Oct

23

The PM and the Hub

Filed Under Big Data, Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Pearson, privacy, Publishing, Search, social media, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

The Story So Far (for slow readers and foreigners): One morning, three years ago, the then newly elected UK Prime Minister awoke determined to right a wrong. The previous day, in a meeting with the fabulous founders of Google, he had heard that it would have been impossible to start Google in the UK because of the UK’s intellectual property law regime. “Something should be done” turned into “writing a report”, as so often in political life, and the good Professor Hargreaves was duly appointed to do just that. After pouring down invective and contumely on the industry he was meant to be examining, the good Professor recommended a Hub, and everyone agreed. The good Richard Hooper, late of OFCOM the regulator, was then appointed to decide what the Hub was and what it might do. He decided that it had five roles:

The sensible Mr Hooper then retired from the fray and the really very good Dr Ros Lynch took on the role of implementing the Hub. She was appointed last month and now has 11 months in which to complete her work.

I have been thinking about this a lot recently. The four 25 year old professional users of information who “keynoted” the Outsell Signature Event in early October are much to blame, since their apparent indifference to the existence of copyright – and their confidence that anything they needed could be found on the web, and usually for free, reminded me forcefully that the PM, Prof Hargreaves, Mr Hooper, Dr Lynch and myself live in a different world from those young(er) people, and it is not necessarily the real one. So I decided to to get back to the source of all of this and see if I could not find what had been in the PM’s mind at the time and whether he thought we were making progress. And as it happens my thinking about the future has just about reached thought and gesture based computer interfaces, so I thought I would get around the Press office at No 10, avoid the difficulties of where to put one’s bike in Downing Street, and go straight for Mr Spock and the old Venusian mind transfer. And the old one’s are the best ones: within minutes I had caught the great man between speeches on the new British criminal justice regime, which he said would be “tough and intelligent” (like the Guardian I wondered if the regime of the past three years had been ” tepid and demented”), and very happy to answer my thoughts with his own.

I started where he had started. Did the changes mean that the next Google could be sourced in Shoreditch? Well, the changes had not taken place yet, and were unlikely to do so before the next election, but he wanted to hope that we were building a regime  which would mean that any enterprize could start within this Green and Pleasant and not be disbarred by an inadequate legal framework. But, I urged, IP is about Global Networks in Global Marketplaces, surely. The next Google will grow where there is cost-effective labour, the most favourable tax regime, a large domestic market and an abundance of entrepreneurial drive. Well, he thought, it was unlikely that George would let him tweak the tax base in this sector, and we were a small country, but surely I must admit that we were smart and entrepreneurial? And the Hub, a great British notion, would create a point of exchange in the network for trading IP which would become as important as the City in financial services, leaving the nations of the world once more gasping in our wake at the ability of the Brits to organize the world’s marketplaces for them.

I admit this thought set me back a bit, but I countered by asking why, in that case, Dr Lynch had been given a year, and a staff of one, and was currently based in a small office gifted by Pearson for the purpose. He thought it vital that the Hub was not imposed, or, in these straightened times, funded by government. It should grow from the industry and be funded by the industry. My thought was that getting the whole media and information sector to think together was likely to be a difficult task – getting consistent data on rights – probably a Big Data issue in itself – to plug into the back of the Hub would prove hard for some sectors, and almost impossible for others. Might this not be an area where more government leadership was required? I thought, but banished the thought, that the strategy might be to get the media sectors spending the next two years building their rights databases and fighting each other, so they could be seen to be to blame when the Hub’s likeness to the tower of Babel at length became clear.

He thought that this was unworthy. And his counter-thought really interested me. “So where would you put the priority, clever clogs” obviously matters. My thought was that the front end was what needed government support if industry was to get the back end done in time. The interface that changed behaviours had to have values. Free or discount purchases for registration and the ability to audit? Want those graphs from this market research report in your powerpoint – subscribe to our loader toolset. Want to use this lesson with that video and this music in your classroom? Use our special comprehensive school-rates education one stop clearance system (Hooper says schools currently need to use 12 clearance agencies in the UK). I pointed out the precedents in this education zone alone: teacherspayteachers.com in the US, now competing with the UK’s TES Connect working with the US teaching unions. Was that not entrepreneurial? We needed to re-invent the way users saw rights, and we needed to make rights protection relevant to the work of every individual as a creator of IP, and offer them real value to be licit!

But, sadly there came no reply. All I faintly recall was the echo of another thought, as though someone was whispering in his ear, “now this Savile scandal has broken you can attack the BBC on all fronts without fear” and the thought transfer process came to an abrupt end. I will try to re-connect, but, in the meanwhile, these are make or break months for the Hub.

