Curated for content, computing, and digital experience professionals

Category: Computing & data (Page 79 of 80)

Computing and data is a broad category. Our coverage of computing is largely limited to software, and we are mostly focused on unstructured data, semi-structured data, or mixed data that includes structured data.

Topics include computing platforms, analytics, data science, data modeling, database technologies, machine learning / AI, Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, augmented reality, bots, programming languages, natural language processing applications such as machine translation, and knowledge graphs.

Related categories: Semantic technologies, Web technologies & information standards, and Internet and platforms.

The Attention Economy

Lot’s of talk about ‘attention’ here at ETech. Thinking of attention in terms of economics is fascinating and thought provoking, but I have not quite got the essence of the excitement – just saw Tim Bray who also said he was not sure he got it, and everyone at my lunch table squirmed and then said they didn’t get it either.

The last thing I want is someone managing or making money or even knowing about my attention allocation. I don’t mind some – I am not averse to sharing certain preferences and behavior – but it is mine to share or not, and mine to monetize or not. As a consumer, what is the return? I get more personalized ads? I get stats on my own behavior? I get more people and advertisers paying attention to me? I definitely am not yet interested in making it easier for others to try to influence me based on some attempt at interpreting my activity/interest – is this a matter of not just being good enough at it yet? Maybe.

Will Attention Trust make a difference? I don’t know.

I understand that some people have more intense desires to communicate everything they think and do and will buy into attention for that, but surely that is an edge group…?

Attention and its scarcity and therefore value are important to pay attention to when deveoping products or businesses – but it is not all in the user’s interest.

UPDATE:
Listened to Michael Goldhaber’s talk on the economy today at ETech. He’s the one who everyone quotes. Interesting talk, but I still don’t get it. I suppose the desire for attention might be as rational as the desire for money (although I hope not – it doesn’t seem as practical, you can’t simply bank attention over time without its value diminishing). Trading in “attention bonds” as Seth Goldstein wants, is a bit scary in that it depends on people who don’t think they get enough attention!? I thought Seth’s talk was the most enlightening on the topic.

UPDATE 2:
And this will be it for the updates. See Jon Udell’s and Doc Searls’ comments on this.

UPDATE 3:
Well, it is now 2018, and does this dated or what!

Sun Announces Aquisition of Storage Technology Corporation

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW) and Storage Technology Corporation (NYSE: STK) announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Sun will acquire StorageTek. The combination will create a new global leader in comprehensive network computing and data management which collectively had total annual revenues of more than $13 billion in the past four quarters. The aquisition will deliver a systems approach to Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) to help customers better manage their growing privacy, security, compliance and policy requirements. Under the terms of the agreement approved by both boards of directors, StorageTek stockholders will receive $37 per share in cash for each StorageTek share for an aggregate value of approximately $4.1 billion, including the assumption of employee stock options. The completion of the proposed transaction is expected to occur in late summer/early fall 2005. http://www.sun.com, http://www.storagetek.com

Longhorn adoption, file systems & content technology

Dan Farber raises the issue of Longhorn adoption and quotes a Jupiter analyst who claims the challenge is that XP is “good enough”. There is actually a more fundamental reason the question of adoption is interesting. What is that and what does it have to do with content technology?

I’ll start the answer with a little history. In 1994 at our first Documation conference, I moderated a debate between Tony Williams, Chief Architect of COM at Microsoft, and Larry Tesler, Chief Scientist at Apple. The Microsoft COM and OFS/Cairo and Apple OpenDoc efforts both recognized the need for operating systems to provide more support for the richness of unstructured information than is possible with the primitive file systems we had then.

Before the debate I preferred the OpenDoc approach because it seemed more consistent with my view that new operating systems needed to be able to manage arbitrary information objects and structures that could be described with a markup language (like SGML at the time). However, Tony convinced me that OpenDoc was too radical a change for both users and developers at the time. Tony agreed with the ultimate need to make such a radical change to file systems to support the growing need for applications to manage more complex content, but he said that Microsoft had decided the world was not ready for such a shock to the system yet, and defended their strategy as the more realistic.

Eleven years later and we are still stuck with the same old-fashioned file system in spite of the fact that every modern business application needs to understand and process multiple types of information inside files. This means that database platforms and applications need to do a lot more work than they should to work with content. I am no expert on Longhorn, but the file system that will be part of it (although maybe not initially), WinFS, is supposed to go a long way towards fixing this problem. Is the world ready for it yet? I hope so, but it will still be a big change, and Tony’s concerns of 1994 are still relevant.

Gilbane Report Team Expands with Laplante as VP Consulting Services & Zoellick as Senior Analyst

5/18/04

Industry Veterans on Board to Manage Growth of Content Technology Works™ Program and Industry Consulting Services

Contact:
Mary Laplante
mary@gilbane.com
(630) 820.3007

Cambridge , MA , May 18, 2004. Bluebill Advisors, Inc. and the Gilbane Report announced the appointment of two highly respected industry veterans to meet the rapidly growing demand for the company’s consulting services. Mary Laplante has joined the company as Vice President, Consulting Services, and will be responsible for the management and operations of the Content Technology Works Program, Gilbane Report webinars, white papers, and consulting projects. Mary is well known throughout the content technology industry from her extensive industry sales, marketing, and management experience, from her work as an analyst, writer, and consultant, and from her role as Founding Executive Director of OASIS (www.oasis-open.org/). Mary’s experience and exceptional management and organizational skills will help grow the Gilbane Report CTW program and consulting activities to the next level. Mary will also chair the CTW Track at the Gilbane Conference on Content Management Technologies Conference in Boston.

