by Dan Nicollet - November 28, 2011
The Open Source movement is moving into government data. Governments are finding a new source of untapped economic stimulus with the mountains of data they collect. The data is collected for the ultimate good of the public but rarely shared because information access was too people intensive and expensive up until recently. Things have changed.
ETALAB (France), data.gov.uk (UK), data.dc.gov (Washington, DC, US), whitehouse.gov/open (US), and countless other local and national governments have open their data coffers. In the case of DC for instance, the cost of publishing the data was $50K for the city. The DC government expected it to spur the creation of a few new ventures, and a bit of private investments. Instead, 50 startups were born and $3M invested. There is a world of open data coming to the private software industry.
Open Government data is also going to be Big Data. The size of data collected is by definition larger larger than traditional “enterprise data” for instance (especially at the national level). The tools being developed for big data will solve some of the issues with access and real time analytics that exit with government data. Exorbyte MatchMaker is one of these tools. That’s why government agencies have already chosen MatchMaker for their search and data access challenges (2 national European census agencies, German Finance Ministry, and more).
Are you ready for open government data? Any ideas what would make sense to build with this data?
Tags: big data, data, economic stimulus, egovernment, etalab, governement, open data, open source, software
Posted in Business, Government, Software, databases | No Comments »
by Dan Nicollet -
Every economic cycle comes with its host of enterprise software trends. Big Data hs become a recognized phenomenon in 2011. In May 2011 McKinsey released the “Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity” report. It started with: ”The amount of data in our world has been exploding and analyzing large data sets—so-called big data—will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus”.
IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, SalesForce.com, and others are all aiming their development efforts at Big Data (see vldb.org). The amount of data produced, collected and stored by online activities to which companies, their customers, their partners, and their sales channels participate has grown enormously. Tools are being developed that allow affordable long-term storage. New columnar in-memory database formats have emerged that enable near-real-time analytics. Fast growing stratups and open source solutions have also converged with their own new NoSQL formats (InfiniDB, LucidDB, InfoBright, Hadoop, NoSQL, etc.) MatchMaker, Exoryte’s Universal Search platform, is the perfect answer to search within Big Data.
The challenges of search within big data are:
- Searching Big Data though SQL queries is simply too slow and inflexible – fuzzy or advanced search requires a search indexer layer or something different than traditional on-disk relational DB formats.
- Indexing large databases can be long, disruptive to normal database operation and require complex hardware infrastructures.
- Running complex queries and fuzzy logic requires so much calculation and lookups that new search strategies are required.
Exorbyte MatchMaker is made to address these challenges and our professional services team has proven repeatedly tht they can be addressed: Allianz (the world’s 12th-largest financial services group), German Finance Ministry, and more blue chip and government organizations tun o us each year for that very expertise.
What do you think of Big Data?
Tags: big data, database, enterprise, erp, hadoop, ibm, oracle, salesforce, salesforce.com, sap, search, search engine, search engines, software
Posted in Exorbyte, Government, Insurance, Search, Software, Technology, databases | 1 Comment »
by Dan Nicollet - October 12, 2011
Ebay is about to launch the new X.Commerce Platform. Finally something eBay does for developers. We can’t wait to see what this will do to the independent online retail space. All platform vendors are waiting to hear the announcements and product descriptions this week.
The potential is huge with Magento already in the lead of independent ecommerce platforms. The power of eBay’s marketing engine and PayPal’s payment platform should ensue some interesting contender for Yahoo! Store and other integrated platforms (Volusion, Amazon, etc.) . Watch the X.Commerce Innovate Conference this week for the latest!
x.commerce mission statement
Tags: ebay, ecommerce platform, magento, Merchandising, merchants, online retail, online store, online stores, paypal, x.commerce, xcommerce
Posted in eCommerce | No Comments »
by Dan Nicollet - October 8, 2011
He created the C language and Unix. Everything that has led Exorbyte to existence since has a little of Dennis in its DNA, including MatchMaker. Thank you Dennis from the Exorbyte Team!
Dennis Ritchie created C and Unix
Tags: c, Dennis Ritchie, unix
Posted in Software, Technology | No Comments »
by Dan Nicollet - October 5, 2011
Just ran into this post from Matt Cutts (a bit of an Internet star and head of the webspam team at Google) which says about Google.com search:
“10% of our queries are misspelled”. We often see this going up in te 20-30% range on online shops.
So if anyone out there still doubts that string matching algorithmic fuzzy search is a nice-to-have in site search, I challenge you. Yes indeed, by nature site search or ecommerce shop search has two problems when exact matching or low grade fuzzy methods (stemming, etc.) are used:
- Greater chance of returning zero results with misspellings. Google almost always has something to return even with exact matching on misspelling. It’s returning results from among billions of web pages after all.
