Talking about Big Data
April 23, 2013
The Council on Foreign Relations blog Asia Unbound features the piece “Big Data: An interview with Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schonberger” provides insight on how the two authors feel about big data, foreign policy and China. Cukier and Mayer-Schonberger are the authors of the book “Big Data: A revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think.” They both had some interesting comments about the future of Big Data. Cukier believes that the Council on Foreign Relations should use Big Data because it is a valuable tool that in previous years we were unable to harvest but now we can do so easily and cost efficiently. Not using it would be a critical error when understanding and practicing foreign policy. In countries such as the U.S. some officials are beginning to understand its importance and are paving the way. Mayer-Schonberger comments about China and how many start-ups are beginning to understand the importance of Big Data and view it as a great opportunity. Cukier made an interesting comment concerning the U.S. and its position in the Big Data world.
“Yes, the U.S. is at the forefront of big data. But that’s just because it tends to be at the forefront of most technology trends. And this says less about America’s inherent strengths and more about its vibrant educational, business and financial culture that encourages people to flit between disciplines and sectors and start businesses. So for the moment, the U.S. has a very healthy lead. But it is not inherently sustainable. Big data companies are cropping up everywhere. Yet the most interesting place plowing into big data is China.”
With the U.S., China as well as other areas continuing to come up with new ideas, Mayer-Schonberger believes that new niches will be born which will ultimately create new opportunities for other potential players. Though various users may have different ways of utilizing Big Data, it seems that it has definitely spread and can’t be linked to just one particular group. Big Data is knocking down barriers.
April Holmes, April 23, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
The Evolution of Analytics
April 23, 2013
In the Kontagent Kaleidoscope article “Analytics: 2012 Is For Mobile What 1997 Was For The Web” marketing executive provides a video overview of the evolution of analytics. Known as an expert in his field, Schulman makes some bold statements such as the Web is dead. Schulman believes that in its current state mobile marketing is the same as simply measuring the number of hits on the Web. This does provide you with some information but it doesn’t give you everything you need. App developers try to get their apps at the top of user lists by testing names, categories and other things that might hopefully lead to the best rankings. He states that developers and marketers need to also be able to test the messaging, channels and segments to determine which of them would best attract potential users. In the beginning the Web only looked at visitors and not the unique users and there were only two kinds of marketing, direct mail and response. However, once Web analytics came along this also brought a whole new way to measure marketing and taught marketers how to not only track but also optimize campaigns.
“The evolution of marketing continues as we enter the multiscreen world. Think of it this way: 2012 is for mobile what 1997 was for the Web. Take it a step further; Kontagent is to mobile what Webtrends was to the Web. You can draw parallels around early adopters of Web analytics: these tools require some scientific methods of controls, A/B testing, cohort analysis, etc. Marketers need to take these proven methods and transfer them to measuring mobile users and in-app behaviors. In order to optimize conversions in mobile, imperative to help optimize conversions in mobile.”
If mobile marketers dig a little deeper they can use analytics to figure out where they should be focusing their mobile marketing for optimum results. Remember some things are more than just skin deep.
April Holmes, April 23, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
The Unknowns and Big Data Integration
April 23, 2013
John Yapaola, CEO of Kapow Software gave an interesting presentation at the Kapow.wow user summit about the three main cases for Big Data. According to the Kapow Software blog article “Winning the Unknown Unknowns with Big Data Integration” the three cases are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns (UU’s). Yapaola uses post 911 as an example, to show that the United States realized that we had very little actual data about the enemy. The current known data intelligence that we had was not good enough because there were new sources of unknown information about unknown enemies and combatants that was constantly emerging. There is a similar battle in the business world. It involves the shift from “data at rest” to “data in motion.” Data at rest describes your business data, which is physically stored in databases and mainframes tucked behind the firewall. This can be thought of as the comfort zone of the business or the “known knowns” because in this area business decisions are generally made based on historical data.
