Hulu Hops Onto Caption Search Technology

By Dave Fidlin

With the Internet maturing and online video become the norm - not a novelty item - enhancements are being created for streaming content. Caption searching, one of those enhancements, was added recently to the popular site Hulu. But a smattering of smaller companies had already been offering a similar service before Hulu added the feature to its site in late December.

Hulu Labs, the online video portal’s development arm, is running the feature in beta while engineers continue to work on perfecting the technology.

In a statement, Eugene Wei, Hulu’s vice president of product, says the feature will enable users to search for captions of thousands of videos across hundreds of shows. For now, Wei says users can access the feature through Hulu Labs’ website. Eventually, a feature tab will be included on all Hulu shows that have captions.

Wei points out how captions search might be beneficial to a viewer of an online video. Wei says he was watching an episode of “House” recently, and a joke between main character Dr. Foreman and Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin took place. Wei says he was in a quandary when he wanted to watch the episode a second time.

“I couldn’t remember which episode it was in, let alone which moment within the episode,” Wei says in the statement. “With the new caption search, I just type in ‘Mike Tomlin,’ and voila.”

Jason Blackwell, practice director with ABI Research, says features like Hulu’s caption search will be an asset to users with online content growing exponentially each year.

“It’s going to be important for all service providers,” Blackwell says. “I think (Hulu’s caption search) is an important step in what will become the future.”

Blackwell says ABI will soon begin to study features like caption search and examine specifically how it can be beneficial not only to online video, but other specialized services, such as pay TV and other cable and satellite services with a user interface.

While Hulu’s caption search is breaking new ground for the company, it is not a pioneer in the technology. Numerous smaller companies have offered similar services, some as long as five years.

One of those companies, Realtime Transcription Inc., offers a service called Transendia. Tanya Ward English, technology director for Realtime Transcription, says Transendia offers a video search based on the full text of a transcript, in addition to glossary tags for non-spoken information within a video.

Ward English says Transendia caters to a higher-end market. Many of the company’s clients do not want videos hosted on such public sites as YouTube. Instead, she says, those clients opt to use a customized player with full search and playing options from Transendia.

“One of the most useful and unique things about our technology, I think, is something upon which we have a patent pending,” Ward English says. “That’s the ability go pin-point search video or audio files directly from a text search engine like Google or Bing.”

Ward English, a self-described advocate for people with hearing loss, says caption search technology is especially beneficial for online users who have such a condition.

Blinkx, another smaller, specialized company, was launched in 2005 and went public two years later. Suranga Chandratillake, CEO and founder of Blinkx, says his company offers an advanced video search engine feature that gives online video users an opportunity to not only search for captions within a program, but to look for titles and episode names of particular programs.

“We can extract a lot of information from what’s going on inside a video,” Chandratillake says. “Our video search engine doesn’t just work on our own site. It can also get results from other sites like YouTube, or any other site with video out there.”

Chandratillake says Blinkx has been a popular service with advertisers, and revenue has doubled in the past three years.

More companies are sure to join Hulu, Realtime Transcription, Blinkx and others as the quest continues to make caption search technology an integral part of online video.

UK Launches Semantic Data Site: Will the Rest of the World Follow?

By Linda Broughton

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, credited with conceptualizing if not inventing the World Wide Web, is not finished yet.

Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, both appointed as Information Advisors to the UK Government, are coordinating Data.gov.uk. Data.gov.uk plans to provide the general public with a single access point to all the United Kingdom’s national, regional and local statistics, surveys and studies - all the information in the UK collected under the umbrella of the national government.

In a passionate speech at TED, Berners-Lee explains that no data is an island - it’s the relationships between different data that make the data valuable, insightful and useful. And these relationships are not often visible to the human eye - if anything, our own preconceptions and individual personalities often interpret rather than understand the relationships between different data, closing us off to real social trends and concerns.

Berners-Lee wants to use the Web to bypass the human attempts to dress up data for personal or political purposes. Instead, he wants the Data.gov.uk platform to expose the real significance buried within the data-to-data relationships through encouraging the digital mapping of raw, unadulterated social, political and economic data. Berners-Lee calls this ‘linked data,’ a precursor to the semantic Web that he believes will one day explain the meaning behind how we collect, calculate, evaluate and use the data that we post online.

Not all of these data relationships will be obviously significant - imagine an application that maps the relationship between data discussing the annual amount of Cadbury chocolate sold in Yorkshire and the corresponding annual number of failed marriages within the same geographical location and time period. However, the project is expected to help identify unexpected and insightful data relationships, insights that would normally take several decades and hundreds or thousands of brilliant socialist scientists, statisticians, psychologists, focus groups and public policy experts to simply suspect.

