IntelTrax Summary: October 26 to November 1
November 5, 2012
The IntelTrax information intelligence blog posted some excellent articles this week discussing the importance of investing in data analysis technology to help improve the efficiency of workplaces.
“Big Data a Big Part of IT Spending” looks at some projections regarding the rate of IT spending growth, most of which went towards social media campaign spending. However, the spending is continuing to branch out as more and more industries are beginning to utilize the technology.
The article states:
“Big data this year will account for US$28 billion of IT spending worldwide, which will increase to US$34 billion in 2013, according to Gartner.
In a report released Wednesday, the market research firm said much of 2012 expenditure will be in adapting traditional tools to address issues related to the big data phenomenon such as machine data, social data, and the large variety and velocity of data. In contrast, only US$4.3 billion will be focused on new big data functionalities.”
As big data analytics becomes more mainstream, we are seeing more interesting ways that it is being utilized. “Big Data Justice League” examines the use of big data analytics to predict the criminal behavior of maritime pirates.
The article states:
“There are almost too many sources of unstructured data to grapple with: interviews with pirates in custody, news stories about piracy incidents, data from mobile phones found during investigations, e-mail traffic, and social media posts from the pirates themselves. And here’s where the story gets really interesting, in my opinion. Most of this data comes from disparate sources that can vex the best investigations. It’s not simply a matter of easily formatted spreadsheets with clean rows and columns. At warp speed, data comes in from the Web, mobile devices, PDF files and other documents — a potential treasure trove of hidden insights.”
Some companies that a new to the big data game take a little bit of time to see the return on their investment. “Data Scientists More Important Than Most Think” gives four major detractors to analytics success:
“1. 35% of the time, it is the missing analytics skills – For analysts – how well are they able to bridge the gap to business, to understand the real question behind the ask before they jump into the data pull? For PM’s and marketing managers – how well do they understand the recipe behind making decisions based on data (BADIR framework), how well familiar they are with the fundamental analytics technique?
2. 10% of the time, it is the missing decision making process – How does budget get allocated? What is the process of laying out product roadmap?
3. 25% of the time, it is the organization’s data maturity – how easy is to get to data, how many version of the truth exist, does data exist in its rawest form for everybody to aggregate as they please?
4. 30% of the time, it the management and leadership – how is the management making decision, how are they establishing roles and responsibility, how are they holding people accountable?”
Regardless of your industry or expertise in the data analysis field, Digital Reasoning can be of great help. It offers one of the best analytics platforms on the market and can get your house in order by using automated understanding for big data.
Jasmine Ashton, November 5, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Salesforce Expands Marketing Cloud with Social Analytics
October 29, 2012
Social analytics vendors are in the spotlight this week thanks to a big expansion from Salesforce.com. The enterprise cloud computing company is leading the shift to the social enterprise with its Marketing Cloud ecosystem expansion, bringing in twenty social analytics vendors to enable more insights from a single dashboard and help companies make better, faster business decisions. We learn in “Salesforce.com’s Marketing Cloud Adds 20 Social Analytics Vendors” on ZDNet that OEM text analytics company Bitext was included in the signing with the “world’s only integrated social media marketing platform.”
We learn about the platform in the article:
“Essentially, it promises to turn insights into action and connections into customers for life because of the way that brands can engage them using this platform.
With the addition of the services from these social analytics firms, Salesforce said that customers should be able to ‘create a dashboard that delivers a single social snapshot of their company using the analytics that are most valuable to their specific business.’ This includes support for content in 17 languages.”
Bitext will be assist in that anticipated language support, providing multilingual sentiment analysis, which will help companies connect with customers across the world more quickly and efficiently than ever before. The company’s multilingual sentiment analysis solution, which will be integrated into the Marketing Cloud, will help businesses expand globally via social networking.
Andrea Hayden, October 29, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Smart Firms Look to Business Intelligence that Delivers Information
October 25, 2012
When there is more than enough new data types to warrant new methods of analysis, you know there must be a paradigm shift at play. SAP certainly is not the first to point out the juncture we currently sit at, but nonetheless they threw in their hat to the number of firms presenting research on the subject. CMS Wire reported on the matter in “Report: ‘New Paradigm’ of Data for the Social Enterprise.”
The report is titled Rethinking Analytics for the Social Enterprise and it makes the case that social businesses are in a new generation of analytics where data is collected, analyzed and often used socially. That is, the data is disseminated through mobile platforms in near real-time.
One of the characteristics of the new paradigm is the social collection of structured and unstructured data from sources both inside and outside a company, including interactions with customers and prospects. That data is analyzed socially in a collaborative fashion throughout enterprise, using mobile tools and generating results that are more visual, more current and immediately actionable.
The looming question is which vendors will pull through as the big players in shaping this new arena of software solutions and more. There is no doubt that keeping an eye on PolySpot‘s information delivering business intelligence solutions is a smart move.
Megan Feil, October 25, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
New App Mila Applies Semantics to Sales
October 15, 2012
The “micro-entrepreneur” movement has taken off in recent years, and now there’s now an app for that. Semanticweb describes how enterprise resource planning company Core Systems has employed technology from Knowledge Hives to craft the new tool in its piece, “Mobile App Mila Uses Semantics to Match Micro-Entrepreneurs to Social Media Customer Leads.”
