Posts tagged Don’t
Data Visualization for People Who Don’t Visualize Data: CA ERwin 8.2
Feb 3rd
In enterprises everywhere, including even the largest ones, the transition to cloud-based architectures has brought a new class of managers into the computing process. Suddenly, personnel managers and folks whose purview had been limited to finance and personnel, are being doubled-up with oversight roles for cloud deployments. The back office is no longer in the back (or the basement), and now these new managers are wondering: What is all this we’re dealing with?
Donna Burbank – who’s a senior director of product marketing for CA Technologies’ long-time data visualization tool, ERwin, has a new phrase for this class of customers: business sponsors. “When I talk to our customers, they tell me it’s a whole new… thing, for lack of a more technical word. They’ve heard of SQL Server, but what is this SQL Azure thing? They don’t have the skill sets, and may be nervous about that. These business sponsors might not be moving the information, but they want to see it. And they don’t want to look at those database scripts. They want to look at something they can understand.”
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So it is that CA Technologies found itself in the business of manufacturing a class of software that a new and growing chunk of its customers might not actually care about all that much: database visualization tools. ERwin has been the market share leader in this category ever since its creation in 1998. Its typical customers have been database architects (DBAs), the people whose jobs are to model the classifications and structures for the relational data that businesses rely upon every day.
Welcome to Your World
But the shift to cloud technologies has partly been fueled by the need for tremendous space for data warehousing – to house the huge data stores generated by millions of Internet customer transactions. It’s that shift which is pushing data outside of the constraints of traditional SQL relational databases. That push is forcing businesses to examine, some for the very first time, the structure of their data. And what they’re seeing, they don’t understand.
“A lot of the move to the cloud is a business decision. The technical people doing the move are probably still the DBAs, but they’re challenged,” CA’s Burbank tells RWW. “There will always be that core group of people who want to use a data model, that’s our sweet spot right now: the data architect, the DBA. Those people and more would like to use a Web-based interface.”
ERwin’s new Web portal, she explains, is a browser-based interface for information that has otherwise been modeled for DBAs by ERwin Data Modeler (which itself moves to version 8.2 this week). This new portal will help both architects and Burbank’s “sponsors” to analyze the relationships of data from a business impact standpoint. “If I’m building a data warehouse, I want to see how data moves from the source system to the target warehouse to the reporting tool. Maybe I’m changing a data element; what other parts of the organization are affected? You could sort of get that through ERwin’s repository [in Model Manager] with some queries, but it wasn’t the tool for that.”
The new, more objective breakdown aims to give multiple classes of users a comprehension of the data that they may have never had before. A “sponsor” who wants to search for relationships is going to expect search to behave like Google, Burbank explains. So the Web Portal tool gives that user a text-based search query line (shown above). What that user gets in return will be something that may explain what tables or fields relate to the search criteria, but it might not directly correlate to the model as the original DBA intended.
As Burbank explains, the business user, not getting a complete overview from the initial response, may decide to export the data he’s seeing into Excel, and generate some PivotTables from them. The DBA, on the other hand, may use the Portal’s new graphical impact analysis tools to drill down further, or perhaps execute a “What If?” experiment. If a column is changed on a table, for instance, the DBA can see how the rest of the schema is impacted. “It’s that type of drilldown over the Web that they could never do before,” she remarks.
Big data vs. “lots of data”
All this said, ERwin is not quite yet a data warehousing assistance tool. While CA’s Donna Burbank says it’s something her company is considering, she points out that Hadoop and the restructuring of data it entails, lend themselves to very different situations.
“I’ve done several presentations where I’ve explained to people that there’s ‘big data,’ and then there’s ‘lots of data,’” she relates. “And these are different use cases. Maybe I’m an energy company, and I’m trying to use a Hadoop-type structure to see uses across my different [operating units], and I need to eventually manage that in a warehouse. It’s that analysis of that big data that then goes into a data model. One use case [involves] massive volume, real-time, more of a programmatic approach to data. There’s a lot of messaging there around, is data modeling going away? Is data warehousing going away? Today, it’s two different use cases. You’re doing an analysis, and then you use the data model to make sense of that raw data. And if I’m going to use it for a BI report, that’s when your data model comes in. I’ve done my data analysis with the big data; here’s my data model to say which pieces of that I used in the warehouse.”
