Friday, January 20, 2006

Business Intelligence software looks to future

Business Intelligence software looks to future

Applications that actually answer questions rather than just present mounds of data is the key driver of a market set to grow 10 percent in 2006

Monday, January 16, 2006

Michael Kahn
SAN FRANCISCO: When Hewlett-Packard Co. was looking for ways to make money from its sharper image display technology, the company relied on a piece of smart software to help it find the most profitable answer.
The application quickly sifted through opportunities, in much the same way a venture capitalist might do, and calculated high margins in large-screen televisions made that the market to target, HP executive Ralph Morales said.
The program from a company called SmartOrg marks a growing trend in the estimated $7 billion business intelligence (BI) software market for applications that can predict the financial impact of future decisions. "You have all these great plans and you can only do a couple," Morales said. "You need something that is fast and quick to sort through the potentials."
Traditionally, large companies have used software from leading vendors such as Business Objects, Cognos Inc., Hyperion Solutions Corp. to mine mountains of information stored in databases and use the data to detect marketing trends and patterns.
But analysts say applications that actually answer questions rather than just present mounds of data is the key driver of a market set to grow 10 percent in 2006 or about twice the rate of the business software industry in general.
"Increasingly you are seeing applications being developed that will result in some sort of action," said Brendan Barnacle, an analyst at Pacific Crest Equities. "It is a relatively small part now, but it is clearly where the future is. That is the next stage of business intelligence."
Analysts also say as companies realize business intelligence software can churn out much more than just data, demand for the tools will grow. This will draw more attention to the market and could fuel further consolidation.
Barnacle said BI's major names may look to strengthen their positions by acquiring smaller vendors, while the biggest players like Oracle Corp. and IBM search for targets to help them compete in a specialized area. Business Objects Chief Executive John Schwarz, whose company has been the target of Oracle takeover rumors, said many big companies do not effectively exploit business intelligence tools.
This combine with the fact that very few small-or medium- sized companies make use of business intelligence software, provides plenty of opportunity.
"There is almost no penetration of business intelligence," Schwarz said of the concentrated use of such software among big companies. "As you look at the market opportunity it is a huge one going forward." Schwarz said tools that predict business trends and answer specific questions about the future represent a great area of interest but do not yet generate a large amount of revenue.
Instead, these types of applications, which are often narrow in focus, can often prove a great showcase for the technology to convince companies of the importance of business intelligence software.
"The predictive analysis is the sexy wedge of the business intelligence market, which is very useful to sell the value of business tools to the chief executive," Schwarz told Reuters.
Yet John Hagerty, who tracks BI software makers for AMR Research, sees users beginning to demand tools to help divine the future as part of an insatiable thirst for more information on their businesses.
As in the case of HP, he said, companies increasingly want more than just the capability to ask the right questions, the want technology that can do it for them.
"You are seeing this whole awakening in companies to make present decisions," Hagerty said. The mantra for many users is becoming: "'Tell me where I want to go and how to get there.'"
© Reuters

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Hackers Attack U.K. Student's Web Site

Hackers Attack U.K. Student's Web Site
Jan 18, 5:57 PM (ET)

LONDON (AP) - A Web site that earned an enterprising British student $1 million suffered a crippling attack by ransom-seeking hackers.
Alex Tew, 21, said Wednesday that his Million Dollar Homepage was targeted after he publicized how it had helped him raise money for his university studies.
Tew had sold 10,000 small squares of advertising space on the Web site for $100 each, achieving his target in four months. His initiative spawned several copycat sites.
But Tew said that on Jan. 7, he received a threat from an organization calling itself "The Dark Group," demanding that he pay them $50,000 within 72 hours or face having his site taken down.
"It was written in poor English, but the hackers asked for $50,000, saying that it was just 5 percent of what I had made," Tew said. "I did not reply to the e-mail. I had no intention of paying."
Tew ignored the threat. Hackers then initiated a so-called distributed denial of service, in which attackers take command of third-party computers, through a virus or other security vulnerability, and instruct them to send junk data to the target site, overwhelming servers and causing the site to crash or perform poorly.
Tew said the site now works normally.
Tew, from Wiltshire, a county in southern England, said he informed the FBI because his site is hosted in the United States.
FBI spokesman Paul Bresson said the agency was investigating.
Such extortion cases targeting Web sites are occurring with greater frequency.

