to another. What represents a staid, uninspiring, and somewhat slow-moving product set to one enterprise may represent a solid area of comfort and low risk to another. And of course, vendors and products are in constant flux.
Charting Risks
The chart below represents four key dimensions that we believe should supplement a functional, cost/value analysis in any major procurement decision. Use this tool in addition to the specific product research that looks in more detail at the detailed functional and technical capabilities of the technology sets.
There is no “right” or “magic” or “leader” location this chart. Buyers with strong internal IT processes and a predilection for “early adoption” may favor a vendor undertaking fundamental change, on the grounds that they can influence roadmaps and new technology and “leapfrog” competitors stuck with older tools and approaches. Other customers will prefer an ECM supplier evolving at a more moderate pace; while still other buyers will prefer a more conservative approach. It is for you to decide where your preferences sit.
The four dimensions we plot are:
1. Size – Denotes the relative size and importance of the vendor in the broad technology marketplace.
2. Focus on ECM – Indicates how much of the firm’s efforts are focused on ECM. For some it is a side activity, for others it is the sole focus.
3. Vendor Evolution – Weighs the current pace of change at the vendor itself: Is it evolving as the marketplace changes? Has it just been acquired, or acquired another product?
4. Product Development – Weighs the current pace of change for the ECM solution. Is the product line about to undergo a major revision? Is the firm in the midst of trying to piece together many disparate modules. Or is little happening, with a mature product undergoing minimal change?
Each buyer will rate the importance of these dimensions differently and we encourage you to make use of this tool interactively. Our placement of the vendors denotes our assessments as of mid-2007; we will update it substantially every six months. To be sure, the vendor are in motion but here is our quick snapshot.
The Vendors
EMC|Documentum
EMC|Documentum is going through a period of major change in 2007: not only is D6 (a major upgrade to the product) due in September, 2007, but the firm lost recently lost its charismatic leader Dave DeWalt – a loss seemingly unexpected by EMC, and one that will have a major impact on the executive leadership, and by default corporate and product direction of the Documentum product set. Hence our placement of EMC Documentum firmly in the Refresh sector toward the Turbulence sector of the chart.
IBM / FileNet
When IBM bought FileNet in late 2006, they took on a product set in P8 that had recently undergone a major revision to Version 4. There is integration work to be done to make sense of the two parallel product sets (IBM CM and FileNet P8) but there is less turmoil than may have been expected. Likewise, as the entire executive team from FileNet replaced the previous IBM team, there will be a period of settling down, and certainly there will be change over time to manage; hence our placement of IBM across the Turbulence and Shifting sectors.
Oracle / Stellent
Oracle will apparently allow the Stellent UCM product set to continue in its current guise for some time to come, and instead is concentrating on integrating elements to run on top of its Content DB and BPEL process manager, so there is less turmoil here than we might have thought. Nevertheless this is a period of major change for Stellent, albeit one we expect to settle down sooner rather than later, in large part due to Oracle’s enormous resources and the relatively small size of this acquisition for Oracle. Hence placement across the Turbulence and Refresh sectors.
OpenText / Hummingbird
Corporately Open Text has a clear, applications-oriented strategy, yet there can be no underestimating the scale of the task they face in rationalizing not just the Hummingbird acquisition, but a myriad of prior purchases. Hence our placement in Shifting albeit bordering Restructuring.
Alfresco
The new kid on the block in the ECM world, Alfresco has made a mark quickly on the market, and yet despite being a new firm, they are surprisingly stable and well-funded. They are not undergoing any major corporate change, and the product is reaching a point of some maturity (as an ECM platform), but the company is still experimenting with licensing and governance models; hence our placement in Shifting, bordering Balance.
Interwoven
The WorkSite products have clearly done well for Interwoven, yet it remains unclear whether the company will commit to them to the same depth as its traditional WCM tools. Interwoven operates as a group of fiefdoms, this particular group is in comparison to others moving slowly both at the product and corporate level, hence we have placed them in Stasis, bordering on Maintenance. They are potentially a good match for a conservative buyer.
Vignette
Like Interwoven, Vignette’s original WCM products seem to get more attention than the company’s acquired ECM tools. As such little of import is happening with the product set. Some elements from the Tower acquisition appear to be languishing, and corporately addressing this does not appear to be high on their agenda. Hence our placement of Vignette in the Maintenance sector bordering Stasis.
Xerox
Xerox is a very large firm, but DocuShare is a tiny part of this mammoth company – albeit a small part that has done well. The product is mature, and we expect changes to be organic and incremental. The executive team responsible for DocuShare also remains stable, though the larger Xerox company continues to show little real interest in DocuShare – hence our placement and weighting of Xerox in Continuity.
Microsoft
Despite all the hype around SharePoint, ECM is not a major area of focus for Microsoft as a whole, even if it is getting more attention now than in the past. But the deeper story here is that SharePoint remains nowhere near complete or mature, even if it is progressing well. As such, we expect it to undergo some major revisions over the next year or so. Hence we have positioned Microsoft in Overhaul.
Hyland
Hyland is a stable company with a stable product set, developing its technology continuously, if conservatively. Hence our placement of them in the Balance sector.
[Editors note: this article was excerpted from the recently released ECM Suites Report, which contains detailed evaluations of each of these vendors.]
Enterprise Content Management Marketplace: Opportunities and Risks
by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
23-Apr-2007
Enteprise Content Management (ECM) technologies can have a huge impact on your business. So naturally, buyers will do well to carefully assess both ECM products and the vendors that sell them.
It is all too easy to select vendors for your short list based on their supposed “leadership” status in the market – status given either by analyst firms or by the vendors themselves. As our ECM Suites Report amply describes, ECM represents a very wide range of technologies to solve an equally wide range of business problems. Your challenge becomes making the right “fit” for your specific needs.
Once you have identified toolsets that meet your requirements, you also need to consider the vendors. Again “leadership” status in a top right quadrant on an analyst chart does little more than tell you who has the biggest revenues in the sector, along with the widest array of technology to offer. It does not tell you whether the vendor’s corporate status is in state of flux, or whether the product set is currently undergoing an overhaul, or whether both are in the process of becoming somewhat irrelevant in the marketplace due to a lack of innovation and investment.
Major ECM vendors will gladly dazzle, and wine and dine your team, but though they may appear to be a safe and conservative choice, in fact today many are ironically higher-risk partners.
All of these factors involve risk to you, the buyer. So we'd like to provide you with some key indicators to recognize and weigh those risks. Interestingly, you'll see that major brands that would appear a safe and conservative choice actually, in some circumstances, represent higher-risk choices.
To gain maximum value from this analysis you need to consider two key factors: Your enterprise and the ECM marketplace. Each buying organization is different. What represents a high risk to one may represent a chance for innovation and a competitive advantage to another. What represents a staid, uninspiring, and somewhat slow-moving product set to one enterprise may represent a solid area of comfort and low risk to another. And of course, vendors and products are in constant flux.
Charting Risks
The chart below represents four key dimensions that we believe should supplement a functional, cost/value analysis in any major procurement decision. Use this tool in addition to the specific product research that looks in more detail at the detailed functional and technical capabilities of the technology sets.
There is no “right” or “magic” or “leader” location this chart. Buyers with strong internal IT processes and a predilection for “early adoption” may favor a vendor undertaking fundamental change, on the grounds that they can influence roadmaps and new technology and “leapfrog” competitors stuck with older tools and approaches. Other customers will prefer an ECM supplier evolving at a more moderate pace; while still other buyers will prefer a more conservative approach. It is for you to decide where your preferences sit.
The four dimensions we plot are:
1. Size – Denotes the relative size and importance of the vendor in the broad technology marketplace.
2. Focus on ECM – Indicates how much of the firm’s efforts are focused on ECM. For some it is a side activity, for others it is the sole focus.
3. Vendor Evolution – Weighs the current pace of change at the vendor itself: Is it evolving as the marketplace changes? Has it just been acquired, or acquired another product?
