Author Archive
Unclassified + Unclassified = Classified
by Pete Bell
Hollywood has taught us that intelligence is secret: signal intelligence, like communications intercepts; imagery intelligence, like spy satellites; and human intelligence, like Mata Hari. But intelligence analysts say that many of their best sources aren’t secret, they’re open source (that’s “open source” as in publicly available, not as in free source code.) But feed it [...]
In: HCIR, Search/BI convergence
Interview: Are Search Engines and Libraries Competitors?
by Pete Bell
Interviewer Brett Bonfield pulls off a tough balancing act in a new conversation with me and the founder of the web search engine DuckDuckGo, Gabe Weinberg: How do you ask the same set of questions of both a web search and search applications company? You can read the interview on the best-named library blog ever, [...]
TEDxBoston: The Future Of Search vs. Seeing The Future With Search
by Pete Bell
TEDx conferences, the local offshoots of TED, are more experimental in format than the classic TED talk. An innovation of TEDxBoston is the “Adventure” — an immersive trip that puts the big ideas of TED into the context of a physical location. This year, there were nearly two dozen, including a tour of Dean Kamen’s [...]
QlikTech’s IPO & Vigilante BI
by Pete Bell
We’re often asked about how Endeca’s BI offering compares to QlikView — more than usual with their “heavily oversubscribed” IPO this morning of their parent company QlikTech (QLIK).
The comparisons aren’t surprising. If you read their S-1 IPO filing, you’ll find spots where you could cut-and-paste “Endeca” for “QlikView.” For example,
“We have pioneered a powerful, easy-to-use [...]
Listening to the Customers’ Story
by Pete Bell
My favorite part of the Endeca year just started with our sixth annual call for Navigator Award nominations, recognizing the most visionary Endeca deployments. What’s most fascinating to me about the awards is hearing our customers tell their stories in their own words.
We have our own narratives about each facet of the Endeca story. For [...]
In: Search/BI convergence, miscellaneous :)
Hadoop + Hive + Endeca, Spotted in the Wild
by Pete Bell
In his post MapReduce just semi-good for semi-structured data, Adam Ferrari answered one of his FAQs about the relationship between Endeca and MapReduce, the popular big data cruncher. Now here’s one example of them complementing each other.
The question Adam answered was, if MapReduce is so powerful for processing big data, then what role does [...]
Bring Back the Dead Ends
by Pete Bell
There’s still so much room for innovation on faceted search user experiences. Here’s a great improvement that’s still rarely seen in the wild: graying out dead ends instead of removing them. “Gray ends” are just for certain cases, but in those conditions, they make a big difference. Moreover, they exemplify one of the great Edward [...]
Faceted Search, Without Electricity
by Pete Bell
Yesterday, Paul Sonderegger blogged great examples of reporting and filing systems from before the days of computers, including DuPont’s “chart room” and the 19th century invention of the vertical file. Beyond their appeal to fans of oak cabinetry, those early systems remind us that the design of a system can be independent of its implementation, [...]
It Listens More Than It Speaks
by Pete Bell
“If men do not pour new wine into old bottles, they do something almost as bad — they invest old words with new meanings.” That’s Herb Simon’s warning at the beginning of his landmark speech, “Designing Organizations for an Information Rich World.”
Last time out, I willfully ignored him, making the claim that Simon, father of [...]
The Nobel Prize For Attention Spans
by Pete Bell
During a foreign crisis in the late 1960s, a government agency found itself starved for information. They reacted by upgrading their intelligence system, replacing their slow teletype machines with the latest technology, high-throughput line printers. The result? When the next crisis hit, they were even more starved for information.
That was one jumping-off point for Herb [...]