IPWireless launches 3G mobile TV technology

IPWireless launches 3G mobile TV technology
Rupert Goodwins
ZDNet UKJanuary 18, 2006, 17:55 GMT

With questions of bandwidth, cost and spectrum availability, TV on mobiles raises a lot of issues. IPWireless says 3G standards are the answer

Another contender for mobile phone TV was unveiled in London on Wednesday, when IPWireless demonstrated its TDtv system transmitting multiple channels over the air from a cellular base station.
Based on MBMS, the Multimedia Broadcast and Multicast Standard, TDtv is designed to work alongside the current 3G WCDMA standard.
Using part of the 3G spectrum put aside for data transmission, IPWireless says that it is relatively easy to adapt existing base stations and other network infrastructure to integrate TV broadcast services with existing voice, data and video. This compares with O2's trial of a mobile TV service, which used entirely independent spectrum in the UHF TV band, and BT's DAB-based experiment in the digital radio band.
By the end of 2007, IPWireless claims, the cost of adding TDtv to a handset will be around $10. "We're working on an integrated solution with a major chip manufacturer," Chris Gilbert, chief executive of IP Wireless, told journalists in London on Wednesday. "Much of the technology exists already, we're using a lot of the sophistication we've developed for the uplink, where a base station has to work hard to pick up a weak signal from a mobile, and using it on the downlink."
The company says that because all the standards involved are part of the 3GPP global standards project, the technology will work worldwide and thus be attractive to handset manufacturers and international operators who want to encourage roaming.
"We'll be trialling with Sprint in the US, IPmobile in Asia Pacific and four international operators in Europe in the first half of 2006," said Gilbert.
"We estimate that upgrading the 3G networks will cost around €10,000 [£7,000] per base station, less than HSDPA. If operators offer TV over their existing 3G service first, they can spot what channels are popular where and then upgrade by postcode as necessary. Success-driven capital expenditure is what operators want to talk about at the moment."
In the UK, there is 20 MHz of data spectrum allocated in 5MHz slots to four of the five 3G operators — only Vodafone lacks this sub-band. IPWireless says that 5MHz is sufficient for more than fifty TV channels suitable for mobile phone sized screens, fifteen channels designed for PDA/handheld video devices, or a mixture thereof.
"TDtv can support any IP datacasts", said Gilbert, "including audio and clipcasting. Operators are free to develop their own mix."
"TDtv is a very good solution for multichannel offerings", said Alastair Brydon of consultancy Sound Partners, who presented at the launch. "You can broadcast your most popular channels saving bandwidth on your WCDMA network, while using that network to offer a wide selection of minority interest content. Users need not even be aware which system is carrying their channel, and operators can reallocate content according to popularity or local demand."
More bandwidth will be available shortly, said Gilbert. "There's another three lots of 5MHz yet to be auctioned at 2.010 to 2.025 GHz. In Japan, that's already been allocated with 5MHz dedicated to MBMS. And in the next two to three years, the UMTS extension bands will become available with hundreds of extra megahertz".

