It Will Take More Than a Great Product for Microsoft to Gain in Search

Several information blogs reported last week that Microsoft’s new search engine, possibly named Kumo, could debut as early as this week at the All Things Digital conference. Microsoft has been trying to gain more of a voice in the search market for some years and has purchased several search technologies. However, this is the first sign the new engine might be ready to hatch. There is plenty of genuine interest in watching if Microsoft can be a real player in search, but when competing with Google, technology is only one of many battle grounds.

A recent Neilsen study gives Google 64.2 percent of the US search market with Microsoft only at only 10.3 percent. Other studies have put Google’s share closer to 80 percent and growing. Even within Microsoft, it is reported, 80 percent of employees still use Google.

Despite the omnipresence of Google, there is a lot of improvement to be made in search. All of the big search engines return a lot of irrelevant information, especially on long tail searches. Google has had a few outages lately and recently there have been some rumblings at search conferences that perhaps Google has hit a wall– in market share and innovation.

Kumo plans to tackle the challenges of search with some neat user experience features and some potentially powerful back-end technologies. The UI will have a left hand navigation bar that breaks search results into different categories ( photos, blogs, product detail pages etc.) and allows the user to quickly switch between categories. The back-end technology will encompass the abilities of the search engines Microsoft has purchased: Medstory, a health search engine, Farecast, a travel search engine, and the highly anticipated but untested semantic search of Powerset.

With all this innovation, what stands in Kumo’s way? Well, like it or not, Google is the backbone of the Internet right now. It has, arguably, one of the most powerful brand associations in history. Google has become synonymous with finding information. Websites and businesses spend huge amounts of time and money trying to master Google’s algorithms and web crawlers. Google has gained close to a natural monopoly, something that has continually worried federal lawmakers. But people go to Google largely because they want to. And, at the moment, they do have the best technology.

To really gain ground in search, Kumo will have to return better results with a superior user inferface, get a blitz of good press, earn some very influential fans and–most importantly–wait it out. Breaking the Google habit is a cultural shift at this point, even if the technology promotion are perfect. Cultural shifts, though they don’t always seem like it, are long sells. Ripples do become waves, but rarely overnight.

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CubeTree: A Step Forward for Office Communication

by Mielle Sulliivan, Janus Networks

Inter-office communication can be complicated. There are lots of messages: messages for you, messages for your team, messages for your branch or company as a whole, interesting articles coworkers share…the list goes on. To often all of these messages can end up in a big pile in your inbox– where they can easily be lost. A new startup, CubeTree, address some of the challenges of workplace communication through a platform inspired by social networking.

In CubeTree, employees can create a profile, send out micro-updates, “follow” other coworkers, share documents, set up wikis, and much more. One particularly useful feature is the search tool– great for finding documents created by coworkers and filed with mysterious logic. The passive sharing of micro-updates for non essential information, like industry articles, is convenient because it helps reduce emails and therefore the chances that an important message will be buried.

Setup is quick and painless. Because CubeTree exists in the cloud, there is nothing to install. Just sign up for one of their three subscription levels and begin. Most employees will already be familiar with the social networking environment, so training is minimal. CubeTree also easily incorporates information from other commonly used office programs, such as Google Reader, Salesforce and Tripit trips.

Of course CubeTree is not the only company to take an idea that evolved in the social space and use if for the workplace. Yammer is already the standard for business micro-messaging. SocialText delivers workplace wiki solutions and LinkedIn is the site for professional profiles. But CubeTree offers it all, on one platform, with superior security assurance because the founders come straight from Symantec, an IT security leader.

For all its functionality, CubeTree is not an office suite. It doesn’t compete with any of the standard business software, but rather stands along side it. CubeTree is a complimentary office tool to help coworkers stay more organized and in better communication–something nearly every workplace could use in today’s hyper-information age.

