January 27, 2009 in Brand Asset Management, Brand Resource Management, DAM (Digital Asset Management), DAM Abstracts, DAM Books, DAM Case studies, DAM Demo, DAM White Papers, Digital Asset Management, Media Asset Management with
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Enterprise search: The target is moving
Lucid Imagination, an open-source enterprise search company, is looking to compete with established players like Autonomy, Microsoft’s Fast, and Endeca, but the target is already shifting.
Paula Rooney highlights Lucid CEO Eric Gries’ open-source enterprise search plan: be the Red Hat of enterprise search.
Lucid, which just emerged from stealth mode with US$6 million in funding, had already lined up some big customers like Hewlett-Packard and FedEx.
But let’s fast forward a bit. Like Red Hat, Lucid will start in one area and need to expand into new adjacent markets. Red Hat can offer a stack of software mainly fueled by its acquisition of JBoss and the middleware it provides. Lucid will have to follow a similar path. Why? The enterprise search market is already shifting.
Continues @ http://www.zdnetasia.com
Deinze, January 20th , 2009 – ADAM Software (www.adamsoftware.net) announces that Britvic Soft Drinks Ltd uses ADAM to manage their digital assets. Britvic is the latest client of ADAM Software’s system integrator partner TEEC (www.theenterprisecompany.co.uk).
“We use ADAM as central core repository for storing all of our digital assets linked to our brands including pack shots, brand guidelines and associated artwork. It is considered to be our strategic digital platform with over a 1.000 registered users that include design agencies, the general public and the media all of whom can access ADAM and retrieve Britvic digital imagery. These users manage files according to the user group they belong to as ADAM manages their rights to see or download specific files”, explains Britvic’s digital manager Denise Meek.
“Thanks to the ADAM-workflow capabilities, uploading and approving assets has never been easier. Communication is much clearer and faster than ever before”. Britvic experiences ADAM to be a robust and powerful system. “The speed is a real benefit to us”, Denise Meek continuous.
“With Britvic ADAM confirms its position in the food & beverage sector, alongside of leading brand owners such as AB-Inbev, VandeMoortele, Puratos, ..and many others”, says Pieter Casneuf from ADAM Software.
TEEC is a UK-based provider of Marketing Technology software and services with major Corporate Enterprise clients in the UK, Europe and the US and service clients in Sports & Leisure, FMCG, Catalogue, Pharmaceutical, Business Services and Agency fields.
http://www.adam.be/news/0209_01_britvic.asp
Once you get a DAM, you may have a lot of analog data (paper, prints, negatives, etc.) you want to get into your DAM, but you’re wondering…
“How am I going to scan all this stuff and add keywords to it all in a timely manner?”
First of all, you should cull through to see what is worth adding to the DAM and decide what may have value to your organization. Some of the material may not. That is up to your organization to decide upfront on a high level, but consider your organization’s legacy as well as its future with some forethought.
Once you have narrowed down your focus to what is worth scanning into digital form and keywording, you’ll need to decide how and who will do this.
If you may have paper, negatives, transparencies (aka slides) and/or prints you need scanned. You have a few choices for who can do this:
- Hire/assign people to scan part/full time at a workstation.
- Out source it to an outside vendor.
What about the metadata and keywording?
- Hire/assign people to collect specific information about the assets and turn that information into metadata within your metadata schema.
- Outsource the metadata/keywording task to an outside vendor.
If it is a matter of security or needing institution knowledge to do this, the simple answer is the first option. Nothing can replace your institutional knowledge unless it is fully documented (which is rarely the case). If this work requires accumulating information about the assets, use these resources to your benefit while they are still around. If it is a matter security or sensitive information, you are should probably keep it all in house.
Continues @ http://anotherdamblog.wordpress.com
Posted on January 22, 2009 by mshulha
Testing and validating a taxonomy can go many ways. With a little luck and some hard work, usually it goes pretty well, you watch users click through the structure, find the right terms, and you go home feeling like everything’s in its right place.