The automatic data relationship mapping will allow the UK government and the UK public to discover connections, trends and causal relationships that will inform public policy for decades to come. If implemented properly, Data.gov.uk could come very close to comprehensively mapping and explaining the past and real-time behavior of the public - and thus allow platform users to accurately plan the future of a society.

Of course, the key to the concept is the raw data. Currently, there are already third-party applications that map roads and potholes in the UK, provide statistics and information about the location of doctors throughout the UK, and give up-to-date information about local schools. This is useful data to aggregate but it is not yet generating anything that a few quick, targeted searches online can’t. The next push will encourage interested developers to create applications linking the different data to generate data relationship maps that give researchers at think tanks and academic institutions something to ponder and investigate.

Supporters of the open data movement are urging private businesses to follow the UK government’s example and release their raw data to the public. If the private sector keeps its data too close and too secret, the sector risks losing potential profits that would arise from information generated by an external comparison and review of their aggregated data. Moreover, the private sector makes up an important part of modern society. Accurately identifying, explaining and impacting public trends requires more than the government’s analysis of the population’s behavior, it requires an accurate understanding of the public’s practices in commerce and industry.

Data.gov.uk may soon be the way for the UK government (and anyone else interested) to keep several fingers not only on the pulse of modern UK society, but on its stomach, windpipe, eyes, mouth, ears, etc. The platform and its third-party applications may soon provide an in-depth and automatic monitor of modern British, Scottish and Northern Irish daily public life. Do the industries want to jump in now, developing their own applications and supplying their own data to complete the public picture, or will there always be a yawning gap in the data buried in the private sector’s own digital databanks?

http://www.opte.org/maps/tests/

A Mind of Its Own: Search Engine Technology Ever Pervasive

By James Zipadelli

Americans performed more than 15 billion searches in January, which is up 3 percent from the month before, the audience measurement service comScore says. The latest search engine rankings show that Google is still king when it comes to search engines. “Google Sites accounted for 9.9 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites (2.6 billion), Microsoft Sites (1.7 billion), Ask Network (574 million) and AOL LLC (375 million),” the release says.

Although Google spokesperson Nate Tyler declined to comment on Google’s numbers, he did say that Google Suggest Technology is an effective way to help users search for what they are looking for.

“As you type into the search box on Google Web Search, Google Suggest offers searches similar to the one you’re typing. Start to type [ new york ] — even just [ new y ] — and you’ll be able to pick searches for New York City, New York Times, and New York University (to name just a few). Type some more, and you may see a link straight to the site Google thinks you’re looking for — all from the search box,” Google’s Help Forum says. (Ask.com and Microsoft were not available for comment at press time.)

Kevin McFall, co-founder of the vertical search engine RushmoreDrive.com, says the level of difficulty “is pretty high” for anyone trying to gain a share in the search engine market because established search engines spend large amounts of money on marketing and advertising. However, he says there are ways a new search engine can differentiate themselves from their competition. RushmoreDrive.com was a sister site of Ask.com and was shut down in June 2009 due to the recession.

“One must position the value of one’s search in such a way as to change existing behaviors and habits of those who already use Google, Yahoo, AOL or Bing by offering them a reason to change and then delivering a rich enough experience to warrant their frequent return,” McFall says. “One must also realize that instead of taking on the major search players head on, one must find a way to backdoor them to get a slice of the market share instead of trying to compete directly.”

According to McFall, he was able to do this with Rushmore Drive.com by marketing his website as a discovery engine and a search engine. “We achieved the ability to deliver a richer and more relevant set of results through our unique index and page ranking algorithm, along with a distinguished universal results page, which delivered text, image, video and blog results all in one page,” McFall says.

He also suggested search engines that have a social component would be more successful long-term.

There are also specialized websites that find search engine technology useful. For example, Healthline Networks uses search engine technology to help customers with health and drug information.

Healthline Networks CEO West Shell says, “We’ve found out that consumer search can be complicated when it comes to health. Consumers and doctors speak different languages, and often consumers don’t know what to look for when they start.”

Shell says the technology Healthline Networks uses is based on “semantic taxonomy,” or classification, of health information. He also says the technology is always being updated to ensure customers have the latest information available and that they are partners with health carriers like Aetna.

Rich Kahn, CEO of the search engine eZanga.com, says his search engine is being redesigned and should be finished by late 2010.