“Data in motion is all the new types of digital data, constantly changing, external and unstructured. This is where businesses are crossing the chasm into the known unknowns.”
Companies know that their competitors are making changes but they don’t know exactly what changes are occurring or when. Yapaola goes on to point out that the last area the “unknowns unknowns” is the most complicated and require much more predictive intelligence and information in order to be able to identify and ultimately react. However, on the other hand unknown unknowns can be a good thing and bring about innovation. Yapaola sums it up by saying
“You have volatility built into your business – changing market conditions, new competitors entering the market, employees’ turnover, financial markets etc. The information you need is also constantly changing, in a variety of internal and external sources, multiple formats, structured and unstructured. At the end of the day, the combination of integrating the right data, the agility that you get it with and the ability to distribute it as Big Data insights directly to business users for decision making is going to determine your business trajectory. Value creation is at the heart of this Big Data movement.”
Wouldn’t it be great to be able to break down the unknowns and unknowns and predict which horse will win the Kentucky Derby or even more important how will China decide to handle North Korea. Yapaola finds an interesting way to remind us that with things constantly changing in the business world the importance of predictive tools and understanding Big Data in order to be prepared for these changes is more important than ever before.
April Holmes, April 23, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Swinging for the Fences and Search
April 22, 2013
I have been reading—actually time traveling to an economics class in graduate school—David Stockman’s The Great Deformation. I follow the argument. No problem, but I am skeptical of blame from those who were involved in the events. I have been in quite a few crazy meetings, and I avoid discussing the subjects of most of those stories for two reasons: [a] In the midst of events, I had zero clue about the larger, political forces at work in which the meeting was a grain of sand in the larger dust storm and [b] I focus on search and retrieval, a subject definitely not part of the more interesting meetings in which I have participated over the last 40 years.
What impact does the “big bet” approach to investing have on search, content, and analytics vendors?
However, the “deformation” arguments triggered some thinking after I read “Google Investors Say Yes to Big Bets.” I have been looking at some of the reviews of the book. In the Kirkus Review a theme surfaced:
fiscal math hit the shoals,” leaving a legacy of permanent “massive deficit finance” and the legend that “deficits didn’t matter.”
What’s this have to do with search? Well, that is a good question. I took a moment and looked up the venture money which has flowed into a handful of search and content processing companies. Here’s the table in which I captured my result. The link points to the source (maybe a good source, maybe a lousy source).
| Company | Venture Funding | Year Founded |
| Attivio | $48.2 million | 2007 |
| BA Insight | $10.5 million | 2004 |
| Coveo | $34.7 million | 2004 |
| Digital Reasoning* | $5.2 million | 2000 |
| Palantir ** | $301 million | 2004 |
| Vivisimo | $4 million | 2008 |
* The Digital Reasoning number includes In-Q-Tel funding excludes friends, angels, and family funding
** I included Palantir because in one briefing the system was presented as having a robust search function available to analyst users.
If I total these numbers, I get $403.6 million. Tossing out the astounding $301 million for Palantir, the more “searchy” vendors’ funding in this sample total $102.6 million.
Several questions rose in my mind:
First, in today’s economy, how will these firms return to investors their money, interest, and a profit?
Liferay Supports Nonprofit Water for People
April 22, 2013
Open source technologies are a good fit for nonprofits, both in theory and design. Water for People is an international nonprofit working toward providing clean water and sanitation to people in developing countries. Their Re-imagine Reporting platform is designed to show progress over time in an interactive format. The platform was created by EffectiveUI and supported by Liferay. Read more in the report, “Water For People Launches Re-Imagine Reporting Platform Created by EffectiveUI.”
The article talks about the Liferay platform:
“EffectiveUI selected Liferay, a Java-based open source portal solution, as the backbone of the Re-Imagine Reporting platform. ‘When we evaluated technology platforms, Liferay was a natural fit; the company espouses a strong desire to impact the world community, and the Liferay Portal boasts a rich open source heritage along with great functionality,’ said Ken Guiberson, CTO, EffectiveUI. ‘The portal provides a real-time content management system (CMS) editing capabilities, as well as the ability to upload financial and program data and build custom application elements.’”
