Notwithstanding the manifest virtues of centralization, there are numerous reasons you might want data marts,  in the tabular and document worlds alike.  For example:

• Price/performance. Your main/central data manager might be too expensive to support additional large specialized databases. Or different databases and applications might have sufficiently different profiles so as to get great price/performance from different kinds of data managers. This is particularly prevalent in the relational world, where each of column stores, sequentially-oriented row stores, and random I/O-oriented row stores have compelling use cases.
• Different SLAs (Service-Level Agreements). Similarly, different applications may have very different requirements for uptime, response time, and the like. (In the relational world, think of operational data stores.)
• Different security requirements. Different subsets of the data may need different levels of security. This is particularly prevalent in the document world, where security problems are not as well-solved as in the tabular arena, and where it’s common for a search engine to index across different corpuses with radically different levels of sensitivity.
• Integrated application and user interfaces. In the relational world, there’s a pretty clean separation between data management and interface logic; most serious business intelligence tools can talk to most DBMS. The document world is quite different. Some search engines bundle, for example, various kinds of faceted or parameterized search interfaces. What’s more, in public-facing search, a major differentiator is the facilities that the product offers for skewing search results.
• Different text applications require different thesauruses or taxonomy management systems. Ideally, those should all be integrated — but the requisite technology still doesn’t exist.

Bottom line: Text data marts, much like relational data marts, are almost surely here to stay.

Related link

• The future of data marts

• Open source
• Targeted to appear in netbooks in the second half of 2010
• Google Chrome browser + new windowing system + Linux kernel
• Minimal user interface
• Data stored or at least backed up in the cloud, and hence available on any computer
• Hardware compatibility hassles allegedly eliminated
• Ditto for software update hassles
• Ditto for security problems
• Apps apparently assumed to run inside the browser. (Not clear if this is required or just recommended.)

Obviously, Google Chrome OS is a direct attack on Microsoft — even more so than Google Wave, which I’ve predicted will “play merry hell with Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, and more,” or for that matter than Google Mail and the rest of Google Apps. Taken together, Google’s initiatives suggest that an all-out Google-Microsoft war is coming, in a conflict that many people have been expecting — and analyzing — for years.

So how will this all shake out? Well, let’s start with some basic points:

• Google Chrome OS Release 1 is expected over a year from now, and then only on a limited subset of PCs, namely netbooks.
• Google Chrome OS Release 1 is supposed to have great performance and be bullet-proof. Hmm …
• Google is evidently assuming that the apps people want to run will either be browser-based, or else be new ones written for Chrome OS. Hmm …
• Google is signaling that Chrome OS will be very limited in features. That makes sense for Release 1 — but what will be missing?
• Consumers have proven their willingness to buy non-Microsoft computers, especially Apple ones, specifically in the Mac and iPhone/iTouch product lines.
• A lot of people would have compatibility issues replacing Microsoft Excel or PowerPoint with partially-compatible alternatives. I’m not so sure about Microsoft Word, however. Other than those three, Outlook, and the Windows family itself, I’m not aware of any Microsoft client products that have much lock-in. (Well, maybe Xbox, but that’s not in the main stack.)
• Open source software often gets most of its community support in a couple of areas, namely compatibilities and language translation. Google probably doesn’t need the help in languages, but letting other people fix Chrome OS compatibility issues whose importance it didn’t recognize is potentially valuable.
• Google probably won’t make any direct revenue from Chrome OS. So how much will it invest in the project?
• Notwithstanding Danny Sullivan’s concern, there isn’t much of an antitrust issue here. Google’s search can’t easily be used to favor Chrome, Chrome OS, or Google Apps. And the other way around — e.g., using Chrome OS to favor search — Google clearly isn’t a monopolist.

So while Google may kill Microsoft’s client business some day, it clearly won’t happen for quite a while, Techcrunch’s excitement notwithstanding. We’re talking a multi-year effort before there’s any realistic chance of Microsoft being toppled. On the other hand, it’s hard to think of major software compatibility issues that won’t quickly be addressed, except Microsoft’s own product and, probably, MMO games — assuming, of course, Chrome OS gets enough initial traction for anybody to care. So intermediate- and long-term, Microsoft’s PC business is very vulnerable indeed.