Mila is free, though premium services are expected to be added later. Unfortunately, the app is so far only available to users in Switzerland. That could change, though, if it proves successful. Besides serving up social media leads, the software also helps users set up their (micro)businesses. Upon registration, entrepreneurs answer a series of questions designed to help the app “understand” their company and products. Writer Jennifer Zaino reports on comments from Mila’s Sebastian Kruk:
“That [understanding] feeds into its social media monitoring capability for lead generation. Currently, it supports only Twitter, but Kruk says other social outlets will be on the way. ‘Whenever we see there is some potential interesting lead or tweet, we try to find the companies in our database that sell that product or that are in categories that match the lead, and then send the lead to the company,’ says Kruk. Mila uses natural language processing technology and Knowledgehives’ Civet service, which extracts meaning from text, to help with analyzing the tweets, fixing on their most important keywords and also user locations.”
Interesting. We would like to see some user feedback on how well this process works.
Founded in 2002 and based in Windisch, Switzerland, CoreSystems strives to be the world’s top business app provider. Systems and consulting firm Knowledge Hives makes its home in Gdynia, Poland. Its solutions are underpinned by its semantic Web and social networking technologies.
Cynthia Murrell, October 15, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
The Facebook Voter Experiment
September 28, 2012
Discover Magazine hosts in interesting read on the impact of information within social networks. The Not Exactly Rocket Science Blog post is titled “A 61-Million-Person Experiment on Facebook Shows How Ads and Friends Affect Our Voting Behaviour.” Blogger Ed Yong describes the huge experiment in which, on congressional election day 2010, Facebook worked with researcher James Fowler from the University of California, San Diego.
Fowler’s team wanted to see if they could influence Facebook users to vote by applying social (media) pressure. Almost everyone who visited the site on that day saw a special Election Day message which displayed an “I Voted” link, a link to find their polling place, and a counter with a running total of users who (claimed they) had voted by that point. The vast majority also saw the profile pictures of any of their friends who had already voted. One control group saw the election messaging minus the pictures of their friends. Another control group missed out on the special message altogether.
See the article for specifics, but the upshot is this: users who saw that their friends had cast a vote seem to have been prodded to head to the polls themselves. Mobilizing voters is indeed a noteworthy thing, and this was a clever experiment. I’m most interested, though, in the following glimpse of the future:
“The internet, and social networks like Facebook, could [allow] scientists to carry out research on an unprecedented scale. It’s cheap and the results have ‘external validity’, meaning that they’re relevant to what people actually do in life, rather than in a stark controlled laboratory.
“‘It’s a brand new world!’ says Fowler. He thinks that such experiments could help psychologists to do detailed studies on very specific groups of people. ‘[That] is the first step in understanding not just average human behaviour, but the behaviour of specific types of individuals in specific types of environments,’ he says. ‘There are many human psychologies, not just one.'”
Advancing psychological understanding is a worthy goal. But how do we all feel about being unwittingly, if anonymously, enrolled in such experiments? We had better figure that out, because I see many more coming our way. Figuratively, of course; we won’t know such projects exist until (and unless) they are trumpeted in the news.
Cynthia Murrell, September 28, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
How Facebook is Playing Close Attention to Your Internet Activity
September 24, 2012
Those who choose not to “like” anything on Facebook for fear that the social media giant will use our interests, gender, location and other information against us, you may be right. Business Insider recently reported on some disconcerting news in the article “This is How Facebook is Tracking Your Internet Activity.”
According to the article, Facebook is indeed out to sell your personal information to advertisers through the use of “trackers.” Trackers are defined as “a request that a web page tries to make your browser perform that will share information intended to record, profile, or share your online activity.”
Albine privacy analyst Sarah Downey explained why users should pay more attention to trackers, and block them:
“In addition to invading your privacy, these tracking requests can consume large amounts of data. And transferring lots of data takes time. Generally, the more tracking requests on a website, the slower that website loads. That’s why DNT+ gets you surfing at 125% of the normal speed and with 90% of the bandwidth, compared to a browser without DNT+ running.”
While not all cookies are used for tracking purposes, some are just used to store information. However, it is the broader scope of these requests that is proving to be both problematic and scary.
Jasmine Ashton, September 24, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
IntelTrax Top Stories: September 14 to September 20
September 24, 2012
This week the IntelTrax advanced intelligence systems blog delivered some interesting stories that are especially pertinent to those looking to solve the big data problem with analytics solutions.
One field that could see a great deal of benefits from data analytics is education. “The Future of Education Lies with Data Analytics” foresees an education system that is taught through computerized software programs that collect data on the length of time it takes students to master material. Unlike teachers who have limited time and availability, this software would provide instant feedback and compare students to classmates as well as other students across the country.
