Attensity’s New Year’s Resolution
January 11, 2011
Attensity, now a multi-faceted technology management firm, has set a new course for itself this year in Making it Work in 2011!. In the past it seems as though the company’s focus was increasingly on government contracts, as illustrated by the formation of the subsidiary Attensity Government Systems. Well oh how “the times they are a changing.” In a blog post on the company’s website in late December, buried beneath references to both classical music and reality television, the new direction is laid out.
Currently, a massive amount of data is generated by the surging wave of social networking sites and the new breed of citizen journalists. Per Attensity: “These days, competitors often have access to the same source material of customer conversations from Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums, and review sites. However, where the battle is truly won or lost is in how companies are able to harness and arrange that material, embellishing it with insights from their own internal survey and call center data, and transforming it into a symphony of action.” So, Attensity’s new focus for the coming year is to improve their current menu, giving companies the option to act on multi-channel conversations.
It appears that like many companies, Attensity sees an opportunity in repackaging their services for broader consumption in an effort to cash in on the public’s embracing of these fresh and exciting technologies. The same blog post gives a quick nod to the outgoing year’s poor economic makeup, though one is still left speculating if its main motive for the shift from its government affiliations to those of private consumers is to have a bountiful 2011. No problem with that.
Sarah Rogers, January 11, 2011
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Lexalytics and DataSift
December 31, 2010
If sentiment analysis is the key ingredient in the social content technology cocktail, then Lexalytics aims to be the brand of choice for businesses and individual consumers everywhere. MediaSift Ltd., the British company behind the Datasift social media filtering engine, is eager to see a partnership with the Lexalytics text analysis software take root.
We learned in DataSift Taps Lexalytics to Help “Tune Your Data”, that one focus of the alliance is the ever increasing accumulation of data generated from tweeting. “Lexalytics provides the ability to automatically extract companies, people or product names, without having a list of them ahead of time; the ability to calculate tweet, entity, and “linked-content” sentiment; output lists of positive/negative entities; and more.”
The Founder and CEO of Favorit Ltd., owner of Tweetmeme, a service designed to total all links and ascertain which are the most popular, is Nick Halstead. “An important part of the metrics we provide through Datasift is the sentiment, or tonality of the data. We needed an engine that could integrate quickly into our environment and start immediately providing accurate sentiment analysis across all our data services.” says Halstead. “Lexalytics Salience gives us a great combination of flexible integration, high performance and accurate sentiment analysis.”
Another goal of the union is to give users the tools to observe and respond in real-time. This is accomplished through the interpretation of massive amounts of data from a variety of online sources. The Lexalytics software possesses the capability of converting all English text and is compatible with multiple systems. Looks like another player in social content technology is being added to the shaker.
Sarah Rogers, December 31, 2010
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Scientists Map the News
December 22, 2010
People have been trying to figure out what makes good news stories and a team of European computer scientists might have found the answer. Red Orbit points us to the article, “Scientists Map What Factors Influence The News Agenda.” The team discovered that if you study a wide range of media outlets for a long period of time, patterns start to emerge. Most of the content that makes it on the news concerns national biases, cultural, geographical, and economic ties between countries.
“The analysis the researchers have conducted could not have been done in the past, due to the sheer scale of the data, but is now possible using automated methods from artificial intelligence because of recent advances in machine translation and text analysis.”
An analysis of the new agenda could prove to have many applications, especially in understanding how people view and use information. It also has the potential to allow scientists to study how media affects the entire globe and discover discernable patterns they normally would never have found.
Whitney Grace, December 22, 2009
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SAS Juices Up Text Mining
December 20, 2010
SAS has updated their Predictive Analytics & Data Mining page, and of particular note is their updated version of SAS Text Miner, which can be used to grasp trends from unstructured text without the user having to be familiar with the contents.
Text Miner “provides complete views and meaningful insights within an integrated predictive modeling environment. Automating manual comprehension of the textual data sources, incorporating interactive drill-down reporting, and delivering algorithms for rigorous advanced analyses make it possible to grasp future trends and act on new opportunities more efficiently and with less risk.“ The 4.2 version includes not only a high-performance search capability, but also enhanced spell-check and the processing of multiple topics for each document and includes new text parsing, topic, and filter nodes.
The difference of SAS Text Miner versus any other text mining solution is that SAS has the best data mining algorithms and the simplest interface for managing and importing data, and SAS integrates its text mining capabilities into its data mining solution better than anyone else.
