Webinar from BrightFunnel Ties Marketing to Revenue
June 30, 2015
The webinar on BrightFunnel Blog titled Campaign Attribution: Start Measuring True Marketing Impact (How-To Video) adds value to marketing efforts. BrightFunnel defines itself as platform for marketing analytics that works to join marketing more closely to revenue. The webinar is focused on the attribution application. The video poses three major questions that the application can answer about how pipeline and revenue are affected by marketing channels and specific campaigns, as well as how to gain better insight on the customer. The article overviews the webinar,
“Marketers care. We care a lot about what happens to all those leads we generate for sales. It can be hard to get a complete view of marketing impact when you’re limited to trusting that the right contacts, if any, are being added to opportunities! In this recording from our recent webinar, see how BrightFunnel solves key attribution problems by providing seamless visibility into multi-touch campaign attribution so you can accurately measure the impact you have on pipeline and revenue.”
BrightFunnel believes in an intuitive approach, claiming that three to four weeks has been plenty of time for their users to get set up and get to work with their product. They host a series of webinars that allows interested parties to ask direct questions and be answered live.
Chelsea Kerwin, June 30, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Matchlight Lights Up Stolen Data
June 26, 2015
It is a common gimmick on crime shows for the computer expert to be able to locate information, often stolen data, by using a few clever hacking tricks. In reality it is not that easy and quick to find stolen data, but eWeek posted an article about a new intelligence platform that might be able to do the trick: “Terbium Labs Launches Matchlight Data Intelligence Platform.” Terbium Labs’ Matchlight is able to recover stolen data as soon as it is released on the Dark Web.
How it works is simply remarkable. Matchlight attaches digital fingerprints to a company’s files, down to the smallest byte. Data recovered on the Dark Web can then be matched to the Terbium Labs’s database. Matchlight is available under a SaaS model. Another option they have for clients is a one-way fingerprinting feature that keeps a company’s data private from Terbium Labs. They would only have access to the digital fingerprints in order to track the data. Matchlight can also be integrated into already existing SharePoint or other document management systems. The entire approach to Matchlight is taking a protective stance towards data, rather than a defensive.
“We see the market shifting toward a risk management approach to information security,” [Danny Rogers, CEO and co-founder of Terbium} said. “Previously, information security was focused on IT and defensive technologies. These days, the most innovative companies are no longer asking if a data breach is going to happen, but when. In fact, the most innovative companies are asking what has already happened that they might not know about. This is where Matchlight provides a unique solution.”
Across the board, data breaches are becoming common and Matchlight offers an automated way to proactively protect data. While the digital fingerprinting helps track down stolen data, does Terbium Labs have a way to prevent it from being stolen at all?
Whitney Grace, June 26, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Digital Reasoning a Self-Described Cognitive Computing Company
June 26, 2015
The article titled Spy Tools Come to the Cloud on Enterprise Tech shows how Amazon’s work with analytics companies on behalf of the government have realized platforms like “GovCloud”, with increased security. The presumed reason for such platforms being the gathering of intelligence and threat analysis on the big data scale. The article explains,
“The Digital Reasoning cognitive computing tool is designed to generate “knowledge graphs of connected objects” gleaned from structured and unstructured data. These “nodes” (profiles of persons or things of interest) and “edges” (the relationships between them) are graphed, “and then being able to take this and put it into time and space,” explained Bill DiPietro, vice president of product management at Digital Reasoning. The partners noted that the elastic computing capability… is allowing customers to bring together much larger datasets.”
For former CIA staff officer DiPietro it logically follows that bigger questions can be answered by the data with tools like the AWS GovCloud and subsequent Hadoop ecosystems. He cites the ability to quickly spotlight and identify someone on a watch list out of the haystack of people as the challenge set to overcome. They call it “cluster on demand,” the process that allows them to manage and bring together data.
Chelsea Kerwin, June 26, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Deep Learning System Surprises Researchers
June 24, 2015
Researchers were surprised when their scene-classification AI performed some independent study, we learn from Kurzweil’s article, “MIT Deep-Learning System Autonomously Learns to Identify Objects.”
At last December’s International Conference on Learning Representations, a research team from MIT demonstrated that their scene-recognition software was 25-33 percent more accurate than its leading predecessor. They also presented a paper describing the object-identification tactic their software chose to adopt; perhaps this is what gave it the edge. The paper’s lead author, and MIT computer science/ engineering associate professor, Antonio Torralba ponders the development:
“Deep learning works very well, but it’s very hard to understand why it works — what is the internal representation that the network is building. It could be that the representations for scenes are parts of scenes that don’t make any sense, like corners or pieces of objects. But it could be that it’s objects: To know that something is a bedroom, you need to see the bed; to know that something is a conference room, you need to see a table and chairs. That’s what we found, that the network is really finding these objects.”