4. Product Development – Weighs the current pace of change for the ECM solution. Is the product line about to undergo a major revision? Is the firm in the midst of trying to piece together many disparate modules. Or is little happening, with a mature product undergoing minimal change?
Each buyer will rate the importance of these dimensions differently and we encourage you to make use of this tool interactively. Our placement of the vendors denotes our assessments as of mid-2007; we will update it substantially every six months. To be sure, the vendor are in motion but here is our quick snapshot.
The Vendors
EMC|Documentum
EMC|Documentum is going through a period of major change in 2007: not only is D6 (a major upgrade to the product) due in September, 2007, but the firm lost recently lost its charismatic leader Dave DeWalt – a loss seemingly unexpected by EMC, and one that will have a major impact on the executive leadership, and by default corporate and product direction of the Documentum product set. Hence our placement of EMC Documentum firmly in the Refresh sector toward the Turbulence sector of the chart.
IBM / FileNet
When IBM bought FileNet in late 2006, they took on a product set in P8 that had recently undergone a major revision to Version 4. There is integration work to be done to make sense of the two parallel product sets (IBM CM and FileNet P8) but there is less turmoil than may have been expected. Likewise, as the entire executive team from FileNet replaced the previous IBM team, there will be a period of settling down, and certainly there will be change over time to manage; hence our placement of IBM across the Turbulence and Shifting sectors.
Oracle / Stellent
Oracle will apparently allow the Stellent UCM product set to continue in its current guise for some time to come, and instead is concentrating on integrating elements to run on top of its Content DB and BPEL process manager, so there is less turmoil here than we might have thought. Nevertheless this is a period of major change for Stellent, albeit one we expect to settle down sooner rather than later, in large part due to Oracle’s enormous resources and the relatively small size of this acquisition for Oracle. Hence placement across the Turbulence and Refresh sectors.
OpenText / Hummingbird
Corporately Open Text has a clear, applications-oriented strategy, yet there can be no underestimating the scale of the task they face in rationalizing not just the Hummingbird acquisition, but a myriad of prior purchases. Hence our placement in Shifting albeit bordering Restructuring.
Alfresco
The new kid on the block in the ECM world, Alfresco has made a mark quickly on the market, and yet despite being a new firm, they are surprisingly stable and well-funded. They are not undergoing any major corporate change, and the product is reaching a point of some maturity (as an ECM platform), but the company is still experimenting with licensing and governance models; hence our placement in Shifting, bordering Balance.
Interwoven
The WorkSite products have clearly done well for Interwoven, yet it remains unclear whether the company will commit to them to the same depth as its traditional WCM tools. Interwoven operates as a group of fiefdoms, this particular group is in comparison to others moving slowly both at the product and corporate level, hence we have placed them in Stasis, bordering on Maintenance. They are potentially a good match for a conservative buyer.
Vignette
Like Interwoven, Vignette’s original WCM products seem to get more attention than the company’s acquired ECM tools. As such little of import is happening with the product set. Some elements from the Tower acquisition appear to be languishing, and corporately addressing this does not appear to be high on their agenda. Hence our placement of Vignette in the Maintenance sector bordering Stasis.
Xerox
Xerox is a very large firm, but DocuShare is a tiny part of this mammoth company – albeit a small part that has done well. The product is mature, and we expect changes to be organic and incremental. The executive team responsible for DocuShare also remains stable, though the larger Xerox company continues to show little real interest in DocuShare – hence our placement and weighting of Xerox in Continuity.
Microsoft
Despite all the hype around SharePoint, ECM is not a major area of focus for Microsoft as a whole, even if it is getting more attention now than in the past. But the deeper story here is that SharePoint remains nowhere near complete or mature, even if it is progressing well. As such, we expect it to undergo some major revisions over the next year or so. Hence we have positioned Microsoft in Overhaul.
Hyland
Hyland is a stable company with a stable product set, developing its technology continuously, if conservatively. Hence our placement of them in the Balance sector.
[Editors note: this article was excerpted from the recently released ECM Suites Report, which contains detailed evaluations of each of these vendors.]
Friday, April 20, 2007
FT.com / Companies / Financial services - USFE seeks new friends on MySpace
FT.com / Companies / Financial services - USFE seeks new friends on MySpace
USFE seeks new friends on MySpace
By Doug Cameron in Chicago
Published: April 20 2007 19:24 | Last updated: April 20 2007 19:24
The US Futures Exchange is 99 years old and male, at least according to its new MySpace page in what market experts view as the first move by the derivatives sector into the world of social networking.
The details provided by the Chicago-based exchange which, like its peers, prides itself on the transparency of its markets, could just catch the eye of regulators. The USFE is in fact less than one year old, formed in late 2006 when Man Group took over the US exchange formed by Eurex, the derivatives platform controlled by Deutsche Börse. Its sex was previously undisclosed.
The appearance of the USFE on a site beloved of teenagers and musicians comes as it launched its inaugural contract on Friday, based on the outcome of the two-way battle for control of the Chicago Board of Trade.
The ”binary” contract is viewed as an opportunistic move ahead of the formal launch of the USFE, target retail investors with the exchange’s initial product offerings before widening to attract institutions and hedge funds.
Binary futures offer an all-or-nothing pay-out on a range of defined outcomes, such as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange or the Intercontinental Exchange winning the CBOT bid battle or the acquisition of CBOT by a third party.
The USFE has been working on its Myspace page for a number of weeks and was first reported by John Lothian, a Chicago-based trader who publishes a widely-followed blog and newsletter. “For the longest time I had only one [MySpace] friend, said Mr Lothian who, like many in the sector, was previously unaware of the social networking site before signing up to view the USFE offering.
Mr Lothian is now joined by 13 other friends on the USFE page.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
USFE seeks new friends on MySpace
By Doug Cameron in Chicago
Published: April 20 2007 19:24 | Last updated: April 20 2007 19:24
The US Futures Exchange is 99 years old and male, at least according to its new MySpace page in what market experts view as the first move by the derivatives sector into the world of social networking.
The details provided by the Chicago-based exchange which, like its peers, prides itself on the transparency of its markets, could just catch the eye of regulators. The USFE is in fact less than one year old, formed in late 2006 when Man Group took over the US exchange formed by Eurex, the derivatives platform controlled by Deutsche Börse. Its sex was previously undisclosed.
The appearance of the USFE on a site beloved of teenagers and musicians comes as it launched its inaugural contract on Friday, based on the outcome of the two-way battle for control of the Chicago Board of Trade.
The ”binary” contract is viewed as an opportunistic move ahead of the formal launch of the USFE, target retail investors with the exchange’s initial product offerings before widening to attract institutions and hedge funds.
Binary futures offer an all-or-nothing pay-out on a range of defined outcomes, such as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange or the Intercontinental Exchange winning the CBOT bid battle or the acquisition of CBOT by a third party.
The USFE has been working on its Myspace page for a number of weeks and was first reported by John Lothian, a Chicago-based trader who publishes a widely-followed blog and newsletter. “For the longest time I had only one [MySpace] friend, said Mr Lothian who, like many in the sector, was previously unaware of the social networking site before signing up to view the USFE offering.
Mr Lothian is now joined by 13 other friends on the USFE page.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Thursday, April 19, 2007
ECM-Strategie: Konsolidierung der Vielfalt im Unternehmen
ECM-Strategie: Konsolidierung der Vielfalt im Unternehmen
Anwender haben ein sehr unterschiedliches Verständnis von Dokumenten und Content Management. Die Spanne reicht von der einfachen MS Office-Dateiverwaltung auf dem Server mit Volltextsuche bis hin zur Prozessunterstützung in Content-zentrischen Prozessen, die in eine heterogene Anwendungslandschaft unter Einhaltung regulatorischer Anforderungen integriert werden können. Dementsprechend vielfältig und selten direkt miteinander vergleichbar sind auch die verschiedenen Angebote der Hersteller.
