State-of-the-art mobile search part 6: search execution

May 23, 2013 by Leave a comment

State-of-the-Art Mobile Search is a series exploring how to implement advanced mobile search.

State-of-the-Art Mobile Search Part 5: Term Canonicalization

Rod Smith

Rod Smith

As explained in prior installments in this series, advanced search relies on term frequency and inverse document frequency. Together, those two factors reflect the importance of a term in a given document with respect to the rest of the corpus, which tells the search engine how relevant a document is given a single search term.

To optimize search execution, term frequency and independent document frequency are calculated for each term and document in the corpus before executing search queries. Then, when a search query is issued, the search engine quickly scores each document for the given search terms. Read more of this post

Filed under Custom Development, Mobile Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Upcoming webinar: maximize video in the enterprise

May 21, 2013 by 1 Comment

David Lozzi

David Lozzi

Microsoft SharePoint is a powerful solution that can manage content across organizations in a variety of ways. Recently, I had the opportunity, as part of a Slalom Consulting team, to work with RAMP and help create its enterprise product MediaCloud for SharePoint. We integrated RAMP’s impressive media solutions with SharePoint to provide a rich video experience inside SharePoint itself.

MediaCloud for Sharepoint enables team members to upload a video directly into SharePoint, which then handles processing, querying, etc., using RAMP’s secure cloud-based storage and delivery. Once the video is ready, the user is notified and video playback is accessible through RAMP’s custom player. The video is searchable through SharePoint, including spoken words—meaning users can stay in SharePoint from start to finish. As a result, organizations can get the most from their video content through the SharePoint solution they already have in place. Read more of this post

Filed under Microsoft, Portals & Collaboration Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Apply MDM today to avoid paying a hefty price tomorrow

May 17, 2013 by Leave a comment

How can MDM help you? is a series exploring how applying Master Data Management techniques and best practices can affect your bottom-line profit.

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Eniko Tucker

Have you ever wondered why organizations wait to make changes until data quality issues bring them to their knees? There are many key steps that companies can take today to proactively manage information assets without breaking budgets. By investing in MDM, organizations can solve key business problems and provide long-term solutions to run their companies more efficiently.

MDM best practices

If you are a manufacturing or pharmaceutical executive with data quality problems or broken business processes that have led to less than ideal performance in enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, or customer relationship management, consider the potential of MDM. Read more of this post

Filed under Information Management Tagged with , , ,

One-cloud solution takes a media company to new heights

May 16, 2013 by Leave a comment

Art Fort

Art Fort

For the past year, I’ve been working with a media and entertainment client on a SaaS application. Hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the application provides creative professionals with a “one-cloud” solution for media and content collection, collaboration, production, and transcoding of high-value, high-definition content.

I’ve been fortunate to be part of this project from the beginning—starting with some small proof of concepts, to doing a cloud migration assessment of their on-premise technologies, and ultimately contributing to application architecture, development, and deployment onto AWS. For me, two things set this project apart: the team and the technology. Read more of this post

Filed under Amazon Web Services, Cloud, Custom Development Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Maximizing store space with localized inventory assortments

May 14, 2013 by Leave a comment

Ian Rogers

It’s an age-old challenge for retail: what is the ideal breadth and depth of product offerings in a store that meets competing objectives, including:

  • Maximizing store turnover vs. maximizing product selection and availability
  • Store-to-store consistency vs. local market customization
  • Store vs. digital product selection and availability

This challenge has become even more difficult in this customer-centric omni-channel environment. Customer expectations and shopping behaviors have changed, which is challenging the role the physical store plays. Stores used to be the primary way of selling products, so the focus was on how to drive foot traffic to the store. Sales were then driven by the product availability and customer service in the store. This role is changing as the relationship between customers and retailers becomes more complex and personalized. Stores are more and more becoming the medium for brand building, engagement, and product showcasing to drive sales across all channels. Read more of this post

Filed under Cloud, Retail, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , ,

Pro tips for making the most of IWNY with mobile

May 10, 2013 by 1 Comment

Internet Week New York (IWNY) is the largest Internet festival in the world. The event’s hub—IWNY HQ in Silicon Alley—will attract some 10,000 attendees between May 20 and 23.