Researchers being researchers, the team is investigating their own software’s initiative. The article tells us:
“In ongoing work, the researchers are starting from scratch and retraining their network on the same data sets, to see if it consistently converges on the same objects, or whether it can randomly evolve in different directions that still produce good predictions. They’re also exploring whether object detection and scene detection can feed back into each other, to improve the performance of both. ‘But we want to do that in a way that doesn’t force the network to do something that it doesn’t want to do,’ Torralba says.”
Very respectful. See the article for a few more details on this ambitious AI, or check out the researchers’ open-access paper here.
Cynthia Murrell, June 24, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Expert Systems Acquires TEMIS
June 22, 2015
In a move to improve its product offerings, Expert System acquired TEMIS. The two companies will combine their assets to create a leading semantic provider for cognitive computing. Reuters described the acquisition in very sparse details: “Expert System Signs Agreement To Acquire French TEMIS SA.”
Reuters describes the merger as:
“Reported on Wednesday that it [Expert System] signed binding agreement to buy 100 percent of TEMIS SA, a French company offering solutions in text analytics
- Deal value is 12 million euros ($13.13 million)”
TEMIS creates technology that helps organizations leverage, manage, and structure their unstructured information assets. It is best known for Luxid, which identifies and extracts information to semantically enrich content with domain-specific metadata.
Expert System, on the other hand, is another semantically inclined company and its flagship product is Cogito. The Cogito software is designed to understand content within unstructured text, systems, and analytics. The goal is give organizations a complete picture of your information, because Cogitio actually understand what is processing.
TEMIS and Expert System have similar goals to make unstructured data useful to organizations. Other than the actual acquisition deal, details on how Expert System plans to use TEMIS have not been revealed. Expert System, of course, plans to use TEMIS to improve its own semantic technology and increase revenue. Both companies are pleased at the acquisition, but if you consider other buy outs in recent times the cost to Expert System is very modest. Thirteen million dollars underscores the valuation of other text analysis companies. Other text analysis companies would definitely cost more than TEMIS.
Whitney Grace, June 22, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Latest Version of DataStax Enterprise Now Available
June 19, 2015
A post over at the SD Times informs us, “DataStax Enterprise 4.7 Released.” Enterprise is DataStax’s platform that helps organizations manage Apache Cassandra databases. Writer Rob Marvin tells us:
“DataStax Enterprise (DSE) 4.7 includes a production-certified version of Cassandra 2.1, and it adds enhanced enterprise search, analytics, security, in-memory, and database monitoring capabilities. These include a new certified version of Apache Solr and Live Indexing, a new DSE feature that makes data immediately available for search by leveraging Cassandra’s native ability to run across multiple data centers. …
“DSE 4.7 also adds enhancements to security and encryption through integration with the DataStax OpsCenter 5.2 visual-management and monitoring console. Using OpsCenter, developers can store encryption keys on servers outside the DSE cluster and use the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol to manage admin security.”
Four main features/ updates are listed in the write-up: extended search analytics, intelligent query routing, fault-tolerant search operations, and upgraded analytics functionality. See the article for details on each of these improvements.
Founded in 2010, DataStax is headquartered in San Mateo, California. Clients for their Cassandra-management software (and related training and professional services) range from young startups to Fortune 100 companies.
Cynthia Murrell, June 19, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Make Your Data Pretty
June 19, 2015
It is very easy to read and interpret data when it is represented visually. Humans are visual creatures and it can be easier to communicate via pictures for an explanation. Infographics are hugely popular on the Internet and some of them have achieved meme status. While some data can be easily represented using Adobe Photoshop or the Microsoft Office Suite, more complex data needs more complex software to simplify it visually.
Rather than spending hours on Google, searching for a quality data visualization tool Usability Tools has rounded up “21 Essential Data Visualization Tools.” What is great about this list is that it features free services that available to improve how you display data on your Web site, project, or whatever your specific needs are.
Some of the choices are obvious, such as Google Charts and Wolfram Alpha, but there are some stand outs that combine JavaScript and draw on Internet resources. Plus they are also exceedingly fun to play with. They include: Timeline.js, Tableau Public, PiktoChart, Canva, and D3.js.