- Low success rates in search overall: Misspellings will invariably miss their target even if they sometimes match on stemming or misspelled content here and there.
At Exorbyte, we have the very best structured data error-tolerance you can find anywhere. We have beaten some of the biggest names in the business in enterprise search purchase. If you are about CRO (conversion rate optimization), you need error-tolerance and your best option is Exorbyte.
Tags: conversion rates, conversions, error tolerance, fuzzy, google, matt utts
Posted in Merchandising, Search, Software, Usability, eCommerce | No Comments »
by Dan Nicollet -
Exorbyte waves goodbye to one master of interface and product design!
Steve Jobs Flew Away
http://www.apple.com/stevejobs/
Tags: dead, steve jobs
Posted in Business, Software, Technology, Usability | 6 Comments »
by Dan Nicollet - September 30, 2011
Oracle Larry Ellison has been attacking the rationale of HP buying Autonomy for $10B. One wonders if he wasn’t eyeing Autonomy himself for an acquisition before HP snagged it. This said, now that Fast, Convera, Autonomy, Netrics, have all been acquired, we are wondering if Endeca might not be the next one up for an Oracle acquisition this time?
See more here:
http://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-hp-autonomy-2011-9
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/oracle-fuels-fire-over-h-ps-autonomy-deal-2011-09-29
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-09-29/tech/30216980_1_oracle-qatalyst-slides
==== 10/18/2011 – Update ====
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2011/10/18/oracle-buys-endeca-targeting-unstructured-data/ That’s it. Oracle announces they are buying Endeca. This is big news. Another confirmation for us that Search is a hot category for enterprise software but also that deeper integration of search is in the works. While this acquisition of may be a good thing for those Endeca users with full-text and unstructured data applications, other with massive structured data (ecommerce, CRM, etc.) will need to turn to other solution providers possibly. We are ready and waiting.
Tags: autonomy, endeca, hp, oracle, Oracle Acquires Endeca, Oracle Buys Endeca, search, search engine, search engines, software
Posted in Exorbyte, Software | No Comments »
by Dan Nicollet - September 29, 2011
Exorbyte doesn’t care but the feud between Oracle and the “cloud bunch” (Andreessen, Benioff of Salesfoce.com, and more) but we feel it has something else to teach us besides the low blows.
“Andreessen kicked off BoxWorks, the first-ever customer conference for cloud collaboration provider Box.net, this morning in San Francisco.
His firm invested in Box, he says, partly because he found that a lot of the other startups they were funding already used Box’s product.
As he put it, “Ten years ago, it was a joke: you’d raise $20 million in venture capital and write a $4 or $5 million check to Oracle, Sun, BEA, and EMC….When it started, Salesforce looked like a toy compared with Siebel. Look ahead five years later, it’s obviously better. Not a single one of our startups uses Oracle.”
Read more: Marc Andreessen: The “Clock Is Ticking” On Oracle - http://www.businessinsider.com/boxnet-2011-9#comment-4e84d76aecad04784000002d#ixzz1ZNOjydsW
Oracle is indeed under siege big time. But this cloud computing debacle is just one more front for them to fight on. SAP, their main rival in the DB business, has been taking effective swings at them regarding the lack of believe they have in in-memory databases (which are by-the-way the way forward for cloud computing also). Hasso Plattner from SAP has a field day here with this:
Our company sells SaaS site search for ecommerce and we also did away with Oracle from the start. Better yet, the vast majority of our customers are the same and this is a growing market!
Good luck Larry!
Tags: cloud, databases, in-memory, in-memory databases, levenshtein, real-time, real-time databases, search
Posted in Exorbyte, Technology, databases | 5 Comments »
by Dan Nicollet -
Wow, after the Microsoft / Fast $1 Billion debacle , we now have the Autonomy / HP / Oracle $10 Billion version of the same type of debates over company valuation when HP acquired Autonomy last month. Sitting on the sidelines happily we get splattered with great intelligence on the reality of Autonomy’s claims of shareholder value. Enjoy and send your comments!
BUSTED: Oracle Publishes Slide Deck To Prove Autonomy CEO Is Lying
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-hp-autonomy-2011-9#ixzz1ZNOVjCVb
9/29/2011 – 2:16PM - I will just add that no matter what Autonomy and HP say to justify that acquisition, I just can’t see it why they ended up above $10B, especially after looking at these slides. Good luck.
