Connotate Adds PDF Extraction Function
October 12, 2012
PDF files often pose challenges for those extracting data from these types of documents, but Connotate is announcing added capabilities that will make this process easier for users. According to the article “Connotate Expands Automation Solution to Include Precise PDF Extraction” on Market Watch, the provider of automated data solutions is expanding capabilities that will allow data extraction from unstructured flat-file documents and transform them into higher-value structured content.
The article informs us about the changes at the company and the need for the technology in the market:
“‘In listening to our customer base, we heard very clearly the need for automated collection and transformation of more types of data — and PDF extraction was at the top of the list,’ said Isai Shenker, vice president of product management for Connotate. ‘We are delighted to offer a proven solution to meet this need by working with our partner, Khemeia Technologies.’”
This PDF extraction function will benefit numerous industries, as these documents are used often in financial reporting, legal services, publishing, and government documentation. We applaud Connotate in the unique and highly demanded technology, which will enable organizations to process higher volumes of data, likely reducing costs and generating revenue.
Andrea Hayden, October 12, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Connotate Partners for Crowdsourcing
October 11, 2012
Crowdsourcing.org recently reported on a new crowdsourcing partnership in the article, “Connotate and CrowdSource Partner to Offer Comprehensive Solutions for Capturing Competitive Intelligence Data for the Web.”
According to the article, Connotate and CrowdSource, two leaders in the fields of automated data collection and crowdsourcing, have chosen to collaborate to to offer more options for companies seeking cost-efficient ways to leverage Web data for business advantage.
Matt Jacobson, VP of Channels and Operations for Connotate, said of the partnership:
“We are seeing a real surge in demand for Connotate to collect competitor pricing and product data from the Web. In cases where product matching is particularly complex, crowdsourcing complements Connotate’s automated approach — and the resulting combination produces a superior solution. Our partnership with CrowdSource allows us to offer our customers a wide range of options to best meet their needs.”
By combining crowdsourcing with automated data collecting, these two companies will be able to offer solutions that accomplish formerly labor intensive tasks at unprecedented speeds and quality.
Jasmine Ashton, October 11, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Oracle Shares Mind Map of RightNow CX Cloud Service
October 10, 2012
As it is wont to do, Oracle recently conducted an educational session, this time about their CX cloud service, RightNow. They have kindly posted some details through their very brief post, “RightNow: an Introduction.” The post is basically a link to a related “mind map”; it reads:
“Today, our CRM Consultant Mr. Suresh conducted an introductory session on Oracle’s popular CX Product ‘RightNow’. Sharing our notes from this event, in Mind Map format.
“Click Here to view the Mind Map in Full Size: http://www.flickr.com/photos/crmit/7870772132/sizes/l/in/photostream/“
Are today’s products too complicated for licensees to understand without a diagram? Go ahead and click on the flickr link and see if you find it helpful. I am not sure it helps me out all that much. A transcript of the session might have been clearer to some. But, different learning styles for different folks, I guess. Perhaps the mind map will speak to you.
Here’s what the RightNow CX Cloud Service product page has to say (in prose form):
“Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service combines Web, Social and Contact Center experiences for a unified, cross-channel service solution in the Cloud, enabling organizations to increase sales and adoption, build trust and strengthen relationships, and reduce costs and effort. RightNow’s service enterprise platform provides transparent reliability, unmatched security, and total Cloud freedom for mission critical customer experience delivery.”
Cynthia Murrell, October 10, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Endeca Set to Enrich Oracle Business Intelligence Solutions
October 8, 2012
It may be obvious that Oracle’s purchase of Endeca allows the tech behemoth to incorporate unstructured data like social media, log files and text documents into their business intelligence framework. Emtec‘s blog gets more specific in the post by Jamal Syed, “What Endeca Adds to the Oracle BI Bag of Tools. . . .” The write up tells us:
“Endeca enables users to iteratively model the data as it suits them. IT does not have to perform traditional data modeling on the data before it can be available for end users. Endeca combines structured and unstructured data from disparate systems (inside or outside the company) and automatically organizes the information for search, discovery and analysis. This makes Oracle Endeca the only BI technology that unifies structured content and social media for analysis.”