Real-time analysis of big data, she goes on, may enable DBAs to add some elements to the relational data model that they may not have seen before.
As for the other use case, Burbank agrees that data modeling may never be appealing to 100% of the “sponsor” audience. But making it appeal to a somewhat greater audience through more intuitive graphics, along with Google-like search, could go a long way toward enabling those tasked with new responsibilities to be able to better understand what they are, and carry them out with a greater sense of confidence.
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…Because Most SEOs Don’t Know What Strategy Means
Feb 2nd
There seems to be some confusion when people talk about SEO strategies that could lead to problems for your own efforts…and your clients. What’s interesting is this confusion seems to be created and sustained not by people who don’t know what they are talking about, but the very people who should know what they are [...]
Follow SEJ on Twitter @sejournal
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Google Responds to Privacy Policy Backlash: Don’t Log In
Jan 30th
For years legislators, privacy advocates, and the FTC have suggested Google simplify its privacy policies. In consolidating policies associated with various Google products, it stands to reason the company believed it was satisfying such requests.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
SEO Efforts Don’t Have to be Dead on Arrival – Search Engine Journal
Jan 10th
 Search Engine Journal |
SEO Efforts Don't Have to be Dead on Arrival
Search Engine Journal Well, for some business owners, they probably feel that way sometimes about their company's SEO efforts. The intent may be good, but the bottom line is the search engine marketing campaigns their companies are employing are on a fast track to nowhere. … |
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You Don’t Need A College Degree to Be a Great Coder
Jan 7th
Okay, so we all know that both Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg never finished their Harvard degrees, and look where they are now. But for the rest of us who just aspire to have a full time job, let alone an equity share in a hot startup, is a college degree really necessary to code? Maybe not, according to this blog post from Good Technology.
Erin Biba, who wrote the post back in November, asks: “Programming isn’t accounting. It requires creative thinkers and problem solvers, people unlikely to thrive in the confines of a college classroom. So why do hiring managers apply traditional methods to a nontraditional job?”
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Exactly. And she cites a recent study by Dice.com that puts the number of available tech jobs at more than 84,000. While not all of them are programmers, certainly a good portion of them are. It is a good time to be a nerd.
The stories about the perks at Google and Facebook are now the stuff of urban legend. I was recently in the trendy SoMa neighborhood of San Francisco, and visited a typical 200-person tech firm that had the required bicycles, snack room, and catered lunches and dinners. So why do hiring managers insist on the sheepskin (that means the actual diploma, for those of you too young to remember the reference)? Tradition, perhaps?
I went shopping around a few typical college Web course catalogs, looking for the kinds of software engineering classes that would teach kids today how to do a Hadoop cluster or learning CSS/XML. I came up empty-handed. Granted, I didn’t spend hours on this research.
Take a look at this course listing from the University of Texas at Austin’s Computer Engineering Department. Disappointing, from a place that has an active software community. Or how about this list of classes offered at the University of Urbana-Champaign, where the Web browser was invented? You can find plenty of advanced computer research happening on campus, but teaching something practical to undergrads? Not in the catalogs that I could find.
Both Vatterott and ITT Technical Institute teach Java programming as part of their certificates, so there is some hope for those who have the time and money to afford these expensive programs. But not on every one of their campuses.
As the software market heats up (and you have noticed that it is heating up, right?), the idea of a degree becomes less and less necessary, especially if you can prove your coding chops and demo what you have actually built. As you can see from my brief exploration, sometimes a CS degree doesn’t mean that you can actually program, and many schools are woefully behind on teaching the sorts of tools and techniques that the bread and butter of modern Web apps.
Granted, teaching programming skills is a lot more than offering a course in Java. But you need both the theory of software design and the actual language instruction too. It would be like teaching French by only showing what art you can find in the Louvre and d’Orsay museums. In the meantime, we need a better match between courseware and software practice, and better understanding by hiring managers of what is important.
