Last week, two of the senior ArnoldIT professionals delivered a one hour lecture to a select group of executives. The topic was related to our work in locating high-value information using open source content sources.
The thought that struck me was the way the deal illuminated a comment made by an investment banker attending out lecture last week. The former consultant told me:
We focus on innovation. We are looking in high tech sectors.
The statement is a bit of misdirection. The investment firm wants to find companies, inject cash, and then do a deal like the WhatsApp anomaly. The user of the word “innovation” is an audible pause. Like the person who uses “so” or “um” in conversation, the individual talking about innovation is not interested in innovation.
Y Worlds – a community in progress organized about ways to better understand, better communicate, and better organize every aspect of our complex lives. This is NOT a tech on tech project. This is totally focused on the humans, on eliciting from each human in the network real-time interaction, and on educating humans one interaction at a time. It is intended to be a change agent system that can be applied one instance at a time, or across multiple instances. It does what Wikipedia, Google, and all other data management systems cannot do — makes sense.
NOTE: 32 offerings. All of the below times are in minutes and seconds.
I read a long report and then a handful of spin off reports about HP and Autonomy, mid February 2014 version. The Financial Times’s story is a for fee job. You can get a feel for the information in “HP Executives Knew of Autonomy’s Hardware Sales Losses: Report.” There are clever discussions of this allegedly “new information” in a number of blogs. What is interesting is an allegedly accurate chunk of information in “HP Explores Settlement of Autonomy Shareholder Lawsuit.” My head is spinning. HP buys something. Changes the person on watch when the deal was worked out. HP gets a new boss and makes changes to its board of directors. HP then accuses everyone except itself for buying Autonomy for a lot of money. HP then whips up the regulators, agitates accounting firms, and pokes Michael Lynch with a cattle prod.
As this activity was in the microwave, it appears that HP knew how the hardware/software deals were handled. If the reports are accurate, Dell hardware was more desirable than HP’s hardware.
Automating repetitive processes, including those you use to seek, filter, tag, store, and retrieve information, can be a useful infotention practice. I've Scooped IFTTT before. This blog post is by social media management service Buffer, so the examples are Buffer-centric, but any of these automation tools can be applied to a variety of platforms, services, and practices.
One of the most fun and useful things I’ve been doing lately is automating small processes I do all the time. It took me a while to work up the courage to dive into automation, as it always seemed like a really difficult, technical thing to do, which should be left to programmers.
Luckily, there are lots of tools being created lately to make automation much easier for those of us without a solid understanding of how our computers really work.
Sometimes repetition is good for us – for instance, when it comes to developing new skills. But rote tasks don’t serve much purpose. Every time I noticed myself doing tasks over and over now, I try to find a way to automate it the same way we create social media shortcuts at Buffer. And when I do, it feels amazing to watch my computer doing stuff for me, or to see files and text show up in the right places at the right times, as if by magic.
I bet if you really pay attention, you’ll pick up a few small tasks you do all the time. It might be copying and pasting links to previous blog posts you’ve written (I have an example for how to automate that below), adding up specific numbers, visiting the same websites every day or another element of your daily routine. Maybe some of these tools can help.
I was particularly pleased to see this study appear in the top-tier journal, Nature. (Thanks to my colleague Sarah Vieweg for flagging). Earlier studies have shown that “human communications are both temporally & spatially localized following the onset of emergencies, indicating that social propagation is a primary means to propagate situational awareness.” In this new study, the authors analyze crisis events using country-wide mobile phone data. To this end, they also analyze the communication patterns of mobile phone users outside the affected area. So the question driving this study is this: how do the communication patterns of non-affected mobile phone users differ from those affected? Why ask this question? Understanding the communication patterns of mobile phone users outside the affected areas sheds light on how situational awareness spreads during disasters.
GEDB, the Global Education Database, is a great and extremely useful curated collection of the best apps, web tools, gadgets and moocs now available online for educational purposes.
Anyone can register to GEDB and submit any valuable resource or tool by filling out the dedicated form.
Submissions are reviewed for factual accuracy and integrity and approved and published within 24 hours. Readers and contributors can in turn rate the review and share it online.
This is a great educational resource, simple to consult and well organized. A treasure trove of qualified resources for anyone wanting to teach and learn with new technologies.
I did a series of reports about open source search. Some of these were published under mysterious circumstances by that leader of the azure chip consultants, IDC. You can see the $3,500 per report offers on the IDC site. Hey, I am not getting the money, but that’s what some of today’s go go executives do. The list of [misappropriated] titles appears below my signature.
Elasticsearch, a system that is based on Lucene, evolved after the still-in-use Compass system. What seems to have happened in the last six months is one of those singularities that Googlers seek.
In January 2014, GigaOM, a “real news” outfit reported that Elasticsearch had moved from free and open source to a commercial model. You can find that report in “6 million Downloads Later, Elasticsearch Launches a Commercial Product.” The write up equates lots of downloads with commercial success. Well, I am not sure that I accept that. I do know that Elasticsearch landed an additional $24 million in series B funding if Silicon Angle’s information is correct. Elasticsearch, armed with more money than the now aging and repositioning Lucid Works (originally Lucid Imagination) has. (An interview with one of the founders of Lucid Imagination, the precursor of Lucid Works is at http://bit.ly/1gvddt5. Mr. Krellenstein left Lucid Imagination abruptly shortly after this interview appeared.)
I noted that in February 2014, InfoWorld, owned by the publisher of the $3,500 report about Elasticsearch, called the company “ultra hip.” I don’t see many search companies—proprietary or open source—called “hip.” “Ultra Hip Elasticsearch Hits Commercial Release.” The write up asserts (although I wonder who provided the content):