It’s exciting to be in the tech hub of New York City at Internet Week, where tomorrow’s trends are being formed today. The successful start-ups in media and technology are shaping the way our clients will better connect with their customers, partners, and employees, and the tech-elite are all here during the festival to share their experiences.

Read more of this post

Filed under Custom Development, Mobile, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , , ,

State-of-the-Art Mobile Search Part 5: Term Canonicalization

May 1, 2013 by 1 Comment

State-of-the-Art Mobile Search is a series exploring how to implement advanced mobile search.

State-of-the-Art Mobile Search Part 4: Fields and Phrases

Rod Smith

Rod Smith

The inverted index built in earlier parts of this series use an undefined function canonicalize(word) to convert strings of characters into a standard form. Doing so accounts for the fact that there are multiple forms of most words in English and similar languages. Consider a query like the following:

“3d printing donuts”

Crude search engines match literal words of the search query against literal words from the document collection with case insensitive substring matching. Literal substring matching is obviously deficient given its failure to match the query above against documents that contain the following:

  • “3D Printers Make Donuts Healthy”
  • “… a 3D-printed donut….”
  • “Dunkin Donuts has made a 3D printer.”

To match the search query above with those documents, search engines can employ various types of term canonicalization that ignore non-semantic details like grammatical class, so printing matches print, printed, printers, etc.  The most common approach for English-language search is known as stemming.

Read more of this post

Filed under Custom Development, Mobile Tagged with , ,

The Art of Project Management: Scale

April 30, 2013 by 2 Comments

Slalom Consultant Carl Manello

Carl Manello

The control of a large force is the same principle as the control of a few men: it is merely a question of dividing up their numbers. —Sun Tzu, military strategist

Creating principles

The basic principles of project management are fully extensible from the smallest initiative to the largest program. The key is that the project management practices should be understood as principles: accepted or professed rules of action or conduct. It is based on this belief that I encourage my clients to establish project manager guiding principles and to construct project management frameworks (not detailed, step-by-step methodologies). By maintaining the governance rules at the highest level (at first definition), the organization maintains the flexibility to scale the implementation of principles based on specific needs. Read more of this post

Filed under Project Management Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

From Data to Insight: Addressing the Last-Mile Problem

April 23, 2013 by Leave a comment

Prakash Aditham

Ask any amateur runner or triathlete and they’ll tell you that the last mile (or last several) of any endurance event is the most challenging and difficult one to cover. In the networking world, the last-mile problem refers to the speed bottleneck which limits the bandwidth of data that can be delivered to the customer. Within the information delivery network, as data travels from the source system to the data warehouse and approaches the last-mile transformation to actionable intelligence, we notice problems as well. Analysts struggle with data issues and decision-makers continue to grumble about having to make decisions with insufficient information.

As a business leader or decision-maker trying to increase the number of actionable insights, it’s beneficial to do some root-cause analysis and focus on the three major causal categories affecting the last mile: people, platform (equivalent of equipment and materials), and process. Read more of this post

Filed under Business Intelligence, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , ,

State-of-the-Art Mobile Search Part 4: Fields and Phrases

April 17, 2013 by 1 Comment

State-of-the-Art Mobile Search is a series exploring how to implement advanced mobile search.

State-of-the-Art Mobile Search Part 3: TF-IDF Models

Rod Smith

Rod Smith

The inverted index and the ranked retrieval model from earlier in this series did not distinguish between different fields of the indexed documents, nor did they make any special accommodation for multi-word phrases.

Phrase queries

A user may need to find documents that contain multi-word phrases like “all your base.” Users understand phrase queries well enough that explicit phrase queries are one of the few effective types of advanced queries. Typically, users identify phrase queries by enclosing each phrase in quotes, but implicit phrase queries are also possible, where a search engine identifies phrases without quotes or any other indication beyond the mere proximity of the words. Read more of this post

Filed under Custom Development, Mobile

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