Centrifuge Releases Latest Version of Visual Networks Analytics Platform
September 24, 2012
Centrifuge recently published “Centrifuge Delivers Scalable Big Data Analytics With Visual Networks Analytics Version 2.7” which discusses a new solution that minimizes the need for data scientists while accelerating discovery across disparate data points. Sounds pretty cool…and complicated.
According to the news release, Centrifuge, a provider of Big Data analytics and visualization solutions for fraud, security and risk, announced the availability of the latest version of its Visual Networks Analytics platform. It addresses the need to derive context intelligence and pattern discovery in big data by delivering powerful technology that addresses the growing need to quickly filter, sift and understand large amounts of data.
Renee Lorton, Centrifuge CEO, explains:
“Corporate Information security is a big data analytics challenge that cannot be addressed with traditional data mining, BI, or legacy analytics approaches. The sheer volume and complexity requires a powerful investigative discovery approach that is easy enough for a non-data scientist to use. Machine data, for example, is one of the fastest growing segments of big data, generated by websites, applications, servers, networks, mobile devices and other sources. Now, discovering patterns in Big Data is both easy and cost effective with Centrifuge’s powerful interactive data visualization.”
With an increasing number of organizations being hacked, information security is becoming a higher priority. A variety of industries would benefit from this technology.
Jasmine Ashton, September 24, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Centrifuge Video Worth a Look
September 18, 2012
Centrifuge Systems has a metaphorical-type video explaining its system and method, lengthily titled: “Uncover the Mysteries in Big Data and Fraud Data Analysis with Centrifuge Systems.” The overview runs 1.24 minutes and is worth a look. If you like that one, check out more instructive videos at the company’s resource page. These folks are good at explaining things.
Centrifuge recently released version 2.7 of its analysis software. About their technology, the site explains:
“Centrifuge Visual Network Analytics gives you the power and flexibility to connect, visualize and collaborate without complex data integration, costly services or a data science degree. Using advanced link analysis, you can ‘bring your own data’ from any source, filter and combine as desired, and quickly make connections between people, behavior and events.
“Centrifuge Interactive Visualizations move beyond simple visual dashboards to give you the ability to interpret data within the context of your business. With patent-pending Collaborative Discovery, you can share findings and collaborate with others for deeper insights and faster problem-solving.”
Centrifuge is proud to have garnered a place in the 2012 FinTech Innovation Lab Program, and to have been placed on the 2012 Always On Global 250 Private Company Top Ones to Watch list. The company is Headquartered in McLean, VA.
Cynthia Murrell, September 18, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Centrifuge Rolls Out Big Data with Visual Analytics
September 16, 2012
Centrifuge has released its latest version, we learn from “Centrifuge Delivers Scalable Big Data Analytics with Visual Network Analytics Version 2.7.” Centrifuge focuses on corporate fraud, security, and risk. The upgraded platform brings more speed to intelligence and pattern discovery for large amounts of data. The press release states that Centrifuge is the first big data analytics solution to allow customers to bring in their own data, eliminating the often expensive data transformation step.
Centrifuge CEO Renee Lorton explained her company’s niche :
“Corporate Information security is a big data analytics challenge that cannot be addressed with traditional data mining, BI, or legacy analytics approaches. The sheer volume and complexity requires a powerful investigative discovery approach that is easy enough for a non-data scientist to use. Machine data, for example, is one of the fastest growing segments of big data, generated by websites, applications, servers, networks, mobile devices and other sources. Now, discovering patterns in Big Data is both easy and cost effective with Centrifuge’s powerful interactive data visualization.”
The write up points out a new ease-of-use feature and flexible relationship matching. Also, the Relationship Path Discovery function serves up all possible connections, but points out the shortest ones. The new version also includes an extensible data framework that broadens users’ access to a wealth of data set types.
Headquartered in McLean, VA, Centrifuge embraces the considerable challenges behind corporate security data analysis. It is proud to have garnered a place in the 2012 FinTech Innovation Lab Program, and to have been placed on the 2012 Always On Global 250 Private Company Top Ones to Watch list. Their trademarked slogan is “See Clearly Now.”