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Don’t Fall Into The Made-For-SEO Website Trap – Search Engine Land
Jan 3rd
 Caribbean Media Vision |
Don't Fall Into The Made-For-SEO Website Trap
Search Engine Land There are many things that categorize a Made for SEO website. Large scale sites are prone to fall into this trap, because their scale often has them already competing for a large number of search terms across their many pages. … BizCloud Provides SEO Tips for New Websites 12 SEO Resolutions for 2012 5 SEO Strategies When Naming and Branding Your Company |
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You Don’t Have To Use Twitter To Invest $300M In Twitter
Dec 19th
The $300 million secondary investment Twitter confirmed Monday morning comes from a key figure in a region where Twitter is experiencing some of its fastest growth.
Never mind that Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the Saudi investor whose Kingdom Holding investment firm has stakes in Apple, Citigroup, and now, 3% ownership of Twitter, isn’t a big user of the service himself (Prince Alwaleed follows just 25 users with his account – including Fox News and Barack Obama – and he hasn’t tweeted since Oct. 6 when he sent out RIP condolences to Steve Jobs).
Arabic is the fastest growing language used on Twitter and the company has gotten credit for playing a role in the Arab Spring uprisings in Northern Africa and the Middle East earlier this year, and that makes Prince Alwaleed’s investment significant.
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“Kingdom realizes the importance of social networks like Twitter and their future growth prospects, and decided to benefit from this trend,” Samer Darwiche, an analyst at Gulfmena Investments in Dubai, told Bloomberg News.
The investment was confirmed by a Twitter spokesman, but the company declined to give further details.
Twitter, which remains a private company, was valued at $8 billion in August. A series of recent management shakeups and staff departures has had some speculating that the company is growing through some growing pains, but other see it as an attempt to solidify its engineering talent and prep the company for more growth and, perhaps, an initial public stock offering.
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Why Don’t More People Care About Tech News?
Dec 16th
Earlier this week on his personal blog, one of Google’s product management directors, Hunter Walk, posted a very interesting sampling of responses from technology journalists about the broad question of whether they are receiving the level of journalism from our business that they deserve. I found it very interesting that a product manager from any company was able to reveal at least as much, if not more, about the folks who usually interview him than they reveal about his company.
The emerging theme from the journalists’ responses was distinct exasperation and frustration with the level of interest that you, their reader, have demonstrated in their product. It’s getting “harder… to convince people to read these stories” on broader subjects like piracy, said one. Another remarked, “I wish more people cared about” the very topic on which his publication was founded (you’ll know the one I mean), and which you would think his livelihood is based. And a third went so far as to blame readers for being interested in the wrong things, saying, “I am dismayed every day by the crap that people seem to find worthy of page views.”
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I can sympathize to some extent. When your job is to engage people’s interest not only in topics that should be naturally engaging and attractive, but at the same time in the most obscure and esoteric ones (I have a piece I’m working on now about a new high-bandwidth VoIP routing component for use by regional voice carriers), and you’re given the tools to measure what appears to be reader sentiment on a moment-by-moment basis, the feedback you get will be depressing. Stories about the everyday innovations that happen in our business here and there, only attract about a few hundred people each. If your career began with a publication whose claim to fame was dethroning TV Guide and Penthouse as the nation’s most purchased newsstand magazine, you start to have dreams about how many more people you could attract if you stood atop a kiosk at an airport gate and banged a tambourine. (And as Carl Jung might point out, you start to refer to yourself in the second person.)
I thought you cared
But here’s something I know, and it’s what keeps me working every day. I know that the conclusion arrived at by these folks Hunter Walk interviewed is wrong. I know when I walk into a café and listen to the stories you tell about the technology you use, and when you hold it in your hand to show me something you’ve discovered, you’re far more interested in the depths and details of technology than any analytics or heuristics or demographics would pretend to reveal.
The problem (dear Brutus) is not with you. And frankly, it’s not with us either. There’s something keeping us apart, that’s disconnecting you and me from what we want to know, in ways we haven’t yet begun to fathom.
