Oz Analytics

One Month On

It has been a hectic month since we launched Bridger. Hectic and exciting with some real highs and lows. This post is to give you a little insight into the life of a startup over our first month as a company with a real product.

So what's happened and perhaps most importantly what's been learnt?

The first bit of good news is that our users have found a number of our features very cool, and some unique. The consensus list of Bridger 'good stuff' (in no particular order) is:

• User selects their own documents
• Supports multiple document types - and PDF support is unique to Bridger
• Understands a wide range of subjects.
• An extensive number of semantic targets are identified giving a rich picture of the document contents
• The mark-up of detected targets in document summaries and the full text is very useful
• Our dynamically generated profiles are unique
• It's mobile 
• It's multi-platform
• It's free - costs nothing and there are no ads

So we are all over the moon with this initial feedback from our users.

Unfortunately (and also inevitably) this is not the end of the story. There are also some issues. These include:

• Users are limited to selecting documents from Dropbox or webpage urls
• There are too many steps to get documents analysed
• Only short documents can be processed - some people want to process whole books
• It takes too long to get results - 10 seconds seems to be the limit
• Results have errors that make you doubt all results
• Smartphone screens are too small
• Some people don't understand what Bridger does
• A lot of users don't know that profiles are available
• The sixdegreesofdata URL is too long, and requiring user ids and passwords make accessing Bridger ATH (all too hard).

A few things to take on the chin but OK, the team can take it but the lack of instant fame and fortune is disappointing ...

Now some of these things are inherent in the nature of semantic analysis and linked open data. Others are 'fixable' through either the user experience (UX) or how we explain (market) Bridger.

In a way, we planned for this and the lean principles have prepared us for an immediate pivot of Bridger to address a number of these issues.

So stay tuned as we work on a radical redesign to the UX.

Birth Announcement

We launch today version 1.0 of our new mobile web app. We're hoping to build a community of users that find Bridger a mind blowing new way to explore documents and web pages.

If you are a student, a knowledge worker or anyone who wants to get to the nitty gritty quickly in documents, articles etc., Bridger will change forever the way you look at documents.

• It summarizes.
• Shows you who's who and what's what in Word, txt, PDF documents or webpages, in a few moments.
• It works on your iPhone, galaxy, iPad, android tablet - anywhere you have a connection to the net. 
• Its easy to use, even my least techie friends have said that.

Just go to our website http://www.sixdegreesofdata.com from your mobile device. The application is free.

If you enjoy using it, tell your friends!

Not Seeing the Wood for the Trees

I recently blogged about blowing off beta testing as a stage of product development. I'm not sure all I said is valid but the first learnings from our beta users was right on the mark.

The public beta we launched a couple of days ago is already paying dividends. No pivot yet but a key learning is that people are finding it difficult to understand what Bridger can do. I blamed the users but cooler heads have prevailed (luckily). And this applies to many/all of the screens. One of the team is familiar with Wix and he showed how they embed short help videos all over their site.

This seems like a good solution. A pop-up screen with a 30 second video and some basic help text works well for them and as Pablo Picasso said "Good artists copy, great artists steal". So this is what we will do in the coming weeks before we launch Bridger 1.0.

As a side note. Picasso also said "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers" so I'm not sure I should be quoting him.

A little digging into Picasso's stealing quote also reveals that he even stole (and mangled) the quote. This time from a W. H. Davenport Adams who wrote in an article titled “Imitators and Plagiarists” published in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1892:

“That great poets imitate and improve, whereas small ones steal and spoil.”

Let's just say I am learning from Wix and applying best practise ...

Public Beta Release of Bridger

I'm very happy to announce that after a successful closed beta test of Bridger we are now opening the app to anyone that wants to use it.

Our new web site is at www.sixdegreesofdata.com.

What Does Bridger Do?

It reads any document or web page you point it at, tells you what the document is about and automatically creates profiles of all the people, organizations, places, technologies and concepts involved. Bridger profiles are dynamically created using billions of facts from popular internet sites like Wikipedia, Freebase, The New York Times, The Guardian, MusicBrainz, Twitter, and Google.