 

 

Aug

14

Speech is the Future of Search

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data protection, Education, eLearning, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment

Here is an extract from a story carried by the International Herald Tribune on 14 August 2012;


The Express Tribune
august 14, 2012

Quaid’s speech calling for religious, ethnic tolerance missing from Radio Pakistan’s archives.

KARACHI: The audio recordings of every speech of the Quaid-e-Azam are with Radio Pakistan – except for one.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s landmark speech at the Constituent Assembly’s
first meeting on August 11, 1947 in Karachi has been missing for decades
and all recent efforts to retrieve it have so far been in vain.

These days, Radio Pakistan runs an Urdu translation recorded in
somebody else’s voice of the same speech. Where the original speech
disappeared, and whether this was deliberate, remains an unanswered
question.

It may be no coincidence that the missing speech has these famous
words in it: “You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are
free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this
state of Pakistan …You may belong to any religion or caste or creed—that
has nothing to do with the business of the state.”

It was also in this speech that the founder had said that the first
duty of a government was to maintain law and order, “so that the life,
property and religious beliefs of its subjects are fully protected by
the state.”

 

Important words, and never more so than at this time. And almost certainly not lost – mislabelled, misfiled, disguised by inadequate metadata, maybe, but it is worth a small wager that the speech turns up one day – so very many things do. The world is full of attics and libraries from which lost symphonies, early works of poetry, the juvenilia of great writers reappear with monotonous regularity. This speech will be found.

But the story interested me because it provided a graphic reminder of the problem and potential of speech, and returned me to a long held conviction – that voice is the real future of search. However, I no longer believe that the route to this is through Google and the other search engines. though I am aware of Google’s downloadable voice search app, and I am sure that the pace set in this area will accelerate as Google get even further invested in the future of the smart phone. However, we need semantic technologies that can treat text as voice and vice versa for search purposes, and while we have evidence of many attributes in this pipeline, we seem to be a long way away from finding a universal solution, and one that resolves the legacy content issues as well.

I am coming to believe, however, in the explosive growth potential for voice in business, partly because of Siri and its ilk, partly because of the need to get more functionality into the phone than the keyboard will allow, but mostly because I can now see a group of very relevant business areas where being able to move seamlessly from voice to text, to be able to search both using either, unlocks productivity gains that cannot be attained in any other way. My conclusions on this were formed by following two companies quite closely. One was Aurix (www.aurix.com), a former UK Defense establishment company privatized within QinetiQ and now owned by Avaya. No prizes for guessing where their voice interests began, but their interests now lie far beyond security and intelligence. The other is BigHand (http://uk.bighand.com), bought earlier this year by my colleagues at Bridgepoint, where I do some media advisory work. It happens that both of these are UK technology companies, but I am sure that we could find equivalents for them in the USA or Israel.

Clearly a vital sector for voice search remains security. Searching voicemail alone when required is a major undertaking (not even the News of the World in its prime had the right technologies). Beyond this, media and broadcasting is surely a primary market. No one who drowned in the ocean of superlatives surrounding the London Olympics can doubt that heavyweight voice technologies of the sort that Aurix deploys will be as critical as the major investment put together by the BBC, partnering with MarkLogic, to put in the text-image-video handling platform that sat behind the BBC Sport website. And then we put together the fastest growing sector – monitoring and searching voice messages, recorded conversations  and realtime calling in direct selling and customer service contexts. The productivity gains are as large as the range of uses is wide – checking compliance and script adherence, learning from common complaints, measuring call centre workloads, analysing trends in customer response etc etc.

And there are two marketplaces where voice records, the ability to attach them to text records, and to search both at the same time, has always been important, even when it wasn’t possible. One is the law practice market, and the other is the health market. Here there are solid traditions of voice recording, but real productivity gains to be made (for example, in legal eDiscovery) by using effective voice search. BigHand are market leaders in legal dictation and have the exciting prospect before them of what seemed a limited market a few years ago now opening out in an interesting way to embrace technology change which will then move into education (voice reports?), surveying, engineering and then some of the science research disciplines. As a law database publisher in 1982, I now have the delightful prospect of seeing another wave come ashore in the same market with very similar productivity, and compliance, advantages.

So here then is a brief sketch of a demand-led digital voice revolution. In 2020 we will ask our screen for research results, and define if we want them by ear or by eye – bearing in mind that some of the results will be transcripted voice turned into text, and others will be text turned into speech. Around then we shall find the missing speech in this news story – and admire again the wonderful sentiments of the speaker.

 

 

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