MapMaking Used to Prevent Public Health Threats
February 10, 2012
Science Blogs recently reported on a new tool that blows Google Maps out of the water in the article, “New Mapping Tools Bring Public Health Surveillance to the Masses.”
According to the article, HealthMap is a team of researchers, epidemiologists and software developers at Children’s Hospital Boston who use online sources to track disease outbreaks and deliver real-time surveillance on emerging public health threats. They also utilize the help of local residents to help with research.
Blogger, Kim Krisberg writes:
“HealthMap, which debuted in 2006, scours the Internet for relevant information, aggregating data from online news services, eyewitness reports, professional discussion rooms and official sources. The result? The possibility to map disease trends in places where no public health or health care infrastructures even exist, Brownstein told me. And because HealthMap works non-stop, continually monitoring, sorting and visualizing online information, the system can also serve as an early warning system for disease outbreaks.”
Mapmaking and public health are hardly strangers. Public health practitioners use maps to guide interventions. Despite the complexity of most disease outbreaks, maps can still help health professionals raise public awareness about prevention and target interventions in ways that make the most of limited resources.
Jasmine Ashton, February 10, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
The Heat in SharePoint Semantics: January 27 – February 3
February 7, 2012
This week SharePoint Semantics shared a variety of informative reading material that is pertinent to both SharePoint end users and search enthusiasts.
In the article “Avoid the Most Common Mistakes Made by Beginning SharePoint Developers,” Ken Toth shares an article that outlines a list of situations worth avoiding if you are a SharePoint development novice.
Toth points out:
“Sometimes reinventing the wheel means you end up with a bigger wheel, but also you will have to look after and support that wheel for when it breaks, and you may also have wasted a load of time making that bigger wheel.”
Similarly, in “Uncover Business and Staff Needs Before Deploying a Microsoft SharePoint Intranet,” we learn that staff often don’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to determining what’s best in a SharePoint intranet.
Toth advises:
“First, conduct an intranet needs analysis to determine staff needs. Then, uncover how SharePoint can allow for new ways of working through scenarios, case studies, stories, and examples. Third, get everyone on the same page by making sure all stakeholders have the same definitions and priorities.”
As SharePoint grows in popularity, many people are starting to wonder what to do with paper information in this increasingly digital world. The post “Looking to Partners to Aid with Managing Paper-Based Information in the SharePoint Environment” offers some solutions.
Writer Jeff Shuey explains the importance of finding partners to manage your paper information.
Toth concludes:
“Bringing paper and digital information together is no doubt a challenge in our information age. It is a discussion worth having so that solutions continue to be made available for handling the ever-increasing variety of formats.”
Sometimes, regardless of the number of needs assessments and situations that you avoid when implementing your SharePoint platform, your site still falls short of its target. In this case, consider turning to The Semaphore Content Intelligence Platform from Smartlogic. It will ensure that your SharePoint content is easily found and re-purposed, saving valuable staff time and money.
Jasmine Ashton, February 7, 2012
Cignifi Uses Mobile Phone Usage to Discern Credit Risk
February 6, 2012
There’s a new predictive analytics twist in the realm of credit worthiness. Slashdot informs, “Banks Using Mobile Phone Usage to Gauge Credit Risk.” Should’ve known—everything now comes back to the phone.
Startup Cignifi focuses on consumers who use mobile phones but have no access to formal financial services. In the absence of credit histories, the company has developed software that makes credit risk predictions based on phone usage patterns. Writer Hugh Pickens explains,
The way you use your phone is a proxy for your lifestyle say the developers. ‘We’re looking at things like the length of calls, the time of day, and the location you make them from. Also things like whether you top up [a pre-paid SIM card] regularly. We want to see how stable the patterns are. When you look at that, you can create these behavioral clusters that give you information about users’ appetite for new [financial] products, and their ability to repay a debt.’
Cignifi is currently operating in Brazil, and is looking to expand to other limited banking countries like China, India, the Philippines, and Mexico. Deployment in the US is not planned anytime soon. The company is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has offices in Sao Paulo, Brazil and Oxford, England. In fact, it was behavioral mathematicians in Oxford who developed the technology. Go figure.
Cynthia Murrell, February 6, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Cracking Technology Start Ups
February 1, 2012
Quote to Note: If you have an MBA and are dreaming about making big money in technology start ups, you will want to read “New Identified Research Reveals Engineers Far More Likely than MBAs to Build and Run Companies.” My interest is search, which is a spectacularly complex technical process. I have watched companies run by MBAs crash and burn. An English major with a knowledge of medieval Latin would probably have done an equally poor job. But MBAs!