It is exciting to see open source impacting charitable work in this way. LucidWorks is another open source based company that supports charities and nonprofits. Open source is a good fit with the cost efficiency and high user expectations that accompany nonprofit work.
Emily Rae Aldridge, April 22, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Janya Goes Dark
April 22, 2013
The business intelligence world is growing at a rapid pace. There are a variety of business intelligence vendors that all offer worthwhile products. Each vendor continues to come up with new ways to stay competitive and ahead of the competition and the sometimes the battle can get fierce. Janya was a business intelligence company known for providing customers with semantic analysis tools and solutions that allows users to extract important information from both structured and semi-structured data. In addition they also had a variety of customizable solutions which included automated metadata, social media mining and CRM enhancement. Users basically counted on Janya solutions to help them speed up the discovery as well as sharing of hidden information within their existing data. In previous years the company seemed to be doing well and had built a respectable reputation. However, it now seems that the company’s website seems to have gone dark. A trip to the Janya website brings up a Go Daddy page and asks visitors
“Do you want to buy this domain?”
They didn’t leave any information or even a forwarding address for customers to find. Should we assume that they are gone for good? It makes one wonder exactly what happened to the once bustling company and their product base. In such a competitive field did they meet their match and were able to uncover or do they simply run out of financial resources. One thing is for sure Janya has gone dark and only time will tell if they will ever see the light of day again.
April Holmes, April 22, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Five Noteworthy Big Data Analytics Apps
April 22, 2013
As the relationship between Big Data and analytics continues to grow so does the number of enterprise analytics applications. There are now a variety of applications designed to help enterprises get the most from their Big Data. The Enterprise Apps Today article “5 More Buzz-worthy Big Data Analytics Apps” gives an overview of the analytic tools Concurrent, Birst, SAS, Clearstory Data and Terracotta. Concurrent Lingual is a free open source project that was designed to work with Apache Hadoop. It uses Cascading application framework which allows SQL users to use their existing skills to run application on Hadoop without needing additional training. Birst Big Data is notable because experts say it helps to eliminate a vast majority of the upfront investment that is generally required to leverage Big Data. SAS Visual Analytics uses an in-memory engine to help speed up the analytics as well as the visualization process. Mark Torr, director of the SAS Global Center of Excellence stated
“SAS Visual Analytics enables creation and dissemination of dashboards, reports and the results of investigative exploration either through the Web or to native mobile applications running on an iPad or Android tablet. We believe that we are the only vendor that has analytics in-built rather than tagged-on through call outs to other services.”
“Terracotta In-Genius sits on top of Terracotta’s BigMemory 4.0 in-memory data platform. It comes with event stream processing and messaging, is said to process one million event transactions per second, identify patterns and create action items based on predicted behavior. It is also certified to operate with Oracle, SAP Hana and Hadoop.”
ClearStory Data gives users the ability to discover, analyze as well as consume data from data sources including Hadoop and Web and social application interfaces. For me these apps were new but regardless they definitely seem to bring a little something extra to the table when it comes to Big Data and analytics.
April Holmes, April 22, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Chattering About Big Data
April 22, 2013
As social media outlets such as Twitter continue to grow analysts can tell a lot from what users are tweeting or which topics have the most followers. It seems that Big Data is really buzzing in the Twitter world and created quite a stir in 2012. According to the DataSift article “Who’s Big in Big Data? the data science team at DataSift did an analysis of the amount of social interaction that Big Data received in 2012.
“A record number of Tweets were reported relating to big data within the technology sector in 2012 showing a continual growth of social interaction around ‘Big Data’. Using our sophisticated social data platform, we ran a DataSift Historics query against our hot list of Big Data products and conversations to identify which vendors were the most socially interactive, which domains were the most favorable in publicizing ’Big Data’ Tweets, the quarterly traffic progression for mentions of ‘Big Data’ and the most Tweeted stories.”