The redesign allows eZanga.com to “significantly increase the number of sources we pull information from, improve our relevancy algorithm so that our results will be more accurate to the queries performed by our users [and] designing new technologies, that are not used by any other search engine at present, that will improve how we display our results to users in a way that will be more useful to our users,” Kahn says.

Google & Microsoft: Top Ad Networks See Double-Digit Increases

By Ron Callari

When audience measurement service, comScore, released its ranking of the top 15 advertising networks among U.S. Internet users, Microsoft Media Networks US and Google were the only two tech companies that posted double-digit growth in 2009 over the previous year.

With a 31-percent increase year over year, Microsoft was the fastest growing ad network according to this analysis. When approached for this article, several executives indicated they “never comment on comScore studies,” and “Microsoft does not have information to share regarding this.”

Neil Strother, practice director for ABI Research, indicates that large players like Microsoft are often reticent about validating or debating these types of stats. So Strother helped DMB by sharing his thoughts on comScore’s stats. He believes that the reason for Microsoft’s success this past year was due to the company “integrating their network across their four platforms: PC, Mobile, Gaming and Digital TV.” This combined synergy helped tit focus and allowed advertisers to dip into any of the company’s media properties such as MSN, XBox, Windows Live, Office Live and others,” without having to strike separate deals with each entity.

Strother also feels that during “economic downturns, advertisers and brands “will seek out the larger networks like Microsoft and Google because they are perceived as ’safe havens’ to conduct their business.” In so doing, while total ad networks increased 8 percent year over year, Microsoft most likely obtained a portion of its increase from “a market share shift from some of the smaller players like ValueClick, Tribal Fusion and AOL Advertising.”

Additionally Strother notes, since all networks showed increases year over year except for Traffic Marketplace and the Adconion Media Group, “Microsoft also benefitted in general by the increase in digital advertising over traditional media,” particularly with legacy newspaper ad revenues estimated to have fallen as much as 12 percent in 2009.

Google, on the other hand, did share some insights regarding the comScore report. And while Rachel Nearnberg, Google’s global communications spokesperson couldn’t “speak to the data point increase [13 percent] listed in the report,” she could report some of the reasons for the growth they have been experiencing. Attracting top line advertisers is a main reason, Nearnberg notes. For the “last 12 months, 94 of the top 100 Ad Age advertisers have advertised on the Google Content Network,” she says.

Google’s strategy is looking to help both brand and direct advertisers reach consumers through several innovative means. According to Nearnberg:

• Google has made recent improvements to its targeting tools on the Google Content Network to help advertisers match ad to content across the Web.
• Over the summer, Google launched contextual targeting that enables advertisers to focus on specific themes.
• Google launched view-through conversions in September 2009 to help advertisers better measure the impact of their display ad campaigns for those instances when an ad is seen, but not immediately clicked on.
• Google also launched a tool called Campaign Insights October 2009 to give advertisers reliable data about how a campaign has raised brand awareness, or active user interest, in a particular product or service. It looks beyond the traditional measures of clicks and conversions to calculate the incremental lift in both online search activity and website visits that result from a display ad campaign.

With the recent controversy in China whether or not Google will be pulling out of the country due to censorship issues and attacks on several of its users’ Gmail accounts, Nearnberg looks favorably on the future growth for Google and China. In another comScore study pertaining to the growth in the global search market, it showed China’s searches at 13.3 billion was second to the United States globally.

According to Nearnberg, “Asia [in general] has over 40 percent of the world’s Internet users and is an important region for Google.” Particularly in countries like China, “we’re excited about the opportunity for Chinese exporters to use Google’s ad tools to reach a global market.” She also adds that “the pace of mobile innovation in Asia is also extremely rapid, and mobile advertising is already a strong business for us, particularly in countries like Japan, which has a strong culture of mobile commerce.”

ABI’s Strother sees a “detente” eventually reached between the search engine giant and the superpower. With public critiques by Bill Gates and others who see this issue as overplayed in the media, Strother feels that both parties will acquiesce and over the long haul solve their differences behind “closed doors in quiet agreements.” According to Strother, “in the advertising space, there is too much at stake with wireless coming on very strong in China.”

While there are a lot of competing interests in play here and the world can applaud Google on taking the moral high ground, after the dust clears, this is “big business,” and Google will take all that into consideration in order to maintain its double-digit ad network increases in 2010.