Here’s the quote I noted:
We culled through 36 million professional profiles in the Identified database and found 3,337 founder/CEOs have an advanced engineering background compared with 1,016 MBAs. The ratio of undergrad business and engineering founders/ CEOs is about even (9,461 versus 9,334), a significant shift occurs in the number of leaders who have advanced degrees.
Not all will succeed, of course, and you will want to read the entire document which is available at this link. I don’t know for how long, however.
Stephen E Arnold, February 1, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
The Heat in SharePoint Semantics: January 20 – January 27
January 31, 2012
As always, SharePoint Semantics has delivered many posts that are vitally important to both SharePoint end users and search enthusiasts alike.
The first post that I would like to share with you is entitled “SharePoint Joel Lists Seven Actions to Take Before Calling Microsoft Support.” This post shares helpful hints on how to solve your SharePoint issues on your own before having to involve Microsoft.
Writer Ken Toth summarizes the key points:
“The seven things you should do are: 1. Review the Service Pack and Cumulative Update Level 2. Reboot / Recycle 3. Eliminate Third-Party Add-ons as the Issue 4. Engineers Escalate / Partner / Awareness (maybe you could solve the problem in-house if you asked engineering) 5. Isolate the Issue 6. Code Issue 7. Reach Out to the Community (Twitter and/or Newsgroups).”
Many organizations use wikis to gather and share ideas on SharePoint quickly and efficiently. The post “Build the Best Microsoft SharePoint Wiki You Can Build” shares virtues and tips on how to make a SharePoint wiki work effectively for your business.
Toth states:
“To be useful, the wiki must be easy to navigate and provide all of the resources the SharePoint end user needs linked into the wiki Home page. In this way the wiki can be a one-stop shop for information about every task team members need to accomplish. Contributions are limited in order to make sure the information is accurate.”
Another noteworthy post from this week is “Excellent Resources on End User Issues for Those New to SharePoint” which points beginners with no previous experience with SharePoint to small to medium-sized implementations to resources that can be of help.
After sharing the three helpful resources for SharPoint end users, Toth notes:
“The three resources above can be quite useful for beginning users of SharePoint in smaller deployments, but if you have frustrated end users in an enterprise deployment, look to Smartlogic. The Semaphore Content Intelligence Platform provides a comprehensive solution to frustrating out of the box SharePoint search and navigation.”
As always, while these articles provide helpful tips for users to efficiently overcome the lack of out-of-the box help that SharePoint provides, It is important that users recognize the web application platform’s limitations and utilize other products like Smartlogic’s Semaphore Content Intelligence Platform. Smartlogic fills in the gaps by using semantic technology to deliver information quickly and in context.
Jasmine Ashton, January 31, 2012
The China Market: Apple and Google
January 30, 2012
Quote to note: I read the Fast Company story “Apple Could Sell 40 Million iPhones In China…” The guts of the story is an estimate—probably crazy—that Apple will sell beaucoup iPhones in China. Here’s the snippet I jotted down in my paper notebook:
Apple will seek out tie-ups with China Telecom and China Mobile to sell up to 40 million iPhones in China alone in 2013.
Underneath this estimate I wrote, “Are these 40 million phone sales which Google has lost?” Interesting question related to the notion of getting a nation state to change how it runs its railroads. I think some of them crash, but 40 million is an interesting number, if accurate. Can Google get back into China? One hopes.
Stephen E Arnold, January 30, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Inteltrax: Top Stories, January 23 to January 27
January 30, 2012
Inteltrax, the data fusion and business intelligence information service, captured three key stories germane to search this week, specifically, how certain industries are gaining a foothold via big data analytics.
One story, “Marketing Analytics Makes for a Wide Open Field,” showcases how smart marketers are getting a better understanding of potential customers with BI.
“Human Resources is Not Helpless With Big Data” acts as a rebuttal of sorts to a spate of news saying HR offices aren’t properly utilizing big data. We think they are and can do even more with a little help.
However, not all the news is positive. “Avoiding Obsolete Analytics” deals with SPOTS, an acronym for obsolete analytics, of which some say are more prevalent than we think. We, though, disagree, and showcase some finely evolving tools.
Big data is storming the castle of industry, changing the way nearly everyone does business. From the cutting edge HR work to stepping around potentially obsolete tools, there is an entire world of news waiting for you. We’re going to give you all you need to stay current in the big data world.
Follow the Inteltrax news stream by visiting www.inteltrax.com
Patrick Roland, Editor, Inteltrax.