Alice Wasielewski, December 20, 2010
Gepi: The Open Source Graphing Tool
December 20, 2010
A New Year’s Day treat!
Want to create open source graphs with lots of pretty colors? The O’Reilly Radar recommends “Strata Gems: Explore and Visualize Graphs with Gephi.” This program allows you to turn any form of data into a graph. Gepi is an open source project great to analyze networks and data. It can be used on all the major operating systems is described as a “Photoshop for data.”
“Graphs can be loaded and created using many common graph file formats, and explored interactively. Hierarchical graphs such as social networks can be clustered in order to extract meaning. Gephi’s layout algorithms automatically give shape to a graph to help exploration, and you can tinker with the colors and layout parameters to improve communication and appearance.”
Another great feature Gephi offers is that it is extensible through plugins. These will allow you to export and publish the data on the web and experiment with other layouts. Gephi appears to be a quick and easy way to study data, plus the color options will keep your artistic side happy. Get Gephi at http://gephi.org/.
Whitney Grace, December 20, 2010
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Arnold Comments about Exalead
December 20, 2010
A couple of times a year, I make a swing through Europe. I visit vendors, get demos, and talk with engineers about the future of search. In Paris on November 30, 2010, I answered questions about my views of Exalead. As you know, Exalead is a unit of Dassault Systems, one of the most sophisticated engineering firms in the world. You can get my view of Exalead by navigating to this link. Here’s an example of the observations I made:
“Exalead delivers applications that fit seamlessly and smoothly into customer workflows,” said Arnold. “When I spoke with Exalead customers I heard only: ‘This system works,’ ‘It’s easy to use,’ ‘It’s stable,’ and ‘I don’t have to chase around.”
In the interview, I point out that Exalead’s engineering makes it possible to embed search and information access in applications. Instead of using key words to unlock the information in a traditional search and retrieval system, Exalead makes the needed information available within existing work flows and applications. Access extends across a full range of content types and devices, including smart phones.
I have tracked Exalead for a number of years, and it continues to distinguish itself in information access by going “Beyond Search.” Here at Beyond Search we use the Exalead platform for our Overflight service.
Stephen E Arnold, December 20, 2010
The Exalead engineering team bought me lunch, a plus in Paris. Too bad about the snow and ice, though.
Google, Multiple Operating Systems, and the Mad Scramble
December 19, 2010
I thought politicians changed their tune. Navigate to “The Cloud OS” and you will see that even wizards and former Math Club members can crawfish with the best of the Washington DC big wheels. Xooglers have, in my opinion, a schizophrenic knife edge. On one hand, Google gave them the moxie to be world beaters. On the other hand, Xooglers are no longer part of the Google.
The point of “The Cloud OS” is, well, it’s okay for Google to be Google. I don’t have any problem with a multi billion dollar company doing what it thinks furthers the shareholders’ interests. I am ambivalent about Google’s multiple operating system approach. I think most users don’t know an operating system from a solid state drive. Computing is on a trajectory to work like toasters. I don’t have a strong opinion about that shift either.
Here’s a passage from the write up that caught my attention:
One way of understanding this new architecture is to view the entire Internet as a single computer. This computer is a massively distributed system with billions of processors, billions of displays, exabytes of storage, and it’s spread across the entire planet. Your phone or laptop is just one part of this global computer, and its primarily purpose is to provide a convenient interface. The actual computation and data storage is distributed in surprisingly complex and dynamic ways, but that complexity is mostly hidden from the end user.
The big question is, “Who decides what does a function and when?” The answer, in my opinion, is the Math Club, Xooglers, and others of that ilk. The operating system is indeed irrelevant to the user. What matters is the control of the information utility.
Forget Google. Forget Gmail. Forget whatever hook one uses to think about a giant company controlling information plumbing. The physics of information work like the good old physics taught in grad school. In systems, strange attractors grab old and structures emerge. The idea for online information is to “own” one of those emergent structures. Other, smaller structures exist, but the physics of information becomes interesting when one of these big, emergent systems snags “energy”. In information one can measure energy in money, clicks, volume of data, or some other situational metric. The idea, however, is that once a big emergent structure becomes manifest, that structure calls the shots.