Anwender haben ein sehr unterschiedliches Verständnis von Dokumenten und Content Management. Die Spanne reicht von der einfachen MS Office-Dateiverwaltung auf dem Server mit Volltextsuche bis hin zur Prozessunterstützung in Content-zentrischen Prozessen, die in eine heterogene Anwendungslandschaft unter Einhaltung regulatorischer Anforderungen integriert werden können. Dementsprechend vielfältig und selten direkt miteinander vergleichbar sind auch die verschiedenen Angebote der Hersteller.
ASG Needs to Act Fast to Make the Most of Mobius Acquisition
ASG Needs to Act Fast to Make the Most of Mobius Acquisition
Buying Mobius will give Allen Systems Group more customers and a wider document archiving portfolio. But ASG must develop the business and exploit combined assets quickly to stave off rivals in this maturing market.
Buying Mobius will give Allen Systems Group more customers and a wider document archiving portfolio. But ASG must develop the business and exploit combined assets quickly to stave off rivals in this maturing market.
Google Extends Advertising Dominance With DoubleClick Deal
Google Extends Advertising Dominance With DoubleClick Deal
Google's purchase of DoubleClick will change the landscape of online advertising by enabling Google to offer both search-based and display advertising to its clients, ultimately boosting the vendor's competitive position.
Google's purchase of DoubleClick will change the landscape of online advertising by enabling Google to offer both search-based and display advertising to its clients, ultimately boosting the vendor's competitive position.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Adobe and Microsoft Face Off Over Rich Media Platforms
Adobe and Microsoft Face Off Over Rich Media Platforms
Announcements made at the same event by Microsoft and Adobe of a desktop video player and rich media browser extension, respectively, have given new prominence to the companies' previously hidden rivalry.
Announcements made at the same event by Microsoft and Adobe of a desktop video player and rich media browser extension, respectively, have given new prominence to the companies' previously hidden rivalry.
New Content in IBM's ITUP Should Prove Useful to ITIL Shops
New Content in IBM's ITUP Should Prove Useful to ITIL Shops
A new version of the IBM Tivoli Unified Process tool should prove useful to many organizations implementing the IT Infrastructure Library, because ITUP's new content offers how-to guidance that ITIL lacks.
A new version of the IBM Tivoli Unified Process tool should prove useful to many organizations implementing the IT Infrastructure Library, because ITUP's new content offers how-to guidance that ITIL lacks.
FT.com / Services & tools / SearchFT.com / Services & tools / Search
FT.com / Services & tools / SearchFT.com / Services & tools / Search
Google/DoubleClick
FT.com site
Published: Apr 16, 2007
After being on the receiving end for so many years, Microsoft can finally stir the anti-trust pot for somebody else. It should have learnt some tricks along the way to put the spotlight on Google's acquisition of online advertising platform DoubleClick. Microsoft's experience in Europe could be particularly useful, given that regulators there have been willing to go after fast-changing technology companies.
But does the complaint that a DoubleClick deal risks giving Google too much power in the provision of online adverts hold water? Possibly. Leave search advertising aside for now, where Google is the global market leader. In display advertising there are two main companies that serve ads to websites around the world. Google is the strongest in the contextual side – where ads are targeted based on the information on a given web page. DoubleClick is the strongest in ads that are placed according to the behavioural history of each internet user.
There is a risk that putting the two together – and allowing them to use the sheer scale of information they have about internet users – would raise barriers to entry for rivals. Those already exist, given the cost of building an ad-serving platform.
Microsoft, for example, has discovered how difficult it is to get into the provision of search-related advertising from scratch. Its failure, so far, in that arena is a big reason for its reaction to Google's deal. After all, advertising is the fuel for the internet and Microsoft has very little.
That is a good reason for people to take Microsoft's gripes with a fistful of salt. There are rivals who serve display ads. But regulators should still look very closely at how they define the market when assessing Google's deal. Too much dominance for one company now might be difficult to undo in the future.
Google/DoubleClick
FT.com site
Published: Apr 16, 2007
After being on the receiving end for so many years, Microsoft can finally stir the anti-trust pot for somebody else. It should have learnt some tricks along the way to put the spotlight on Google's acquisition of online advertising platform DoubleClick. Microsoft's experience in Europe could be particularly useful, given that regulators there have been willing to go after fast-changing technology companies.
But does the complaint that a DoubleClick deal risks giving Google too much power in the provision of online adverts hold water? Possibly. Leave search advertising aside for now, where Google is the global market leader. In display advertising there are two main companies that serve ads to websites around the world. Google is the strongest in the contextual side – where ads are targeted based on the information on a given web page. DoubleClick is the strongest in ads that are placed according to the behavioural history of each internet user.
There is a risk that putting the two together – and allowing them to use the sheer scale of information they have about internet users – would raise barriers to entry for rivals. Those already exist, given the cost of building an ad-serving platform.
Microsoft, for example, has discovered how difficult it is to get into the provision of search-related advertising from scratch. Its failure, so far, in that arena is a big reason for its reaction to Google's deal. After all, advertising is the fuel for the internet and Microsoft has very little.
That is a good reason for people to take Microsoft's gripes with a fistful of salt. There are rivals who serve display ads. But regulators should still look very closely at how they define the market when assessing Google's deal. Too much dominance for one company now might be difficult to undo in the future.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Die RAF für Kino und Wohnzimmer Martina Gedeck soll Ulrike Meinhof werden - Kultur - sueddeutsche.de
Die RAF für Kino und Wohnzimmer Martina Gedeck soll Ulrike Meinhof werden - Kultur - sueddeutsche.de
Bernd Eichinger plant, die Erfolgscrew seiner "Elementarteilchen" nun für eine Verfilmung der RAF-Geschichte zu gewinnen. Neben der Oscar-erfahrenen Gedeck sollen Moritz Bleibtreu und Nina Hoss in die Rollen von Terroristen schlüpfen.
Bernd Eichinger plant, die Erfolgscrew seiner "Elementarteilchen" nun für eine Verfilmung der RAF-Geschichte zu gewinnen. Neben der Oscar-erfahrenen Gedeck sollen Moritz Bleibtreu und Nina Hoss in die Rollen von Terroristen schlüpfen.
Saturday, April 14, 2007
FTD.de - IT+Telekommunikation - Nachrichten - Google kauft für Rekordpreis DoubleClick
FTD.de - IT+Telekommunikation - Nachrichten - Google kauft für Rekordpreis DoubleClick
Google baut seine Vormachtstellung in der Internet-Werbung aus: Der Suchmaschinenbetreiber übernimmt für 3,1 Mrd. $ in bar die New Yorker Online-Werbefirma DoubleClick. Damit zahlte Google einen Rekordpreis - und stach Konkurrenten Microsoft aus.
Google baut seine Vormachtstellung in der Internet-Werbung aus: Der Suchmaschinenbetreiber übernimmt für 3,1 Mrd. $ in bar die New Yorker Online-Werbefirma DoubleClick. Damit zahlte Google einen Rekordpreis - und stach Konkurrenten Microsoft aus.
Friday, April 13, 2007
Salesforce.com Gets Into Content Management Through SaaS
Salesforce.com Gets Into Content Management Through SaaS
Salesforce.com's new offerings are evidence of the growing interest in basic content management delivered through the software-as-a-service model. But prospective buyers should approach these new offerings cautiously.
Salesforce.com's new offerings are evidence of the growing interest in basic content management delivered through the software-as-a-service model. But prospective buyers should approach these new offerings cautiously.
Salesforce.com Gets Into Content Management Through SaaS
Salesforce.com Gets Into Content Management Through SaaS
Salesforce.com's new offerings are evidence of the growing interest in basic content management delivered through the software-as-a-service model. But prospective buyers should approach these new offerings cautiously.
