Actually, this is a brilliant idea. However, I am not sure if I will use this service for my organization. Why? It's got something to do with (everything to do with!) my data and my trust.
Most likely, you're just converting my questions into queries and parsing it over my data. Because your hompage is not clear if you are letting out just an API or you are giving out results of our data by yourselves. But if you gave out just an API, then it would mean we still have to process the converted queries and create our own interfaces to display the results. So I'm going to assume you take care of the data processing as well.
But, wait? You need access to my data to perform those queries. Let's say I have a million users. This means, you could potentially log every single query AND the result of the query into YOUR databases.
This means,
If I ask you "Which percent of my users pay the highest and are from the United States?"
And you perform a query on my one million users to find that out, you have data in your hands that my competitors or third party advertisers will come around you like sharks for. Whereas, all I can do at that point is just hope that you won't sell my data to them, which puts me and my data in a pretty vulnerable state.
Not to say that this is a bad idea. It's a brilliant idea, but I'm not sure how you are going to earn the trust factor.
Yup, this is a big issue, and obviously our lives would be easier if everyone was happy for us to just gobble up their data. As I've mentioned elsewhere, we want to enable a scenario where we know your schema and ontology, and can therefore generate the query. That allows us to query on your network, but as you say, there's still a huge trust issue.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on the minimum desirable interaction here - is an API that just translates natural language to, say, SQL useful enough for you to pay for?
> is an API that just translates natural language to, say, SQL useful enough for you to pay for?
Definitely!
If you get the natural language to SQL right, then it is multitudes easier for me as a developer to parse a JSON and display the results to an interface than having to learn the natural language processing part by myself and then try to interact and implement with it!
Yes an API or library for text > SQL is well worth paying for. Enterprise library in Java something like $2k per install for internal use, $10k for use on a web server would fairly standard. Bare in mind that a lot of enterprises use ORMs which you may need to interoperable with.
The tricky bit is going to be your enterprise sales channel, you need someone with the right connections.
Yeah, that's a decent option. We'll already have the problem of supporting software in the customer's environment, so it's not really a huge leap to imagine a fully local version or an appliance.
It might be a completely worthless idea, but I would consider offering a "USB Stick" version rather than an appliance. It is much easier to replace, costs close to nothing, yet it can still be implemented as a self-contained blackbox with no customer serviceable parts.
Total speculation but Java is mentioned and it's very common in Javaland to sell enterprises highly priced components to use on their own codebases. It's not the sexiest way technology like this could be used but it could certainly form the base of a lucrative business. (Indeed, they could do that to make the business worthwhile while still doing something more sexy and modern as a third party service.)
We are indeed a JVM shop. Doing something resembling consultancy is a fallback position for us. We don't want to reject big contracts, obviously, but in many ways the more technically challenging problem we'd like to solve is making an NLP product that's portable between different apps. We think we're getting there for certain sizes and classes of app, but we'll see where the market takes us when we have a saleable product.
Absolutely sell/license the portable component. Doesn't have to be a consultancy thing (although it might have to be in the beginning). Either as a library or as a standalone server like Solr. 99.99% of data in the world that this is relevant for (sales/revenue numbers, finance etc) is locked away and you are never, ever, going to get access to it on servers you control.
Yeah, this is the model that I had in mind. There's a giant enterprise (and government!) market for this sort of stuff who rarely venture out into places as cool as HN ;-) (They can be tricky to sell to though given the time involved and even finding them in the first place.)
1) they often have sprawling, disparate data sources, with schemas designed by deranged people in the 80s or 90s. The cleaner (and admittedly smaller) your data, the easier you can integrate, and to be honest, there's probably a hard limit at some point beyond which we couldn't provide value without doing bespoke customisation.
2) there are some fearsome competitors at the higher level of the market, who offer wider business intelligence suites.
Are there any well-known purveyors? I've been thinking of developing components to sell recently and was looking for some examples of what's already on the market to compare and contrast.
Most likely, you're just converting my questions into queries and parsing it over my data. Because your hompage is not clear if you are letting out just an API or you are giving out results of our data by yourselves. But if you gave out just an API, then it would mean we still have to process the converted queries and create our own interfaces to display the results. So I'm going to assume you take care of the data processing as well.
But, wait? You need access to my data to perform those queries. Let's say I have a million users. This means, you could potentially log every single query AND the result of the query into YOUR databases.
This means,
If I ask you "Which percent of my users pay the highest and are from the United States?"
And you perform a query on my one million users to find that out, you have data in your hands that my competitors or third party advertisers will come around you like sharks for. Whereas, all I can do at that point is just hope that you won't sell my data to them, which puts me and my data in a pretty vulnerable state.
Not to say that this is a bad idea. It's a brilliant idea, but I'm not sure how you are going to earn the trust factor.