Standing out in a cloud

24 February 2011, Last updated at 00: 05 GMT by Robert Plummer Business reporter, BBC News Gracenote says that its technology helps people discover new music Marketing in the digital age is difficult, but one of the main problems is simply connecting with your audience.

In the old days, the main battle was to obtain records or CDS in stores, hoping that fans curious browsing in the racks would pick up on them.

Nowadays, modern technology makes it a breeze for artists to get their work on the internet. The trouble is that you're easily overlooked.

Most digital music services offer a wider range of songs that could offer any store of bricks and Malta. But when it comes to recommending new, unheard music, usually point you in the direction of what else has purchased the last listener.

"A music service could have 300,000 artists, but the average consumer only know 10 artists, so what about the other 299,990?" says Ty Roberts, chief technology officer for the Gracenote music database firm.

"Well we have software that analyzes what we know about music. It tracks and pulls them apart and analyze energy, time, the mood.

"You could take Black Sabbath and say this is a dark, brooding, Gothic, heavy metal. If people like that, we can therefore say that other kind of music you might like. "

Accounting for taste

Gracenote Software is in the heart of many music services "cloud based"-i.e. services that do not require you to download songs or host them on your computer.

Instead, the music is on a server and is transmitted to your PC, laptop, mobile phone or other device.

Software for recognition of the Gracenote Music is used by Apple iTunes

Services like Pandora and Spotify, MOG all employ know-how of Gracenote to some extent.

But what makes use of Gracenote is unlimited music service new Sony, available through its online platform Qriocity, a payment service for which gives full access to six million songs.

The service was launched last week in the United States, having already been made available in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Canada and Japan.

Sony service uses Gracenote Discover technology to analyze the taste in music, based on the collection of an existing user.

As well as human input from a team of international experts, Gracenote Music subject also works of computer-based analysis of waveforms that produces what the company calls "trace level descriptive data".

Using this information, the service is able to provide custom music recommendations for individual consumers, giving them new songs to listen to.

«All»

"That the technology is crucial to make these services cloud work," says Mr Roberts of Gracenote.

"A lot of people who use these services may be disconnected from the music for decades. They still like music, but they have not gone to the record store in a long time. "

It is not surprising that Sony is the most enthusiastic user of latest Gracenote technology, since it has purchased the company in 2008.

However, Gracenote has maintained its headquarters in Emeryville, California, and on the change of ownership has not stopped it that provides services to other businesses.

"We work with a lot of other companies that are competitors of Sony-every company we have worked with in 2008 is still with us today," says Mr. Roberts.

"Everyone gets all the data. We are part of the community of Silicon Valley and there is a cooperative spirit.

"I've been doing this for 15 years and is quite a good community. We know everyone else. "

Mr Roberts says that is a "challenge" for his company to become "a more publicly recognized brand".

If you have heard of it, chances are that it is because you saw the message "connection to the database, Gracenote" while ripping a CD into iTunes from Apple.

Most popular product of the company remain his great music database, which contains the details of eight million CD and 100 million songs, iTunes and other such programs to produce fully tagged MP3 tracks to your music player.

Growing fast

"The music industry ever thought of putting a number on CD indicating what is," says Mr. Roberts.

The Gracenote software is behind many MP3 coding systems

"Our system uses the length of the individual tracks. If you put those numbers in a sequence, create a telephone number for the CD.

"If you have six to 10 tracks, the sequence lengths is quite unique. Is down one 75th of a second. "

Gracenote MusicID product also helps Apple Genius service that analyzes your songs and build playlists based on any artist.

And a third of the company's revenue now comes from cars, thanks to the incorporation of its database products from how communication system in auto Sync us Ford.

All these activities have helped to grow quickly. Gracenote Founded in 1998, had just 2004 staff of only 20, but now have 320, with offices in Munich, Berlin and Tokyo, as well as part-time workers CD details all over the world.

"Now we have a total access 5.5 billion searches per month, so that we are closing the McDonald," says Mr. Roberts. "We are like the McDonald's music, but with less cheese".

