Open Password – Wednesday, August 11, 2021
#959
Outsell – Government, Risk and Compliance Solutions – Alternative Data – Will Jan – Geovisualization – Operational Risk Management – Real-time Alerts – Pulse Analytics – Geopolitical Uncertainty – Economic and Government Sanctions – Adverse Weather – Social Unrest – Crisis and Reputation Risk Management – Physical Safety and Security – Cyber-threat Detection – Business Intelligence – Quandl – NASDAQ – Yewno – S&P Global – Alexa – Amazon – Financial Services – Game-changer – Market Intelligence – Marketing Effectiveness – Customer Relationship Management – Supply Chain Risk – Data Urgency – Fact Set – BTU Analytics – IHS-Markit Merger – Search Engines – Dirk Lewandowski – Springer Nature – Special Search Engines Social Media – Deep Web – Universal Search –
Elisabetta Mocca – European Municipalism – Stephan B. Kaplan – Globalizing Patient Capital – How algorithms endanger democracy – Syllabus
- Cover story:
Outsell´s August Contribution: A New Breed of Government, Risk and Compliance Solutions Evolves from Alternative Data- By Will Jan, VP & Leas Analyst –
II.
Newly published: Third edition of “Understanding Search Engines”
III. Outside the box: Open Password Recommender
Municipalism – Global Patient – Algorithms
Newly published
Third edition of “Understanding Search Engines”
Dirk Lewandowski
Dirk Lewandowski, Understanding search engines, third completely revised and expanded edition, Springer Nature 2021 – ISBN 978-3-662-63190-4 – ISBN 978-3-662-63191-1 (eBook) – https://doi.org/ 10.1007/978-3-662-63191-1 .
One of the few “bestsellers” in the information industry, which is now in its third edition. The book has been revised and updated in detail. For this purpose, the literature references were “significantly” supplemented in many cases. The author Dirk Lewandowski comments on this in his foreword: “But I made sure that this book does not suffer the fate of many introductory works, namely that it continues to grow but ultimately no longer represents an easy-to-read introduction.” Changes did occur in some cases , because “from the amount of feedback, I also received numerous tips as to which parts should be made even more understandable, where should be added, and where should be deleted.”
Restructuring also took place “in order to do justice to the current circumstances. The chapter on special search engines and the special collections that are included in web searches has been moved to the sixth chapter and completely restructured and revised in accordance with the ever-increasing importance of these collections. …The chapter on social media has been shortened and integrated into the chapter on the Deep Web. Although the importance of social media has not diminished by any means, the strong integration of the well-known social media services into the search engines, which was widely assumed a few years ago, did not take place. Therefore, the content of these services is now (still) Deep Web content, which, however, will be discussed further in a separate section due to its importance.”
The reading and reader-friendliness claimed by the author is fully achieved, as the reading sample, the summary of the chapter “Vertical search: Special collections and their integration into the general search”, shows:
“Special search engines are search engines that voluntarily limit themselves to certain areas of the web. Their strengths can lie in greater completeness of the content recorded on their topic, in deeper indexing, in adapting the ranking to a specific user group and in adapting the presentation of results and user guidance to this target group. In doing so, you encounter some of the problems of general search engines, which cannot capture the content of the web completely and up-to-date and also have to adapt to the model of an average user.
Special search engines play a role in the context of web searches primarily through their integration into the general search. With this so-called universal search , the results from the web search are combined with those from various special search engines and displayed on a common search results page.
The well-known search engines integrate a large number of special search engines into the general web search. Important collections here include news, images, videos and scientific content.
Special search engines are often hardly perceived as such by users, but rather are used as part of their integration into the universal search. It turns out that this often creates many paths to a document, which in turn benefits the users.
Further reading. Unfortunately, there are no books that deal comprehensively and in-depth with special search engines and their integration into general searches. However, the well-known research manuals by Bradley (2017) and Hock (2013) contain extensive information on special search engines as research tools. A specialized work that deals with the ranking of various content in specialized search engines on a technical level is the book by Long and Chang (2014).”
Outsell’s August Contribution
A New Breed of Government,
Risk and Compliance Solutions Evolves from Alternative Data
By Will Jan, VP & Leas Analyst
Will Jan
Dataminr buys WatchKeeper to offer contextual data, including traffic data, company security data, weather data, and IoT sensor signals. The result is an open data architecture that captures any event contributing to enterprise risk, an approach that could displace traditional GRC solutions (GRC for Government, Risk and Compliance). __________________________________________________________________________________
What to Know and Why It Matters
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Dataminr, a major supplier of alternative data to financial services and other industries, is acquiring WatchKeeper, a real-time data geovisualization platform for companies. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Geovisualization is the ability to collect and navigate through layers of external data impacting a company to evaluate them against internal company data. The acquisition aims to leverage geovisualization to support operational risk management (ORM), a subsegment of Outsell’s Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) Solutions segment.
Through the acquisition, Dataminr will offer real-time alerts on both external and internal events that could disrupt a company’s business. The objective is to allow users to identify the threat of these events in real time so they can expedite corrective measures. Currently, WatchKeeper is offering geovisualization tools for physical security and crisis management.