The Web as a tool for generating interest in information and ideas is overrated. I will go so far as to say it is defective. While nothing thus far created in the history of humankind has given individuals greater access to information at any level, from any place, as a web – as a device that links information with common contexts together to make it meaningful – it fails miserably.
Would you like fries with that?
I’ve used this analogy for over a decade, but here I go again: We “tech news” journalists perceive a world where the product that we produce is being under-consumed. It is as if we established a chain of French fries restaurants, serving up French fries at incredible volume. Out front of our stores, we build long treadmills where we stamp out packets of fries, one after the other, piping hot. When not enough people show up to buy fries, we produce more. We compete with one another to make the most fries.
And when we wonder why, why people aren’t eating our French fries, we try innovating. We serve up varieties of fries with your choice of flavored salts, toppings, and packet colors. We try sour cream, salsa, different textures of ketchup. It attracts some interest for a while but then it dies down again.
“Why Don’t More People Eat Our Fries?” we write on a big banner, which we hang outside our store in big, bold letters. Even pleading with our patrons fails. On a late Friday night after a particularly hopeful sales promotion for French Fries with Chocolate Sprinkles and Free Justin Bieber Doll crashes miserably, we come to the obvious conclusion: People hate potatoes.
Hopefully this metaphorical model makes a little plainer what analytics services fail to account for: The Web, such as it is today, mandates that all information be served up on individual plates, a la carte. The most effective tools and apps produced for the Web today are those which offer folks some way of making a meal of it all (Pulse, Flipboard, News360, ShowYou, Qwiki). But despite the advent of the hyperlink which supposedly sparked this entire revolution, the Web does not link itself to itself. More to the point, it does not generate its own context – the frame of reference that gives meaning, flavor, and value to one element by relating it to all the others.
Main course change
It is therefore somehow fitting that the one response Walk received that speaks to the core of the real problem, came from the writer for the publication that defined context for generations.
“There are topics which receive significant coverage, but are not being addressed in ways that I find particularly effective,” wrote Quentin Hardy of The New York Times. “That is, I think people may care about them, but they tend to fall back on familiar tropes and biases which prevent them from engaging with them successfully. ‘Care more’ in this sense might be seen as ‘address differently.’ [An example is] our national financial situation. Ideological biases, strengthened by a desire to avoid painful disruptions to the status quo, are preventing many people from addressing the choices we have made about revenues in and payments out.”
It was a question about tech news, but for Hardy, it became about the economy. There are aspects about our business that are not the least bit interesting, and may not even make much sense, taken unto themselves. In a media environment that is obsessed with what the business calls “verticals,” we forget that vertical is only one dimension. If we wonder why the cross-sections of our readership look somehow wrong, small, insignificant, uncaring, perhaps it is because no one out there is as vertical as we think they are.
I love asparagus. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say it is my favorite vegetable. But not one time in my life did I munch on a sprig of asparagus as a snack. At the risk of sounding self-righteous, the reason I know as much about the industry of technology as I do is because I see it in a context that gives every element of the subject some degree of pertinence to the rest of the world – to the broader economy, to the subject of our world’s infrastructure, to the question of our fate as a society. In other words, I eat my asparagus but in the context of a full meal.
If publishers are to resolve the issue of maintaining your attention in tech news, we in this business will all need to come to the collective realization that tech news is a side dish. We need to break the barriers that the Web imposes upon us, and learn to provide it with a main course.
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Don’t Buy 3G/4G on Your Tablet: Wifi is Fine
Dec 13th
While walking through one of the T-Mobile or AT&T or Verizon stores this holiday season, you may be tempted to buy a tablet after looking at the low price tags on some of them. However, before you buy a tablet from your mobile service provider, understand their total cost and see if you even need a tablet with 3G/4G, or if Wifi will suffice. You might be surprised at how much money you can save.
Indeed, according to a new study from NPD/Connected Intelligence, a higher percentage of tablet users are buying Wifi-only tablets.
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R. Paul Singh has been a founder and CEO of four high tech startups with three successful exits. He is currently the CEO of SocialNuggets, a social media data and sentiment real time research and brand analysis firm.