The only problem is that all these cloud-based services are not necessarily persuade people to pay money for music.

Unlimited music service has met with a lukewarm reception from some technology analysts, who cannot see why consumers should be to pay for something that you could get for nothing from the likes of Spotify.

Unlike Spotify, Sony does not have a free option.

Mr Roberts admits that the culture of something-for-nothing remains a problem for the music industry.

"There is increased use of music," he says.

"People are playing more music everywhere, but that doesn't translate into sales, so we get this right as well. We get this right, we'll be around to make more music. "

Cloud meets CRM: how to keep track of who's who

In the early days of CRM, was simple: people were people and companies were companies. Adding a new person to CRM database was quite clear, if they came in by direct input or through integration through the clouds.

Two forces have mucked this. CRM systems has gotten more sophisticated, creating leads to integrate contacts. Just to spice up things, some systems, CRM created the notion of a person for B2C use cases. Then the boys Sell incited the pot by saying which leads were opportunities really early stage or even accounts ... Although these objects must be kept separate in any CRM system. And for fun, they added the template named account, which makes most cables in contacts, even though we would call those same people leads to a standard sales model.

So now the rules of how to incorporate new people in CRM records are about as simple as the rules for a game of Fizzbin (Google it).

Contact leaded vs

Going back to the basics, you might ask "why do we even need port anyway--why not just make everyone a contact?" In fact, there are situations where this is exactly the right (and of course, other) where is exactly wrong. As a generality, port is people who just know (aside from some level of interest), and the contacts are people we've talked about and know a lot. Typically, leads cannot be attached to the accounts, but must be contacts.

Port have some special properties in CRM systems, most notably: (1) the system assigns to representations by using rules and (2) that can be owned by a queue--not just by an individual. Both of these features are really valuable if you have a lead nurturing Group (often called telesales or telemarketing, inside sales).

If you are a pure B2B lead with no nourishment and a pure group named account model (for example, in/aerospace), well you might be able to lose the table leads. Each is essentially a contact because you're only interested in employees of your named accounts (which are precompiled in the system).

In most B2B companies, however, even if you don't have a group of nurturing it cannot blow away the lead. Marketing systems from other clouds (like Google Adwords, email blasters, drip marketing and social networking tools) almost always work on the subject of lead. These integrations with cloud CRM system may not allow you to use a contact object.

Also, if you are a B2C shop and the use of person-conti, really sorry you get rid of the cables.

Person vs. accounts

In B2C world, customers are individuals. Even if they are part of a company, they are not treated in this way. This problem is increasingly common with companies doing e-commerce and by accepting credit cards: each purchase is made by John Doe, the credit card holder, and there is no real account to pin him. In some systems, you handle this by giving the company called "individual" on all those contacts.

The person-account has been developed to facilitate this, using a hybrid object that has the characteristics of a contact and an account. When viewing a person, there is essentially a contact: there is only the account. So when you enter new contacts in CRM system, if you use the account of the person you are inserting actually accounts. If you're not careful, this is going to go over very well with people in accounting.

So for the B2C CRM systems, lLeads are really important as a way of storing information Handbook without creating bogus accounts.

So what is the paradigm?

The exact rules for which object to use when inserting new people into your CRM system "will depend on the specifics of your business process lead management. But the General model will be along these lines:

• Identify first, if the person works for one of your named accounts. (Note that doing a fuzzy match against all the different divisions of a company like The Walt Disney Company that can make it very research). If so, you can put the person as a contact associated with that account.

• Identify later, if the person works for one of your accounts. Depending on your business rules, or add the person as a contact is connected to your account or just a lead.

• Identify later, if the person is an individual. If you need to make an immediate transaction with them, place them as a person-account. Otherwise, enter them as a lead.