Cynthia Murrell, September 16, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Building a Better Dashboard
September 13, 2012
How do you fix a the problem of poorly designed dashboards? Why, start a contest urging folks to come up with a better one, of course. Stephen Few has issued that challenge, the 2012 Perceptual Edge Dashboard Design Competition, from his Visual Business Intelligence blog under the post titled “Defeating Bad Dashboards by Example.” One contender, Michael Schiff, has written about his solution at The Mashup, also titled “Defeating Bad Dashboards by Example.” Though Few specified contestants may use a program like Photoshop to create a mock up, Schiff chose to make his interactive. Kudos to him.
Few’s challenge is based in the teaching field, but we should be able to apply the principles explored by contestants to business intelligence and other fields. He writes:
“This will be the most challenging event of this type to date resulting in the most esteemed award for dashboard design (in my not-so-humble opinion) since I judged a similar competition for the B-Eye-Network back in 2006. . . .
“The winning dashboard will be featured in ‘Information Dashboard Design, Second Edition’, due out during the first half of 2013, and in an article in the ‘Visual Business Intelligence Newsletter”. No, you won’t win $10,000 or an all-expenses-paid vacation to the Bahamas. Instead, you will have an opportunity to advance the information age by showing a better way to display data for performance monitoring. In other words, you will have a chance to do something useful for the world.”
Ah, virtue as its own reward and all that. Bragging rights will just be the icing, right? The submission deadline is September 21, so hit up Few’s post for details if you would like to take part. Otherwise, check his blog sometime around October 10 for the winning design. I know I’m curious about the results.
Cynthia Murrell, September 13, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Performance Dashboard ROI Calculator from Visual Mining
September 12, 2012
Visual Mining offers a (free) calculator to determine the value of a visual dashboard—see the Business Dashboard ROI Calculator at their site. Naturally, their focus is on their own software, NetCharts Performance Dashboards, but you may be able to extrapolate. The tool’s description reads:
“Reporting and analysis for your business shouldn’t be an arduous undertaking. But many businesses spend 10, 20 or even 40 hours per month assembling financial reports. With performance management dashboards, you don’t have to involve IT or consultants to customize reports, and you don’t need to spend endless hours copying, pasting and assembling data out of spreadsheets or report writers.”
Well, yes, that’s a performance dashboard for you. To use the calculator, you will enter the business’ revenue and an estimate of how many hours currently spent each month producing reports. Then plug in how much you might spend on the software, and the calculator will spit out estimated returns.
Visual Mining has been building data visualization software since 1997. Despite its old-school roots, the company prides itself on keeping up with technology, from supporting the latest browsers and devices to employing advanced chart-rendering methods. Their NetCharts is Web-based, and they also produce tools for developers to build customized, integratable dashboards. The company is headquartered in Rockville, Maryland.
Cynthia Murrell, September 12, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
New Visualization Service from BT
August 16, 2012
BT (British Telecommunications) has launched a new product called Assure Analytics, MarketWire informs us in “BT Simplifies Big Data and Security Challenges with New Visualization Service.” The security data analysis service focuses on big data, naturally, and aims to facilitate fast and effective decision making. The press release reveals:
“The service, which instantly fuses together structured and unstructured data from any number of sources – such as emails, reporting systems, databases and internet news feeds – brings the information to life for businesses through insightful imagery and mapping which highlights potential patterns, threats, interdependencies and outcomes across their organization.”
Interestingly, the company is practicing what it promotes. The write up notes:
“BT is already using Assure Analytics in its battle to protect the UK telecoms network from copper theft. The service is helping the company analyze crime statistics, fault reporting and geographical information – highlighting patterns and theft hotspots to inform its prevention and response policies.”
The world’s oldest surviving communications company, BT began as The Electric Telegraph Company in 1846. The company provides a range of communications solutions to customers in over 170 countries. Not surprisingly, it is the official Communications Services partner for the London 2012 Olympic Games.
Cynthia Murrell, August 16, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Ontopia 5 2 1 Released
August 15, 2012
Ontopia’s Blog has posted an extremely brief notice: “Ontopia 5.2.1 Released.” The post states that “This is a minor release which fixes the vizigator and vizlet in the distribution.” (Vizigator is a nifty graphical visualization too.) It then refers us to the release notes, which state:
“This release is a minor bug fix release, which includes the fixed vizigator and omnigator vizlet.”