None of the data visualization tools are better than the others, in fact the article’s author says what you want to use is based on your need:
“As you can see, there is plenty of Data Visualization tools that will make you understand your users in a better, more insightful way. There are many tools being launched every day, but I managed to collect those that are the most popular in the ‘industry’. Of course, they have both strong and weak sides, since there is no one perfect tool to visualize the metrics. All I can do is to recommend you trying them yourself and combining them in order to maximize the efficiency of visualizing data.”
It looks like it is time to start playing around with data toys!
Whitney Grace, June 19, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Basho Enters Ring With New Data Platform
June 18, 2015
When it comes to enterprise technology these days, it is all about making software compliant for a variety of platforms and needs. Compliancy is the name of the game for Basho, says Diginomica’s article, “Basho Aims For Enterprise Operational Simplicity With New Data Platform.” Basho’s upgrade to its Riak Data Platform makes it more integration with related tools and to make complex operational environments simpler. Data management and automation tools are another big seller for NoSQL enterprise databases, which Basho also added to the Riak upgrade. Basho is not the only company that is trying to improve NoSQL enterprise platforms, these include MongoDB and DataStax. Basho’s advantage is delivering a solution using the Riak data platform.
Basho’s data platform already offers a variety of functions that people try to get to work with a NoSQL database and they are nearly automated: Riak Search with Apache Solr, orchestration services, Apache Spark Connector, integrated caching with Redis, and simplified development using data replication and synchronization.
“CEO Adam Wray released some canned comment along with the announcement, which indicates that this is a big leap for Basho, but also is just the start of further broadening of the platform. He said:
‘This is a true turning point for the database industry, consolidating a variety of critical but previously disparate services to greatly simplify the operational requirements for IT teams working to scale applications with active workloads. The impact it will have on our users, and on the use of integrated data services more broadly, will be significant. We look forward to working closely with our community and the broader industry to further develop the Basho Data Platform.’”
The article explains that NoSQL market continues to grow and enterprises need management as well as automation to manage the growing number of tasks databases are used for. While a complete solution for all NoSQL needs has been developed, Basho comes fairly close.
Whitney Grace, June 18, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Exorbyte Offers Entity Detection
June 16, 2015
Germany based Exorbyte is a leading European solutions company for search and analysis in structured/unstructured data. Business On tells us that Exorbyte has released a feature to help users manage their email inboxes: “Input Management: Exorbyte Automates Identity Determination.” Using Google Translate to give us the details, the article explains that Exorbyte now offers a Full Page Entity Detect, a tool that extracts the identity data from full-text documents and compares them with reference databases.
Full Page Detect is advertised as taking out the guess work in figuring out where data originates in documents. The process is described as:
“The identity data can be extracted directly from the digitized full-text documents such as letters, faxes and e-mails and efficiently compared with reference databases – virtually independent of language. It doesn’t matter whether the data in question is incorrect or incomplete. Exorbyte’s Full Page Detect Entity is able to read the valid data and organize it without fail for customers.”
Full Page Detect’s main selling point is that it can recognize information in documents no matter where it is placed in the document. It uses Exorbyte’s leading Matchmaker technology, which is extremely reliable in detecting errors and keeping analysis on track.
Exorbyte offers a useful service for people trying to summarize their emails without having to open every single one. It streamlines the email process and makes it more efficient.
Whitney Grace, June 16, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Search Cheerleader Seeks Text Analytics Unicorns
June 12, 2015
The article on Venture Beat whimsically titled Where Are the Text Analytics Unicorns provides yet another cheerleader for search. The article uses Aileen Lee’s “unicorn” concept of a company begun since 2003 and valued at over a billion dollars. (“Super unicorns” are companies valued at over a hundred billion dollars like Facebook.) The article asks why no text analytics companies have joined this exclusive club? Candidates include Clarabridge, NetBase and Medallia.
“In the end, the answer is a very basic one. Contrast the text analytics sector with unicorns that include Uber — Travis Kalanick’s company — and Airbnb, Evernote, Flipkart, Square, Pinterest, and their ilk. They play to mass markets — they’re a magic mix of revenue, data, platform, and pizazz — in ways that text analytics doesn’t. The tech companies on the unicorn list — Cloudera, MongoDB, Pivotal — provide or support essential infrastructure that covers a broad set of needs.”
Before coming to this conclusion, the article posits other possible reasons as well, such as the sheer number of companies competing in the field, or even competition from massive companies like IBM and Google. But these are dismissed for the more optimistic end note that essentially suggests we give the text analytics unicorns a year. Caution advised.
Chelsea Kerwin, June 12, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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