Salesforce.com's new offerings are evidence of the growing interest in basic content management delivered through the software-as-a-service model. But prospective buyers should approach these new offerings cautiously.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Interwoven veröffentlicht verbesserte Collaborative Document Management-Lösung
Interwoven veröffentlicht verbesserte Collaborative Document Management-Lösung
Höhere Produktivität und Flexibilität durch optimiertes Content Management
Interwoven, Inc., ein weltweit führender Anbieter von Content Management-Lösungen, gab die Veröffentlichung einer verbesserten Version von Interwoven Collaborative Document Management bekannt. Diese Lösungs-Suite optimiert das Zusammenwirken dokumentengestützter Geschäftsprozesse und bietet Unternehmen die Möglichkeit, beweglicher und flexibler zu agieren.
Höhere Produktivität und Flexibilität durch optimiertes Content Management
Interwoven, Inc., ein weltweit führender Anbieter von Content Management-Lösungen, gab die Veröffentlichung einer verbesserten Version von Interwoven Collaborative Document Management bekannt. Diese Lösungs-Suite optimiert das Zusammenwirken dokumentengestützter Geschäftsprozesse und bietet Unternehmen die Möglichkeit, beweglicher und flexibler zu agieren.
Salesforce.com Buys Into ECM (AMR)
Salesforce.com is acquiring on-demand content management provider Koral, Inc., and while the deal is so small that salesforce.com isn’t required to report its size, it’s a big enough deal for the press and investment community to take heed. But even after wiping the hype off, the acquisition points to looming changes in the content management market. Koral, a $2.5M venture-funded startup, had already demonstrated its capability, ease of use, and ease of integration as a salesforce.com AppExchange partner. Salesforce.com will deploy Koral in a two-pronged content management strategy:
Salesforce.com’s vision for content management is aggressive, suggesting competition with long-standing, firmly established enterprise content management (ECM) providers like Documentum, FileNet, and Open Text and more pointedly, Microsoft’s rapidly growing SharePoint product. Established ECM vendors have far too frequently expressed their growth potential in terms of how much information is unstructured (industry lore has it as about 85%) versus structured. Warning customers that their information is unstructured incites neither fear nor urges to buy. The better point, one that Koral and salesforce.com express aptly, is that only 5% of employees use any content management system. Productivity, collaboration, and knowledge management needs dictate that far more people should; compliance mandates that far more must.
Of course, the value of getting to more users is not lost on Microsoft, already in front of most business users and seeking to retain and leverage the position. It may only come to a salesforce.com-Microsoft showdown if someone can successfully evangelize a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model for content management; not an easy task considering companies’ efforts to consolidate their content management investments while addressing growing compliance concerns. These days, compliance is a primary or secondary concern in almost every content management inquiry AMR Research takes. In many industries and for many business processes, systems must meet rigorous regulatory standards, some advising and some requiring that documentation must reside within the enterprise’s control. A deeper look at this acquisition, its ramifications in the ECM market, and the future of SaaS in ECM can be found in, “Salesforce.com Buys Into ECM: Is Content Management Ready for SaaS?”
Salesforce.com’s vision for content management is aggressive, suggesting competition with long-standing, firmly established enterprise content management (ECM) providers like Documentum, FileNet, and Open Text and more pointedly, Microsoft’s rapidly growing SharePoint product. Established ECM vendors have far too frequently expressed their growth potential in terms of how much information is unstructured (industry lore has it as about 85%) versus structured. Warning customers that their information is unstructured incites neither fear nor urges to buy. The better point, one that Koral and salesforce.com express aptly, is that only 5% of employees use any content management system. Productivity, collaboration, and knowledge management needs dictate that far more people should; compliance mandates that far more must.
Of course, the value of getting to more users is not lost on Microsoft, already in front of most business users and seeking to retain and leverage the position. It may only come to a salesforce.com-Microsoft showdown if someone can successfully evangelize a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model for content management; not an easy task considering companies’ efforts to consolidate their content management investments while addressing growing compliance concerns. These days, compliance is a primary or secondary concern in almost every content management inquiry AMR Research takes. In many industries and for many business processes, systems must meet rigorous regulatory standards, some advising and some requiring that documentation must reside within the enterprise’s control. A deeper look at this acquisition, its ramifications in the ECM market, and the future of SaaS in ECM can be found in, “Salesforce.com Buys Into ECM: Is Content Management Ready for SaaS?”
Monday, April 09, 2007
FT.com / Companies / IT - The race for the $100 laptop
FT.com / Companies / IT - The race for the $100 laptop
The race for the $100 laptop
By Kathrin Hille in Taipei
Published: April 9 2007 03:00 | Last updated: April 9 2007 03:00
When a team of education and technology experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said in 2004 they were going to overcome the digital divide by making a $100 (£51) laptop for the poor children of the world, they were ridiculed.
Technology executives said such an extreme drop in cost would be "impossible". Even those who saw the team as visionaries thought the "one laptop per child" (OLPC) project had no future beyond charity.
Three years later, OLPC appears to be changing the computer industry, although not in the way its founders imagined. The sector has discovered the marketing power of the poor and has increasingly come to believe that the vast majority of the world's population that does not already possess a computer will be one of the main drivers of future growth.
"Currently the semiconductor population is limited to the 800m people at the top of the pyramid," says Cynthia Chyn, a researcher at the Institute for Information Industry, a Taiwanese government-funded think-tank. "The industry is in search of a PC for the next billion."
Over the past year, global hardware and software companies have announced initiatives aimed at this group. Intel, one of OLPC's fiercest critics, has developed low-cost computers aimed atstudents in third-worldcountries, including the "Classmate" PC and the "Eduwise" laptop.
Its rival AMD has pledged to get half the world's population online by 2015 with a device called the Personal Internet Communicator. Microsoft is supporting the establishment of kiosks in villages in developing countries, where residents would share a computer and just pay for usage.
Analysts see some of these moves as no more than public relations campaigns, defensive attempts to make sure that the respective company's brand or technology has a foot in the door once these countries turn into real markets.
But recently companies have started taking steps that are neither charitynor PR: Dell, the world's number two computer company, launched a desktop computer in China last month that sells for as little as $336, more than 60 per cent below the price tag of its previously cheapest machine.
Quanta Computer, the world's largest contract manufacturer of notebook computers, says next year it will start making laptops that will sell for only $200. It is also making the OLPC, the first shipments of which are due to be made this -summer.
Most of these moves have been made possible because the OLPC project forced a group of companies to develop a laptop with the goal of making it as cheap as possible.
This turned out to be far easier than critics had suggested. Costs were cut by using a cheaper form of liquid crystal display, leaving out the hard disk and running the machine on open-source software rather than Microsoft Windows.
"Not all people need to have as heavily loaded PCs as they have today," says Michael Wang, Quanta's president.
Intel's founder Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years, driving the technology industry to produce ever more powerful devices.
Now, though, computer makers will have to use the most advanced technology to produce "older", simpler specifications, argues Jeremy Wang, Asia-Pacific executive director of the Fabless Semiconductor Association.
Mr Wang of Quanta predicts that many different laptops will appear on the market with price tags between $600 and $200 - the lowest price for a laptop so far. "There will be many different combinations [of software and hardware components] for different segments," he says. Quanta has transformed its OLPC project team into a new business unit. "Their task is to create a market," he says.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
The race for the $100 laptop
By Kathrin Hille in Taipei
Published: April 9 2007 03:00 | Last updated: April 9 2007 03:00
When a team of education and technology experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said in 2004 they were going to overcome the digital divide by making a $100 (£51) laptop for the poor children of the world, they were ridiculed.
Technology executives said such an extreme drop in cost would be "impossible". Even those who saw the team as visionaries thought the "one laptop per child" (OLPC) project had no future beyond charity.
Three years later, OLPC appears to be changing the computer industry, although not in the way its founders imagined. The sector has discovered the marketing power of the poor and has increasingly come to believe that the vast majority of the world's population that does not already possess a computer will be one of the main drivers of future growth.