To Start Using Bridger

Bridger is a smartphone optimised web browser application - not an app downloaded from the Apple or Android stores. Remember, it's free to use, there is nothing to install and access is instant when you register. Android and iOS ready!

If you really want to, then it looks to us like it also works fine on your iPad or desktop running Chrome or Safari. But no guarantees.

Try it and let us know what you think.

Pocket and Bridger

Bridger is intended to be a universal document and web content analyser and we want to have it play nice with as many file types, applications and platforms as is possible. Of course, not all companies are as open as they perhaps could be so we do our best.

We developed the Bridger user interface specifically for smartphones and it works well on Android and iOS iPhones. We also quickly discovered that it does a pretty good job on the iPad as well and we are also working on supporting desktops - although this may only be possible using Safari or Chrome at this stage.

More news on this soon.

This openness is possible for a little startup company like Six Degrees Of Data because we use a very agile set of technologies. These include HTML5, CSS 3.1, jQuery Mobile and others and we've tried to be as open as is possible. But this only takes us so far.

Take off-line reading applications like Pocket, Readability and the like. Both are excellent apps that I use a lot on my desktop browser and smartphone. Like for millions of others, these apps have become embedded in my daily browsing habits. One problem however is that they really only delay the inevitable. If I'm going to get any value out of the documents I've saved, then I'm going have to read them. And this is where things fall down.

I often never get around to reading this growing pile of stuff sitting waiting for me in Pocket and Readability.

The unfortunate reality is that the virtual world mimics my physical world habits. Just like my bedside table is piled high with books and magazines I want to read - so are my virtual repositories: not just Pocket and Readability, but also email, Zinio, Flipboard, Kindle, iBooks, Instapaper and the like.

Now there are precious few things that I am certain of in life but I know for a fact that I will never read everything that I have squirreled away in these apps!

And that's the motivation behind Bridger. It Bridger continues to develop like I plan, then I can use it to extract the value trapped in these documents. But I digress - because there are speed bumps on my road to document nirvana.

For example, Readability uses some url mapping tricks to do what it does and this currently stops us using Bridger to analyse readability documents. A pity, but we will keep persevering until all avenues are exhausted.

Pocket, on the other hand has been easy to integrate into our work habits and the following short video shows you how Bridger can analyse all the documents saved in your Pocket app:

 

Bridger On iOS 7

The first product to use our new semantic analysis platform has now gone alpha. That product is Bridger, a mobile service that instantly analyzes documents and web pages and then automatically generates profiles of people, places, organizations and technologies on the fly.

This weekend we had our first chance to see Bridger working on iOS 7 phones. I had my doubts about iOS 7 when it was announced but after working with it for a day there is more in it that I like than dislike. More importantly (for me) Bridger looks and works great. Here are a couple of screen shots from an iPhone 5 running the new OS.

This first screen is our launching point from which you explore your analyzed document:

The second screen shows the dynamic ranking of the people mentioned in this document. The higher the rank, the more important someone is within the context of the document:

And here is one of the dynamically created company profiles. Everything is hyperlinked to the original document and out into the wider web:

Finally, here is the semantic cloud we create:

 

So we are all happy with the results and in a couple of weeks time Bridger is going to be released as a beta. Stay tuned for more news then.

Oh, and one final thing for Android users - don't despair. Bridger is 100% compatible as it is built with a html 5 front-end. We aim to support all modern Android and iOS 6 and 7 phones from day 1.

Bootstrapping Versus External Financing - Part 2 of 2

In my last post I talked about the influence of external financing on time to market, control and stress. It wasn't exactly a glowing endorsement of venture capital. This week I'd like to focus on some of the beneficial aspects of venture capital and round off the discussion with a look at ramping-up, risk, and market access.

Ramping-up

By ramping-up, I mean either grabbing market share and/or generating profits sufficient to achieving the aims you had when starting the company.