There are always the nightmare scenarios, the tester who can’t find anything and randomly clicks through the taxonomy as though they were sight seeing on a Sunday drive in the country, the tester who looks in the same category for everything… don’t ask me why but it’s always accessories, the tester who freely admits volunteering for this session to escape an insane co worker, if only for 45 minutes… But I digress.
This last testing experience was by far and away the most rewarding I have ever done. Not because the taxonomy was perfect…it wasn’t. Not because the testers were brilliant enough to intuit our mistakes… they weren’t, but because almost everyone left the sessions excited about taxonomy in general, and thought it would make their life, at least the part that had to do with information management, better.
I know, its sounds crazy, you don’t expect a positive response when you tell someone that from now on when they create a document they are going to have to use this elaborate structure in front of them to tag it…but they were. Everything from ”Its about time” to ” this is going to make finding things later a lot easier”. Now certainly a large part of this positive reaction had to do with the fact that the overall structure and vocabulary of the taxonomy really resonated with them, but an even bigger part of this positive reaction had to do with the sense of participation in the overall project the testers felt when truly engaged and asked for feedback.
Continues @ http://sethearley.wordpress.com
Will the “brand bubble” pop soon, following the evolution in the financial markets? Or will it provide the oxygen in order for companies to better overcome the crisis?
What the recession is going to do is elevate good brands and purge the weak ones. Companies with strong, healthy brands and good business practices are going to have struggles through the recession (as will everyone), but they are going to be in much better shape than the rest of the companies out there throughout it and when it’s over. Those with brands who are all talk and no real substance to back it up will be hurt the worst.
For some great thinking on this, and things far smarter than I could say here, get a copy of The Brand Bubble.
Snip from a 3 part interview with Paul Isakson @ http://willitbrand.blogspot.com
Combination of Autonomy and Interwoven Extends Meaning Based Computing to New Customer Base Enabling World’s First Comprehensive Manage-In-Place Architecture
A teleconference call to discuss the transaction will be hosted at 9:00 a.m. GMT on January 22, 2009. The call will be available live via webcast over the World Wide Web. To access the live webcast, investors are directed towards the investor relations section of Autonomy’s website, http://www.autonomy.com/. Investors should go to the website approximately 15 minutes prior to the start time of the call to register.
CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND – January 22, 2009 – Autonomy Corporation plc (LSE: AU. or AU.L), a global leader in infrastructure software, and Interwoven, Inc. (NASDAQ: IWOV), a global leader in content management software, today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Autonomy will acquire Interwoven. The combination of the two companies will redefine how global 2000 corporations, leading law firms and government regulators will discover, analyze and manage information and interactions.
Acquisition Highlights
Under the terms of the Acquisition Agreement, it is proposed that Interwoven stockholders will receive $16.20 in cash for each outstanding Interwoven share, representing a premium of 36.8% to the closing share price of $11.84 on January 21, 2009, and a premium of 36.2% to the average closing share price over the 30 days through January 21, 2009
Aggregate consideration of approximately $775 million (assuming exercise of all vested in-the-money Interwoven share options), funded by an underwritten placing of ordinary shares (the “Placing”), a new revolving credit facility from Barclays and a portion of Interwoven and Autonomy’s cash reserves. Post-closing Autonomy expects to have a cash balance of at least $75 million, assuming close in Q2′09
All directors and selected executive officers of Interwoven and Autonomy have agreed to vote in favour of the Acquisition
The Acquisition is expected to complete in the second quarter of 2009 and is subject to Autonomy and Interwoven shareholder and regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions
Combined customer base of in excess of 20,000 will provide additional scale and significant cross-selling opportunities
Opportunity to provide broader and more comprehensive offerings to customers
Combining the two companies will accelerate the delivery of the next generation unstructured information management software
The Acquisition will strengthen Autonomy’s access to the worldwide legal and compliance industry through Interwoven’s significant sales force with industry expertise
