Wordcount.org – it counts words…
…or rather it lists English words in order of how frequently they appear on the Internet
EDIT: Here’s a link to the Arcanicity Index Calculator I mention lower down in this post.
I stumbled across this site the other day when looking for information on the frequency of words used in common English. The site is the brainchild of Jonathan Harris and is wonderfully minimalistic. It almost feels as though this simple Flash plugin were an installation in a museum’s white room. A real lesson to us “more is more” types that indeed, less is more.
Anyway, take a look at wordcount.org and marvel at where your favourite words, your first name, your last name or your company name… Continue reading
Talend and FuseSource Fight for the Title of “Geek of Geeks” – Who has the Most Arcane Content?
I promised that I would share some real-world examples of how high-tech vendors’ marketing copy scores in my Arcanicity Index. So first up is some text from the respective web sites of Talend and FuseSource – two ESB vendors that I’m looking at in detail to test project REPAMATron.
As a reminder the Arcanicity Index looks to rate how much technical, or domain knowledge a reader would need to posses in order to understand a given piece of text. At the moment it works from the density of the abbreviations and acronyms found in the text. Future version may also look for technical concepts as well. The equation and MUCH more information on the Arcanicity Index can be… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, communication, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, natural language processing, readability, REPAMATron, Vendor-Related Posts | 
abbreviations, acronyms, arcanicity, automated reading index, coleman-liau, Enterprise Service Bus, esb, flesch-kincaid, fusesource, gai, geek-of-geeks, goodall arcanicity index, gunning-fog, natural language processing (nlp), readability, REPAMATron, smog, syllables, talend, technology reading ease index | 
Leave a commentThe Characteristics of a Technology Reading Ease Index
I wrote the other day about the need for a Technology Reading Ease Index. I’ve been thinking about how it might work so here are my current thoughts.
The problem I am looking to solve is that I want to be able to rate the readability of different technology vendors’ marketing copy. As I explained here, traditional readability indexes do a good job at rating the complexity of text, but do not recognise the domain knowledge that the author expects a reader to posses in order to understand it . So I’ve decided to build something on top of the existing readability indexes that takes into account the frequency and density of technological acronyms that are used.
This technology reading… Continue reading
I’ve created a monster… REPAMATron – A Search Engine for Competitive Marketing Intelligence?
…Well strictly speaking that should be I’m creating a monster. You see, I’m in the process of automating our REPAMA methodology. Let me explain.
I’ve been using the REPAMA competitive research methodology for many years to understand vendors’ marketing strategies. Long before the formation of Lustratus in fact. It wasn’t a strict methodology back then. It was a set of relatively loose processes, measures and classifications that I used to ‘score’ various elements of a specific software vendor’s marketing strategy.
I used the process when I worked on the vendor side in various senior marketing positions. It allowed me to understand how I could differentiate my company’s technology from our competitors. And to differentiate, first I had to know how… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, communication, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, differentiation, ideal customer, marketing, Marketing Strategy, Marketing Tactics, pain, REPAMATron | analysis, automated, competition, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, competitive, Lustratus REPAMA, marketing intelligence, nlp, REPAMA, REPAMATron, search engine | 6 CommentsTalend acquires Sopera – Does the World Need “Suck-it-and-see” Global Middleware?
I had a chat with an ex-colleague yesterday who told me that Talend had acquired Germany-based open source SOA platform ‘vendor’ Sopera.
This move came on the back of the news that the company had completed a $34M round of funding and Talend seems to be aiming very high with it’s combined proposition. In the accompanying press release, which is refreshingly bullish and direct, the company is aiming at vendors such as TIBCO, Software AG and Progress Software; describing those vendors’ solutions as ‘proprietary’.
Whilst it will be very interesting to see how Talend embeds the acquired technology into its own offering, it will be even more interesting to see how Talend will massage it’s go-to-market model in the… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, differentiation, esb, SOA and Integration, Vendor-Related Posts | acquisition, competitive, deutsche post, fuse, fusesource, integration, MITICOR, open source, PIPESCOM, progress software, software ag, sopera, talend, tibco | 1 CommentTruth Denied?
Plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery – or something like that. Anyway I’m sure Blake Dournaee of Intel will forgive me for borrowing the title for this blog…
…from his own “Truth Denied” blog entry on his Truth in SOA blog. Follow the link and you’ll see that Blake is a little aggrieved at a previous blog entry of mine where I suggested that Intel was using spin when describing something as both an appliance and software.
Now I’m also a little aggrieved because in his post Blake seems to suggest that he attempted to wield the sword of truth by posting a clarifying comment on this site but, he claims that his comment… Continue reading
Positioning, depositioning and the UK General Election
I watched the 2nd televised leaders’ debate the other evening and was struck by the maturity of some of the competitive marketing campaigns conducted by the UK’s political parties.
(Please get through this rather turgid and wordy description of the state of current political debate in the UK – there is a marketing-related point to this.)