January 30, 2012
Glassbeam: Fusion and Analysis
January 20, 2012
Formerly known as Orchesys, Glassbeam, Inc. provides software-as-a-service (SaaS) based solutions for product analytics. Its namesake technology lets organizations view a continual stream of data regarding product use and configuration. In 2009, the company was included in Gartner Inc.’s “Cool Vendors in BI and Performance Management” report. In 2011, it was a winner of TiEcon’s TiE50 award, which recognizes leading start-ups, and received $6 million in funding from TiE Angel investors. The firm was one of six on IDC’s “2011 Innovative Business Analytics Companies Under $100M to Watch” list.
Glassbeam’s technology enables users to gain insights from large quantities of product operational semi-structured data, such as log data, contained in any intelligent device. The solution converts the product operational data into actionable information using the company’s patent-pending Semiotic Parsing Language (SPL) technology, which scales to analyze terabytes of data using next generation data warehousing techniques.
The firm’s Glassbeam Server includes a parsing engine and an extraction and load engine that process information from terabytes of raw unstructured data. The Glassbeam Support Portal, provides data to departmental portals using information from its data warehouse. The company also provides Glassbeam Workbench, an analytics toolkit that enables users to build and run queries, share saved queries and results with other users, and publish the queries as dashboard widgets embeddable into other applications. Glassbeam Views provides a reporting toolset and infrastructure to design and build reports and insights from its data warehouse. In addition, it offers SPL maintenance, business analytics, enterprise application integration, and report management and delivery. Glassbeam’s Product Analytics solution uses OpSource Inc.’s OpSource Cloud to process large amounts of unstructured data.
Potential clients include those in the server, storage, network, software, telecom, medical, and industrial sectors. While there are no established players in its market, Glassbeam faces competition from firms wanting to build their own solutions.
Rita Safranek, January 20, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
MegaSearch: Looking for Excitement?
January 19, 2012
Short honk: Search systems for underground or dark net content such as credit card numbers come and go. If you are interested in this particular type of search excitement, you will want to read “‘MegaSearch’ Aims to Index Fraud Site Wares.” The service points and does not store certain information such as credit card information. We learned:
MegaSearch said that when his site first launched at the end of 2011 and began indexing the five card shops he’s now tracking, those shops had some 360,000 compromised accounts for sale, collectively. Since then, those shops have moved more than 200,000 cards. The search engine currently has indexed 352,000 stolen account numbers that are for sale right now in the underground.
For more information, see “Underground Credit Card Store Operators Aggregate Their Stolen Data.” The link, which may be blocked by certain systems, is MegaSearch.cc. Explore but understand the risks.
Stephen E Arnold, January 19, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
JackBe: Data Fusion
January 17, 2012
Founded in 2002 by brothers Luis and Jacob Derechin, JackBe was originally an AJAX widget company. At the demand of its customers, the company centered its product offering around an enterprise mashup server that supports the user-driven ad-hoc integration of data. The company was cited as a “Next-Gen BI” technology by Forrester Research, Inc. in its March 2011 “Trends 2011 And Beyond: Business Intelligence” report.
JackBe’s real-time business intelligence platform, Presto, allows users to combine data from any enterprise application, as well as data from the cloud to compose apps and dashboards that are publishable to portals, the web, spreadsheets, and mobile devices. The platform is organized around Presto Hub, which provides a single point of sign-on for JackBe’s mashup development editors, governance tools for administrators, and application storefront.
The company’s Presto Enterprise Mashup Server provides service virtualization that solves business problems and allows users and developers secure and consolidated access to disparate data from internal services, external services, and application databases. Presto Mashup Composers and Presto Mashup Connectors feature tools that enable business and technical users to create mashups. JackBe also offers Transparency 2.0, a solution for data feeds and data widgets for state and local government’s citizen-facing websites, and Mashup Sites for SharePoint, an intelligence solution that provides SharePoint 2007/2010 business users with real-time visual web-part-based apps and interactive dashboards.
To help users store, organize, and share mashups and apps, JackBe developed an app store framework in the third iteration of Presto. The apps are portable and can feed data into Excel and run standalone, on dashboards, on mobile devices, or in SharePoint.
Customers include the US Air Force, the US Army, NASA, Elsevier, Random House, Qualcom, GE Energy, and Accenture and illustrate the broad appeal of the platform. Competitors include Zapatec, IBM, and mashup tools provided by online service providers such as Google and Yahoo.
One observation: Our efforts to contact the company have been routinely ignored or pushed to a telemarketer. Your mileage may vary.
Rita Safranek, January 17, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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