"Currently the semiconductor population is limited to the 800m people at the top of the pyramid," says Cynthia Chyn, a researcher at the Institute for Information Industry, a Taiwanese government-funded think-tank. "The industry is in search of a PC for the next billion."
Over the past year, global hardware and software companies have announced initiatives aimed at this group. Intel, one of OLPC's fiercest critics, has developed low-cost computers aimed atstudents in third-worldcountries, including the "Classmate" PC and the "Eduwise" laptop.
Its rival AMD has pledged to get half the world's population online by 2015 with a device called the Personal Internet Communicator. Microsoft is supporting the establishment of kiosks in villages in developing countries, where residents would share a computer and just pay for usage.
Analysts see some of these moves as no more than public relations campaigns, defensive attempts to make sure that the respective company's brand or technology has a foot in the door once these countries turn into real markets.
But recently companies have started taking steps that are neither charitynor PR: Dell, the world's number two computer company, launched a desktop computer in China last month that sells for as little as $336, more than 60 per cent below the price tag of its previously cheapest machine.
Quanta Computer, the world's largest contract manufacturer of notebook computers, says next year it will start making laptops that will sell for only $200. It is also making the OLPC, the first shipments of which are due to be made this -summer.
Most of these moves have been made possible because the OLPC project forced a group of companies to develop a laptop with the goal of making it as cheap as possible.
This turned out to be far easier than critics had suggested. Costs were cut by using a cheaper form of liquid crystal display, leaving out the hard disk and running the machine on open-source software rather than Microsoft Windows.
"Not all people need to have as heavily loaded PCs as they have today," says Michael Wang, Quanta's president.
Intel's founder Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years, driving the technology industry to produce ever more powerful devices.
Now, though, computer makers will have to use the most advanced technology to produce "older", simpler specifications, argues Jeremy Wang, Asia-Pacific executive director of the Fabless Semiconductor Association.
Mr Wang of Quanta predicts that many different laptops will appear on the market with price tags between $600 and $200 - the lowest price for a laptop so far. "There will be many different combinations [of software and hardware components] for different segments," he says. Quanta has transformed its OLPC project team into a new business unit. "Their task is to create a market," he says.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Roland-Berger-Studie Experten erwarten grünes Job-Wunder - Deutschland - sueddeutsche.de
Roland-Berger-Studie Experten erwarten grünes Job-Wunder - Deutschland - sueddeutsche.de
Die globale Klimaschutz-Debatte hat einer Studie zufolge äußerst positive Auswirkungen auf den deutschen Arbeitsmarkt. Im Jahr 2020 werde die Öko-Branche mehr Mitarbeiter ernähren als die Autoindustrie.
Die globale Klimaschutz-Debatte hat einer Studie zufolge äußerst positive Auswirkungen auf den deutschen Arbeitsmarkt. Im Jahr 2020 werde die Öko-Branche mehr Mitarbeiter ernähren als die Autoindustrie.
FT.com / Business Life - Micro-bloggers of the world keep it short
FT.com / Business Life - Micro-bloggers of the world keep it short
Micro-bloggers of the world keep it short
By Chris Nuttall
Published: April 9 2007 17:04 | Last updated: April 9 2007 17:04
At Twittervision.com the beginnings of what could be a fresh trend in internet self-expression are being spelt out on a map of the world.
Users of this addictive new website can see a text bubble flash up over the state of Arizona with a picture icon of the sender “Chilblane” inside. “Resetting all of my album art,” it says. The world map spins over to Sydney, Australia: “Waiting on my girlfriend to come,” says CJH2. Then to Tokyo: “Keep snoozing, can’t start my day yet,” says Nobi. “Twitter – the reality TV of the blogosphere,” comments LoveHouseRadio back in Richmond, Virginia.
Twittervision’s pop-up bubbles of instant texted thoughts from around the world are a “mash-up” of Google Maps combined with a live feed of the short messages sent out by users of Twitter.com’s service.
Its popularity has forced its creator, David Troy, to create a periodic warning to people who have been glued to their computer monitors for long periods: “You have been watching Twittervision for 12 hours. Do you want to continue?”
Mr Troy pays homage to Twitter – the original service that created the online ecosystem of which Twittervision.com is part – for helping create the phenomenon of text messages that turn into web television.
The service was launched last year to let people post brief messages to groups of friends and the public at large, letting them know their current actions and thoughts.
It has rapidly become the poster child of a new trend of micro-blogging, where the social networking tool is reduced to single sentences, pictures and the most everyday emotions and events.
Besides Twitter, another internet tool called Tumblr is enabling scrapbook-style blogs of pasted quotes, pictures and thoughts. Radar.net creates social connections through the posting of camera phone images. And services such as Jaiku, Mozes and Moodgeist have their own take on this new form of web shorthand.
Twitter was invented by Jack Dorsey, a developer at Obvious Corp, a San Francisco start-up. He thought of mashing up existing concepts such as groups of friends and instant messaging (for example: “I’m away from my desk”) and MySpace-style “I’m listening to ColdPlay” status messages. The resulting service allows users to let each other know what they are doing, wherever they are, through mobile phone SMS text messages.
Twitter users tend to update their status from their computers during the day and their phones at night. In each case they are restricted to 140-character messages.
“I really like that constraint. I’m a person of few words. I really like conciseness and making every word count,” Mr Dorsey says.
He feels that Twitter messages avoid the abstraction and commitment of composed blog posts and free people from the obligations of technologies such as the phone and e-mail, where responses are expected in a timely manner.
“Twitter is more ambient,” he says. “You are basically writing on a wall and if someone chooses to read it they can do.”
Hitwise, the web research firm, says visits to Twitter.com in March were up 135 per cent on the previous month and 500 per cent on January, but they have yet to reach critical mass.
Lee Ann Prescott, research director of Hitwise, says Twitter is entertaining but users are still trying to find useful applications for it.
“This is still really niche. It takes a lot of time for a network like this to build,” she says.
Tumblr has attracted 50,000 users so far and 10,000 posts an hour are coming into its micro-blogs. Users can press a Tumblr button in their browser to attach to their blogs a video, photo, quote or link they find while surfing or to post a random thought.
“This is going to be the year of short form,” says David Karp, Tumblr’s founder. “Blogs are great if you want to hammer out commentary, but what if you’re not particularly comfortable as a writer? There are a lot of people who just want to share stuff and we wanted to make a simple, shallow funnel for them.”
With Radar.net’s postings of camera phone pictures, users don’t even have to write. “Pictures have an entirely different feeling,” says John Poisson, the service’s founder. “They can have an immediacy that is compelling.”
Given the underlying appetite for concision, he notes: “A photo can be worth a thousand words.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Micro-bloggers of the world keep it short
By Chris Nuttall
Published: April 9 2007 17:04 | Last updated: April 9 2007 17:04
At Twittervision.com the beginnings of what could be a fresh trend in internet self-expression are being spelt out on a map of the world.
Users of this addictive new website can see a text bubble flash up over the state of Arizona with a picture icon of the sender “Chilblane” inside. “Resetting all of my album art,” it says. The world map spins over to Sydney, Australia: “Waiting on my girlfriend to come,” says CJH2. Then to Tokyo: “Keep snoozing, can’t start my day yet,” says Nobi. “Twitter – the reality TV of the blogosphere,” comments LoveHouseRadio back in Richmond, Virginia.
Twittervision’s pop-up bubbles of instant texted thoughts from around the world are a “mash-up” of Google Maps combined with a live feed of the short messages sent out by users of Twitter.com’s service.
Its popularity has forced its creator, David Troy, to create a periodic warning to people who have been glued to their computer monitors for long periods: “You have been watching Twittervision for 12 hours. Do you want to continue?”
Mr Troy pays homage to Twitter – the original service that created the online ecosystem of which Twittervision.com is part – for helping create the phenomenon of text messages that turn into web television.
The service was launched last year to let people post brief messages to groups of friends and the public at large, letting them know their current actions and thoughts.