I see two clear paths for a start-up consumer software company trying to get noticed in today's market. The first is to have a social media strategy that takes your product viral. It's a nice thought and I think that big data analytics can definitely help this process. How? By delivering insights into customer behaviour and identifying segments of the market most likely to want to purchase/use your product.

It's a nice theory.

Viral is easy to see when is happens but is fiendishly difficult to intentionally start.  Does anyone know of an example of a product engineered to go viral? Not just an ad campaign. I know plenty of products that have gone viral but only as a result of having a brilliant product launched at the right time. Maybe they were just lucky?

In any event I'm pretty sure the people that have had this happen to them are either a lot luckier or smarter than myself.

So the second path is to ramp-up every aspect of the company as fast as you can. Product development, marketing, sales, operations, support. Everything. The first step in ramping-up is to get more people on board and nine times out of ten, the only way to do this fast is to spend money.

It may be that you know people in every area of expertise, and you can offer then enough equity to leave what they are currently doing to join your venture. I don't. I tapped-out my own network attracting the current team of 5 and 2 further advisers.

I do know other people I would like to be involved but that would take more money than I am willing to invest at this stage.

The right external financing not only gives you the money you need but (if you do it right) also gives you access to a network of people with the expertise you need to bring into the company.

De-risking

External financing de-risks a venture when the financing is done on reasonable terms and at the right time.

Reasonable terms are ones where everyone is rewarded fairly for what they bring to the venture and where the potential rewards of future efforts will be fairly shared.

The right time for software companies to take external financing is that point where two or more of the following exists:

• The product is working
• Traction has been won in the market
• The right team is in place

If you have achieved at least two of these then you have a chance to raise funds on reasonable terms.

Market Access

As I mention above, good external financing delivers a network of new contacts. They can also bring you customers. This is not guaranteed but it can working the B2B market or a specialist VC with contacts in exactly your market niche. In my case our B2C product is going to need widespread market distribution. I believe that only the likes of Google, Yahoo!, etc. can do this in our case.

 So my advice is to look at the contacts that come with a potential investor. They could be worth a lot more than the money they invest. I have heard enough stories from successful founders who have taken lower valuations because the investors brought more to the party than cash.

A Final Judgement Call

Today, Six degrees of Data is on the cusp of launching our first product. I know Bridger works because it does what I designed it to do - and that's a pretty amazing feeling to have!

The challenge now is to test it in the market. That's what we will do in October and November 2013.

So these most recent posts about financing need to be seen from my perspective.

I believe that Bridger is a new category of software. One that lets our documents link intricately into the world wide web - very much like a road map shows you how to get around a city.

Bridger's semantic links create the maps of meaning that you need to reach the full potential of the web.

Well, if you're going to dream, you might as well dream big.

Speed Hump On The Road To World Domination

Since my last post we continue to work on our NBT (Next Big Thing) - or least I do in my spare time as my work at a large media group remains full-on as we continue the move from print to digital. Nevertheless working on Bridger is now in the final weeks before our official launch - and quite frankly I can hardly wait.

So this post is simply to talk about one of the dirty start-up secrets that you don't often read about: start-up work is a lot like your corporate day job.

How so?

Well for a start, everything stills takes so long to do and much longer than you originally planned for. Sound familiar? The old adage of 'one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration' is as true as ever - even as a lean start-up.

Establishing your own company is a liberating experience but many of the frustrations that you may have experienced in a large corporate will be just the same as those you have when you are 'on your own'.

Why?

First off: you are still you. Your strengths and weaknesses remain and the perspiration still needs to be generated. You are still going to have to do things you don't like doing. The details will change. For example, dealing with a large internal bureaucracy doesn't happen in your startup - but selling your start-up product to a large corporate maens dealing with their large bureaucracy. Then there are other fun things like bookkeeping to do. 

Secondly, unless you truly are an extraordinary individual, you can't do it all yourself. You are not on your own. So you are going to have to rely on other people to make things happen - just like before. In my case I already have 3 other partners in place, and more will join soon. So all the frustrations and challenges of working as a team remain.

