The new Attensity — deal overview
A new Attensity Group has been created in a complex set of maneuvers. So far as I understand or guess, elements of the deal include:
- The Attensity Group is being formed by the merger of three companies: Attensity, empolis, and Living-e. Frankly, I’d never heard of either empolis or Living-e until this merger. (In case you ever have to resort to the Wayback Machine, embolis’ URL was http://www.empolis.com/home.html and Living-e’s was http://www.living-e.com/us/index.php)
- Existing investors (employees aside) have largely been bought out. Most of the stock is owned by Aeris, an investment vehicle for SAP co-founder Klaus Tschira. Living-e already was a Tschira investment.
- Inxight managers have been brought in to run the whole thing. Specifically, Ian Bonner will be CEO, and Ian Hersey will be EVP of Products and Technology.
- The former CEOs of Attensity and empolis will run the Americas and EMEA regions, under the Attensity and empolis names respectively, apparently with their prior sales organizations more or less intact.
- A former CEO of Living-e will be their boss, but also run “Special Projects”, which adds up to a very odd title indeed: “Senior Vice President of Operations and Strategic Projects, Attensity Group”
- The former CTOs of Attensity and empolis are CTOs of system software (“Natural Language Processing”) and application software respectively. This gets Attensity’s total CTO count up to 3, a level I’ve previously seen only at Teradata. I haven’t talked with David Bean yet, but his colleagues insist that he’s excited about his new role.
- This whole deal has been underway since at least late last year. For example, Ian Bonner has been involved for that long. empolis and Living-e announced the pooling of their sales forces back in February.
- Technically, the merger isn’t complete, as Living-e is a public company and all 100% of its shares haven’t been acquired yet. (But they will be Real Soon Now.)
- Attensity, of course, was a venture-backed private company, with tired investors. empolis was owned by Bertelsmann, and was itself a roll-up of several smaller text analytics companies.
I was told on the phone empolis was doing something like €30-40 million. Attensity and Living-e were under $10 million each. That surprises me a bit, as I thought Attensity was in that range on commercial business alone, and was doing more than $10 million counting its government accounts.
It turns out that if I had been paying attention to the news filters I could have seen this coming. Read more
| Categories: Attensity | 5 Comments |
There’s a virus on Twitter: StalkDaily
Twitter got a virus today. I’m updating what I know technically in my Network World post on the subject. The gist apparently is that somebody found a way to hack Twitter pages by hacking the URLs in one’s Twitter settings,and created the hacked @GadgetBoyHah profile. Then he got lots of clicks on it via the usual tactic of following lots of people who, upon notification, checked him out. I was infected too.
The implications for Twitter’s security are not good. The best way to disable or remove this malware is, as I write this, not yet clear, but I hope to get clarity and update the post linked above accordingly.
| Categories: Microblogging, Twitter | Leave a Comment |
(Humor) You don’t exist if you’re not on Twitter!
I’d like to recommend two Twitter-related comedy videos:
- Twouble with Twitters is a hugely popular, slickly executed cartoon video.
- The Twitter Song is a funny song that happens to be better musically than most satirical songs.
But I’m still waiting for a Twitter-related takeoff on “The Trouble With Tribbles” …
| Categories: Fun stuff, Humor, Microblogging, Social software and online media, Twitter | Leave a Comment |
Google has a lot more features than I realized
A features and syntax page reveals that the basic Google search box now gives you flight times, weather, stock quotes, sports scores, currency conversion, calculator results, and a lot more. Wow. I did not know.
Since the early 1980s, I’ve thought that natural language interfaces — spoken or otherwise — would someday win. While this versatility isn’t natural lanaguage per se, it still in my opinion is evidence in favor of that belief.
| Categories: Google, Search engines | Leave a Comment |
Thoughts on the rumored Google/Twitter deal
Michael Arrington reports that Google and Twitter are contemplating both:
- A Google acquisition of Twitter
- Some other kind of relationship built around real-time search
I have three initial thoughts on this:
1. Clearly, in Google’s mission to “organize all the world’s information,” there are several web areas it isn’t yet doing well in, and one of those is microblogs. What’s more, much as in the case of YouTube, it’s hard to see how Google would do that organizing any time soon unless it owned or otherwise was in bed with the leading platform for that kind of content — i.e., Twitter.
2. The YouTube example is apt in another way as well — it’s not clear where the monetization would come from. Google famously doesn’t make much advertising revenue from YouTube. And Twitter is even worse as an advertising platform; sticking ads into the tweetstream would quickly drive users elsewhere, and any other advertising scheme would likely fail because of the broad variety of interfaces — such as various mobile phones — Twitterers use to get at the service.
3. I’ve been suggesting all along that Twitter needs radical user experience enhancements. But when has Google ever made made user experience enhancements to a service? Its core search engine always looks pretty much the same. Ditto GMail. Ditto Blogger. Ditto YouTube.
| Categories: Google, Microblogging, Search engines, Social software and online media, Twitter | 2 Comments |
A savage critique of Microsoft’s online efforts
Loose Wire Blog offers a savage critique of Microsoft Encarta (whose discontinuation was recently announced). Although the blog seems in general to be a bit over-the-top curmudgeonly, that particular post seemed well-reasoned.
I’d like to make a more general comment about Microsoft: its online stuff is awful, and Encarta is no different. There are already plenty of people musing on why Encarta died, but I’d say one good reason is that it’s hard to access and get your mind around as pretty much every Microsoft online property.
| Categories: Microsoft | Leave a Comment |
Actually, Google’s other April Fool’s joke is indeed funny
CADIE is an an AI with a MySpace-like blog suitable for a young girl. (E.g., lots of cuddly panda bears.)
I suspect CADIE is going to grow up a lot over the course of the day …
Google’s April Fool’s joke seems pretty lame
3-D browsing. Yawn. Not like this Google April Fool’s classic.
| Categories: Google, Humor | 2 Comments |
April Fool’s spoof re newspapers, social media
The Guardian says all its articles will be published on Twitter, in 140 characters or less. Very well played.
A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper’s archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include “1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!”; “OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more”; and “JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?”
| Categories: Fun stuff, Humor, Microblogging, Online media, Social software and online media | 2 Comments |