The bulk of Google’s announcement follows (emphasis added):

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android. Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.

We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.

We have a lot of work to do, and we’re definitely going to need a lot of help from the open source community to accomplish this vision. We’re excited for what’s to come and we hope you are too. Stay tuned for more updates in the fall and have a great summer.

Natural language computer interfaces were introduced commercially about 15 years ago*.  They failed miserably.

*I.e., the early 1980s

For example, Artificial Intelligence Corporation’s Intellect was a natural language DBMS query/reporting/charting tool.  It was actually a pretty good product.  But it’s infamous among industry insiders as the product for which IBM, in one of its first software licensing deals, got about 1700 trial installations — and less than a 1% sales close rate.  Even its successor, Linguistic Technologies’ English Wizard*, doesn’t seem to be attracting many customers, despite consistently good product reviews.

*These days (i.e., in 2009) it’s owned by Progress and called EasyAsk. It still doesn’t seem to be selling well.

Another example was HAL, the natural language command interface to 1-2-3.  HAL is the product that first made Bill Gross (subsequently the founder of Knowledge Adventure and idealab!) and his brother Larry famous.  However, it achieved no success*, and was quickly dropped from Lotus’ product line.

*I loved the product personally. But I was sadly alone.

In retrospect, it’s obvious why natural language interfaces failed. First of all, they offered little advantage over the forms-and-menus paradigm that dominated enterprise computing in both the online-character-based and client-server-GUI eras.  If you couldn’t meet an application need with forms and menus, you couldn’t meet it with natural language either.

Even worse, NL actually had a couple of clear disadvantages versus traditional interfaces.  First of all, it required (ick!) typing, often more typing than the forms and menus did.  Second, forms and menus tell the user exactly what he can do. Natural language, however, lets him give orders the computer doesn’t know how to follow.  This is inefficient, not to mention frustrating.

However, even in 1983, it was obvious that the typing objection would go away some day, because of speech recognition — once desktop computers reached 100 MIPs or so.  (Effective keyboard-replacement speech recognition – as opposed to true natural language understanding — is mainly a matter of processing power.)  15 years later, standard PCs exceed 100 MIPs (assuming that 1 MIPs = a couple of megahertz for these purposes), and speech recognition is indeed getting practical.

In fact, as become increasingly evident recently, speech recognition is now a hot technology.  Bill Gates has been talking it up for a couple of years.  Increasingly, the press has swung to believing him … And my parents just bought a PC with two speech recognition products on it.

That said, speech recognition is as misunderstood (no pun intended) as most artificial intelligence technologies.  Yes, it beats typing, in a number of circumstances:

• On the telephone (duh!)
• “Busy hands” and/or “busy eyes” applications and locales (doctors‘ offices, trading floors, warehouses, etc. – and, some day in the future, your kitchen and car)
• People simply reluctant to type (e.g., anybody with sufficient wrist or back problems, and many males over the age of 45)

But before our computers talk back and forth with us in the voice of Majel Barrett Roddenberry, applications are going to have to add several important elements required for truly functional natural-language  interfaces:

• Intuitively clear names for everything on (or just behind) the screen
• Application-specific disambiguation logic

For most practical purposes, the latter requirement equates to

• A new generation of document selection technology

THE RULE OF NAMES

According to legend, knowing something’s name gives you power over it.  When that “something” is a button or menu choice on a speech-enabled computer, the legend is literally true.  But when a feature doesn’t have an obvious name, you can’t easily invoke it.

When applications consisted mainly of forms and menus, this was rarely a problem.  Everything had a clear role and label.  But web pages are less organized.  Hyperlinks can be scattered all over the place, with little rhyme or reason.

Frankly, I don’t think this is a hard problem to solve.  It wouldn’t take a lot of XML to divide the page into clear regions, so that commands like “Show me article #3″ (on a search results list) could be interpreted in the obvious way.  But it does take at least some discipline; random web pages will not necessarily be easy to “talk” to.