Ron Callari is a freelance journalist and editorial cartoonist whose work has been published on AlterNet, CounterPunch and the Sacramento News & Review. He is currently a social media blogger for InventorSpot.com and the author of two graphic novels.

Google Steps Up White Space Chase

By John Greaves

Google recently made a significant move in the battle over white space by proposing to the FCC to be one of several administrators of a TV bandwith’s geo-location database. This is in response to FCC filings requiring such a database to minimize signal interference between white space devices and broadcast signals.

This is a key component of the fight to make unused white space available for bandwidth expansion, as signal interference is one of the key arguments made against such a move by white space opponents like the National Association of Broadcasters.

According to the proposal, Google would build and oversee the database as well as provide data repository, registration and determination of available channels/query process.

Having Google, a major industry player, be one of the administrators begs the question of whether letting Google keep track of what channels are available for bandwidth as well as the location and identification of all white space devices might not run counter to an open and competitive marketplace.

However, Rick Rotondo, CMO for Spectrum Bridge, which deployed the world’s first TV white spaces network and also applied to be a database manager, says Google’s proposal does not surprise him.

It’s a competitive environment,” Rotondo says. “But I think Google is actually trying to make the playing field more level.”

In a Jan. 8 blog on the Spectrum Bridge site, Rotondo had previously explained that the FCC is not granting unlimited authority in authorizing white space database managers.

“Specifically, in the case of TV white spaces database managers, the FCC is authorizing companies to represent themselves as being able to meet the minimum requirements the FCC has set out in its previous ‘Report and Order,’ as well as some new requirements spelled out in the recent Public Notice,” the blog states.

Rotondo’s comments echo Google’s official position on this issue. “I see myself here, in D.C., as playing kind of a defensive role, in terms of maintaining open platforms where they exist today, and more offensively, trying to be constructive in terms of creating new platforms and particularly ensuring that those new platforms also remain open to innovation and consumer choice,” says Richard Whitt, Google’s Washington Telecom and Media Counsel, in a January 2009 interview for CircleID.com.

That view has not changed. A Google spokesperson who asked not to be identified tells DMB, “We strongly supported the FCC’s decision to adopt an open, unlicensed model for white spaces, similar to what exists for Wi-Fi. Much as open, unlicensed access to the Wi-Fi spectrum has led to its widespread use, open, unlicensed access is also crucial to fulfilling the potential of white spaces.”

Whitt further supports the argument. “From the Google perspective, the C-Block, to us, was a successful story. We came into it with the hopes of triggering the openness conditions, by making the bid that would enable that to happen, which we did.”

Some may wonder if Google’s move signals the impending doom of 3G and 4G technology. However, such fears are unfounded, according to Digital Society analyst George Ou, a former network engineer who built and designed wired network, wireless network, Internet, storage, security and server infrastructure for various fortune 100 companies.

“The idea that you’re going to take unmanned white space and replace 3G and 4G is wrong. The guys that like white space always talk about propagation, and how Wi-Fi doesn’t have enough propagation,” Ou says. “What they don’t understand is propagation sounds like a good thing but it’s a bad thing. The more you can propagate the less you can use. The lower the power, the more the signal dies as it gets further away, the more you can use the same spectrum channels. That’s why Wi-Fi has such pathetically low signal strength, so you can reuse the same signals.”

Google tends to take the opposite view. A Google spokesperson says, “This spectrum is extremely valuable and has the potential to transform the way we connect to the Internet. As Larry Page has put it, ‘white spaces’ are like ‘Wi-Fi on steroids’ - wireless Internet with much faster speeds, stronger signals and more affordable costs.”

As far as the database is concerned, Spectrum Bridge’s Rotondo points out that the vague nature of the FCC’s ruling has left the door wide open for interpretation. “There is nothing saying you have to tell a device the best channel, you just have to give a list of available channels,” he said.

Google says it has yet to hear from the FCC regarding its proposal, which is understandable due to the enormity of creating a national broadband plan and presenting it to Congress in time for the new March 17 deadline.

John Greaves is a writer living in Dallas, Ga. His work has appeared in newspapers, magazines and websites.

Competing With Google is Like Dancing With Elephants

By Ned Smith

Google. It’s the master of all it surveys, an 800-pound elephant that’s not afraid to flex its muscles. “No company inspires more awe, or fear,” wrote Ken Auletta in Googled: The End of the World as We Know It. No one knows that better than the companies large and small that have had the temerity to challenge Mountain View’s dominion.