• What remains should be treated as a lead, but a hierarchy of routing and scoring rules to be applied. First, apply rules only to geographical level "what country." Then apply rules for Government and industry of the country (e.g., national Governments and departments of defence properly, go to the territory specified industries are directed to the appropriate management team partners). And finally, geographical local rules are used to assign the port to the territory of the relevant partner or sales. If there is insufficient information on a particular lead to use geographic rules, assign the new records to a generic queue.

To avoid damage to the database, any source of leads or contacts--a simple lead flow or an external cloud--must follow these rules before inserting new records of perspective. Fizzbin, indeed.

David Taber is the author of Prentice Hall's new book, "Salesforce.com secrets of success" and the CEO of SalesLogistix, a consulting company from Salesforce.com certified focused on improving business processes through the use of CRM systems. SalesLogistix customers in North America, Europe, Israel and India, and David has over 25 years experience in high tech, including 10 years at VP level or above.

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Virtualization is a key factor in Cloud security

SAN FRANCISCO--virtualization technologies allow you to better control and security in cloud computing environments, said Art Coviello, RSA Chief today.

In a keynote address at the RSA Security Conference here, Coviello has hit an optimistic tone about cloud security issues. While he recognized some of the concerns enterprises might have about how to move data and applications to the cloud, said that approaches to address possible issues are closer than many think.

"Trust in the cloud is feasible today," Ivanov said, adding that the key is to stop depending on the security controls designed for physical infrastructure. Instead, companies should consider leveraging virtualization technologies to enable advanced security, visibility and control they want in cloud environments.

Coviello argued that security needs to be approached to information or transactions which is protecting. In virtual environments, static damage perimeter way logical boundaries defined by information and transactions. Therefore safety must become logical as well.

"The stack IT is changing. Our borders are logical, rather than physical. We can not depend on the physical infrastructure for security, "he said.

Virtual machines are designed by nature to adjust dynamically loads of work, he said. As a security really work in these types of environments, the controls must be just as dynamic. "That means building security in virtualized components and, by extension, distribution of safety throughout the cloud," he said.

Security policies and best practices must be encoded and enforced by systems of automated security management for the cloud, Coviello said. The focus should be on enabling protection that is more risk-based and adaptable to changing conditions--and less static.

The economy and agility enabled by cloud computing are pushing more and more companies to adopt it, regardless of security and control concerns they may have, he said.

Counterintuitive as it may seem, "if properly exploited, virtualisation can be a path toward overcoming the level of control and visibility that exists today in physical environments," he said.

As part of its effort to enable RSA Security, the company launched a service called RSA cloud Trust Authority, Coviello said. The service will leverage VMware virtualization tools to provide a set of compliance monitoring in cloud services and identity management.

Jaikumar Vijayan covers data security and privacy issues, security, financial services and e-voting for Computerworld. Follow Jaikumar on Twitter at @ jaivijayan or Subscribe to the RSS feed of Jaikumar. His e-mail address is jvijayan@computerworld.com.

To learn more about security in Computerworld Security Center topic.

For more enterprise computing news, visit Computerworld. Story copyright © 2010 Computerworld Inc. All rights reserved.

Greplin: a one-stop searching through the data flow and the cloud of social network

We are starting to have problems tracking your information through social networks, Web, and within the cloud? If you're a power user who always can't resist a shiny new site useful--or simply cool--Web app, the folks behind Greplin are betting that you would like to get a handle on everything that scattered data.

The idea has also appeal to those who do not have to keep track of an extensive social network across multiple services, but have different ways of storing information that access (and in part) at home, in the Office and on the road. In my case, some are available in Google Docs, more was saved in Evernote and lately I started to use Dropbox to synchronize local files, so they are available to me everywhere.

Then there are my social networks. I've got useful connections on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn; But even with a desktop client like TweetDeck that aggregates the networks, it is not easy to break down through multiple streams to find information on a particular topic. And none of the information that the media is tied in with my data.

With your permission, Greplin will search through your data in different sites up to seven free: Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Twitter, Dropbox, Facebook and LinkedIn. A free account is also equipped with up to 200 M of storage for the search index. (Paid accounts get more storage space and a few more services like Evernote and Google Apps. Additional services, such as Basecamp and Google Reader, I'm at work).