CYBERNETIC LISTENING SKILLS

The bigger challenge is to make sure that the application can respond in some useful way, no matter what command it’s given. This is even more difficult than it was 15 years ago, because of the radical increase in “casual” computer usage.  In the old days, we could assume the user had some clear business reason for using the application, and if necessary that s/he had time to be trained (even if people rarely sat still for as much training as they really needed).  Therefore, we could at least assume that the users had at least a general idea of what the application did, and hence of which commands the computer could obey.  From an NL standpoint, we could assume that what they actually “said” (which in those days meant “typed”) was at least reasonably close to what they were “supposed” to say.

Now, however, some of the most important applications are internet e-commerce and portals, competing and begging for the user’s attention.  The user is there strictly on a voluntary basis, and if he doesn’t get immediate gratification, he‘s gone, history, hasta la bye-bye.  Site-specific training isn’t even a consideration. And even if somebody did actually take a class on “How to use Excite,” the knowledge would be obsolete in six months.  So applications, if they are to have natural language interfaces that please and respond to users, have to be able to respond pretty much to any command.

Ideally, voice-enabled systems would be like the computers on Star Trek, which can return information from vast archives, brew a pot of Earl Grey tea, play three parts of a quartet, create self-aware life forms, or answer questions like “Computer, what is the nature of the universe?”  More realistically, they should be able, for example, to respond to a command like “Tell me about flights to Miami” by automatically giving the user a travel-reservation application or web page, and entering Miami in the appropriate form field.

If one thinks about the complications in such a system, it becomes clear that there are only two possible ways an application system can be designed to respond meaningfully to an enormous range of reasonable possible requests.

1. It can do the equivalent of saying “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that,” “I’m sorry, I can’t do that,” and so on.

2. It can interpret many commands as text-search strings, and return appropriate results.

The first strategy – application-specific disambiguation logic, clear responses to “errors,” etc. — is absolutely necessary.  No software is perfectly intelligent; the user will have to be asked for disambiguation help from time to time (just as clerks today ask customers to repeat their requests!). I’m not going to go into much detail about how that works because, frankly, it’s a tricky thing to get right.  Users hate unnecessary disambiguation steps. They also hate the incorrect responses that result from ambiguity, and do tolerate being asked for help when it’s truly needed.  In short, whatever you build the first time around will probably be wrong.  So build something fast; then run, don’t walk, to the nearest usability lab, find out how you screwed up, and redo your system until you get it right.

I’m convinced that the second strategy — heavy reliance on text search technology — is a requirement as well. Just try to name a major web site that doesn’t use text search.  True, text search has gotten a bad rap recently, mainly because a whole generation of search engines didn’t really work.  But it will stage a comeback.

Related links

• My December, 2007 survey of speech recognition technology
• Star Trek fun

]]> http://www.texttechnologies.com/2009/05/30/men-are-from-earth-computers-are-from-vulcan/feed/ 2 http://www.texttechnologies.com/2009/05/30/men-are-from-earth-computers-are-from-vulcan/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TextTechnologies/~3/3bVS4DSrGks/ http://www.texttechnologies.com/2009/05/29/google-wave-finally-a-microsoft-killer/#comments Fri, 29 May 2009 09:49:24 +0000 Curt Monash http://www.texttechnologies.com/?p=330 Google held a superbly-received preview of a new technology called Google Wave, which promises to “reinvent communication.” In simplest terms, Google Wave is a software platform that:

• Offers the possibility to improve upon a broad range of communication, collaboration, and/or text-based product categories, such as:
  • Search
  • Word processing
  • E-mail
  • Instant messaging
  • Microblogging
  • Blogging
  • Mini-portals (Facebook-style)
  • Mini-portals (Sharepoint-style)
• In particular, allows these applications to be both much more integrated and interactive than they now are.
• Will have open developer APIs.
• WIll be open-sourced.

If this all works out, Google Wave could play merry hell with Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, and more.

I suspect it will.

And by the way, there’s a cool “natural language” angle as well.

For starters, here are some basic links:

• Google has naturally set up a home page for the Google Wave project.
• Featured on that page but also separately available is an 80-minute video introducing Google Wave.
• Techcrunch has two highly detailed posts on Google Wave, one summarizing what’s in the main Google Wave video and one reporting on a Google Wave Q&A.