The landscape is littered with names of wannabes who became also-rans when they attempted to compete with Google in the area of its core competency, Internet search. Names like Alta Vista, Lycos, InfoSeek, Excite and Inktomi. They may still be around, but their glory has been eclipsed.

Search was just the beginning for the Google octopus. Google’s interest are universal and the boundaries of the realm of products and services it offers expand daily; if it’s got a pulse and can be digitized, Google’s there. Gmail, Google Docs, Picasa, YouTube, Google Maps, Google Voice, Chrome, Android Nexus One, etc., etc. You get the picture.

Is the past prologue for companies audacious enough to compete with Google’s far-flung empire, or is peaceful coexistence a possibility? Can you dance with an elephant without getting your toes stepped on?

Sridhar Vembu knows all about competing on the periphery of the Google empire. He is the CEO and founder of Zoho, a company that offers a comprehensive suite of Web-based apps ranging from word processing to spreadsheets that encroaches on the turf of Google Docs. Yet Zoho maintains cooperative, albeit competitive, relations with Google and, in fact, has integrated Google Docs with Zoho CRM, Zoho Mail, Zoho Docs and Zoho Projects.

“It works both ways, ” Vembu says. “The elephant helps pave the way through the jungle, as long as we avoid getting crushed. And as you will notice, we dance with the elephant well.”

That kind of cordial entente may be possible when you’re not targeting the heart of the empire. But what happens when you’re aiming squarely at the secret sauce. Search, for example. Do you still want Google on your dance card?

That’s an issue faced by Jodange, a recent entrant into the world of sentiment analysis, a subset of the search universe that is gaining traction. In the not-so-distant past, there was a quasi-paranoid fear in the search community of being gobbled up by Google. “I think a lot of people get really nervous about interacting with Google, much in the same way they got nervous about interacting with Microsoft,” says Larry Levy, Jodange’s co-founder, chairman and CEO. The fear, he says, was that the larger player would just copy what you had because they had more resources and clout.

That was then. “The thought today,” Levy says, “revolves around the fact that there are all these partnerships that these companies need to engage in so they can push various capabilities out there with some degree of timeliness. If they see something they like they almost always deal with small companies as an external R&D resource.” The “not invented here” barrier to adoption is largely a thing of the past.

But what is in store for the future? Is Google too large to fail or can it be toppled by a more nimble organization that’s forming in a garage somewhere? “It’s been done before,” Levy says, citing Google’s successful assault on Yahoo, the previous 800-pound elephant in the search world. “The question is, can it be done again? It’s the young guys that think they can rule the world. Some of them will. The vast majority won’t.”

Facing off with Google is always a complicated calculus. Being acquired by the giant is one option, but not one that’s universally attractive. “Our preference and intent is to stay independent, competing on value, depth and integration,” Zoho’s Vembu says. “Cloud computing will see consolidation. That is inevitable in any industry. Our own focus is to navigate these waves with a focus on solid engineering, outstanding product execution and a strong focus on serving our customers well. We believe those are the traits that will help us stay vibrant and healthy long term.”

And there will be casualties, companies that flare like sunspots in the Google universe and then quickly fade into oblivion. “There are many companies that have a built-to-flip model, with an extreme short-term focus,” Vembu says. “Some of them get lucky and hit the jackpot, while others peter out. We believe a strong R&D and engineering is essential to survive long term. All too [often], vendors focus too heavily on marketing, at the expense of R&D. We believe that business model has a short shelf life.”

“It’s an ecosystem,” Levy says. “With an ecosystem, you get the people who are producing and the people who are consuming. Small companies just need to be these producers and get themselves to the point where they’re either big enough to break out or get consumed by one of the big boys.”

If you look at Google’s acquisition pattern, it’s easy to see how good, small ideas can be more powerful when folded in with larger ideas. “Let’s talk about Wolfram Alpha,” Levy says, referring to the “computational knowledge engine” launched last year by Stephen Wolfram, a British physicist, software developer, mathematician and computer programmer. “Do you think they have the potential to be successful on their own? I question that. It could be quite compelling, but it’s not compelling on its own.”

The problem is when companies think they can build a business, but in actuality they are part of another, larger solution, Levy sys. And he’s clear-eyed about Jodange’s role in a firmament where the Google sun is the main source of light. “There are pieces of Jodange that fit into that category. We’d probably be more powerful as part of a broader offering than to try to do it on our own. This is a struggle small companies have continuously as they’re trying to define who they are,” Levy says.

Ned Smith is a New York-based writer who reports on business and technology. He can be contacted at nedsmith@gmail.com.

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