Bill Zoellick has also joined the Gilbane Report as Senior Analyst, and will be devoting his considerable analytical and writing skills to the Gilbane CTW and White Paper programs. Bill is a highly regarded author whose books include CyberRegs: A Business Guide to Web Property, Privacy, and Patents, and Web Engagement: Connecting to Customers in e-Business, both from Addison-Wesley. Bill’s insightful and penetrating analysis has informed his many roles as a manager, researcher, developer and author in the content and information management industry.

“It is great to be working with Mary and Bill again,” said Frank Gilbane, CEO of Bluebill Advisors, “Bill, Mary, and Adina Levin worked with me as analysts at CAP Ventures in the mid-nineties where they developed a prodigious amount of sought-after analysis for the industry, including the very first research report on Content Management in 1997. Their experience and knowledge will be a great resource for all our customers.” Sebastian Holst, founder of the Gilbane CTW program, will continue to be a valuable contributor to the Gilbane Report.

About Bluebill Advisors, The Gilbane Report 
Bluebill Advisors, Inc. serves the content management community with publications, conferences and consulting services. The Gilbane Report (www.gilbane.com) administers the Content Technology Works™ program disseminating best practices with partners Software AG (TECdax:SOW), Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ:SUNW), Artesia Technologies, Atomz, Context Media, Convera (NASDAQ:CNVR), INSCI (OTCBB:INSS), Trados, Vasont, Venetica, and Vignette (NASDAQ:VIGN).

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Snapbridge Announces General Availability of Snapbridge XStudio 2.5

Snapbridge Software announced Snapbridge XStudio 2.5, a drag-and-drop development environment for building information processing solutions based on XML technologies. The improved development tool allows drag and drop development to choreograph the integration and publication of data and content with no coding or data schema required. In addition to availability on a stand-alone basis, XStudio is bundled with each version of FDX Information Server to provide developers with tools to build, test, debug, and deploy information integration solutions built with XStudio 2.5 for deployment to a full production environment. Snapbridge FDX Information Server is available in 3 editions, scaled appropriately to meet organizational needs. Both XStudio 2.5 and FDX Information Server are based on Snapbridge FDX, a technology for federating large amounts of heterogeneous kinds of data in real-time, including data from relational databases, flat files, mainframe data, Web services, digital images from content repositories, streaming feeds, etc., to create composite objects that can be viewed, or updated as part of a transaction. XStudio 2.5 retail price is $199 USD per seat and can be downloaded at www.snapbridge.com

Mondosoft Enhances BehaviorTracking

Mondosoft announced enhancements to its third generation search activity and visitor behavior reporting software, BehaviorTracking. BehaviorTracking 5.1 offers insight into web site visitors’ behavior and identifies new trends on the web site, and new content demands. It gives a picture of the site performance, success in meeting users’ expectations as well as a number of success metrics. The information is available online and sent directly with individual content to the inboxes of management, marketing, and web editors. BehaviorTracking 5.1 was built using .NET technology and has been integrated and tested to support Microsoft’s Enterprise server product suite. Along with the BehaviorTracking enhancements, Mondosoft offers an InformationManager tool kit that use search best practice metrics, to apply findings from the search and visitor behavior data for continual site tuning and optimization. www.mondosoft.com

InQuira Embeds Analytics in Inquira 6

InQuira, Inc. announces the availability of Web analytics embedded as part of its InQuira 6 customer search and navigation application. InQuira 6 enables Web site visitors to ask a question in natural language and then interprets the real intent of their query, automatically responding with the answer and guiding the user to additional related information and opportunities to buy products and services. InQuira 6 utilizes content diagnostics to measure the quality of each users’ Web experience, enabling businesses to identify content gaps and add new content to improve the Web site. InQuira 6 contains a new analytics architecture and an extensive set of new reports. The architecture features an OLAP engine, a normalized reporting database, a star-schema analytics database, and a built-in business intelligence tool. The reports provide enhanced information, ranging from aggregated management information to drilldown into individual users, questions and sessions. www.inquira.com

eXcelon Unveils Portal Server 3.0

eXcelon Corporation introduced eXcelon Portal Server 3.0. Portal Server 3.0 includes a new integrated XML development environment, support for the latest XML standards, and enhanced scalability and performance. Portal Server 3.0 includes new tools and capabilities that make it easier for companies to aggregate data and content from any source into a common XML-based business information model. Stylus Studio provides a visual debugging platform for XSLT, greatly reducing the time to deploy new client or server applications that include both XSLT and user-defined Java extension functions. Stylus Studio also includes an XML Editor to load and manipulate large XML files, a DTD and XML Schema editor, as well as a visual XML-to-XML mapping facility for easily defining XSLT transformations between XML documents with sup-port for DTD and XML Schemas. Portal Server aggregates data from as many as 30 disparate sources, such as structured, semi-structured and unstructured data, as well as legacy data for-mats such as COBOL files and mainframe data, and makes it available to new e-business appli-cations. Portal Server converts the data from the sources and manages it as XML so developers can build applications using standards-based XML languages. The beta version of eXcelon’s Portal Server 3.0 is available now as part of eXcelon’s official open beta test (www.exceloncorp.com/beta/b2bps.html). Portal Server 3.0 will be available on the Windows NT, Windows 2000, Solaris 7 and Solaris 8 platforms. Portal Server 3.0 is expected to be gener-ally available within 45 days. eXcelon Stylus Studio is expected to be available as a stand-alone product in the second quarter of 2001. A beta version is available for download at www.exceloncorp.com/beta/studio.html. Pricing will be announced closer to availability.

 

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