The Acquisition exploits Autonomy’s skills and strong track record in integrating businesses
Expect to achieve synergies of approximately $40 million per annum over the first year from completion, from a combination of duplicative general and administrative, marketing programs and other redundant costs
Acquisition expected to be earnings enhancing in the first full quarter following completion; expected earnings accretion of approximately 20% in 2009 (assuming completion had happened on January 1, 2009)
Significant brought forward tax losses will be assumed
Interwoven Company Highlights:
Leader in technologies for managing and improving the interaction of human beings with content and data
Top Gartner rating for Web Content Management
De facto standard for Legal Document Management
Founded in 1995 with headquarters in San Jose, CA
4,600+ customers worldwide:
Interwoven customers include 1,200 of the top law firms, 9 of BusinessWeek’s top 10 global brands, and 21 of the Forbes Global 30
Powers 100,000 websites, intranets and extranets
Consistently strong financial results: on January 6, 2009, Interwoven announced that it expects to report total revenues of $69.5 million to $70.0 million for the three months ended December 31, 2008, with license revenues of approximately $26.5 million for that period. Interwoven also expects to report net income per share of $0.21 to $0.23 on a U.S. GAAP basis and $0.22 to $0.24 on a non-U.S. GAAP basis for the same period.
Strategic Rationale:
Autonomy believes:
The combination of Autonomy’s Meaning Based Computing technologies (IDOL) (with its ability to understand content) with Interwoven’s suite of products (focussed on managing the interactions of people and content) will create a new set of technologies, updating and enhancing Interwoven’s products by significantly reducing the levels of manual effort now required. These technologies are ready to address the new need for manage-in-place and extend Autonomy’s reach into a new customer base. Interwoven’s products know what the customer interactions are, and Autonomy’s IDOL will allow them to know what they mean. Examples of this in action will include:
Combination will extend Autonomy’s legal and regulatory usage by top-end customers and regulators and the ediscovery marketplace into the practices of the world’s leading law firms, creating a larger combined market and a continuous chain through the entire litigation and risk management process. The market need for this solution for law firms has been driven by regulatory changes such as the U.S. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which means much larger volumes of content have to be processed between the chain of the client and the law firm. The Acquisition also allows us to extend Autonomy’s value chain of discovery, review, processing, early case assessment, linking those to the operations within the law firms. The combination creates the largest company dedicated to the legal information management industry with over 20,000 customers including 1,200 top law firms.
The intelligence of Autonomy’s IDOL technology can be used to extend Interwoven’s web content capabilities across 100,000 corporate websites, intranets and extranets already powered by Interwoven. Through the combination of Interwoven’s Optimost software and IDOL, Interwoven’s customers will be able to optimize multiple forms of customer interactions, including email, chat sessions and the telephone. Interwoven’s web solutions, when combined with Autonomy etalk’s industry leading customer interaction software, will marry the call center and web for comprehensive and coherent customer interaction management.
The combination of Autonomy’s Digital Safe and Interwoven’s TeamSite automatically allows the archiving of all customer interactions with corporate websites, thus allowing effective solutions for the raft of recent regulations concerning information shown to customers. Interwoven’s Global Capital Markets (”GCM”) group is central to derivatives management inside major banks. Autonomy’s technology when combined with Interwoven’s GCM capability, will allow compliance and investigation over the historic and future data sources generated in this area.
Customers will benefit from working with a leading software vendor with significant financial resources, technology leadership and customer-facing strengths in sales, support and professional services.
The surge in litigation and regulation resulting from the introduction of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and many recent regulatory changes has heightened the need to capture and understand information, especially employee communications, customer interactions, and financial transactions. The combination of Autonomy and Interwoven provides a one-stop shop for over 1,000 file formats including email, voice, web, images, schedules, tasks, calendars, and stock trades.