The following bugs have been fixed:
- Issue 438: Vizigator is not starting on Mac!
- Issue 439: TopicNameComparator might throw NullPointerException
- Issue 440: bat file pointing to noneixisting jar file in 5.2.0“
Ontopia‘s suite of open source tools help developers build applications based on Topic Maps. This important open source technology is an international industry standard for information management and interchange. A couple of developers have been working on Ontopia for over a decade, and new participants have been pulled in from Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Norway.
Ontopia 1.0 was released in 2001, and the core engine is considered very stable. The software is released under the Apache License 2.0. Because the entire product is released as open source, there are no essential proprietary add-ons. Several options for commercial support are available.
Cynthia Murrell, August 15, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Digimind Explains Visualization
July 10, 2012
The Digimind Blog recently published an interesting post about visualization entitled “Harness the Power of Data Visualization With Digimind.”
According to the post, Data Visualization is a way to make complex unstructured content more visually appealing and digestible. Digimind’s competitive intelligence search engine utilizes this technology so that any search query generates an interactive word cloud.
The article then goes on to explain how this technology works by using the example of the trending Apple versus Sony trending news.
After showing the word bubbles that appear once the It sums up by stating:
“Unsurprisingly, Apple gets a lot more coverage, the main topics around the Apple brand talk about the iPad because of the coming release of a new Microsoft tablet. Google reacted to Apple’s last keynote introducing maps by cutting the price for Google maps usage.
Meanwhile, Sony garnered coverage relating to the release of xperia.”
I really enjoyed ready this post because it explains the way that visualization works in very easy to understand terms.
Jasmine Ashton, July 10, 2012
Sponsored by Ikanow
The Mash Up Mixing Bowl
July 10, 2012
InetSoft Technology is mashing search technologies together with the availability of new custom data connectors for popular enterprise applications. This big mixing bowl will add connectors to the list of supported third-party data sources that do not already have open standards based connectivity according to Times Union’s article, “InetSoft Adds Google Analytics, AdWords, and Microsoft SharePoint as Data Sources for BI Dashboarding”.
The new InetSoft technology provides a smooth mix with an efficient transformation, as:
“Style Intelligence is a full-featured business intelligence solution for dashboard reporting that includes a powerful data mash-up engine. End-users get visually compelling, highly interactive access to data, and IT gets a highly customizable, easy to learn and quick to deploy business intelligence toolset and information delivery platform. Data mash-up capabilities allow for the integration of disparate data sources, enabling agile development and providing maximum self-service, while the application’s SOA architecture and open standards-based technology make for an ideal embedding and integration-ready application for dashboards, production reporting, and visualization.”
Those who take advantage of this new quick mix technology will get compelling visuals, along with highly interactive access to data. The IT department will find the technology easy to learn and highly customizable with a convenient business intelligence toolset and information delivery platform. The end result, InetSoft has mashed up search technologies into a big mixing bowl of efficiency.
Jennifer Shockley, July 10, 2012
A Visual Way to See What is Changing Within Wikipedia
July 9, 2012
Wikipedia is a go to source for quick answers outside the classroom, but many don’t realize Wiki is an ever evolving information source. Geekosystem’s article “Wikistats Show You What Parts Of Wikipedia Are Changing” provides a visual way to see what is changing within Wikipedia.
The performance program was explained as:
“Utilizing technology from Datasift, a social data platform with a specialization in real-time streams, Wikistats lists some clear, concise information you can use to see how Wikipedia is flowing and changing out from under you. Using Natural Language Processing, Wikistats is able to suss realtime trends and updates. In short, Wikistats will show you what pages are being updated the most right now, how many edits they get by how many unique users, and how many lines are being added vs. how many are being deleted.”
Enlightenment was gained when actually viewing the chart below:
This program calculates well defined reports on Wikipedia’s traffic, and Wiki frequenters might find the above chart surprising. The report in this case shows the reality that Wikipedia is an over flowing pool of information.
We are not saying Wikipedia is unreliable, but one should never solely rely on one information source. The chart simply provides a visual way to see what is changing within Wikipedia and help users understand how data flows. This programs potential for real time use on other sites could be tremendous.
Jennifer Shockley, July 9, 2012
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