For now, anyway. For those familiar with using Essbase as a data source with the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, Syed includes this caveat:
“The Endeca integration will not be as simple because of the unstructured nature of the data. Harnessing the power of Endeca’s search engine that utilizes breadcrumbs instead of keywords will be a challenge- but will provide huge benefits to Oracle BI.”
Syed expects to see a unified platform arise from this union within the next year. Endeca was founded in 1999, and developed into a leader in faceted search before being snapped up by Oracle last year.
Cynthia Murrell, October 08, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Exalate Lands Big Venture Funding for Big Data
October 7, 2012
Folks at the online marketing consulting firm eXalate must be celebrating since, as Online Media Daily reveals, “eXalate Secures $12 Million to Harness Big Data.” The Series C funding was led by new investor NewSpring Capital, and a general partner from that firm, Glenn T. Rieger, will be joining the eXalate board. The money is destined to both help grow the company’s product line and facilitate expansion. The write up by Laurie Sullivan tells us:
“eXelate will address several emerging trends, notes Mark Zagorski, the company’s CEO: custom modeling and adaptive audience intelligence. In the former, marketers use their own data as a ‘seed’ to model more relevant target audiences and accelerate the purchase funnel. In the latter, marketers modify targeting models in real-time to adapt to how audiences are interacting with the brand. He said both move the audience targeting business away from ‘cookie cutter segmentation’ and into a model where data conforms to the client, not the other way around.”
Zargosi believes his field is just beginning to glean intel from events with less obvious connections, and that existing investments in limited solutions is holding companies back. “Going beyond ‘the platform’ and actually providing solutions” gives eXalate‘s clients an advantage, he says. The company is headquartered in New York City, and currently has offices in Israel, France, and England.
Cynthia Murrell, October 07, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Free DataCleaner Download Available
October 6, 2012
We’ve found a free utility that might be useful to some of our readers. DataCleaner 3.0 is an open source data quality management tool from the European company Human Inference. The company describes the product here; the press release explains:
“In all modesty, we think that with DataCleaner 3 we are redefining ‘the premier open source data quality solution’. With DataCleaner 3 we’ve embraced a whole new functional area of data quality, namely data monitoring.
“Traditionally, DataCleaner has its roots in data profiling. In the former years, we’ve added several related additional functions: transformations, data cleansing, duplicate detection and more. With data monitoring we basically deliver all of the above, but in a continuous environment for analyzing, improving and reporting on your data. Furthermore, we will deliver these functions in a centralized web-based system.”
The solution is designed to continuously monitor, improve, and share data; at its core is their strong data profiling engine that analyzes data quality. The team incorporated many upstream improvements from dependent projects. A “completeness analyzer” points out records with incomplete fields, while enhanced search-replace and a text case converter help make analysis easier. Results can be exported into professional quality HTML reports. They have also, they say, built a user interface that is helpful and pleasant to use.
With offices in the Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium, Human Inference uses natural language processing to build their data quality solutions. Their client roster includes some familiar names, like ING Financial, The New York Times, and logistics firm DHL.
Cynthia Murrell, October 06, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Semantic Technology Solutions Beneficial for Life Science
October 5, 2012
Another interesting and highly beneficial use of semantics in the medical field has been discussed recently, according to the article “Using Semantic Technology to Find ‘Green Fields’ in Life Science” on SemanticWeb. The article tells us that the life science industry has needed improved research technology to help discover new opportunities for drug candidates, and Code-N Technology is stepping up. The new cloud-based software will allow chemists to find “green fields” of opportunities by performing concept-based searches.