It has rapidly become the poster child of a new trend of micro-blogging, where the social networking tool is reduced to single sentences, pictures and the most everyday emotions and events.
Besides Twitter, another internet tool called Tumblr is enabling scrapbook-style blogs of pasted quotes, pictures and thoughts. Radar.net creates social connections through the posting of camera phone images. And services such as Jaiku, Mozes and Moodgeist have their own take on this new form of web shorthand.
Twitter was invented by Jack Dorsey, a developer at Obvious Corp, a San Francisco start-up. He thought of mashing up existing concepts such as groups of friends and instant messaging (for example: “I’m away from my desk”) and MySpace-style “I’m listening to ColdPlay” status messages. The resulting service allows users to let each other know what they are doing, wherever they are, through mobile phone SMS text messages.
Twitter users tend to update their status from their computers during the day and their phones at night. In each case they are restricted to 140-character messages.
“I really like that constraint. I’m a person of few words. I really like conciseness and making every word count,” Mr Dorsey says.
He feels that Twitter messages avoid the abstraction and commitment of composed blog posts and free people from the obligations of technologies such as the phone and e-mail, where responses are expected in a timely manner.
“Twitter is more ambient,” he says. “You are basically writing on a wall and if someone chooses to read it they can do.”
Hitwise, the web research firm, says visits to Twitter.com in March were up 135 per cent on the previous month and 500 per cent on January, but they have yet to reach critical mass.
Lee Ann Prescott, research director of Hitwise, says Twitter is entertaining but users are still trying to find useful applications for it.
“This is still really niche. It takes a lot of time for a network like this to build,” she says.
Tumblr has attracted 50,000 users so far and 10,000 posts an hour are coming into its micro-blogs. Users can press a Tumblr button in their browser to attach to their blogs a video, photo, quote or link they find while surfing or to post a random thought.
“This is going to be the year of short form,” says David Karp, Tumblr’s founder. “Blogs are great if you want to hammer out commentary, but what if you’re not particularly comfortable as a writer? There are a lot of people who just want to share stuff and we wanted to make a simple, shallow funnel for them.”
With Radar.net’s postings of camera phone pictures, users don’t even have to write. “Pictures have an entirely different feeling,” says John Poisson, the service’s founder. “They can have an immediacy that is compelling.”
Given the underlying appetite for concision, he notes: “A photo can be worth a thousand words.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Sunday, April 08, 2007
FT.com / Companies / IT - Californian IT surges into London
FT.com / Companies / IT - Californian IT surges into London
Californian IT surges into London
By Maija Palmer, IT Correspondent
Published: April 8 2007 22:04 | Last updated: April 8 2007 22:04
A record number of Californian information technology companies including Google, MySpace and Bebo have opened offices in London in the past year, leading a surge of investment by foreign business in the capital.
There were a record 250 foreign direct investment projects into London in 2006, up more than 40 per cent on the previous year, according to new figures from Think London, the capital’s foreign direct investment agency.
The number outstrips activity during the dotcom boom in 2000, when 182 investment projects came to London from abroad.
Some 25 Californian IT companies invested in London last year, making them the largest identifiable group of foreign businesses coming to the city.
The US as a whole accounted for 54 per cent of projects, with Californian companies, including non-IT businesses, making up 15 per cent of all London foreign investment projects.
This compares with 10 per cent from India and 7 per cent from Canada, the next biggest investors.
In response to the influx, Think London recently opened offices in San Francisco, in addition to those in New York and Beijing.
Key projects include the rapid growth of Google’s UK operations during the last 12 months. The company now employs hundreds of UK staff and runs a significant part of its mobile and wireless development work out of its huge office complex in Victoria.
Some of the investments have been relatively modest in financial terms. Bebo, the social networking site, opened a UK office this year with the hire of a single executive, Joanna Shields, poached from Google. Sling Media, the video-streaming company, similarly employs just one person in London.
But such small beachheads can grow quickly. MySpace, a social networking rival to Bebo, sent three managers from California to London in January 2006. A year later it had an office of 55 people in Soho.
Californian IT companies say they see London as a centre for convergence of the technology and media industries.
The fact that many global media companies, advertising agencies and telecommunications operators have headquarters in London makes the city a good place for dealmaking.
Google, for example, has signed key deals with Vodafone, the UK mobile phone operator, and with British Sky Broadcasting, Rupert Murdoch’s satellite television business, in the past year. MySpace has done a deal with Vodafone. And Bebo is working with Orange in the UK on the first deal to give mobile phone users access to the social networking site.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Californian IT surges into London
By Maija Palmer, IT Correspondent
Published: April 8 2007 22:04 | Last updated: April 8 2007 22:04
A record number of Californian information technology companies including Google, MySpace and Bebo have opened offices in London in the past year, leading a surge of investment by foreign business in the capital.
There were a record 250 foreign direct investment projects into London in 2006, up more than 40 per cent on the previous year, according to new figures from Think London, the capital’s foreign direct investment agency.
The number outstrips activity during the dotcom boom in 2000, when 182 investment projects came to London from abroad.
Some 25 Californian IT companies invested in London last year, making them the largest identifiable group of foreign businesses coming to the city.
The US as a whole accounted for 54 per cent of projects, with Californian companies, including non-IT businesses, making up 15 per cent of all London foreign investment projects.
This compares with 10 per cent from India and 7 per cent from Canada, the next biggest investors.
In response to the influx, Think London recently opened offices in San Francisco, in addition to those in New York and Beijing.
Key projects include the rapid growth of Google’s UK operations during the last 12 months. The company now employs hundreds of UK staff and runs a significant part of its mobile and wireless development work out of its huge office complex in Victoria.
Some of the investments have been relatively modest in financial terms. Bebo, the social networking site, opened a UK office this year with the hire of a single executive, Joanna Shields, poached from Google. Sling Media, the video-streaming company, similarly employs just one person in London.
But such small beachheads can grow quickly. MySpace, a social networking rival to Bebo, sent three managers from California to London in January 2006. A year later it had an office of 55 people in Soho.
Californian IT companies say they see London as a centre for convergence of the technology and media industries.
The fact that many global media companies, advertising agencies and telecommunications operators have headquarters in London makes the city a good place for dealmaking.
Google, for example, has signed key deals with Vodafone, the UK mobile phone operator, and with British Sky Broadcasting, Rupert Murdoch’s satellite television business, in the past year. MySpace has done a deal with Vodafone. And Bebo is working with Orange in the UK on the first deal to give mobile phone users access to the social networking site.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Friday, April 06, 2007
Thursday, April 05, 2007
FT.com / Technology - The future of search: It’s how, not where, you look
FT.com / Technology - The future of search: It’s how, not where, you look
The future of search: It’s how, not where, you look
By Alan Cane
Published: March 28 2007 10:13 | Last updated: March 28 2007 10:13
The time staff waste searching for “stuff” – the information necessary to do their jobs more effectively – has become legendary. Accenture, the consultancy, polled more than 1,000 executives in the US and UK and found that managers were on average spending up to two hours – a quarter of their working day – searching for stuff.
When they found it, moreover, at least 50 per cent was useless: irrelevant, out-of-date or just wrong.
Concerned that its intranet was becoming overburdened, BAE Systems, the aerospace group, carried out its own survey and discovered that four out of five employees on the network were wasting an average of 30 minutes a day retrieving information while 60 per cent were spending an hour or more duplicating the work of others.
The solution was a system from Autonomy, a UK company which, with 16,000 customers worldwide, leads the market for what is known as “enterprise search”, a family of technologies that make it possible to extract information quickly from both structured and unstructured sources. With the Autonomy system in place, BAE estimates that time spent in finding information is down by more than 90 per cent.
Another example: lawyers with the US firm Morrison & Foerster found they were drowning in information scattered through their systems: client histories were stored in accounting and customer relationship management systems, documents were stored in a document management system, communications in e-mail servers and so on.
