Enjoyment: Structure News: Facebook takes on Google with AI

Where We Use Just The Right Amount Of SaaS

June 3rd, 2016 / by Tom Krazit

This week, we'll talk about why security companies need to start making their customers' lives easier, a nifty way to water cool a data center, and Facebook's AI-driven attempt at out-Googling Google.

STRUCTURE NEWS

BLACKSTONE’S LEEK: SOLVE SECURITY INEFFICIENCIES, AND THE WORLD WILL BEAT A PATH TO YOUR DOOR

One of the best parts of planning Structure Security has been the illuminating conversations I’ve enjoyed with our advisory board about the state of information security. Blackstone’s Jay Leek (pictured) is one of those advisors, and we recently talked at length about how frustratingly inefficient a lot of security products and services can be. Check out a short recap of that conversation, which is helping inform our agenda as the summer rolls on, and click here to register for Structure Security.

INDUSTRY NEWS

GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS FOR SERVER MAKERS

It’s a sign of the times when tepid unit growth counts as “good news,” but given the transition to cloud services it’s a little surprising that the server market isn’t in the same boat as the PC market. Fortune reports on Gartner’s latest server market share numbers, which show that most server growth continues to come from big webscale companies designing and building their own servers.

IBM WATSON IS NOW OFFERING AI-POWERED DIGITAL ADS THAT ANSWER CONSUMERS’ QUESTIONS

As voice commands become a more popular way to interact with your computers, you had to know this was coming. Get ready for Watson Ads, served alongside The Weather Channel content that answer questions you pose to your computer through its microphone. AdWeek notes that the ads, which have been purchased by companies like Campbell Soup, will offer recipes tied to questions like “what should we make for dinner tonight?”

FEDERAL RESERVE WAS HACKED MORE THAN 50 TIMES IN THE LAST FIVE YEARS

Another one for the “it’s not if you’ll be hacked, it’s when” file: The U.S. Federal Reserve’s network were breached more than 50 times from 2011 to 2015, according to an investigation by Reuters. It’s not clear what, if anything, was lost in the breaches, but given the financial power of the Fed, it’s not surprising that it would be a frequent target.

ORACLE PULLED MADE-UP CLOUD FIGURES OUT OF ITS SAAS - WHISTLEBLOWER

The headline of the week went to The Register (as it usually does), reporting on a lawsuit filed against Oracle by a former employee claiming she was pressured to record pretty much anything coming in the front door as “cloud” revenue. Oracle said it plans to contest the suit, so we’ll see what comes out, but this isn’t the first time eyebrows have been raised about Oracle’s “cloud” revenue numbers.

DELL DESIGNS CUSTOM LIQUID COOLING SYSTEM FOR EBAY DATA CENTERS

This is pretty cool: Dell helped eBay bring some supercomputing cooling technology into its data centers with a special twist. As Data Center Knowledge reports, Dell and eBay are bringing cooling water directly alongside custom-built Intel chips with way fewer pumps than this type of operation usually requires, making the whole system quite efficient.

MICROSOFT MULLS SALES FORCE REVAMP TO SPEED SHIFT TO CLOUD

Sales people (at least in my experience) tend to work the hardest at selling the products that bring them the most commission. So it’s not surprising that Microsoft, now well into CEO Satya Nadella’s push to turn the storied software company into a cloud company, is being pushed by Chairman John Thompson into thinking about ways to better incentivize its sales people to sell cloud products and services, according to Bloomberg.

BIG PICTURE

Google and Facebook are the most important companies built entirely on the web; two organizations that have mastered technology and design to create two of the most popular (yet very different) consumer services we’ve ever seen and reap the ad dollars desperate to reach that audience. Google’s attempts to become more social are well chronicled, mostly because they’ve largely flopped, but Facebook’s attempts to more search-friendly have less heralded.

That might start to change if a new effort from Facebook called Deep Text entices more people to search for things on Facebook. Deep Text is based on the company’s formidable artificial intelligence research and aims to analyze the immense amount of content posted to Facebook every day in hopes of returning satisfying results from a Facebook search. (Alan Packer of Facebook talked about this topic in some detail at Structure Data 2016.)

Facebook’s previous efforts in search, such as Graph Search, haven’t made “Let Me Facebook That For You” into a meme. But Deep Text is interesting: “The unstructured data on Facebook presents a unique opportunity for text understanding systems to learn automatically on language as it is naturally used by people across multiple languages, which will further advance the state of the art in natural language processing,” the company wrote in a blog post.

This isn’t something that will keep Larry Page up at night, at least for now. While Facebook is a massive entity, Google isn’t exactly a small fry, and it has the advantage of crawling publicly available content, as opposed to Facebook, where a lot of its content is shared within the context of one’s social network. It’s not entirely clear how Deep Text will work in terms of surfacing content posted outside your network, but the company noted that lots of celebrities and businesses post publicly on the site, and the growing capitulation of the news media to Facebook’s distribution channel means there will be a lot of public content to analyze and surface.

I’ve always thought the most “disruptive” thing any tech company could do since that odious term gained traction is to dent the cash machine that is Google search. Google’s mastery of this very natural information-retrieval service is what allows it to build self-driving cars and robots, and if Facebook can start convincing advertisers that its search product is actually more targeted than Google’s, some interesting shifts might start taking place in tech.