Of course, if you play your cards right as a start-up, then you will have more control over who is in the team and when the rewards roll in then your share of them should be greater. This has been my experience as I have been lucky in attracting 3 wonderfully smart people who could dream the same dream as I have. I have no idea why they chose to work with me - but I won't question this too closely. I can write this because they are all so busy delivering Bridger that they won't have time to read this blog.

Nobody tells you of these times when despite moving rapidly forward you feel like you're trapped in the horse latitudes. So in my case the perspiration is more stress related than from hard work .

My mind is racked by questions ranging from the reasonable:

How can function X work with Y?

Will the app perform as predicted?

Will we be able to deliver a simple user experience?

To the paramoid:

What if somebody launches the same idea before we do?

What if the need we thought we were filling doesn't exist?

Sounds a lot like the same worries you might have working for the 'man'? And as I like to remind myself, it's only paranoid if they aren't really out there waiting to get you!

My personal frustration/inpatience today is that I am now at the stage of complete reliance on the technical team that is building the app and integrating it into our back-end services. This is how it should be and - as I tell myself each day - is proof of real progress.

It's also a wonderful step forward in the development of Six Degrees Of Data as a company. Why? Because we have transitioned from a one man evangelical band into a core team focussed on making the idea real.

 

Changing Tack

My 2 regular readers (thanks mum and dad!) may have noticed that the frequency of my posts has dropped dramatically since 2012. There was a reason for this - beyond my strongly held opinion that those who have nothing sensible to say should simply shut-up. That reason was/is that I have been starting a new venture and the 'stealth mode' has lasted a lot longer than I expected.

In 2012 I suffered an information crisis and I suspected that I was not alone. The crisis arrived because I was being increasingly overwhelmed with information and most of the information swamping me was not on the web. Instead it was in the form of documents and email. I pride myself as being pretty well organised with effective email filters in place and an organised corpus of professional and personal knowledge approaching 1,000,000 objects. Mostly documents of one sort or another.

I was quietly proud of my knowledge management skills but after pride cometh the fall - and in 2012 that's what happened. Let me explain how it happened and I hope the story will resonate with you.

 As a serial entrepreneur and corporate analyst, I have a broad range of professional interests. These range from all aspects of analytics and information management, and broaden out into general management and IT. I am also a bit of a pack rat and if I come across some information that looks useful I store it. For those interested, my tools of choice are Mac OSX, HoudahSpot, DevonAgent and Devonthink.

So over the last 20 years I have built up a very useful corpus of knowledge. By 2011 however I was becoming increasingly frustrated by my inability to effectively use this corpus in my daily work. Each day I need to deal with the usually pile of emails and read/respond to/create multiple documents. This presented the following problems:

1. Identifying and dealing with those emails and documents that I had to.
2. Ignoring the rest.
3. Locating past knowledge/information that would help me to deal effectively with the day's emails and documents.

So the problems were pretty much at the core of what I do.

If only there was a way for me to more efficiently decide whether-or-not a long email or document was worth me reading. Then, when I needed to make a decision or give advice, how could I tap into my corpus of knowledge?

These are the problems solved by my new venture Six Degrees Of Data.

Six Degrees Of Data is building Apps and web services that we hope turn the web on its head. Our first product will launch later this year. It is called Bridger and is an App and Web Service that intelligently evaluates, summarizes and links your documents to trusted sources on the web.

Bridger is a research assistant for busy people suffering from information overload.

We are trying to release the value currently locked inside documents because despite the phenomenal growth of the internet, 80% of the new information created each year is still unstructured – in other words it is text, graphics and video contained in things like documents, emails, Facebook shares, web pages and tweets, etc. This unstructured information is poorly integrated with the world wide web. Even if they are published to a web site, they have remained isolated islands of information – until now.

Within the last five years, the size of the average web page has more than tripled, and the number of external objects has more than doubled. The average web page is now 1 MB and growing at over 20% each year. Today the average web page has about 10 links and 600 words. So it is reasonable to say that less than 2% of the content is hyperlinked to something else.

Your documents often contain only a single link (or less) and many more words than a web page.

