Cyberstrategics

I have been troubled by CEP marketing lately.   It started when I read a statement by John Davies in his post Algorithmic trading with Twitter.

In his post, John boldly wrote to Peter Lin, and the world:

Peter,
The fuzzy logic is exactly what CEP companies specialise in, ….

-John-

I could not understand how someone who takes such amazingly beautiful photos, and is obviously both creative and intelligent, could make such as bold false statement about CEP companies and what they specialize in.

Everyone in the CEP business, or at least everyone “in the know” knows that almost all software companies who call themselves CEP vendors specialize in SQL-type of straight-forward query logic.  Less than a handful of the other companies calling themselves CEP vendors sell Rete-rule processors.   We cannot name a single company that calls themselves  a “CEP company” that specializes in fuzzy logic, Bayesian classifiers, neural networks or any advanced processing required for classifying text.  In fact, “CEP” from a marketing term, seems to have a de-facto definition (by vendors, analysts and Wall Street) of “query-based stream processing across sliding time windows.”

Curious as to the background of this amazing photographer who peaked my interest, I found that John served as the Technical Director at Progress Software (September 2008 – February 2009), and Technical Director at IONA Technologies (March 2007 – September 2008).    Hence, I am totally confused by what is going on the the CEP space when highly creative and intelligent people make bold, inaccurate public statements.  In fact, I can’t tell if what we are seeing in the CEP airwaves is simply folks dreaming, hoping, wishing or just not knowing.  This is what I find troubling.

And I say, hey hey hey hey
I said hey, what’s going on?

First of all, Twitter is basically an Internet-based communications channel based on short messages.   The messages are unstructured text, for the most part; however there are some informal rules and syntax.  The technical challenges to process and classify unstructured text are well known.   For example, when we use Google to search for relevant data based on our keyword searches it is the wonders of text classification, search and retrieval that makes it all possible (Google makes use of Bayesian analytics for much of their classification.)   I have discussed this many times and will not repeat this information in this post.

I find it really odd that “certain companies” are using this gimmicky marketing blurb “process Twitter and enhance your stock trading” for a number of reasons.  The first reason is that people who make this type of claim are tacitly attempting to tell the public they have the “holy grail” of stock trading for sell.   Of course, everyone would like to have a software platform they can “plug into the rumor-mill” and make a fortune trading stock. Who would not want such a processing beast?    This type of marketing smacks of a “get rich scheme” doesn’t it?

Second, why do we find is necessary to argue with software company employees about this?  Do the people who work for these companies actually believe everyone else in the world is so much less intelligent than they are?  Or do these same folks simply believe that they have such a deeper vision than all of us, including Google, the US Department of Defense, major universities and everyone else under the sun?

A reason to examine further is the business aspect.  If it was possible to process information flying around the Internet and publish reliable market indicators that could be used for trading, Google could already be doing this and selling it as a service to Wall Street.   After all, if you can make a lot of money processing “rumors” based on text messages, then every Google search query, every Google spider of a page has the potential to be the holy grail of trading indicators (and Google has the technology, unlike most of the self-described CEP companies).  The same (business opportunity) is true for Twitter.   The question of the financial viability of Twitter, as a business, continues to linger overhead (however, after CNN adopted Twitter, things have been looking up).  If it was possible to process text-as-rumors and create reliable trading strategies, then Twitter could simply “bolt on” some software and sell indicators as a service (IaaS) to Wall Street.

This is also true for the US government’s intelligence community.  If it was easy to process information and determine, with any degree of reliability, what is going to happen next in the world of crime and terrorism, the world we live in would look vastly different.  The truth of the matter is that, more often than not, automated processing of intelligence fails.   Sure, you can look for keywords “bomb” or “kill” but when someone says “that singer is just the bomb, I would kill to look like her” what happens?   Of course, this is just a trivial example and no one (talking about singers and hairdos) is trying to be deceptive.

The problem is that, although folks have always dreamed of processing vast amounts of text messages and to extract meaningful buy/sell signals for the stock market (or intelligence gathering), reality is far from the dream (and I am talking about much more sophisticated technologies than streaming query engines!).    In fact, experience shows us that trying to trade on these types of signals is unreliable and destabilizing. However, this fact is not my main point today.

My main theme is that I am increasing troubled by CEP marketing.  I am not troubled because something is “wrong with me” per se.   I don’t have any requirements to sell software or to repay venture capitalists or private investors.  I don’t carry a software sales quota (never have).   I swam 2000 meters yesterday and had a wonderful dinner besides a lazy river under candlelight.  Afterwords, I enjoyed a few pages from the famous Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho.    My life is stress-free (for the most part) and happy,  except for what I read by software vendors attempting to sell and create market buzz via gimmicks (and, of course, the social and political unrest we read in the newspapers and on the Internet).

I also believe that people are basically good and I don’t think anyone is intentionally trying to defraud the public regarding the capability of software and the potential to make money in the stock market from it.  I don’t think people are intentionally marketing “get rich schemes”.   I believe in the good nature and intentions of people.  Maybe I am wrong or simply too naive?  (I have heard this more than once, that I am sometimes naive about the big world.)

In fact, I don’t know what to think.  A dream, a fraud or incompetence?  Wishful thinking?  Positive thinking?

I don’t have the answers.  What I do know is that everyone I talk to, or get email from, finds the outrageous claims of software companies troubling and gimmicky marketing less-than-honorable (and that is being kind).  So, I will ask nicely,

Could you please stop it?

Filed under: CEP News and Events, Complex Event Processing