Here are some reasons I think Google Wave could actually live up to its promise:

• The email problem Google Wave purports to solve is real and critical. The email paradigm assumes linear conversations, and what actually happens is that they branch. Google Wave’s message-board-like paradigm is simply better, and more flexible (e.g., not limited to a single enterprise!) than Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes.
• The instant messaging problems Google Wave purports to solve are also major. Instant messaging is slow, tedious, disjointed, and ephemeral. Fully integrating IM with email solves most of those problems. And Google Wave’s UI interactivity solves most of the rest.
• Twitter needs to be integrated with other forms of communication. What’s more, Twitter’s functionality needs to be drastically extended. Google Wave is the best hope I know of to meet those needs.  Enterprise Twitter is just a special case of that.
• Workgroups (enterprise or otherwise) need light-weight mini-portals that can be created on the fly by non-technical users, to ease collaboration. Microsoft SharePoint, SAP Rooms, et al. don’t really meet that need.  Google Wave could.
• In particular, collaboration on documents, presentations and so on needs to be more cloud-based and generally easier than is the case in Microsoft Office. Google Wave has the potential to provide that.
• Google + open source is a potentially potent combination, especially versus Microsoft.

One note: Google of course needs to improve the reliability and customer service of its cloud-based offerings to make a huge dent in Microsoft’s market. But even with its flaws Google has already been a good alternative for a while.

As for the “natural language” angle: At the 44:30 mark of the main Google Wave video is a demo of some cool, very grammar-sensitive spell-checking technology. Google’s spell-checking technology is further discussed in a separate, short video.  The basic idea is that Google uses its vast library of web pages — and email and chat? — not just to model intended word usage but also kinds of mis-spelling behavior as well.

And to the CBS employee who was fired and threatened based on this story – we believe certain U.S. Whistle Blower laws may protect you from retaliation from CBS in this matter. We’d like to provide you with legal counsel at our cost.

That’s a remarkable offer to make, one that is very rare for traditional media to match. As such, it’s a strong (albeit very partial) answer to the ongoing handwringing about the future of investigative journalism.

By the way, I once got an analogous offer — but it was from a company, not a media outlet. In 1994, I broke the news that Sybase’s development efforts were a train wreck.  Gartner Group accelerated its research on the same issue, and went out with the same story*. Sybase faxed libel threats to Gartner and me. I quickly reached out to Sybase competitors for help.  Oracle’s and CA’s general counsels walked me through the legal issues (without overstepping the bounds that would have led them to be “acting as my lawyer”). Larry Ellison promised by email to pay my legal expenses if any. Charles Wang of CA was too cheap to match the offer — but he sat in personally on my call with his lawyer.

*Tony Percy admitted the causality to me a few years later, after he’d left Gartner.

So fortified — and with PR maven Simone Otus doing her best to talk sense into her Sybase clients — I faxed back a pair of two-page letters.  One explained the basis for my written opinions, demonstrating there was NFW I was guilty of libel. The other outlined a proposal for reducing hostilities.  The whole thing simmmered down. Sybase’s sales and earning fell apart a couple quarters later, exactly when I predicted. Management was replaced by people much more friendly to me (Mitchell Kertzman, Dennis McEvoy, et al.). Some outstanding folks got involved in analyst relations (at various times Rob Cooley, Dave Taber, and Merv Adrian, which is pretty much a Hall of Fame class right there).  And all was cool.  But I digress …

Anyhow, my main point is that the new information ecosystem is constantly evolving new ways to fill the roles that traditional media are, at least in part, vacating. TechCrunch’s bold act of investigatory journalistic commitment is just one example.

And while it’s now almost 15 years old, my Sybase story shows another way this can work. I’m a self-employed analyst and writer now, just as I was then. But even so, I can afford to research and write contentious things, without concern for legal intimidation.

But community can’t be copied. Even if you mirrored all of this blog’s content and put someone else’s name on it, the comment threads would still live here. You could copy those too, but only the readers who came here could participate in the conversation, and I believe that would still draw most of you.

Frankly, I don’t think that would work. Good blog commenters are precious, generously donating their own time and thought to build up your content. Could one charge people to read that? Maybe. But charging people to write great content for you seems like one barrier too many, and I’m not sure how to charge them to read without also charging them to write. That said, various forums (i.e., message boards) offer premium forums, so at least for some lifestyle business owners the approach seems to be worth pursuing.