Online's top 25 search engines

Online's top 25 search engines

Jack Schofield and Bobbie JohnsonThursday February 24, 2005
The Guardian

Google
Google, founded in 1998 by two Stanford University graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, quickly became the web's leading search engine because it was easy to use and delivered high-quality results.
Rather than relying on users to frame intelligent searches to find what they want, Google's page-rank system massages the results to push the best sites to the top. Quality is decided by the number of other good sites that link to the same content.
Now Google also provides other options on its front page to search for images, news stories, Usenet postings (under Groups), shopping sites (under Froogle) and, in the US, for local companies. PC users can also install a toolbar that adds Google to their browser, and download desktop search software that enables Google to search their hard drive.
There are further options, not on the front page, to search mail order catalogues, and computer-related topics (Apple Macintosh, BSD Unix, Linux, Microsoft), US universities and scholarly publications.
Google is now expanding beyond search and also offers email (Gmail), a blogging service (Blogger), social networking (Orkut), and photo album software (Picasa). Most are useful, but in general, are not integrated to work together.
Yahoo
Yahoo started 11 years ago as a simple directory of websites compiled by two Stanford University graduate students, David Filo and Jerry Yang. It soon became the most prominent site on the web, and expanded rapidly into a portal.
It now offers email, instant messaging, a groups system (not related to Usenet), auctions, games, online stores, photo albums, home pages on the web (through GeoCities), and too many other features to mention. Many of these have become increasingly hard to find. The hierarchical directory that used to make up the front page has disappeared, and been replaced by a Google-like search box.
Yahoo's options are: Web, Images, Video, Directory, Local, News, and Products. Yahoo used to get its web search results from Google but it has taken over a number of search engines, including AltaVista, and now supplies its own.
If you run a web search on Yahoo, the results look almost identical to Google, and many of the top sites are the same. Yahoo's advantage, as a portal, is that millions of users go there for reasons that have nothing to do with search, but if they need to look something up, they may as well use Yahoo rather than go to Google.
MSN Search
MSN, the Microsoft Network, was launched in 1995 as a rival to AOL. It added Hotmail, instant messaging, shopping and other services as it grew into a portal, and in July 2000, it became the leading web destination, with more than 200m visitors a month. Two years ago, Microsoft decided that MSN's search should be powered by Microsoft technology, and this was finally released in 21 countries in 10 languages on February 1.
Microsoft's offerings are: Web, News, Images, Desktop, and Encarta. It also has a Near Me button for local searches. The results pages look like Google's but adverts are more prominent. As with Google and Yahoo, the toolbar and desktop search software must be downloaded separately.
Unadjusted searches at MSN are rarely better than Google and sometimes much worse. Most of its usage is therefore most likely to come from people who are on the MSN site for other reasons, or are searching from Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, where it is the default.
MSN Search does have a drop-down tool, Search Builder, which includes sliders that let you adjust the settings for sites that are more popular or have been updated recently. However, these are so cumbersome to use, it seems few will bother.
Golden oldies
Ask Jeeves (http://www.ask.com/) is one of the biggest engines outside the top table, and claims to be most people's "second favourite engine". The original concept of using natural language ("where can I find bike shops in Glasgow?") still holds true, although it also caters for keyword searching. The hard work is done by the Teoma engine (http://www.teoma.com/), which Jeeves acquired in 2000. Both give clean results, including image and related search options, and Jeeves also offers MyJeeves, which remembers your searches and lets you save important ones.
Other long-standing search names are still going, though most have been bought out by larger rivals or exist in radically different forms. Pioneer AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com/) was bought out by a series of small firms until it was hoovered up by Yahoo, and it now uses Yahoo results, though it still boasts one of the web's best translators, BabelFish ( babelfish.altavista.com). Other engines including Inktomi have also been consumed by the Yahoo brand.
One of the web's earliest search successes, Lycos (http://www.lycos.com/), is still around, though it, too, has changed hands many times. It now works in tandem with Hotbot (http://www.hotbot.com/), a metasearch site that pulls results from across several engines to produce aggregated - and theoretically better - results.
Dogpile (http://www.dogpile.com/) is probably the best-known metasearch engine, and draws results from Jeeves, Google, Yahoo and others. It pulls answers from these and removes duplicates, but sometimes misses some of the more idiosyncratic results. It also searches across images, audio, video and news. If you find the results aren't quite your cup of tea, you could turn to MetaCrawler (http://www.metacrawler.com/), which is also owned by Dogpile's parent company, Infospace. Metacrawler was launched in 1994, so it has a long track record, and it produces filtered results from a familiar range of sources.
Clustering
Several of the lower league search engines use a technique known as clustering to help users filter out the best results. This intelligently divides a morass of answers into categories, to help users weed out unwanted pages - particularly useful if you get thousands of results on your keywords.
Clusty (http://www.clusty.com/) is still in beta-testing mode, but combines Google-like search functions with clustering options. A search for "Guardian Online", for example, pro duced clusters including newspapers, politics, journalism, entertainment, books and angels. You can build categories based on either topic, source or URL, and the news and image searches seem fairly accurate, even if they sometimes return fewer results than you might need.
Australian-based Mooter (http://www.mooter.com/) has a more visual approach, presenting clusters as a spider diagram, and shows a more traditional list when you click on your chosen category - but by the time you get to the results, they seem much the same as other engines.
Kartoo http://www.kartoo.com/) takes the visual option further by drawing Flash "maps" of search results. While visually interesting, it can be cumbersome and seems to throw up a lot of commercial results.
Regular and real time
Other sites have chosen different ways to change Google's search paradigm. Some have opted for more regular - or even real-time - searching, taking results from the web as they happen rather than relying on an irregularly updated library of results.
Daypop (http://www.daypop.com/) trawls news sites and weblogs at least once a day, producing good results, while Technorati.com (http://www.technorati.com/) applies itself purely to weblogs but picks up new pages within minutes of them being published. The basic search is adequate, though it sometimes suffers from time outs. The recently launched "tags" function incorporates blog categories, social bookmarking site del.icio.us and photo-sharing service Flickr to create ad-hoc keyword homepages.
Local searches
Some search firms focus on geographical niches, favouring local results to offer what could be more appropriate answers. Several target the British market, including UKWizz (http://www.ukwizz.com/), which looks quite basic and struggles to compete with Google's local search (http://www.google.co.uk/).
Newsnow (http://www.newsnow.co.uk/), a British-based news searcher, sifts through headlines on news stories and categorises them by age. It is very good for basic searches ("Beckham", for example) but you have to pay to search for multiword phrases or inside the full text of an article.
Exalead, which is still in beta, ( http://beta.exalead.com/ ) is a well-designed attempt to provide as many search options as possible, including geographically based ones. It also includes audio and video searching, limited clustering and the ability to search for different document types - all without cluttering the interface.
Honourable mentions
Blinkx (http://www.blinkx.com/) drops keyword search in favour of clever artifical intelligence to find what you're looking for. The interface is clunky, but it draws results from the web, your desktop and other sources.
Icerocket is quite similar to the big engines, but provides a screenshot of the page the result comes from, and searches both blogs and photographs within blogs - though that seems limited.
Singing Fish (http://www.singingfish.com/) focuses on audio and video search. It is not perfect and is unlikely to give you huge numbers of results (just 10 for "Eminem Mosh", for example) but it is customisable and has a parental filter.
Websbiggest (http://www.websbiggest.com/) ranks pages by the amount of traffic they get, while Looksmart (http://www.looksmart.com/), a survivor of the early days, focuses on being a portal, offering little to the search melee.
Amazon-owned A9 (http://www.a9.com/) organises and recalls searches easily (handy if you can't remember how you found that website last Saturday), but the basic results are provided by Google. It links up with Amazon.com and the Internet Movie Database, making it useful for searching across books and movies.