Do I need 3G/4G on my tablet?
Most tablet manufacturers (except Amazon Kindle) offer either Wifi or Wifi plus 3G/4G options. Wifi access is available in most homes and offices, as well as in most coffee shops worldwide for free or for a nominal fee. In my last 18 months of owning a tablet, there have been few days when I wished 3G was available on my tablet. You can read books, most magazines on flipboard and even email even without connectivity by caching part of these files before leaving the house.
With 3G/4G connectivity, your tablet can always be connected (subject to availability of 3G/4G connectivity from your mobile operator) to the Internet. However, unlike smartphones, tablets are not generally used on the go and so having always on connectivity just doesn’t offer the same benefits for the cost incurred. So if you need 3G/4G connectivity there are other options besides owning a tablet with such a capability for lot lower price.
Getting a 3G/4G tablet will cost you over $600 for 2 years
Most tablets cost about $100 or more for including the 3G/4G options in addition to Wifi which is standard on most tablets. For most Android tablets, many mobile operators offer a discounted price for a 2 year contract. I looked at some of the tablets at T-Mobile and AT&T stores and saw that for an initial discount of about $200, you end up committing to an additional cost of $960 for T-Mobile, $840 for AT&T and $720 for Verizon Wireless. So the discount of $200-$300 upfront ends up costing you an additional $100 on the price of the tablet plus $500+ of extra cost for getting that 3G/4G connectivity which you could get much cheaper in other ways.
For Apple’s iPad, no mobile operator offers any discount upfront but the tablet ends up costing $130 more plus you pay a minimum of $15/month (250MB) to AT&T or $20/month (1GB) to Sprint or $30/month to Verizon (2GB).
How to get always on-connectivity on your tablet without buying 3G/4G tablet
If you have a Wifi tablet and are not in the Wifi zone, there are two choices available for getting your tablet hooked up to the Internet.
- Get a mobile hotspot
- Get Tethering option on your smartphone
Get a mobile hotspot
This could actually get expensive as the data charges are similar to that of the tablet. However, this alternative is only beneficial if you have a need to connect your laptop to the Internet all the time for the same reason you need to connect your tablet.
Get Tethering option on your smartphone
This option, available on most Android, Blackberry and iPhone models, allows you to turn your smartphone into a mobile hotspot. With this option, you can have 5 devices including your tablet and laptop connect to the Internet. The good news is that this option can be turned on and off on most mobile networks in the US. Sprint charges only $10/mo extra for this option while other mobile operators including AT&T and Verizon charge $20/mo. The only negative of this option is the battery drain that your smartphone will experience.
3G/4G connectivity is generally not needed on most tablets.
If needed, don’t buy this from your mobile operator as it will set you back by $600 on a 2-year contract despite initial $200-$300 discount. If you need to connect your tablet to the Internet all the time, look at using your existing mobile hotspot or just add tethering option on your smartphone which will save you money and won’t lock you into a contract.
Discuss
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How To Make Ads That Don’t Suck
Dec 6th
Ads are as much a part of the Web as all that other stuff next to them, such as blog posts. We’ve gotten used to getting much (or all) of our online content for free, so we pay with our eyeballs instead. Advertisers pay publishers for little fragments of our attention on the off-chance that some of us will notice, be intrigued, click and hopefully buy something.
It’s a generalization to say that the realities of this market have driven the quality of Web experiences into the ground. But surely, you’ve noticed lots of annoying, flashing, animated ads bothering you to do something. Well, remember Cooliris? In October, we covered its first forays into 3D ads. Cooliris has a feeling we Web users would rather be delighted by ads than harassed. Sound too good to be true? Read on and see for yourself.
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The First Draft
When we first met Cooliris, it was introducing its new ad unit, AdJitsu, which had just launched its first interactive, touch-controlled, 3D mobile ads.
One of the campaigns was for the Samsung Galaxy S II. Instead of a boring banner ad, consumers saw a phone jiggling around inside the banner in response to the accelerometers of their iPhones and iPads. When they tapped the ad, it opened up into a sort of app, in which they could zoom in and out on the product, manipulating it with familiar touchscreen gestures, in order to check it out.
