Two days ago, Norwegian enterprise search vendor Fast Search and Transfer announced an agreement to purchase the Retrievalware business from Convera for $23M. You can find the press release here. Let's try to understand what this means. First, some background on Convera. Technically, Convera is a seven-year
On March 22nd, Netezza announced that it had filed a form S-1 with the SEC regarding a proposed initial public offering (IPO) of its common stock. You can find Netezza's registration document here. This is great news for Netezza, and I'd argue, for special-purpose
One of my memes is the rise of special-purpose database management systems (DBMSs). While I’m obviously a big believer in MarkLogic and XML content servers, I believe that XML content servers are simply one example of a whole new class of DBMSs, each designed and optimized for a
I recently found and greatly enjoyed this New Yorker article, entitled "Open Secrets: Enron, Intelligence, and the Perils of Too Much Information," by Malcolm Gladwell (of The Tipping Point and Blink fame). See here for my review of Blink. Open Secrets is a long (7,000 word) article
Just a quick post to a recent article on the costs associated with ineffective enterprise search. Tidbits include: * According to IDC, a company with 1,000 information workers can expect more than $5M in annual wasted salary costs because of poor search. * A recent survey of 1,000 middle managers
BI
According to this story in today's New York Times, Oracle will acquire Hyperion for $3.3B, or $52 per share, a 21% premium over yesterday's closing price. The concept isn't surprising; that it finally happened is. For years, speculation has circled the major BI
Much as I used a post and a blogroll link to highlight the FAQ for this blog, with this post, I'll create a "best of" list to highlight posts that have stood out from the others. * Ut Oh, It's Magic * Don't Trust
Here's a link to a post done by Matt Turner on his Discovering XQuery blog that discusses Publishing 2.0 and content logic. In this post Matt discusses what I call the "thick middle tier" problem with most search-engine-based content applications. Here's
VC
Forbes has published its Midas List, an annual ranking of top venture capitalists. Topping the list this year is Mike Moritz of (Mark Logic investor) Sequoia Capital. Moritz beat out John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins for the top slot. By virtue of running Mark Logic, I've had the
On the plane to France last summer, I channel-surfed into a hilarious movie, entitled Jean-Philippe. In the film, Fabrice Luchini portrays Johnny Hallyday's biggest fan who, after receiving a knockout blow in a drunken fight, awakes to find himself in an alternate universe where Johnny Hallyday
While it's been around for some time, I only recently stumbled up on StumpleUpon, a fun web service that I recommend trying because it restores serendipity to the web. I remember worrying during the web boom of the late 1990s -- particularly during the portals, PointCast, and subscribe/alert
Here's a colorful story I stumbled into on Diplomatic Traffic bashing France's Jacques Chirac for the failure of Quaero, which I've written about previously and characterized as the Airbus of Search. Germany's recent bail-out from the Quaero project, detailed in an