If you are lucky, there is a single bridge (hyperlink) from the web to your document. Think of your documents as information that is connected to the web superhighway only via an off-ramp. You can find published documents easily enough because published documents are indexed by the likes of Google and Bing. But what you can’t do is start from your document and get easily back onto the web in an intelligent way.

That’s why we see the current web-document world as a one-way off-ramp.

Bridger builds you an internet on-ramp for all of your documents – whether they are published on the web or not. This is how we can release the untapped value of the 80%.

How do we do this? Well, it’s pretty complicated technically but the good news is that you really don’t have to know about this if you don’t want to. All you need to understand is that Bridger takes your isolated documents, emails, etc. and automatically links them to over 50 billion trusted additional sources of information on the world wide web.

Drop a document on to the Bridger app and it will instantly tell you what the document is about and give you concise profiles of all the relevant people, organizations, places, technologies and more.

Your document is magically transformed into a fully integrated web body of knowledge.

And Bridger is the first of a stream of new products we re planning. Future areas that we will concentrate on are enriching our personal corpus' of knowledge, collaboration and sharing.

So my posts may remain sporadic but I hope to share more about Bridger and our journey as Six Degrees Of Data gets up and running over the coming months.

In the meantime, if you have a passion for the Semantic Web, Linked Open Data, URI's, sparkle and tuples, then give me a call.

 

The Death of BIG Business intelligence

In the second decade of the 21st century the BI platforms from the SIMO vendors (SAP, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle) are dinosaurs.

A provocative statement - but bear with me.

Over the past few years I've blogged about a lot on the emerging trends of information management: real-time, BIG data, agile BI, actionable performance management and the like. The one thing that they have in common is that they are all big. Either big in terms of expensive or big in terms of the changes that they require within organisations.

I've tried to relate many of these trends to practical actions that (for those of us without large budgets) we can still extract value from. The context of these actions is that I have often been advising medium and large commercial businesses with existing business intelligence operations. So what I have experienced may not necessarily apply to government or small organisations.

Frequently my advice has involved technologies from one or more of the BI platforms from the SIMO vendors. SIMO and cheap are not words that go together. It's not a criticism of the platforms. They are what they are but I argue that their time has past because there are now a number of alternative approaches available that leverage newer low cost products and methods.

I have been increasingly looking to the benefits of open standards and web-based solutions to create low cost platforms without further investment in the SIMO vendor platforms. In the past I have used open source to extend SIMO platforms so that I didn't have to pay for the 'enterprise version' or 'additional module' that the SIMO vendors always seem to suggest when I want my platform to do something new.

An example of this was to extend our web-based dashboards to include sparklines¹. This type of graphic was not supported by the SIMO vendor product at the time but was easily extended using open source. It also saved the company the considerable expense of buying the enterprise dashboard for $250,000 + 20% annual support charge.

Now I have questioned the idea of using the SIMO platform at all. In the above scenario I today have invested in something like Tableau which although very definitely not based on open source code, is significantly cheaper to purchase and more adaptable to a variety of data sources and presentation types.

At this point, I will digress into more technical considerations. So if you become glassy-eyed at the mention of java, then it's best if you skip over the next couple of paragraphs and start reading about the example.

Open standards-based initiatives make our world of data so much more open than it once was. Everyone has heard of Big Data, but there are also dozens of open initiatives such as Mondrian (or more correctly: the Pentaho Analysis Services Community Edition) - an Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) server that enables business users to analyze large quantities of data in real-time.

Why do we care? Mondrian gives us an open standard way to access OLAP using Java on the client side. I'm not referring to XML/A the 'open' standard that Microsoft has been promoting for some years. XML/A is not truly open. Mondrian and Saiku should provide a true open driver capability to those of us building best-of-breed platforms. In time, I hope that market pressures will convince the SIMO vendors to build their own drivers for Mondrian.

A lot of brainpower has been invested over recent years improving database technologies so that they better support business intelligence activities. Combine this with the computing power now available on our desktops and in our data centres and clouds and I think you will find that best-of-breed technology stacks where you decide each layer will often do the job more sustainably and cheaper than an equivalent SIMO investment.

