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Archive for June, 2009

Innovation in Search

June 5th, 2009

Search is hot lately, with two new search engines being announced in recent weeks. As the world’s only easily-searchable database platform, we’re happy to see attention being paid to finding relevant data easily.

The first new search engine to come out is Wolfram Alpha, founded by physicist/inventor/crank Stephen Wolfram. I would describe Wolfram Alpha as a cross between Google and Wikipedia for technical topics: math, physics, chemistry, and so on. It’s neat that I can type in sin(x) and see a graph, or type in benzene and see everything from its molecular structure to a phase diagram. Then again, I’m a nerd. Outside of scientific fields, it does poorly. If I type in Brazil I see only a smattering of factoids about the country. Compare this to Google’s entry for Brazil, which gives me images, maps, recent news, and so on; or Wikipedia’s entry, which is simply awesome, and shows Wikipedia at its best.

The second recent search engine to be unveiled is Microsoft’s Bing. It copies recent Google innovations like chunking out search results into different areas (news, maps, facts, weather) and providing suggestions for refined or related searches. It also has some very useful new features, like a mouse-over preview of the content of each search result that a user can skim before deciding whether to follow the link.

All of this innovation shows that search is as important as ever. We couldn’t agree more. That’s why we built the world’s only searchable database. Type in what you’re looking for, like you would in an Internet search engine: phrases, people, dates, numbers, and so on. TrackVia translates your request into a search that’s appropriate to your data model, and presents a highlighted list of matching records from your database.

You can then edit the data right in the results page. You can also search notes that colleagues have added to database records, and search the built-in change history that TrackVia keeps for every record. And you can use advanced tricks like phrase searches, exact matches, negative matches, field binding, and even searching for blank values. All of this with a single search box, and a button labeled “Go.” No queries or wizards required. Did I mention it’s really, really fast – even with a hundred thousand records in your database?

It’s sort of like TrackVia is the Google/Bing/WolframAlpha of your own data.

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Posted in features, general, industry trends

Tags: bing Google search wolfram alpha

Why is Cloud Hot Now?

June 1st, 2009

Journalists wrote about cloud computing more than 6,000 times in May. Why?

After all, the delivery of IT services across the Internet is more than a decade old. Hotmail is a cloud-based email service, PayPal a cloud-based payment service, and Salesforce.com a cloud-based CRM – and all of those companies were started in the ‘90s. So what’s new that has made cloud computing so popular in the last two years?

I think the answer is that three prerequisites, or enablers, of cloud computing have been progressing steadily over the past decade, and their combination is only now at an inflection point.

The first enabler was the ubiquity of high-speed Internet access. The percentages of offices with broadband, of airports and hotels with WiFi, and of smart phones with data capability have all grown steadily since the dot-com crash. The second enabler was the maturity of browser technology. Only in the last three years have the major browsers settled on standard implementations of the technologies required for rich, interactive user interfaces – most importantly the Document Object Model (DOM), but also xhtml, CSS, and JavaScript. The third enabler was the gradually increasing comfort end-users have with storing private or critical information on the web. Call this the Gmail effect: over the last decade, professionals became accustomed to using the web for email, then retailing, then personal banking, and finally conducting business.

If one supposes that improvement in those prerequisites has been more or less linear over the past 10 years, then their product – cloud readiness by businesses – would have increased not in a straight line, nor even like a parabola, but along a cubic curve. In other words, the trends combined to produce an inflection point in cloud readiness only recently.

At that inflection point, major vendors like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and (ahem) TrackVia entered the space, in turn driving those 6,000 press mentions. Okay – more of that coverage focused on those first three vendors than the last one. But check out our online database for business anyway!