Tags: autonomy, databases, hp, oracle, search engine
Posted in Business, Exorbyte, Industries, Search, Software, databases | No Comments »
by Dan Nicollet - September 27, 2011
Exorbyte just released some news from our customers which makes us quite proud. Conversion increases of up to 45%. That’s impressive by any count. Conversion rates are the ratio of buyers to visitors to an online store. Typically retailers with 10% are pretty happy. Even 5% is acceptable, which would mean that 1 in 20 visitors to a store leaves a buyer. In such a case, a retailer experiencing a 10% increase would see its conversion rate go up to 14.5% after some improvements, such as implementing Exorbyte Commerce.
Now, the question remains, how could Exorbyte Commerce generate such an improvement in conversion rates? Rather than listing our product features which you can view on our site, let’s answer this question from the retailer’s point-of-view. The table below lists a number of features which retailers are advised to pay particular attention to when engaging in Conversions Rate Optimization (CRO). For each of these CRO tactics, Exorbyte Commerce provides an innovative solution.
| CRO TACTICS |
DESCRIPTION |
HOW DOES EXORBYTE COMMERCE RESPONDS? |
| Identify and Pursue Lost Opportunities |
Do you know why your visitors leave without buying? Making conjectures about why visitors leave without buying doesn’t help you. In the real world store owners talk to their clerks, cashiers, and sales staff to find out what sells and what doesn’t. |
Exorbyte Commerce introduces actionable reports about what users search for, what they find, what they don’t find. Retailers can finally find out what people are searching for and not finding. There are many easily identifiable lost opportunities for which Exorbyte Commerce Ranking and Alias rules can become an immediate answer. No need for experts and guesswork anymore. |
| Catch Visitors Before Flight |
Countless online store surveys show how short the attention span of visitors is. In a matter of seconds retailers have a chance to catch a visitor’s attention or never to see a transaction from them. |
The Exorbyte Commerce Autocomplete which features product pictures, prices, categories, and other relevant data based on the first couple of characters typed will instantly catch users attention. Do not doubt the search box is the place to catch a user’s attention. This is the moment of truth for online retail. |
| Make Your Products Visible |
Online stores can easily feature hundreds of thousands of products. They have no floor space limitations like in the brick-and-mortar world. How do you make sure your products are found when you carry thousands of them. |
Exorbyte Commerce always gets users to the product of their choice because its proprietary search engine is far better at decreasing the number of fruitless searches and at ranking relevant search results than any other search engine in the market. |
| Define and Improve Landing Pages |
Landing pages are pages that feature products, promos, marketing programs that may have a stronger visitor appeal than single product pages, pages about store’s policies or the store’s transcriptional process. Landing pages could be about seasonal promotions, an exclusive brand that the store carries, etc. They get picked up easily by web search engines but they don’t show in the store’s search results. |
With Target Pages Exorbyte Commerce allows online retailers to add new landing pages anytime they want. They can be associated with keywords of their choice and will be featured in the site search results when a user’s query seems relevant. |
| Increase Page Load Speed |
Slow stores do not fare well with online visitors. They expect fast page loading times. That’s a known fact. However, it is challenging to balance this requirement with that of featuring rich content like lengthy descriptions, suggestions, large images, etc. |
Exorbyte Commerce is an AJAX-based application. It means that interacting with the Exorbyte Commerce interface users won’t wait for pages to re-load. The page’s contents change on-the-fly in a fraction of a second and there is never a delay. Rather than frustrated and impatient, users are surprised and in awe at the speed and quality of their experience. |
| Reduce Clutter and Messy Interfaces |
Messy pages, clutter, and too many choices almost guarantees visitor flight. Beyond a certain point, information overload pushes visitors to leave so they can breathe the fresh air of a lighter store design somewhere else. |
Exorbyte Commerce’s interface is light and well organized. It is the fruit of years of experience with online retail. We have reduced the presence of buttons, images, text, and other elements to an elegant set of well recognizable tools which visitors will feel are natural and relevant. |
| Make the Process Simple and Natural |
Don’t re-invent the wheel. Users don’t expect your store to redefine the process of finding and buying products on the web. They want a simple and natural experience that feels familiar. Unfamiliarity breeds risk and uncertainty in the minds of consumers. Buyers like control and a risk-less environment to make their purchases. |
Exorbyte Commerce follows the principles of good user interface design with simple, yet fast and sophisticated tools that will feel all but new to visitors. We take the best of what we have learned with some of the largest online retailers we have done work for and bring it to your store. |
| Use Images Whenever Possible |
Nothing replaces a good quality image in terms of removing the uncertainty that comes with buying a product off a strange new store. Seeing is believing. |
Exorbyte Commerce automatically pulls images from your store catalog and features them in search and suggestions. |
Tell us what you do to improve conversions and how much quality search factors into your conversion maximization efforts.
Tags: conversion rates, conversions, CRO, eCommerce, online retail, shop search, shops, site search, store search
Posted in Exorbyte, Merchandising, Technology, Usability, eCommerce | No Comments »