Other strategies to consider include:

1. Charging more money to fewer customers for the core printed product. Apparently, that’s what Newsweek and many European publications are doing.

Speaking to the New York Times, Newsweek’s CEO Tom Acheim said: “For us, mass is a business that doesn’t work. I wish it did, but it doesn’t. We did it for a long time, successfully, but we can’t anymore”.

The idea is that, unless you have sufficiently high ad rates, you lose money on each copy or subscription anyway. So you should shrink your circulation to the point that your average reader is a high-value advertising target. Makes sense to me. But I feel I don’t know enough about advertising business models to comment further right now.

2. The premium/freemium of general enhanced access to actual New York Times reporting or opinion. When this is done just with published opinion/analysis, the results seem to be so-so. Most relevantly, the NYT’s own effort in that vein — Times Select — was shut down. ESPN Insider seems fairly successful, but sports news has the advantage that it’s used directly for a couple different kinds of decision making (wagering and fantasy sports). But then, opinions are hardly a scarce commodity! Unless a published opinion serves as a vehicle for communicating valuable knowledge — e.g., a product review based on direct experience and testing, or detailed reporting on a key football player’s availability for the next game, or the experience to judge which publicly-known time series trends are likely to continue and which are likely to reverse — that opinion usually has little or no cash value.

Hence the best opportunities for this strategy probably lie in actually providing more information. Potential premium forms of — or avenues for — information include:

• Longer versions of a story than were put in the main product
• Observations – perhaps in blog form — that never made it into actual stories
• More photos than made it into a story (although I don’t think of photos as a “Grey Lady” strength)
• Some kind of direct communication with reporters.

3. Topic-specific premium information subscriptions. Rupert Murdoch evidently favors this approach for the Wall Street Journal, and I heartily endorse it. It is reasonable to expect people to pay for the “best” information on a particular subject. And a respected newspaper like the New York Times could usefully partner with specialized organizations as need be, potentially adding value on both the content and business sides — both in its native region, where it’s obviously a leading brand, and (inter)nationally, where it might be an interloper competing with local newspapers and other providers.

There are many possible subject areas to consider, such as:

• Sports (national sports news with a strong local bias)
• Theater
• Art (museums and commercial galleries both)
• Film
• Fine dining
• Food (home-prepared)
• Hyperlocal politics and business

A number of the opportunities do seem quite small (just how much better can one do in any one of them than 10-50,000 subscribers?). Even so, this opportunity should have been pursued more aggressively in the past, and it absolutely should be pursued with full force now.

4. One-off ancillary products. Possibilities include:

• Online or offline events — chats, lectures, whatever.
• Books, etc. – it is already common for major news publications to pursue this strategy to the best extent they can figure out.
• T-shirts/tote bags/coffee mugs — probably not a large revenue line in itself, or a large incentive for a subscription to some more general premium service. But hey, it’s some revenue, which amounts to people paying you for the privilege of advertising their fondness for your product.

Again, each of these opportunities seems, on its own, to be fairly small. But the day of mass-produced-only news is rapidly waning. The news providers that thrive in the internet-centric era will be the ones that successfully exploit a variety of customer clusters, market niches, and revenue-stream opportunities.

• “Freemium” models, in which one gives away some good information but charges for the best stuff, can succeed. I do that, in a way. So does ESPN.com. Rupert Murdoch, so far as I can tell, proposes to make WSJ.com more like ESPN.
• Charging by some kind of usage metric doesn’t make sense. This seems to be what the New York Times is thinking about. It may also be what Murdoch is suggesting for some of his other properties.
• Grand cosmic all-you-can-consume-of-all-but-the-most-highly-valuable-information subscriptions — e.g., an “ASCAP for news” — could be marketable. And I don’t even think they’d require the antitrust exemptions the newspaper industry is whining for.

Those conclusions, in turn, are based on the theory that the the best selling proposition for decision-supporting information and information technologies is:

Keeps you fully and conveniently informed about subject area X, where X is important to you.