The article informs us of the specific need for this type of technology:
“‘According to Forbes Magazine, drug lead discovery is stalled because it takes 10 to 16 years and costs between $4 billion and $11 billion to create a successful new drug. And according to the Wall Street Journal, the pharmaceutical industry will lose $35 billion this year due to patent expirations. Code-N has acted to help alleviate these problems by providing next-generation software based on the open-architecture data model adopted by the pharmaceutical industry, which will speed up drug discovery and deliver cures faster.’”
We think this response to Big Data problems in the highly competitive and data-dense pharmaceutical field is innovative. We look forward to seeing more similar cloud computing solutions come forward to make the mass of data more accessible to allow for swift advances in the medical field.
Andrea Hayden, October 05, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
Endeca Brings Enhanced BI Capabilities to Oracle
October 5, 2012
Oracle’s acquisition of Endeca in October of last year brings the promise of enhanced business intelligence capabilities to the expanding business IT company. According to the post titled “What Endeca Adds to the Oracle BI Bag of Tools” on The Emtec Blog, Oracle will now be equipped to handle unstructured data such as social media and text files and has begun to change Endeca into a reporting engine for social media and other similar text source systems.
We learn about the new capabilities in the article:
“Endeca enables users to iteratively model the data as it suits them. IT does not have to perform traditional data modeling on the data before it can be available for end users. Endeca combines structured and unstructured data from disparate systems (inside or outside the company) and automatically organizes the information for search, discovery and analysis. This makes Oracle Endeca the only BI technology that unifies structured content and social media for analysis.”
The integration may prove a bit difficult for Oracle because of the power of Endeca’s unstructured data search capabilities, but will likely be a very wise move for the corporation. We can already see the company’s BI capabilities expanding and believe Endeca is a great addition to Oracle’s BI framework.
Andrea Hayden, October 05, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
Lissted Streams Tweets and Analyzes Data
October 5, 2012
Discovering what is going on in the world and tracking news stories can be difficult in an overwhelming arena of social media updates. However, Twitter-based media relations platform Lissted is making that task a little easier for journalists and PR professionals. We learn about the company’s developments in “Trend Data and Sentiment Analysis Added to Twitter Tool” on MrWeb, which reports that Lissted has added trend data and sentiment analysis to its platform. The platform currently streams and indexes Tweets from journalists across the world.
The article tells us more about the features and benefits of this technology:
“As well as displaying the top trends across its database, Lissted now enables subscribers to look for trends within a specific group, showing the most talked about topics at a specific time or within a particular field of interest.
The new sentiment analysis feature – which is powered by Lexalytics’Salience Engine – assesses the language used in a tweet, to gauge whether tone is positive, negative, or neutral.”
This increased Twitter functionality shows the capabilities that sufficient data analysis can provide to numerous business and media outlets. We think keeping pace with social networking updates is essential to managing the chaos of data.
Andrea Hayden, October 05, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Study Shows Question and Answer Research Approaches Are Questionable
October 1, 2012
More information about manipulation has been revealed through a tricky study in Sweden, according to “How to Confuse a Moral Compass” on Nature, the weekly, international, interdisciplinary journal of science. The study asked volunteers to fill out a survey on which they answered a level of agreement to statements about morality. A “trick” revealed hidden, opposite statements to participants after their original responses were recorded, which they were then asked to defend. Surprisingly, most participants did not detect the changes and many accepted the changed statements and even defended them.
Lars Hall, the lead researcher on the study, commented on the results:
“‘I don’t feel we have exposed people or fooled them,’ says Hall. ‘Rather this shows something otherwise very difficult to show, [which is] how open and flexible people can actually be.’
The study raises questions about the validity of self-report questionnaires, says Hall. The results suggest that standard surveys ‘are not good at capturing the complexity of the attitudes people actually hold’, he says, adding that the switching technique could be used to improve opinion surveys in the future.”
This study definitely brings about questions about whether question and answer approaches to information retrieval can be trusted. People’s opinions are often fleeting and moral compasses are not stagnant, and this study proves that people can even be tricked into reversing their opinions on moral issues. We think researchers should consider these things when referring to data based on self-report questionnaires.
Andrea Hayden, October 01, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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