It is exceptionally cheap, but with a problem: I want to really start with no track record, having access to so much of my aggregated data? Even with pedigree of $ 4 million venture funding from Sequoia Capital? Finally, curiosity has exceeded my paranoia of privacy and I signed upon notification that Greplin had finally opened to additional beta testers. (My exclusive status as beta tester was short lived, however, the site is now public, Greplin tweeted).

Greplin's interface is simple, quick and easy. You sign up for an account on Greplin.com and select the services that you want included (see screenshot below). Wait to be able to create an index, then enter your search terms. You have the ability to filter search results from people, streams, files and messages, as well as from individual services. These choices are available from a drop-down menu next to the main search bar instead of having to click off to an advanced search page.

For starters, I added my Twitter account (public anyway) and Google Docs (insensitive in there). With 3152 indexed documents, including my 126 M and 500 or so files in Google Docs, I used less 5% of my store.

My test searches executed very quickly, apparently issues reported from previous beta testers. Results are grouped by type (streams, files) and also indicate the initiating service (and any standard file), with search terms highlighted in yellow.

Twitter search is fantastic. If you use Greplin for nothing else, I'd recommend, to keep up with your Twitter stream. I was surprised to see pull up results from a tweet I made back in July, since research just Twitter doesn't go back nearly so far. Is a quick and elegant way to search for Twitter users you follow (as well as your own tweets)--certainly better than I found TweetDeck.

Search result of Greplin a little differed from the internal search Google Docs. A major plus for searching within Google Docs itself: Google indexes your PDF loaded, while Greplin does not. Greplin did not find a term that was part of the title of a PDF file, which is a little less forgivable than an inability to analyze the actual PDF (lost a PDF with the word in the title surrounded by dashes, but found another that use underscores).

It also seems that the Greplin is more literal than Google, which can be an advantage or disadvantage, depending on whether you are looking for an exact match. For example, a search for "landscapes" scored results within Google Docs for documents that contain the word "landscape", but not in Greplin.

Interestingly, I have not had any correspondence on Google Docs or Greplin when searching for a specific document--until I remembered that info is actually stored in Evernote. I spoke to my need for a service like Greplin.

Bottom line? Before Greplin, I had already begun dealing with the dilemma of how to deal with important personal data, which I had sprayed in multiple locations. Greplin is probably not the complete answer to this--certainly would have been better to have consistent archiving strategy at the beginning. And despite the appeal of Greplin, will be a little if anything would be trusted any startup with sensitive information such as e-mail (in fact, still not yet I trust Gmail with messages that must be really private).

That said, however, the service clearly fills a need. In an era of Web/cloud services and social networks, it is highly unlikely that any user can store all your important data in one place. The data are not yet useful as it could be if you can't find what you're looking for when you need them ...

Greplin seems to have some elegant technology behind it, and I hope that the new round of venture funding helps to achieve even better over time. In the meantime, I look forward to more details on how we can trust the company to keep your information private and secure before adding too many more services to be indexed.

Greplin screenshots:

Choose services to index within Greplin

Search results for sample Greplin

Sharon Machlis has online managing editor at Computerworld. His e-mail address is smachlis@computerworld.com. You can follow her on Twitter @ sharon000, on Facebook or by subscribing to his RSS feed:
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RSA Chief puts his trust in the cloud [video]

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Andrew j. Nusca is an editor for ZDNet and SmartPlanet. As a journalist based in New York City, he has written for Popular Mechanics and men's Vogue and his byline has appeared in New York Magazine, The Huffington Post, New York Daily News, Editor & Publisher, New York Press and many others. He also writes the Editorialiste, a media criticism blog.

He is a graduate of New York University and former editor and columnist of the Washington Square News. He is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He was named "Howard Kurtz, Jr." by film critic John Lichman despite not having a relationship with him. A native of Philadelphia, he lives in New York with his girlfriend and his cat, Spats.

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