Here’s some background as to why I think that.  So far as I can tell, why one consumes information almost always boils down to one or more of four reasons:

• To be entertained. This is, obviously, the main purpose of entertainment. It is also a major purpose of “frivolous” news — e.g., about sports, celebrities, or cute cats. What’s more, serious news sources and advice-givers are often judged in part based on how pleasant or unpleasant it is to listen to them.
• To aid in decision-making. Service providers such as doctors, lawyers, accountants and (at least in principle) stockbrokers help you make decisions. So do general consultants. So, hopefully, do business intelligence tools. Technology news is, in principle, focused on helping with practical decision-making. So are the only categories of consumer newsletter that ever thrived in the dead-tree subscription era (health and investment). I could list many more examples.
• To be sufficiently well-informed. Reasons one might wish to be well-informed include:
  • To make better practical decisions. One of the biggest fears when making a decision is that there’s something you don’t know about that will make the decision a bad one. You hire experts in large part to keep you out of trouble. You use analytic technology in large part to warn you of trouble. And a huge part of investing is looking for and hopefully ruling reasons for a company and stock to suddenly fall apart. Many other decision processes are similarly guided by fear, especially of risks yet unknown.
  • To make better voting decisions. If one does a strict cost-benefit analysis, based on the value and likelihood of affecting the outcome of an election, it isn’t even worth the trouble to go to the polls, let alone to inform oneself well enough to make a careful decision. People vote out of a laudable desire to do their part in society (conscious version) or because it’s expected of them (unconscious version). But by extension, this analysis means that the cash value of news that’s useful just for voting decisions is very low, unless your engagement with politics goes beyond mere dutiful poll-going.
  • To facilitate social interaction (whether “water-cooler” and other business-related socializing, or purely social) or, similarly, to avoid the embarrassment of not knowing. Incidentally, this can be a reason for watching a popular TV show or keeping up with sports just as it is for reading the “hard” news.
  • To be educated for future benefit, or just because. People like knowing things. Students are obligated to know things, at least until their final exams are over.
• To flatter (or avoid irritating) the speaker (or somebody the speaker represents). Polite listening plays a huge role in family relationships, classroom behavior and, dare I say it, religious observances. I further suspect that it underlies certain consulting engagements for analysts such as myself.

So what kinds of business models suit these purposes?

• Polite listening is an essentially personal form of interaction. As such, it plays little role in most publishing organization’s business models, and I will not consider it further in this post.
• Educational publishing is a special subject that I also won’t deal with right now.
• Entertainment has traditionally been paid for in connection with a specific item or event, e.g. a concert, book, CD, DVD set, movie showing, or just an individual song. There are plenty of subscription examples too, from humor magazines to pornography services to, of course, cable television itself. Finally, ancillary and/or licensed merchandise is an ever increasing source of revenue, from overpriced food and parking at event venues to the huge business in t-shirts and sports team jerseys.
• Staying well-informed mainly for social purposes is what you do by consuming the same news (and perhaps entertainment) everybody else does. The entertainment side of this can be a unique property — probably a television broadcast — monetized in the usual ways. But the news side is increasingly a commodity, due to internet-based competition.
• General political news is a hard-to-profit-from commodity too. This is the source of much recent angst, in part because it raises the possibility that it may be hard to find a good way to fund much-needed investigative reporting. On the other hand, with all the interested and even passionate parties involved, other sorts of political reporting and analysis are likely to thrive in the new-era information ecosystem.
• Quick-hit advice is delivered via quite a few different business models, from professional services to self-help books and seminars. Or at can arrive for free, via friendly chitchat — which can occur via communication media as new as Twitter or as old as the dinner table.*

*And yes, there are definitely some opportunities to aggregate into a critical mass and then monetize electronically-delivered free advice. But that’s a special case of the topic of the next paragraph …

Finally, with all that underbrush cleared away, we arrive at the main points:

• In a large fraction of cases, information purchases and consumers are looking for the most comprehensive and reliable source(s) of information and informed advice on a particular topic area.
• If the two goals are in conflict, comprehensive is the more important criterion.
• If the main goals are met, convenience is a crucial second criterion.
  • Pre-internet, “convenience” commonly equated to physical delivery of newspapers, television news broadcasts, etc.
  • Now, convenience commonly equates to interface and analysis technology, in areas such as search and business intelligence.

