According to legend, the prophet Mohammed was once asked to give proof of his connection to God and ordered a nearby mountain to come to him. When it did not respond to his command, he took it as a sign of God's wisdom (if it had come to him, he and those nearby would have been crushed), and he said, "If the mountain will not come to Mohammed, Mohammed will go to the mountain."

For decades, internet users have been combing through a proverbial mountain of data looking for information related to their jobs, their hobbies, or even their own curiosity. With users demanding simpler and more efficient ways of collecting and digesting information, a trio of companies serving completely disparate client bases has challenged the assumption that the mountain of information can't be brought to the user.

Fishhound: A New Kind of Online Stream

The words "innovation" and "fishing" don't often come into particularly close contact. Even with the advent of GPS and new high-tech rods, fishing is about as old-school and analog a pastime as there is. The basic concept of dropping a hook and line into the water and coming up with a fish hasn't changed since the Stone Age.

But to Fishhound president and founder Charles Dohs, an avid fly fisherman, the sport needed something new. He responded by bringing the latest trends in hyperlocalization and user-generated online collaboration to the world of fly-fishing.

"Fly-fishing is a very intricate sport, very detail-oriented," Dohs says. "There's a lot of resources on the internet ... none of them are any good. You go on and find fishing reports that are 6 months old." For fly-fishing, any change in the conditions, from weather to water opacity, changes the ideal equipment; it might even make a river unfishable. The constantly changing conditions and inaccuracy of online conditions were particularly frustrating to Dohs, who lives almost 3 hours from the nearest suitable river. He recalled one trip in which he and his friends each did hours of research on the internet to prepare for the trip, only to find that conditions had changed by the time they arrived at the river. The aha moment came when Dohs received more accurate tips from the local tackle shop owner.

"That's the core of the idea, getting the local knowledge," Dohs says.
Fishhound.com (tentatively www.fishhound.com) will compile fishing tips from local sources and allow subscribers to view the very weather conditions that might throw their fishing trips out of whack. What's more, instead of having to make do with outdated reports, Fishhound subscribers will get the latest information, updated, in a manner of speaking, on-the-fly.

One factor in what makes this kind of a venture possible is that the fly-fishing community isn't dominated by one large company. Instead, "the market is run by numerous mom and pop shops," Dohs says. Those mom and pop shops form the backbone of the Fishhound model. Instead of some automated feed, the local shop owners input the day's conditions manually.

"We acquire the information from the locals," Dohs says. "Prior to the locals giving us the information, they create baseline information, where we compare the returns to what they tell us are optimal conditions to fish that particular river."

Fishhound will go live in January. For $12.95 per month or $99.95 for a year, subscribers will not only be able to see the conditions but also a "fishability index rating" (FIR), which is a number between one and 10 that distills all of the conditions reported by the local affiliate into one simple number that says, essentially, how the fish are biting. Subscribers also get tips on what kind of equipment to use. All in all, they get the hyperlocalized tips they want from an internet service either via Fishhound or through text and email alerts.

"We don't even like to call them reports; this is so much greater than a fishing report," Dohs says, adding that the company is taking a "wait-and-see" approach to the market. If Fishhound.com is a success, the company may move into providing localized information for other markets.

Connotate: Aggregation Without Aggravation

Customizable data aggregation isn't just for people who like to wear hip waders and stand in rivers. At least, that's the concept behind Connotate, a New Brunswick, N.J.-based company that specializes in helping corporate clients digest large amounts of data quickly, easily, and efficiently.
To CEO Bruce Molloy, the ongoing recession is a perfect incubator for innovation. Companies with less money to spend than usual have much to gain by increasing efficiency.

"A lot of innovation comes out of these periods historically," Molloy says.

Connotate is aimed at "organizations where people are looking at screens, cutting, pasting, and monitoring manually," he says. "We talked with one pharmaceutical company that said they've got 300 people doing this kind of work."

In order to cut down on the time users spend in front of the computer doing repetitive tasks, Connotate offers a way to automate the process of tagging and tracking online trends and content. In Connotate, the user creates an agent and tags certain parts of a website that he or she wants to track.

"The process of creating an agent is like browsing," says Lokesh Seth, Connotate's vice president of content development. "It's a simple point-and-click exercise. I click on one element and indicate that it's a headline, and click on another and indicate that it's the summary I'm interested in."
Once the program recognizes a pattern in the website, it will automatically highlight summaries and headlines for the rest of the page; it will then analyze the data and send it to a portal, where the user can view trends in graph form or read the content as it exists on the source site.