So the chatter about operating systems is useful but it is like talking about a behavior at a boundary condition. The main event is the emergent system which may contain substructures. Although interesting, the substructures are subordinate to the main idea: control.
What’s this mean to Facebook, Google, and similar companies? A two class world. The builders and the users. Medieval, Dark Ages, paternal? These terms are indeed suggestive. The focus is the system, not the players. The information of physics suggests constant change and when new structures emerge a bit of desperation becomes discernable. Today’s dominant system may be tomorrow’s LTV or Enron because permanence is tough when bytes collide. The mad scramble is a nibble of revisionism, but instructive nevertheless. Just my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, December 19, 2010
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IBM Chases Predictive Analytics Opportunities
December 18, 2010
IBM was once a top technology provider but over the last few years it seems to have lost its oomph, maybe even a decline.
According to the Thomas Net News “New IBM Predictive Analytics Software Personalizes Customer Relationship Strategies,” IBM seems to be trying to bounce back with its new predictive analytics software. IBM attempts to get involved in the social media world and promises that with its SPSS Modeler “users can uncover and analyze information from social media sources, such as social networks and blogs and then merge that with internal data for accurate insight and predictive intelligence.”
More importantly companies could then use the data to better understand their customer fan base as well as for marketing and product development direction. Data analytics providers and the social media world are flourishing and it seems that IBM is trying to enter the game. However, it’s likely that IBM will be benched and forced to watch from the sidelines.
At the same time, SAS appears to be ramping up its effort in this sector as well. The battle of the statistics superstars in underway. Maybe a cable TV reality show here, gentle reader?
April Holmes, December 18, 2010
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For You N-Gram Fans
December 17, 2010
There are grams and n-grams. If you have not looked for occurrence data in the GOOG, navigate to http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/. If the link does not resolve, go to Google .com and enter the query “Google Books n-gram Viewer.” With a bit of effort, you can fire phrases words at the Google Book index and see counts.
I tested the phrase “information factory” and got no hits. My publisher has not made my monograph in which the phrase was used in the mid 1990s available. I ran a query on “information warfare” and there were no hits. Your queries may be more productive. The goose is too narrow for the service.
Stephen E Arnold, December 17, 2010
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Exclusive Interview with Kapow Software Founder
December 14, 2010
Our sister information service, Search Wizards Speak, published an exclusive interview with Stefan Andreasen, the founder of Kapow Software. You can read the full text of the discussion on the ArnoldIT.com Web site.
Kapow is a fast-growing company. The firm offers tools and services for what is called data integration. Other ways to characterize the firm’s impressive technology include data fusion, mashups, ETL (jargon for extracting, transforming and loading data from one system to another), and file conversion and slicing and dicing. The technology works within a browser and can mobile enable any application, integrated cloud applications, and migrate content from a source to another system.
In the interview, Mr. Andreasen said about the spark for the company:
As soon as we started building the foundational technology at Kapow.net in Denmark, I knew we were on to something special that had broad applicability far beyond that company. For one, the Web was evolving rapidly from an information-hub to a transaction-hub where businesses required the need to consolidate and automate millions of cross-application transactions in a scalable way. Also, Fortune 1000 companies were then and, as you know, even more so today, turning to outsourced consultants and hoards of manual workers to do the work that this innovation could do instantly.
On the subject of car manufacturer Audi’s use of the Kapow technology, he added:
In one user case, Audi, the automobile manufacturer, was able to eliminate dependencies, streamline their engineering process, and minimize the time-to-market on their new A8 model. Audi employs Katalyst to integrate data for their state of the art navigation system, called MMI, which combines Google Earth with real-time data about weather, gas prices, and other travel information, customizing the driver’s real-time experience according to their location and taste preferences. In developing the navigation system, Audi had relied on application providers to write custom real-time APIs compatible with the new Audi system. After months of waiting for the APIs and just two weeks away from the car launch date, Audi sought Kapow’s assistance. Katalyst was able to solve their problem quickly, wrapping their data providers’ current web applications into custom APIs and enabling Audi to meet their target launch date. By employing Kapow, Audi is now able to quickly launch the car in regional markets because Katalyst enables the Audi engineers to easily change and integrate new data sources for each market, in weeks rather than months.
For more information about Kapow, navigate to www.kapowsoftware.com. The full text of the interview is at http://www.arnoldit.com/search-wizards-speak/kapow.html.
Kenneth Toth, December 14, 2010
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