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Windows 7 to Have Touch and Gesture Capabilities

by Mielle Sullivan, Janus Networks

By now you have probably heard of Microsoft Surface, the expensive tablet PC that enables the user to manipulate images and interact with applications by touching and tapping the surface–similar to a giant iPhone. But now it is confirmed that Windows 7, set to come out sometime this fall, will have some touch and gesture recognition features built in.

Acer also announced on April 30th that its Aspire Z5600 will feature a 24-inch screen with 1080p resolution that was designed specifically to utilize the touch features of Windows 7.

On compatible equipment, Windows 7 will recognize gestures such as: tapping and double-tapping (just as you would with a mouse button); drag and drop; scrolling (by pull-touching the main window rather than a scroll bar); pinching (to zoom in and out); two-finger tapping (to zoom and orient); rotating (by touching two spots and then twisting); flicking (for quick shifts left and right); and pressing-and-holding (to right-click).

As a pure concept the Surface, and all touchscreen technology, has a lot of sex appeal to consumers. But there are doubts the technology will really get mouths watering on the business side. Bill Gates has said the expansion of user interfaces beyond the keyboard will have a far reaching impact on computing. “In the next few years, the roles of speech, gesture, vision, ink, all of those will become huge. For the person at home and the person at work, that interaction will change dramatically,” said Gates at a digital event last year.

There is huge potential for this kind of technology, but habits, ideas and computers will also have to evolve before it fundamentally changes computing. For touch and gesture recognition to take off in the work place, I think work styles and culture will have to change–and that is long sell.

On the consumer side, I don’t see the Surface becoming mainstream until the price comes down–way down. Despite strong interest, the Surface it self sells for about $17,000, and (probably for due to price) is only being sold to retailers and hospitality businesses. Touch technology within computers like the Aspire will catch on if the hardware and software make it natural to use, which may not happen right away.

As with all computing advances, it may take two or three generations to find the right recipe for large scale adoption. However, being part of Windows 7 means touch and gesture recognition has come a long way culturally and technologically, even if kinks need to be worked out and devices themselves still need to evolve.

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Pulse Smartpen:The First Social Media Pen

by Mielle Sullivan, Janus Networks
If you are not already familiar with it, the Pulse Smartpen by Livescribe, is a computerized pen with an infrared camera and digital audio recorder that helps you link audio to handwriting. Just tap on any note or drawing on the accompanying “dot paper” and the pen will replay the portion of the recording that was recorded when the note was written. Its one of the more practical gadgets on the market, and has been gaining press and users since its launch about a year ago.

As you can imagine, a large percentage of Pulse users are college students. “My Pulse smartpen has been invaluable to me in my classes, particularly my pre-med classes, where I need to take very detailed and accurate notes,” said Kal Shah, a junior at University of California Berkeley. “With my Pulse smartpen, I can pay more attention to what my professor is actually saying rather than scribbling down every single word. It’s also awesome to use when I’m studying for tests.”

Livescribe has taken the utility and fun of its pen one step higher by giving the Pulse a social media platform. Pulse users can post an image of their notes, along with the audio to either the Livescribe community or Facebook. If the author allows, users can even share other people’s notes with friends. The Livescribe community has ten categories of posted notes including academic notes, how-tos and art.

In order to further engage social media using college students, the company created a Facebook application called “Where are you going to college?”
The application is an interactive map that allows Facebook users to see who is going to their college, and what schools their friends are going to. Students can apply for the scholarship by putting their college on the map and writing a 140-character statement on how they plan to achieve in college. Students can submit their entries at www.livescribe.com/mapyourcollege.

It’s always interesting when a brand can add a social media component to its features, but for the Pulse sharing seems particularly useful. Within private online groups, students can instantly compare notes and corporate teams can hone in on essential parts of a presentation. Public uses range from the sharing of sermons to political speeches in a more dynamic way.
By linking writing, audio, the web and community Pulse takes jotting into the 21st century.

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