Not only do Connotate agents tag and analyze headlines, they also follow the link to the full article and continue to keep up with the page as it is updated.

"It allows you to use the web as an innovative data source, where it's not just static," Seth says. "The innovative aspect is that the business users can easily go ahead and identify the content that is required."

Once the data has been coded and submitted to the portal, the user can create charts and reports to share with other users or output to external programs such as Microsoft SharePoint or iGoogle widgets.

The effect of Connotate on efficiency is significant. "We've had cases where we've had 10 times' improvement in productivity, sometimes a hundredfold," Molloy says. In addition to efficiency, user-friendliness was another key concern for Connotate's developers.

"We live in an era of instant gratification," Molloy says. "People aren't going to spend half an hour figuring out how to use something. They're going to click on something and it'll be a go/no go in seconds."

In the end, a new and innovative product has to be useful and easy to use, and that was the concern for Connotate from the beginning.

"This is designed to be extremely easy to use," Molloy says. "Our teams spend a lot of time making sure that you can be successful using this without ever reading the manual."

Safari Books: The Library That Lets You Draw in the Books

But what if you do need a manual? A collaborative effort between O'Reilly Media and Pearson contains a vast offering of information technology books, manuals, and guides that are available to the user's desktop.

Safari Books uses the latest technology and the latest content, but the idea is more than a decade old.

"Safari Books Online really began as the brainchild of Tim O'Reilly in the late '90s," CEO Jeff Patterson says. "He recognized that the concept of electronic books was coming, but he also grasped that an ebook itself has relatively limited value to IT professionals who need access to a broad range of expertise."

What Safari Books offers is a library of ebooks on a range of topics of interest to IT professionals, from software development to network administration. In recent years, Safari Books has expanded its collection to include areas that, while only tangentially related to core IT disciplines, might come in handy, such as business and digital photography.

Between books by O'Reilly and Pearson, the No. 1 and No. 3 publishers of IT content, respectively, and books by Microsoft Press and Wiley, Safari Books offers users access to literally thousands of titles. Moreover, the books are available to be viewed in print-quality resolution, which is useful when perusing illustrated works.

Where Safari Books has an edge over other online libraries is in its collaboration capabilities. Users can bookmark pages, leave notes, and, on some titles, read Amazon reviews. Not only are these bookmarks helpful for personal reference, but they also can be shared with user workgroups or with the Safari Books community at large; in short, if someone's already run into your problem and has found the answers he or she needed, you don't have to repeat the search process. Patterson also takes pride in offering users the most up-to-date content, particularly in an industry where standards and tools change as rapidly as they do in IT.

"In many cases, the technology is evolving so fast that many of these books are out of date within 6 months of being published," Patterson says. But on Safari Books, the most recent editions of books are always available, sometimes even before they go to press.

Rough Cuts is a service with which publishers can post manuscript copies of their books to the site. Not all of Safari Books' publishers make their Rough Cuts available. But some see the benefit in doing so.

"Some publishers are open to unfettered sharing of content because they believe that better serves their users and, frankly, that they'll sell more content that way," Patterson says. In some cases, user comments on and reviews of books posted on Rough Cuts have led to changes in the final printed versions.

"We've had publishers that have told us that they're getting better sell-in and sell-through with books they've made available with Rough Cuts," Patterson says.

While most Safari Books titles currently deal with such subjects as XML programming and proxy servers, there are plans to expand Safari Books to serve more audiences. "Any kind of information that people need for either hobbies or jobs to help them do it better, that's what we do," says Paige Mazzoni, Safari Books' vice president of marketing. "The long-term platform is something that you can put anything on."

From a fly fisherman wondering what lures to bring on his camping trip to a website designer looking for an HTML tag, people everywhere are looking for tools on the internet that are easy to use and customizable and that enable them to get more done faster. What Fishhound, Connotate, and Safari Books have done is bring once-obscure knowledge to the user's fingertips. With the innovators, the mountain comes to Mohammed.

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Michael Baumann is an assistant editor at Information Today, Inc. and works on several publications. Send your comments about this article to itletters@infotoday.com.
Source Citation
Baumann, Michael. "The innovators: making the internet easy, local, and efficient." Information Today 26.11 (2009): 1+. Academic OneFile. Web. 31 Dec. 2009.


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