The firm drew up a specification for an ideal solution, which it called AnswerBase, and commissioned a system from Recommind, a legal search vendor. Searches which had previously taken hours could be completed in seconds using AnswerBase; those taking days were reduced to minutes.
As Craig Carpenter, Recommind’s head of marketing and business development, puts it, the days when enterprise search was a non-essential novelty are past; now the future lies with search technologies which will home in on concepts rather than keywords.
Enterprise search is a comparatively recent phenomenon, forced on companies by the internet, e-mail, company intranets and the 20bn gigabytes of new data now being created by businesses each year.
Google currently leads the world in conventional internet search but as Mike Lynch, Autonomy chief executive, emphasises, enterprise search is different: “Unlike the internet, enterprise information is in different formats. A large company might support 300 different information formats scattered through 5,000 separate repositories.
“An enterprise search engine has to be able to understand all those formats and talk to all those repositories. And most staff are not allowed to see all the information a company has stored away. In a large group, for example, an individual might be allowed to see only one in every 10,000 documents. Each repository has its own set of complex rules governing who is allowed to see what and it is changing all the time.”
So Autonomy uses “spiders” and “ants” – intelligent software – to roam the intranet, indexing all the material available for a search: in that sense, even unstructured data has a structure of sorts. Ants are self-learning and capable of appreciating that particular pieces of information are frequently requested or that some categories of information change rapidly. Mr Lynch says attempts to create search tools without overall indexing – known as “federated search” – are unworkable: “They glow red hot and melt.”
Tamara Alairys, global leader for search at Accenture, points out that using Google to search a word like “Turkey” will return thousands of hits but it will not distinguish between the country and the bird: “The challenge for people searching their intranets has been to get better search relevancy and to retrieve data that can help them make a better decision.”
She argues that search technologies have improved “by leaps and bounds” in the past two years: “Early capabilities were limited: a user could only perform basic keyword searches and sort the results using parameters such as the date of creation. Much more is possible today. Structured and unstructured data can be searched. And natural language processing enables the search engine to understand the intent behind a user’s query and give a meaningful response.”
The cost of failing to retrieve relevant data can be high. Zia Zaman, in charge of strategic market development for Fast, a search company based in Oslo, Norway, recalls a pharmaceuticals company that entered into a strategic relationship with a drug delivery group: “The two companies invested years and millions of dollars in trying to figure out how they could work together but in the end they had to pull the plug on the deal. Then the pharmaceuticals company found a document in its own files which detailed how the drug delivery mechanism could never work. They had been making decisions in a fog.”
Changes in the legal environment in the US is driving interest in enterprise search. The latest revision of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the code for civil legal action, published in December year, gives companies involved in a lawsuit 99 days to produce relevant information stored electronically compared with three years or so previously.
Mike Lynch comments: “This will be impossible for a big drug company or manufacturer unless they already have a system in place. Companies which have some experience of lawsuits have already realised how important this is. Others are just waking up to it. Later this year I would expect to see the first prosecutions resulting from a failure to comply with the requirements.” It is expected that other countries will follow the US lead in principle.
Over the past 18 to 24 months there have been significant improvements in search technology, and the number of vendors of enterprise search systems has grown. IBM, Microsoft and Google have offerings aimed at business. The top end of the market is dominated by Autonomy, Convera, Fast and Open Text while specialist players include Endeca, InQuira, Siderean Software and Vivisimo.
The result, as Jerome Pesenti of Vivisimo writes, is that the search market is fragmented and confusing but that should not stop companies experimenting: customers don’t know what to ask, what features are needed and which vendors to look at, he notes, going on to argue that search should be seen as a long-term application, deployed quickly and improved in phases based on end-user feedback: “There is no limit as to how good and useful a search can be,” he claims, “but modest goals, early rewards and especially, valuable user feedback, can be obtained through quick deployment.”
The BBC has difficult information retrieval needs. It is awash with information: core business systems as well as financial information about programmes, approvals processes, e-mails, audio and video.
Keith Little, BBC chief information officer, says: “We have lots of information that is unsearchable – valuable information that nobody can access. We have systems with search facilities but these are silos and then there are e-mails and other repositories of unstructured data that go right across the organisation.”
The BBC uses several search tools – Autonomy, Microsoft Sharepoint and OpenText Livelink among them. Mr Little says: “At the top level, our search strategy is to create a framework for plugging in, in a service-oriented manner, legacy and future systems.
“We need the ability to put those together to meet the search requirements from the business and we then have to think about how we provide access to our real audience – the people who pay our licence fees.” “Infax”, a simple programme search tool, was made available to the public last year.
What lies ahead for enterprise search? Ms Alairys of Accenture sees four developments. First, advanced analytics and monitoring which will make it possible to tap information in real time and provide rapid responses. Second, sentiment analysis which uses textual analysis to gauge the tone of a document – whether results show a company in a positive or negative light, for example. Third, multimedia search across textual, video and audio sources. And fourth, guided information discovery – exploring information without a specific query.
So in future, even if you don’t know what you want or where to find it, enterprise search will guide you to the right answer.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
The future of search: It’s how, not where, you look
By Alan Cane
Published: March 28 2007 10:13 | Last updated: March 28 2007 10:13
The time staff waste searching for “stuff” – the information necessary to do their jobs more effectively – has become legendary. Accenture, the consultancy, polled more than 1,000 executives in the US and UK and found that managers were on average spending up to two hours – a quarter of their working day – searching for stuff.
When they found it, moreover, at least 50 per cent was useless: irrelevant, out-of-date or just wrong.
Concerned that its intranet was becoming overburdened, BAE Systems, the aerospace group, carried out its own survey and discovered that four out of five employees on the network were wasting an average of 30 minutes a day retrieving information while 60 per cent were spending an hour or more duplicating the work of others.
The solution was a system from Autonomy, a UK company which, with 16,000 customers worldwide, leads the market for what is known as “enterprise search”, a family of technologies that make it possible to extract information quickly from both structured and unstructured sources. With the Autonomy system in place, BAE estimates that time spent in finding information is down by more than 90 per cent.
Another example: lawyers with the US firm Morrison & Foerster found they were drowning in information scattered through their systems: client histories were stored in accounting and customer relationship management systems, documents were stored in a document management system, communications in e-mail servers and so on.
The firm drew up a specification for an ideal solution, which it called AnswerBase, and commissioned a system from Recommind, a legal search vendor. Searches which had previously taken hours could be completed in seconds using AnswerBase; those taking days were reduced to minutes.
As Craig Carpenter, Recommind’s head of marketing and business development, puts it, the days when enterprise search was a non-essential novelty are past; now the future lies with search technologies which will home in on concepts rather than keywords.
Enterprise search is a comparatively recent phenomenon, forced on companies by the internet, e-mail, company intranets and the 20bn gigabytes of new data now being created by businesses each year.
Google currently leads the world in conventional internet search but as Mike Lynch, Autonomy chief executive, emphasises, enterprise search is different: “Unlike the internet, enterprise information is in different formats. A large company might support 300 different information formats scattered through 5,000 separate repositories.
“An enterprise search engine has to be able to understand all those formats and talk to all those repositories. And most staff are not allowed to see all the information a company has stored away. In a large group, for example, an individual might be allowed to see only one in every 10,000 documents. Each repository has its own set of complex rules governing who is allowed to see what and it is changing all the time.”
So Autonomy uses “spiders” and “ants” – intelligent software – to roam the intranet, indexing all the material available for a search: in that sense, even unstructured data has a structure of sorts. Ants are self-learning and capable of appreciating that particular pieces of information are frequently requested or that some categories of information change rapidly. Mr Lynch says attempts to create search tools without overall indexing – known as “federated search” – are unworkable: “They glow red hot and melt.”
Tamara Alairys, global leader for search at Accenture, points out that using Google to search a word like “Turkey” will return thousands of hits but it will not distinguish between the country and the bird: “The challenge for people searching their intranets has been to get better search relevancy and to retrieve data that can help them make a better decision.”