When discussing the value of this new system, the article states:
“In comparing these two learning environments, it is apparent that current school evaluations suffer from several limitations. Many of the typical pedagogies provide little immediate feedback to students, require teachers to spend hours grading routine assignments, aren’t very proactive about showing students how to improve comprehension, and fail to take advantage of digital resources that can improve the learning process. This is unfortunate because data-driven approaches make it possible to study learning in real-time and offer systematic feedback to students and teachers.”
In the field of data analytics, new and innovative partnerships are always coming about. “Tivo and Scripps Sign Deal to Improve Audience Analytics” announces a deal made between Tivo Research and Analytics and Scripps Networks Interactive, allowing Scripps to access TRA’s audience insights and analytics.
Here’s how it works:
“Media TRAnalytics® TV Auto Ratings launched in January 2012 and enables networks and advertisers to identify the right TV programming based on the make and model of automobile purchases by households watching specific networks and programs. By matching households of television tuning and automotive registration data from Experian Automotive’s North American Vehicle Database (NVDB), TRA provides advertisers, advertising agencies and television networks the industry’s largest household-level single-source solution to plan, buy, sell and evaluate the automotive industry’s current investment in television advertising.”
Big data analytics tools allow for companies to be able to gain valuable insights from your credit card statements, web searches, and social media activity. “Social Media Allows for Personal Analytics as Marketing Tools” explains how businesses can harness the data being put out of social media platforms like Facebook in order to gain insights in order to predict buying behavior.
When explaining the service, the article states:
“It also provides an interesting insight into the kind of machinations that Facebook itself could easily be doing with the data in house. Line this up with the output of Facebook’s own data export tool and you get a good picture for the truth of how much data is being collated. Consider combining patterns across tens or hundreds of millions of profiles with this level of detail and you start to get a picture of the power of the platform.”
Being able to uncover marketing trends and insights about customer behavior is becoming integral to the success of companies in nearly every field and industry. For those looking for an affordable solution that promotes automated understanding of big data analytics, consider Digital Reasoning’s flagship solution Synthesys.
Jasmine Ashton, September 24, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
LinkedIn Offers Sneak Peak of Company Pages Redesign
September 23, 2012
The tech watch Web site PCWorld recently reported on the overhaul planned for LinkedIn‘s Company Pages. We learn about the upcoming changes in the article “LinkedIn Previews New Company Pages.” Currently only accessible by a select few companies, with general availability slated for later in 2012, the redesign promises to be more option heavy and mobile friendly. Focusing on a more streamlined navigation, Company Pages brings more attention to updates and notifications while new access from iOs and Android based apps makes it easier to handle on the go. Cosmetic touches also allow users to personalize their profiles by adding a single large photograph at the top of their page, a feature similar to Facebook‘s “cover photo.”
Juan Perez of IDG news continues:
“LinkedIn also announced other enhancements to these mobile applications, including real-time notifications of actions taken by contacts. LinkedIn also added six language interfaces to the iPad application: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and Korean. Coming soon to these mobile applications is the ability for members to edit their profiles.”
With nearly 200 million users worldwide, LinkedIn is making a statement about its dedication to its customers’ core experience. These changes will make it easier for companies to access the data they need from their personalized pages, all while on the go.
Michael Ison, September 23, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Text Mining Makes Sense of Social Media
September 21, 2012
Text mining is taking a curious turn toward social media, according to “Mining the Blogosphere: Researchers Develop Tools That Make Sense of Social Media” on Science Daily. We learn in the article that several Concordia computer scientists are helping computers get closer to “reading” an online blog and understanding it. The system they created, called BlogSum, allows organizations to pose questions and then find out how a large number of people online would respond by examining real-life self-expression.
Leila Kosseim, associate professor in Concordia’s Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science and one of the lead researchers on the project, explains:
“Huge quantities of electronic texts have become easily available on the Internet, but people can be overwhelmed, and they need help to find the real content hiding in the mass of information.”
Kosseim also comments:
“The field of natural language processing is starting to become fundamental to computer science, with many everyday applications — making search engines find more relevant documents or making smart phones even smarter.”
When tested against similar technology or even human subjects, BlogSum was ranked superior. The vast number of possibilities available with this technology are overwhelming, from marketing research on consumer preferences to voter intentions in upcoming elections. We look forward to seeing it advance the world of search.
Andrea Hayden, September 21, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Social Media Adoption Facts for 2012
September 20, 2012
I read “Enterprise Social Media Adoption in 2012.” The information is presented in “infographic” form, and there were two interesting items which caught my attention. The first is the level of understanding of social media. What’s striking is that the “knowledge” seems to be low except among Gen X/Y employees and senior management. I understand the the Gen X/Y understanding at 28 percent of the sample. But the 27 percent understanding among senior management strikes me as high. The question I had, “How was the sample developed?” The second surprise was that fear of negative impacts and a lack of understanding of the benefits of social media were more important than other factors such as cost. In my experience, cost is one of the major concerns. It takes humans to “do” social media. Humans are expensive. You will want to check out the full infographic to ferret out nuggets of interest to you. I did not find any reference to searching for social media content. Despite the talk, finding specific items from social media content streams remains a difficult task.
Stephen E Arnold, September 20, 2012
Sponsored by Augmentext
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