Autonomy and Interwoven have a shared vision to develop the next generation of legal and compliance software, allowing businesses to further automate the organisation, management and processing of human friendly information (text, forms, emails, voice and video) from disparate internal and external repositories. Interwoven is already a user of Autonomy technology within its products, and there are many joint customers already in place, including Bank of America, Bayer, Deutsche Bank, DLA Piper, Shell, Tesco and White & Case.
Commenting on the Acquisition, Dr. Mike Lynch, Group CEO of Autonomy, said: “The combination of Autonomy and Interwoven, industry leaders in Meaning Based Computing and document and content management respectively, will continue the extension of Autonomy’s IDOL as a key element of the regulatory, legal and compliance industries. Our past acquisitions have clearly demonstrated how Autonomy can quickly and effectively leverage the power of IDOL into new customer bases and to address new customer needs. We are very familiar with Interwoven, its product base and management team through our partnership and joint customers over the years and see this transaction as an exciting opportunity to extend the chain of Autonomy’s solutions.”
“Interwoven and Autonomy are two high-performing companies that share the same vision improving the way organizations understand and interact with information,” said Joe Cowan, Interwoven’s CEO. “We believe customers will benefit from the combination of Autonomy’s industry-leading technology with Interwoven’s unmatched position in our target markets. We are extremely excited with the unique possibilities for future product direction that will arise through the integration with Autonomy’s IDOL technology.”
http://www.autonomy.com/content/News/Releases/2009/0122.en.html
Google Earth Screenshot – Iguazu Falls (Argentina/Brazil) with images and Data Logger Track
1.) Sync Camera time with Local Time
2.) Take photos while logging your location continuously with a Data Logger
3.) Import JPEG photos and Data Logger log (.nmea format) onto computer
4.) Use software locr to combine JPEGs and location log, embed into file. This program can also export your geolog file and photos into Google Earth. And if you happen to forget to sync your camera time to your local time, you can shift this time by minute/second/hours to match your geolog (which will be on UTC time)
5.) If using Picasa, the newly geotagged photos won’t be recognized by this program (something to do with the format of the GPS data). I got around this by using this GUI to change the format of the GPS EXIF data to something Picasa could read. If you don’t use Picasa then you shouldn’t need this second step.
http://slowlygoingpro.blogspot.com
Not long ago a press release went out with the provocative title, “Brain Works Like Google, New Study Finds.” More specifically, the news release claimed that the study showed that our brains choose brands from our memories using predictable unconscious rules, much like Google ranks sites using an algorithm:
“Brand choice turns out to be a largely unconscious process,” says Tjaco Walvis, who led the one-and-a-half-year study. “But in that process, the brain behaves much like Google. It seems to use a set of rules called an algorithm to pick the brand from our memory that best and most reliably fits our functional and emotional needs at that particular moment. It behaves rationally, but in an unconscious way…”
Based on the study, Mr. Walvis concludes that the brain’s “algorithm” for brand choice has three elements.
Firstly, the brain selects the brand it has learned is best able to satisfy our biological and cultural goals. We unconsciously select the brand that is the most uniquely rewarding, based on its associations with our goals and the brain’s reward centers (e.g. the dopamine system).
Secondly, the brain selects the brand that has shown most frequently in the past that it is able to fulfill these needs. Coherent brands that repeat their promise are more likely to be chosen. Volvo, Coca-Cola and Disney are examples of coherent brands.
Thirdly, the brain selects the brand it has interacted with most intensely in the past. Brand participation creates numerous new connections in our brain, facilitating that brand’s retrieval. Nike Plus is an example of strong participation concept. [From Marketwire.]”
Given my dual interests of neuromarketing and search engine optimization (SEO), I can hardly avoid discussing this topic. The actual paper that the press release is based on was published by the Journal of Brand Management: Three laws of branding: Neuroscientific foundations of effective brand building. Tjaco Walvis is the sole author. Walvis’s paper is an attempt to survey a wide variety of neuroscience-based studies on branding and form some conclusions from the common themes uncovered by other researchers.
Thought provoking article continues @ http://www.neurosciencemarketing.com