It was neat. But was it revolutionary? Would the ability to play with a virtual model of a phone really convert any viewers into customers? Cooliris enlisted the help of some neuromarketers to make the case that AdJitsu ads were at least more interesting than passive videos, but the brain scans left us with more questions than answers. Sure, these ads are stimulating, but does that make them effective?
The Next Level
Well, Cooliris has been working on making the product speak for itself. What they showed me this time is not just better; it is bigger. There’s more to these new ads. You can explore them, experience them. You don’t need your brain scanned to find them enjoyable.
And there’s more AdJitsu news than just new ad campaigns. Before, AdJitsu was an in-house mobile ad unit. Now, it’s a platform, and it goes beyond mobile devices. Using Web technology and developer-friendly tools, now any advertiser can make ads that don’t suck.
Setting The Ad World On Fire
“Our goal was to take the world of display advertising and set it on fire,” says AdJitsu product manager Aneesh Karve. He says that ads today don’t take advantage of the capabilities of today’s hardware. AdJitsu isn’t even stopping there; it is building an ad platform for devices one or two years down the road using next-generation graphics library WebGL. When phones get WebGL support and smoking-fast GPUs, AdJitsu will be ready for them.
The 3D models come from a variety of places. Some advertisers, like video game makers, already have 3D models ready to go. Other manufacturing companies, whether they make cars or phones, have engineering models at the ready that AdJitsu can simplify and prepare for the Web. Other ads use commercially available models or data, and some advertisers even spring for custom models. To bring those models to life in an interactive ad, AdJitsu has built versatile tools and a powerful engine.
The AdJitsu Engine
Currently, Apple doesn’t allow third-party advertisers to use WebGL, even though the mobile Safari browser supports it. The only ads allowed to use WebGL on iOS are Apple’s own iAds. Apple claims that this is because of security holes. Karve notes that it also lets Apple get a head start in 3D advertising on its platform. Either way, AdJitsu ads still run natively on iOS devices, and you build them with AdJitsu’s software development kit.
But for other devices, PCs, tablets and phones alike, the engine uses WebGL. The performance isn’t quite there yet on most Android phones, but it runs, and Cooliris is thinking ahead to next year’s phones, anyway. AdJitsu has built upon the Web and cutting-edge hardware to enable silky-smooth, immersive 3D ads that run anywhere, and that anyone can build.
The Tools: Do Your Own AdJitsu
AdJitsu’s tool is called PageKit. Developers can write an ad once and run it everywhere. PageKit even makes it easier for developers used to writing 2D code. It bridges the gap to 3D for them, so they don’t have to start over again and learn OpenGL, which Karve points out has a “pretty heady API.” You write in PageKit’s markup, and it all compiles down to the native iOS engine and the WebGL engine.
Need more perspective on that? Allow me to introduce Max. He’s 13. In this less-than-three-minute video, you can watch him build an AdJitsu ad in “62 or so” lines of code. Don’t worry, non-geeks; he explains the process amazingly well.
The Kicker: Better Analytics
For those still looking for a traditional “value-add” for these 3D ads, you don’t have to scrutinize an inscrutable brain scan this time. Cooliris has gone with something more easily measured.
Since users interact so extensively with these 3D models, AdJitsu ads can record heatmaps of which parts of the experience are most interesting to consumers. That’s valuable feedback for advertisers and product people, who can use it to figure out what kinds of features to emphasize. Can your average banner ad do that?
Ads That Don’t Suck
Instead of racing to the bottom with garish display ads, Cooliris has posed a challenge to the advertising world. With all this potential at our disposal, why do ads suck so much? They don’t have to. AdJitsu has proven they can be fascinating, beguiling, even beautiful.
What will we do when the ads are better than the stuff we’re putting next to them? I know what I’ll do: I’ll try to make even better stuff. Thus far, Web ads have been a race to the bottom. Hats off to Cooliris for raising the bar for all Web experiences, not just for ads.
What do you think of these ads? Would you play with one?
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