Cases where this seems true include:

• Stock quote terminals and the like, which are a multi-billion dollar industry, with almost all the revenue going to convenient, all-in-one box suppliers. Reuters beat Quotron on technology. Bloomberg beat Reuters on both information and technology.
• The success of search engines vs. more structured web portals.
• Earlier, the success of the general Web vs. “walled gardens” such as AOL.
• The success of Wikipedia vs. more carefully managed (but narrower) information sites.
• Pre-Web, the daily newspaper.
• The ascendancy of the Web over the (now suddenly limited-seeming) daily newspaper.
• Pre-Web, the multi-billion dollar industry of newsletters, most of which simply aggregated hard-to-get news.
• The failure of what are now many generations of limited enterprise dashboard products, even as dashboards succeed in contexts where they indeed provide more comprehensive information.

If you believe all that, then it follows reasonably that a top selling proposition for information is keeps you fully and conveniently informed about subject area X, where X is important to you. And that, in turn, leads to the business model comments I put at the top of this post.

a significant fraction of news is something large organizations have a vested interest in releasing

In my opinion, that’s a crucial point. On subjects where primary sources want information to get out, traditional journalists are not needed to relay news. Comment (especially sceptically)? Sure. Filter? Maybe. Story-tell? Yes, but only if news-as-entertainment is your idea of fun.

Basically, the “death of media” concerns should for the most part be restricted to the future of investigative features. When one thinks of major investigative reporting that society would have been poorer without, it’s usually either a feature story or a series of articles that might as well have been a feature. The reason those are threatened is that their huge value to society is not always paired with a huge “fun”/”interest” factor in consuming the stories, and hence traditional attention-based economic models may not work for them.

In essence, most investigative journalism is bundled into larger publications and broadcast enterprises. (Even the TV show 60 Minutes seems to get its viewership more from celebrity interviews than journalistic exposes. At least, that’s a reasonable inference based on what segments they particularly emphasize in their marketing.) This can make good business sense on at least two levels:

• They increase the branding and perception of the whole news package.
• To a first approximation, they’re a subsidized public good. But this helps news organizations maintain a status in society extremely useful in getting them access, employees, and legal protection essential to their overall business models.

The disaggregation of news is undermining both of those business cases. To me, that’s the true part of the Chicken Littleish scares.

Offhand, I can think of only two kinds of investigative journalism that directly pay for themselves. One is sober investigations that have pretty tangible benefits – stock short-sale recommendations, Consumer Reports, and the like. The other is entertaining scandal-mongering, most notably in the area of celebrity gossip. That’s the starting point from which we need to build.

Related links

• Rupert Murdoch claimed that his newspapers will start charging much more for online content within the next 12 months. Mockery ensued.
• Mark Hopkins argued succinctly that newspapers have gone from being oligopolists or monopolists to facing vigorous competition, and that’s the root of their problems.
• Ryan Tate offered a heap of examples of unpaid bloggers doing detailed, local reporting, in a blistering rebuttal to traditional newspapers’ claims to the contrary.
• A few weeks ago, it was AP’s turn to inspire mockery by announcing an intent to rein in free use of content.
• In a discussion set off by a tweet of mine, James Kobelius argued that analysts and journalists have always done substantially the same things.
• I’ve been seeing the word “curation” all over. Here’s an example in a company description (see the bio). More important, here it is in Sawhorse Media’s elevator pitch, which involves helping brand-owing companies do their own curation for the benefit of their own audiences.  Jeff Jarvis seems to be pushing the curation idea hard.  And come to think of it — if this long, annotated link list and its predecessors aren’t “curation,” what is?
• Jeff Jarvis offered his own take on the future of the information ecosystem, focused on the general-news area.
• Douglas McIntyre bemoaned the impending shrinkage of the major business magazines’ editorial staffs, and offered a feature on Bernie Madoff as an example of the kind of reporting it would be a pity to lose. I clicked through and read the whole feature, which I found somewhat interesting, not least because I used to be an investment professional myself. But you know what? I’m not sure the many tens of thousands of dollars he implies that feature cost to write really bought an equivalent value in societal protection against future wrong-doing.
• Eliezer_Yudkowsky argued that online communities suffer if they don’t weed out the jerks, or at least obnoxious behavior. Ken Burnside reports on a humorous extreme, in which argument is allowed only in the form of haiku. However, the Washington Post argued that anonymous jerks have their benefits, apparently by showing just how bigoted and obnoxious people’s thoughts really are.
• MySpace Music doesn’t seem to be producing great financial results — some advanced data warehousing software notwithstanding.
• The Wall Street Journal raised some FUD about regulatory implications of indiscreet tweeting.
• Mark Taylor opined in favor of dynamiting the ivory tower.
• Doc Searls clarified his “micro-accounting” — as opposed to micro-payments — plan.
• Forrester projected large continued growth in online advertising, at the expense of offline ads.
• Andrew Orlowski was too busy being a sexist jerk to say anything useful. (Misogyny is standard practice for Orlowski.)
• The Wikipedia-as-a-news-source issue resurfaced.