She argues that search technologies have improved “by leaps and bounds” in the past two years: “Early capabilities were limited: a user could only perform basic keyword searches and sort the results using parameters such as the date of creation. Much more is possible today. Structured and unstructured data can be searched. And natural language processing enables the search engine to understand the intent behind a user’s query and give a meaningful response.”
The cost of failing to retrieve relevant data can be high. Zia Zaman, in charge of strategic market development for Fast, a search company based in Oslo, Norway, recalls a pharmaceuticals company that entered into a strategic relationship with a drug delivery group: “The two companies invested years and millions of dollars in trying to figure out how they could work together but in the end they had to pull the plug on the deal. Then the pharmaceuticals company found a document in its own files which detailed how the drug delivery mechanism could never work. They had been making decisions in a fog.”
Changes in the legal environment in the US is driving interest in enterprise search. The latest revision of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the code for civil legal action, published in December year, gives companies involved in a lawsuit 99 days to produce relevant information stored electronically compared with three years or so previously.
Mike Lynch comments: “This will be impossible for a big drug company or manufacturer unless they already have a system in place. Companies which have some experience of lawsuits have already realised how important this is. Others are just waking up to it. Later this year I would expect to see the first prosecutions resulting from a failure to comply with the requirements.” It is expected that other countries will follow the US lead in principle.
Over the past 18 to 24 months there have been significant improvements in search technology, and the number of vendors of enterprise search systems has grown. IBM, Microsoft and Google have offerings aimed at business. The top end of the market is dominated by Autonomy, Convera, Fast and Open Text while specialist players include Endeca, InQuira, Siderean Software and Vivisimo.
The result, as Jerome Pesenti of Vivisimo writes, is that the search market is fragmented and confusing but that should not stop companies experimenting: customers don’t know what to ask, what features are needed and which vendors to look at, he notes, going on to argue that search should be seen as a long-term application, deployed quickly and improved in phases based on end-user feedback: “There is no limit as to how good and useful a search can be,” he claims, “but modest goals, early rewards and especially, valuable user feedback, can be obtained through quick deployment.”
The BBC has difficult information retrieval needs. It is awash with information: core business systems as well as financial information about programmes, approvals processes, e-mails, audio and video.
Keith Little, BBC chief information officer, says: “We have lots of information that is unsearchable – valuable information that nobody can access. We have systems with search facilities but these are silos and then there are e-mails and other repositories of unstructured data that go right across the organisation.”
The BBC uses several search tools – Autonomy, Microsoft Sharepoint and OpenText Livelink among them. Mr Little says: “At the top level, our search strategy is to create a framework for plugging in, in a service-oriented manner, legacy and future systems.
“We need the ability to put those together to meet the search requirements from the business and we then have to think about how we provide access to our real audience – the people who pay our licence fees.” “Infax”, a simple programme search tool, was made available to the public last year.
What lies ahead for enterprise search? Ms Alairys of Accenture sees four developments. First, advanced analytics and monitoring which will make it possible to tap information in real time and provide rapid responses. Second, sentiment analysis which uses textual analysis to gauge the tone of a document – whether results show a company in a positive or negative light, for example. Third, multimedia search across textual, video and audio sources. And fourth, guided information discovery – exploring information without a specific query.
So in future, even if you don’t know what you want or where to find it, enterprise search will guide you to the right answer.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
The McKinsey Quarterly: How businesses are using Web 2.0: A McKinsey Global Survey
The McKinsey Quarterly: How businesses are using Web 2.0: A McKinsey Global Survey
By and large, executives are satisfied with their previous investments in Internet technology, and most are investing in trends that promote automation and networking online.
By and large, executives are satisfied with their previous investments in Internet technology, and most are investing in trends that promote automation and networking online.
MOSS 2007: Microsofts dritter Anlauf sorgt für Aufmerksamkeit
MOSS 2007: Microsofts dritter Anlauf sorgt für Aufmerksamkeit
Microsoft setzt mit dem Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 auf Synergie-Effekte mit Produkten aus dem eigenen Hause. Beim Funktionsumfang wurde stark zugelegt. Wichtige Lücken der Vorgängerversion, z. B. in den Bereichen elektronisches Dokumenten-Management (EDM), Workflow und Web Content Management wurden geschlossen. Zwei wesentliche Schwachpunkte im Bereich der Verwaltung von elektronischen Dokumenten wurden beseitigt, indem eine rollenbasierte Rechteverwaltung für Dokumentenbibliotheken, Ordner und einzelne Dokumente implementiert wurde und indem mit MOSS 2007 nun Inhaltstypen (oft auch als Content Types oder Dokumententypen bezeichnet) eingeführt wurden, die eine einfache Erfassung der Metadaten zu Dokumenten ermöglichen.
Microsoft setzt mit dem Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 auf Synergie-Effekte mit Produkten aus dem eigenen Hause. Beim Funktionsumfang wurde stark zugelegt. Wichtige Lücken der Vorgängerversion, z. B. in den Bereichen elektronisches Dokumenten-Management (EDM), Workflow und Web Content Management wurden geschlossen. Zwei wesentliche Schwachpunkte im Bereich der Verwaltung von elektronischen Dokumenten wurden beseitigt, indem eine rollenbasierte Rechteverwaltung für Dokumentenbibliotheken, Ordner und einzelne Dokumente implementiert wurde und indem mit MOSS 2007 nun Inhaltstypen (oft auch als Content Types oder Dokumententypen bezeichnet) eingeführt wurden, die eine einfache Erfassung der Metadaten zu Dokumenten ermöglichen.
ECM mit dem SharePoint Server 2007
ECM mit dem SharePoint Server 2007
Interview mit Darius Mahmoudi, Senior Solutions Sales Professional der Microsoft Deutschland GmbH. Mit freundlicher Unterstützung des DOK.magazin.
Interview mit Darius Mahmoudi, Senior Solutions Sales Professional der Microsoft Deutschland GmbH. Mit freundlicher Unterstützung des DOK.magazin.
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
Microsoft's SharePoint Technologies: What to Expect in 2007
Microsoft's SharePoint Technologies: What to Expect in 2007
The upcoming Office 2007 release contains an unprecedented number of server-side components, including newly Office-branded SharePoint tools that support high-performance workplace domains, such as portals, content management and collaboration. In addition to building enterprise SharePoint applications, planners also need to deal with the many ad hoc SharePoint instances that exist "under the radar." These can be a nuisance or they can be a useful part of an overall information ecosystem. Find out what's new, how SharePoint interacts with Microsoft and other applications, how to take advantage of SharePoint ubiquity and what it all will cost.
The upcoming Office 2007 release contains an unprecedented number of server-side components, including newly Office-branded SharePoint tools that support high-performance workplace domains, such as portals, content management and collaboration. In addition to building enterprise SharePoint applications, planners also need to deal with the many ad hoc SharePoint instances that exist "under the radar." These can be a nuisance or they can be a useful part of an overall information ecosystem. Find out what's new, how SharePoint interacts with Microsoft and other applications, how to take advantage of SharePoint ubiquity and what it all will cost.
Google steigt USA-weit in die TV-Werbung ein - Nachrichten - computerwoche.de
Google steigt USA-weit in die TV-Werbung ein - Nachrichten - computerwoche.de
Der Suchmaschinengigant Google wird in den USA in den lukrativen Markt mit TV-Werbespots einsteigen.
Der Suchmaschinengigant Google wird in den USA in den lukrativen Markt mit TV-Werbespots einsteigen.
Monday, April 02, 2007
Sunday, April 01, 2007
ECM mit dem SharePoint Server 2007
ECM mit dem SharePoint Server 2007
Interview mit Darius Mahmoudi, Senior Solutions Sales Professional der Microsoft Deutschland GmbH. Mit freundlicher Unterstützung des DOK.magazin.
Interview mit Darius Mahmoudi, Senior Solutions Sales Professional der Microsoft Deutschland GmbH. Mit freundlicher Unterstützung des DOK.magazin.
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