May

19

How Old is Innovation before it’s New…?

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, news media, Publishing, Search, semantic web, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 2 Comments

Living in a society that seems to value “innovation” above all things it is sometimes easy to forget that innovations sometimes have to wait and fester on the sidelines for many years before we recognize how new they really are, that the most common cause of innovation-failure is being before one’s times, and that some innovations never really perform until other innovations are available to make them fully useful. As a law publisher 30 years ago, we managers were deeply concerned with the quality of our thesaurus and how we could effectively use the major law dictionaries of the day; in 1983 I can recall discussions with West Publishing, as it was then, and the depressing conclusion that Blacks, the prevalent power in the marketplace, would never make it online. Now all the dictionaries and thesauri are online and we refer to them no more, but my other memory of those days of roaming the US as if it was a larder of innovation is going on to Denver to meet a guy who was compiling standardized word lists, which he called taxonomies, and inviting information companies to embed them online. He was a former camera shop manager and he knew from experience how many words could be used at retail to describe the same thing, or facets of the same thing.

This is in my head this evening since a note from a very bright and lively innovatory service player in Vienna, the Semantic Web Company, reminds me that they are a member of Wand Within (http://www.poolparty.biz/poolparty-becomes-partner-of-wand-within-program/), and refers me back to Ross Leher, the founder of Wand and my host on that visit in the mid-80s. I have written about Wand many times since, but it has never struck me more forcibly that it is the semantic web movement that releases the power of taxonomy by placing it in the context of technologies that enable us to be really creative in service innovations around it. The wonder to me is that Ross, his son, and their smart company, have been able to survive the 30 years it has taken for the world to get to where they were. I can well remember sending directory companies to them, but the sort of places where I was recommending them as a cure were dying of market forces anyway. The sort of things that Ross was preaching were endemic to the information culture in Denver and its environs anyway: this is light engineering and aircraft building country, and its largest information services player, IHS Inc (Information Handling Services), was created from the needs of customers with big “parts” lists, a multiplicity of standards to obey and scores of component suppliers.

Wand Within’s members are a guide to the aristocracy of semantic web service suppliers. TEMIS, the important French data analytics player, has often been referenced here as I wrote a White Paper with them on Collaboration earlier this year. DataFacet is Wand’s own toolset. Pingar, the New Zealand semantic search company has also been covered here. But it is also worth taking careful note of the Semantic Web Company and its PoolParty tools. (http://blog.semantic-web.at/2013/05/07/17-video-tutorials-are-available-now-learn-how-to-use-poolparty-step-by-step/). Here is another European source of advanced service development tools which should be critically important to publishers and service providers in the coming year. And attentive readers (both of you) will have noted regular reference here to a project called Jurion being developed by Wolters Kluwer Germany which represents, for me, one of the most complete visions of a semantic web-driven project yet available to us anywhere. The Semantic Web Company were their partners in this venture
(http://www.wolterskluwer.de/ueber-uns/presse/pressemitteilungen/aktuelle-pressemit-einzeln/?tx_ttnews[tt_news]=1309&tx_ttnews[backPid]=10365&cHash=af81776d45e924a85dc9ff273c2b40f6) and both of them may one day be persuaded to translate their press release into English!

So if we look for innovation, let us look for the new, and also for older services which the new play back on side. And let us recognize that innovation can be the re-integration of historic practice in a new context as well as discovery or invention. And, of course, invention never comes entirely from the ether. In just the sense used by Newton, the early fathers of thesauri are the information scientists upon whose shoulders we are now standing.

And one brief moment more, and a little more old law publishing. Thoughts of the Semantic Web Company in Vienna nourished the idea that if it was no accident that taxonomies came out of Denver, then innovation in a world of concepts would be natural in the great city of Freud and Wittgenstein. Which recalled visits in the 1980s to that city to see Tony Hilscher and Franz Stein of Manz Verlag (now 40% owned by Wolters Kluwer) and the wonderful aroma of coffee and cakes from Demel’s coffee house in the same street. And their company history reminds us of how intimately intellectual and commercial life can be linked to common ends:

“In 1912 the famous architect and critic of architecture Adolf Loos designed the main entrance to the bookstore, situated at Kohlmarkt 16 in Vienna’s First District. This entry has been preserved in its original state to the present day. Following Sigmund Freud’s principles of psychoanalysis, its most significant feature, a recessed entryway combined with indirect lighting, was to exercise a subconscious attraction on passersby, pulling them magically inside to browse.”