An Example

I can best explain the business logic behind my ideas by taking an example such as business MDM (master data management).

Old School

You purchase an MDM solution from the SIMO vendor you already have in-house. Let's take IBM in this case. So you will need to purchase the Websphere Business Glossary and probably the MetaData Server and Workbench. What's this going to cost? I'm guessing $1 million or more for an enterprise license once you factor in the specialist technical skills you will need to integrate it into your organisation.

IBM's Websphere Platform (courtesy IBM)

Now Websphere is a nice platform and the integration between DataStage, QualityStage, Information Analyzer and Business Glossary is a joy to have as a business manager of this stuff. I've just never had the business case to buy the entire platform. This is true of the majority of IBM platforms implemented across Asia-Pacific today. IBM is no exception and this is true of the other SIMO platforms. Budgets, capabilities and maturity levels almost always mean that only parts of a SIMO platform are implemented in an organisation. What a missed opportunity - but there is no point in crying over spilt milk. If the business case to implement entire platforms existed, then the SIMO vendors would be the first to let you know.

Microsoft is the exception to this rule, having a much cheaper licensing model. Unfortunately their MDM capability is very much a 'you build it' one, so the TCO (total cost of ownership) is still significant.

The challenge today is being smarter and more effective than past attempts. 

New School

Means that you leverage your existing investments - often those in web solutions.

For example, an MDM on-the-cheap solution would be to have your content management (CMS) platform hold critical business metadata. SharePoint is frequently the CMS of choice for large traditional corporations. Even if not already implemented, Using SharePoint to build a custom workflow and collaboration solution is pretty straightforward. So with a modest effort, the CMS can support an intranet-based community of business owners to create and maintain business metadata.

Making use of this business metadata is also possible. Continuing with the MDM scenario above, and assuming you use BusinessObjects, Cognos or similar, then you can export the business metadata easily to universes/cubes so that it is available to report writers, users and decision makers. This will drive the use of standard definitions of data and measures and make enterprise performance management easier.

We are also reaching the point where the presentation layer products (reports, dashboards and scorecards) from the SIMO vendors are now intelligently integrating back into - you guessed it - the CMS's like SharePoint. So production and consumption of business metadata is done on the most widespread platform available within the organisation.

This takes BI and IM out of the analytic ghetto and integrates it seamlessly into the corporate intranet - and beyond.

Cost? A conservative $100,000.

 Conclusions

What's the overall result? You get 50% or more of the benefits at 15% or less of the cost. Ongoing maintenance is also less. Most crucial of all is that the cheaper option is also the one most likely to be funded by an organisation. Why? Simple: it's CHEAPER.

This blog started with the statement that the SIMO vendors were dinosaurs. This is not quite true, but as my example above illustrates, it is now time to integrate your existing SIMO investments into your corporate intranet. Not by buying more SIMO products. Instead use more open technologies to integrate them into the intranet. Treat the SIMO-based data and report repositories as services to be consumed via a web front-end that does not require those extra SIMO products.

I thought about calling this approach 'Poorman's BI' and 'Lagging-edge BI' but I will stick with another term that I have used in the past: 'Slow BI'. It is slow in a good way because I have seen this approach allow an organisation to build a level of support for BI that is solid, broadbased and delivering benefits that the organisation can measure and acknowledge.

Slow BI provides an enduring organisational and technological platform that focuses limited resources on delivering practical business capabilities. These become part of the operational business and decision making processes among people that are only dimly aware of business intelligence and information management. This is an important step towards the elimination of analytic ghettos and the creation of an information workforce.

Slow BI over the long term exceeds the benefits of the SIMO platforms as they frequently struggle to achieve widespread adoption outside of the analytic ghettos. Perhaps slow-and-steady beats the big-bang?

 

 ¹ Sadly Microsoft has recently tried to patent sparklines - despite the wide acknowledgement that Edward Tufte invented and defined sparkline as a term to describe "small, high resolution graphics embedded in a context of words, numbers, images".