Here’s the long-hand description of the most significant ideological and tactical difference between the two main parties contesting the UK general election.
To those readers who are not familiar with the subtleties of UK politics we have an incumbent government formed by the Labour party. The majority opposition is formed by the Conservative party with the minority opposition coming from the Liberal Democrats. There… Continue reading
Appistry and 3Tera Under the REPAMA Microscope
I’ve just uploaded the first draft of my latest Cloud Computing REPAMA Segment Analysis Study.
This time I’ve looked at a couple of vendors in the Cloud Software / Cloud Management / Application Services Management segment (using the Lustratus REPAMA Cloud Computing market taxonomy / segmentation model). Specifically I’ve reverse-engineered the key go-to-market strategies of 3Tera and Appistry. I will add another couple of vendors to the study as time goes on but for the moment I thought these would be two good candidates to start with. They are very different companies with very different product approaches to solving similar, if not quite the same problems. I wanted to spend a little time here highliting some… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, differentiation, marketing, positioning | 3Tera AppLogic, Appistry, applications services management, cloudiq, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, differentiation, positioning, positioning statement, REPAMA, segment analysis study, value proposition | Leave a commentValue Proposition Categories – MITICOR
I’ve been working on a way of categorising value propositions for some time. I’ve arrived at something I refer to as MITICOR which I believe represents the atomic value proposition elements.
By this I mean that all business to business value propositions can be broken down into these 7 base elements. I’m sure I will refine this over time but for our purposes these elements allow us to analyse and categorise the different value propositions that vendors use in their go-to-market efforts.
So what do these categories refer to?
Market
Elements categorised as “Market” include value propositions that relate to the organisation’s market or competitive situation, new product or service introduction as well as the organisation’s marketing efforts… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, communication, marketing, Marketing Strategy | benefit, cost, decision making unit, dmu, income, institutional, market, MITICOR, operational, REPAMA, risk, time, value proposition | 3 CommentsCompetitive Differentiation in Cloud Computing – “The horse-less carriage and typing pools”
I had a meeting with a prospective client earlier in the week and we were chatting about how differentiation and positioning in Cloud Computing has to mature.
The contention was that cloud computing vendors and service providers today are too inwardly-focussed and that they should look at the external market to determine their competitive marketing strategies. Cloud Computing differentiation bears all the hallmarks of early market strategy and is very limited. It got me thinking. Imagine if competitive differentiation was carried out in other walks of life the way it is currently carried out by most Cloud Computing vendors and service providers.
Imagine if Porsche for example had spent 7 years perfecting its new sports car, a car that was… Continue reading
- On Informatica, Evangelism, Audience Strata and BIG-DATA
- The marketing strategies of open source versus closed source ESBs
- Part 2 – First output from REPAMATron – WSO2 versus FuseSource versus Talend versus the ESB market
- First output from REPAMATron – WSO2 versus FuseSource versus Talend versus the ESB market
- WSO2 – Fits in between Talend and FuseSource…
- WSO2, or rather one of its competitors, has thrown its hat into the ring
- Wordcount.org – it counts words…
Recent Comments
May 12, 2011 (12:01) The Goodall Technology Reading Ease Index - How Complex is Your Marketing Copy? Hmm. I really do like the name Sarah but what about my ego? If I were to call the index 'GoodRead...
May 12, 2011 (11:36) The Goodall Technology Reading Ease Index - How Complex is Your Marketing Copy? I suggest calling it the GoodRead Index. Maybe it's over-reaching a bit, but you'll just have to ...
October 14, 2010 (4:19) Truth Denied? The Software Appliance Revisited. I hope you could tell that I was being more than a little flippant here Jacques. Perhaps I should...
October 13, 2010 (1:56) Truth Denied? The Software Appliance Revisited. Allow me to disagrre. At a customer, we have used Datapower for years to process XML (BTW, it is ...
June 7, 2010 (4:38) New Report From Lustratus Research: A Competitive Review of SOA Appliances Pete,Thanks for your comments, and those of your colleague. I think Danny has answered the 'mar...
June 4, 2010 (4:03) New Report From Lustratus Research: A Competitive Review of SOA Appliances Hi,I'd very much like to develop a point made in the report where it is asserted that software ...
May 6, 2010 (12:35) New Report From Lustratus Research: A Competitive Review of SOA Appliances Thanks for your comment Blake. This is a marketing-focused blog that looks at different vendors' ...
May 5, 2010 (1:23) New Report From Lustratus Research: A Competitive Review of SOA Appliances Hello There - It seems that this is a very provocative report, especially with respect to the sta...
April 14, 2010 (2:57) The Decision Making Unit for Cloud Computing Nice Technology Related Blog. Will visit again.
October 16, 2009 (5:56) The Decision Making Unit for Cloud Computing Very interesting point of discussion. I would be very interested to hear your results.