This is the 201st issue of this blog: thank you for your patience.

May

13

Omniscience and Omerta

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data protection, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, news media, privacy, Search, semantic web, social media, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment

“Although we have long made limited
customer relationship data available to
our journalists, we realize this was a
mistake.” Doctoroff went on to note
that Bloomberg terminals are also
equipped with cameras that can see
through the clothing of female
subscribers, but he stressed that
images collected by the cameras are
not shared with ‘those nerds in the
News division.’

I much enjoyed the ChartGirl (http://chartgirl.com/pdf/BLOOMBERG.pdf) take on the Bloomberg story, and as is very often the case, Hilary Sargent got more sense into a chart than I can get into a thousand words. But we are now two days into the story, and already I note the appearance of stories saying we are giving Bloomberg too hard a time, that this could have happened anywhere, and that using online services is courting insecurity so we really should not be so very surprized. I am sorry, but this part of the development loses me completely. Is there any difference between Bloomberg allowing its news staff to access customer sign-on and usage data and News Corp tolerating a culture of news snooping that led to widespread phone-hacking? In principle, No. In degree, there may be differences, but if you aspire to be a trusted service provider then you simply cannot allow this to go on. I have no doubt that Thomson Reuters have spent the day checking their security, and Dow Jones have been explaining their policies at length. But neither so far has been revealed in the Bloomberg light, and it may say something about the cultures of these various players that this is the case.

The principle at stake here was taught me by the head of a London law practice in 1981. He was an early Eurolex user when I was running that early online service for lawyers, and he burst into my office at 8 am one morning bearing yards of printout. “Have you been watching the questions my staff have been asking”, he demanded, and when I said No, and explained we had confidentiality undertakings in our employment contracts, he calmed down and explained that the questions and search routines asked by his staff indicated exactly how he was going to defend a client insurer resisting a claim for damages to the wonderfully fragile legs of a famous actress who had fallen over at the film studios. As he departed he said “What I put into your machine is mine, and when and how I use it is mine also. You can use it, in anonymized form, to improve the service, but beyond that you may not go”.

It seems to me an important principle. As we as a society prepare to defend ownership of our supermarket bills, protect our phone usage from all comers, dream of building ePassports and eWallets to repatriate our own information to us, so that, if we wish, we can sell it to the highest bidder, we shall all of us call upon such principles, invoking them as property laws in our increasingly user-centric networked society. So how come that Bloomberg got things so shockingly wrong? Bloomberg, that secret cavern of a private company, whose whole culture is omerta and whose staff are sworn to secrecy beyond mortality? It comes down to an identifiable trait in private companies. It is about an omniscient esprit de corps. It reflects a certain arrogance that says that if you have grown fast enough and with enough certainty then you can make your own rules. In the pre BusinessWeek days Bloomberg was renowned for never buying anything, but instead for emulating what it wanted by “doing it again – better”. This admirable and industrial culture clearly also has a downside. It breeds people who can walk on water where confidentiality is concerned. The result will perhaps be a sobering ducking.

And hopefully the shock of cold water will touch the rest of the industry as well. Often, even in the financial services sector, users will want to put their content together to create a resource that the market needs. DataMonitor as a service combining anonymized information from banks and hedge funds on shorting contracts and equity leasing is a case in point. But it does not just indicate data that could be used to help create better markets. It comprises data that belonged to the traders and was theirs to sell, regardless of the ownership of terminals or networks which created that data. Unless we adhere to this idea we shall not have a networked society in any real sense, since all players will feel obligated to work one on one to prevent the data leakage.

We got this right 30 years ago: we cannot afford to sell the pass now, as we move into the Age of data analytics and the semantic web.

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