• The Attensity Group is being formed by the merger of three companies: Attensity, empolis, and Living-e. Frankly, I’d never heard of either empolis or Living-e until this merger. (In case you ever have to resort to the Wayback Machine, embolis’ URL was http://www.empolis.com/home.html and Living-e’s was http://www.living-e.com/us/index.php)
• Existing investors (employees aside) have largely been bought out. Most of the stock is owned by Aeris, an investment vehicle for SAP co-founder Klaus Tschira. Living-e already was a Tschira investment.
• Inxight managers have been brought in to run the whole thing. Specifically, Ian Bonner will be CEO, and Ian Hersey will be EVP of Products and Technology.
• The former CEOs of Attensity and empolis will run the Americas and EMEA regions, under the Attensity and empolis names respectively, apparently with their prior sales organizations more or less intact.
• A former CEO of Living-e will be their boss, but also run “Special Projects”, which adds up to a very odd title indeed: “Senior Vice President of Operations and Strategic Projects, Attensity Group”
• The former CTOs of Attensity and empolis are CTOs of system software (”Natural Language Processing”) and application software respectively. This gets Attensity’s total CTO count up to 3, a level I’ve previously seen only at Teradata. I haven’t talked with David Bean yet, but his colleagues insist that he’s excited about his new role.
• This whole deal has been underway since at least late last year. For example, Ian Bonner has been involved for that long. empolis and Living-e announced the pooling of their sales forces back in February.
• Technically, the merger isn’t complete, as Living-e is a public company and all 100% of its shares haven’t been acquired yet. (But they will be Real Soon Now.)
• Attensity, of course, was a venture-backed private company, with tired investors. empolis was owned by Bertelsmann, and was itself a roll-up of several smaller text analytics companies.

I was told on the phone empolis was doing something like €30-40 million. Attensity and Living-e were under $10 million each. That surprises me a bit, as I thought Attensity was in that range on commercial business alone, and was doing more than $10 million counting its government accounts.

It turns out that if I had been paying attention to the news filters I could have seen this coming. Specifically, a March 16, 2009 story said:

German media giant Bertelsmann has confirmed the sale of its software development unit empolis to data management holding Attensity empolis Europe.

Attensity empolis Europe is based in Switzerland and part of the holding company founded by former IBM manager Ian Bonner.

A Bertelsmann spokesperson told Handelsblatt that empolis, which develops software for semantic analysis, did not fit in strategically anymore. empolis was part of Bertelsmann subsidiary Arvato employing 200 people with revenues of around €30m.

Attensity’s acquisition of empolis adds to the recent takeover of Living-e which was acquired in December 2008 for a symbolic price of one euro after its former majority shareholder Klaus Tschira, one of the SAP founders, was not willing in invest more money.

Tschira, however, is still intent on investing in Attensity empolis which was part of the agreement on Living-e. His portfolio includes holdings in 26 companies with combined revenues of €200m.

I don’t immediately know how to reconcile the apparent contradictions between that and the information above.

I plan to post with technology/business thoughts when I have a chance.

The implications for Twitter’s security are not good. The best way to disable or remove this malware is, as I write this, not yet clear, but I hope to get clarity and update the post linked above accordingly.