The combination of Dataminr’s Pulse analytics platform and WatchKeeper’s risk management tool will allow a company to see if there are business threats coming from its supply chain, employees, assets, or facilities, so it can better assess its overall corporate risk profile.
Dataminr-WatchKeeper’s underlying open-data architecture means that data can come from any compliant data source and in any format, including traffic and weather information (which impacts supply chain logistics), employee communication data, security camera feeds, and IoT sensor data. Industry trends fueling the need for realtime ORM include the growth in geopolitical uncertainty, economic and government sanctions, the increasing severity of adverse weather around the globe, and social unrest — all factors that present risks to business continuity.
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Analyst Rating: Positive
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Outsell rates Dataminr’s decision to buy WatchKeeper positively given that the integration extends Dataminr’s role beyond alternative data provision. The data provider has effectively become a GRC solution provider, enabling crisis and reputation risk management, physical safety and security, cyber-threat detection, and business intelligence (BI), which are all critical components of ORM.
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Winners and Losers
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Dataminr’s main competitors in the alternative data marketplace include Quandl (a NASDAQ company), Yewno, and S&P Global. These players are all capable of creating their respective GRC solutions through their data strategies. While these firms compete for market share in data provision to financial services, Dataminr’s path of enabling GRC management through real-time sensor data also places it in the same space as Alexa. Amazon’s Alexa also possesses risk identification capabilities through its security feeds and voice data when used in conjunction with third-party weather and traffic information.
Given the momentum that it has already gathered in industries beyond financial services, Dataminr, with its ownership of WatchKeeper, becomes a winner among alternative data suppliers looking to develop functional support of ORM. The runners-up would be Yewno and Alexa, both of which maintain open-data architectures that support real-time data in multiple formats, allowing them to support ORM. Yewno still has a ways to go to obtain scale on its capability, while Alexa already has the capability but needs to pivot from its heavy consumer focus to an enterprise focus.
Quandl’s and S&P Global’s alternative data paths continue to rely heavily on textual content and analytics in support of the financial services vertical, which makes them a laggard in being able to serve a horizontal function outside trading and investing. However, their data partnerships are growing aggressively to include real-time data that serves companies outside financial services, so there remains a tremendous opportunity for them to carve out a role in horizontal support in the corporate market.
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What’s Next
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The marriage between Dataminr and WatchKeeper will likely evolve beyond the support of ORM to other aspects of GRC management. Furthermore, the couple’s real-time BI data could also be a game-changer: the pieces are there for Dataminr-WatchKeeper to support market intelligence (strategy), marketing effectiveness, and customer relationship management (CRM), which are necessary horizontal functions in almost any enterprise.
Quandl and S&P Global will continue to invest in data acquisition in support of horizontal applications outside financial services, as trading and investing remain dedicated functions within financial services. The closest horizontal application for them would be GRC management. Given the type of data they possess on companies, the category of GRC management best served would be supply chain risk (as all B2B companies are effectively suppliers of goods and/or services). What will need sharpening is the real-time aspect of your company data — real-time supplier health assessments require real-time data.
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Essential Actions ___________________________________________________________________________
What Dataminr has demonstrated is its ability to evolve from a vertical-based alternative data provider to a function-based solution provider. Information industry participants looking to do the same need to take the following actions.
Understand the Data Urgency of the Function . To enable effective ORM, most of the data required needs to be real-time. While this may also be the case for data supporting trading and investing, not all of that data needs to be real-time to be effective in financial services or other industries. For example, reference (past) data remains important in understanding a company’s approach to performance, which serves both trading and investing as well as corporate strategizing quite well.
First decide on the target function to serve, then determine whether or not it needs real-time data. Conversely, if unique, real-time data is available, this could be a situation where securing the data is a priority, followed by identifying the ideal function that it can serve — “a hammer in search of a nail” scenario.
Know When to Buy Instead of Rent . There have been numerous M&As between non-financial (alternative) data suppliers and major financial platform providers — NASDAQ’s acquisition of Quandl, FactSet’s acquisition of BTU Analytics, and the IHS-Markit merger, just to name a few. A common thread among these deals is that the companies in them have worked with each other before. This gives the acquirer a front-row seat to see how attractive the data is to its customers. If the demand for the data is strong, the platform provider would simply acquire the data asset to lower the cost of use and mitigate future competition (by making the data asset exclusively its own). A trial period for the data is important to determine whether the data is only in demand in the near term or if it will remain relevant for the foreseeable future. The former would dictate data licensing, while the latter would suggest that an acquisition would be better.
Outside the box
Open Password Recommender*
European Municipalism, Globalizing Patient Capital, How algorithms endanger democracy
Elisabetta Mocca, The municipal gaze on the EU: European municipalism as ideology , in: Journal of Political Theories, https://www.tandfonline.com/
Stephan B. Kaplan, Globalizing Patient Capital, Book, Cambridge University Press – China is offering the global south a far better deal in financing economic development than traditional institutions such as the IMF and World Bank. No wonder so many developing countries are lining up for China.
Thorsten Klein, Algocracy – how algorithms endanger democracy, from the series: Studies on political communication. Studies in Political Communication
* In cooperation with Syllabus
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