From the comparison of the various Tweets concerning Big Data, DataSift was able to determine which topics were the most popular. They then went a step further and looked at which links people shared and what Big Data sites people went to the most. Results showed that over 2.2 million Tweets were generated and Apache was the most popular Big Data vendor. As an added bonus DataSift also was delighted to learn that a BBC news article on DataSift took 2nd place in the running for most shared Big Data stories of 2012. This type of social media analysis not only provides companies with valuable insight for their daily business but also shows who the heavy hitters really are in the Big Data world.
April Holmes, April 22, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Lexmark Allegedly Paid $148 Million for Brainware
April 21, 2013
A happy quack to the researcher who sent me a link to “Lexmark Pays $148 Million for Brainware Data Capture Platform.” The write up published in March 2012 asserts:
Lexmark International, Inc. (NYSE: LXK) today announced the acquisition of Luxembourg-based BDGB Enterprise, including its U.S. subsidiary Brainware, Inc., a Vista Equity Partners portfolio company, for a cash purchase price of approximately $148 million.
I tracked Brainware because of its trigram technology which was used in the Brainware search system. What’s interesting is the positioning of Brainware in this write up. Here’s the portion I noticed:
“With the acquisition of Brainware, Lexmark is further strengthening and differentiating our industry-leading managed print services offerings and our end-to-end business process solutions,” said Paul Rooke, Lexmark’s chairman and chief executive officer. “Brainware’s innovative intelligent data capture technology will be attractive to our customers across the globe.” Brainware’s intelligent data capture platform, Brainware Distiller™, accurately extracts critical information from paper and electronic documents, validates the extracted data and passes it to customers’ data management systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and/or financial management systems. Brainware Distiller™ enables customers to more efficiently process invoices, fulfill customer orders, balance remittances, index documents, process loan applications, and perform other document-intensive processes. This high growth market is closely adjacent to both Lexmark’s customer solutions and Perceptive Software’s expanding enterprise content management (ECM) and business process management (BPM) businesses.
Search? Is it just a utility within the larger paper workflow service.
Stephen E Arnold, April 21, 2013
Sponsored by Augmentext
Social Analytics Tips
April 21, 2013
Social media analysis has become popular among marketers, but many businesses have no idea what their return on investment is with these tools. In fact, we learn from BtoB‘s “4 Things to Remember About Social Media Analytics,” a recent survey by BtoB found that just 41 percent of marketers even try to measure their social ROI. Why?
Writer Karen J. Bannan cites Altimeter analyst Susan Etlinger, who says the problem is rooted in fuzzy intentions from the beginning of companies’ venture into social media. You have to have a goal before you can measure progress toward it. A related problem lies in deciding how to use the data you collect.
Bannan offers four points to keep in mind when approaching social media analytics. First, she notes that measuring whether a company or product is mentioned means little if you don’t know the sentiment within the comments. Are folks praising or panning? Another point emphasizes the need for careful human judgment. Item number two reads:
“Some of the most important social mentions won’t use your company or product names. The idea of brand monitoring is not as valid as many believe, said David Rabjohns, CEO of MotiveQuest, a social market research firm. ‘When people are talking about something in social, 95% of them aren’t going to mention a product because they are talking about brands as enablers of their passion,’ he said. ‘But marketers think that everyone is talking about their brand.’ Marketing is evolving from storytelling to story listening, he said. Again, marketers need to be on sites where customers are spending time and listen carefully to everything they say—not just pay attention to specific keywords or phrases that show up in reports.”
Ah, but is that too much of a labor investment for most companies?
The article goes on to observe that there is a wide array of metrics tools available, and companies should choose carefully. Look for one that emphasizes insights that can be applied to decision-making. Scalability is another huge plus. Finally, be aware of the differences between social media flavors. For example, while a Pinterest post is nigh eternal, a tweet will lose relevance very quickly.
Cynthia Murrell, April 21, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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