PTC Acquires SLM Winner for Broader Coverage of Service
August 13, 2012
There has been a renewed interest in customer service of late across many industries leading to an increase in data management solutions targeting the service oriented aspects of enterprises. The latest proof that this is the direction companies are shifting their priorities is PTC’s acquisition of Atlanta based Servigistics, a profitable provider of software which manages service contracts and the like, according to the recent Boston Business Journal article, “PTC to acquire service management firm Servigistics for $220M”.
PTC president and CEO, Jim Heppelmann, was quoted as saying,
“Over the past few years, Servigistics has earned a reputation for innovation in helping companies maximize their global service businesses through increased profitability, cash flow, and customer loyalty. Their customers are at the leading edge of a global trend to take service from a cost center to a profit center, and SLM technology has been a critical driver. This acquisition should make clear just how serious PTC is about helping its customers achieve lasting service advantage.”
Heppelmann couldn’t be more correct in his assessment of Servigistics which has allowed for their impressive success. Product lifecycle management (PLM) as PTC offers and Service lifecycle management (SLM) as Servigistics offers, is no longer just about making life easier for engineers and IT team members. There is a growing understanding that industries across the board need new data management solutions to cut costs and raise revenues. Smart PLM providers are cashing in on the opportunity.
Catherine Lamsfuss, August 8, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Mercado Ignition Evolves into Adobe Search&Promote
August 13, 2012
Looking for Mercado’s search system and merchandising suite Ignition? It is currently tough to find, but it is still available. It is now called Search&Promote, and is owned by Adobe.
Companies can weave a confusing web when they start snapping each other up. Omniture bought Mercado and renamed the software Omniture Merchandising. Then Adobe bought Omniture. It seems businesses would get more sales if it were easier for customers to find the products they liked in an earlier incarnation. Why not just go with “Adobe Ignition?” Nah, too simple.
Here’s the description of the system in its latest form:
“Adobe Search&Promote enables marketers to optimize how visitors browse, find, compare, and select relevant products and content on web and mobile sites. Businesses can easily promote priority items based on business objectives and visitor intent, as well as automate merchandising and promotions activity via KPI-based triggers or metrics. Adobe Search&Promote is part of the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite for online business optimization.”
The software is available as an enterprise SaaS application. The search and navigation interfaces are flexible, and the marketing console is designed to be intuitive.
Mercado began in 1998, and was based in Pleasanton, California. Founded in 1996, Omniture lives on as a division of Adobe, and is based in Orem, Utah. Adobe, of course, is a publishing and (now) marketing software powerhouse that began in 1982 and just keeps expanding. They famously gave the world the Portable Document Format (PDF) in 1993.
Cynthia Murrell, August 13, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Some Countries Still Prefer to Read the Newspaper
August 13, 2012
Science Daily recently posted the article “Online News Takes Off in US and UK While Most Germans Prefer a Newspaper” shines a bright light on traditional publishers. Unfortunately for American journalists, Germany seems to be the only country left that prefers print news.
According to the article, a recent study published by the University’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, based on surveys in UK, US, France, Germany and Denmark, found that While the majority of Germans prefer print news over online, US and UK residents prefer to access their news online. More specifically. 28% of UK and US residents access the news from their mobile phones and 60% of tablet users in the UK regularly access online news.
Report author Nic Newman, a Research Associate at Oxford University’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, said:
“For many people digital news is now the first place to go for the latest news, rivaling television as the most frequently accessed type of news in the UK and the US. Of those surveyed, nearly eight out of ten people accessed online news every week, but the transition from print to digital is much slower in other European countries. The report suggests that the Germans were the least likely to access news online of the five countries studied with almost seven out of ten, of those surveyed, saying they still read a newspaper.”
As online news continues to thrive in some western countries, it is interesting to see that others remain attached to traditional media forms.
Jasmine Ashton, August 13, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Pentaho Semaphonic and Infobright Partner to Tackle Big Data
August 13, 2012
A partnership between three Web analytics organizations is another to keep your eye on. The press release, “Pentaho, Semaphonic and Infobright Deliver Big Data Web Analytics,” uncovers the meaningful union intended to help organizations maximize the value of their Websites as lead generation and revenue engines.
Pentaho, specializing in business analytics, is teaming up with Web analytics consultancy Semphonic and high-performance database Infobright to tackle big data concerns. The partnership is intended to bring together everything organizations need to understand their online channels better and what to do wit that knowledge.
Susan Davis, Vice President of Marketing at Infobright, comments on the partnership in the news release:
“This partnership makes it easy for organizations to use their detailed Web analytics data to drive business improvement. With their expertise in Web analytics and measurement, Semphonic helps organizations understand what data is important and how to use it to their advantage. Using Infobright technology simplifies the process of storing and analyzing the growing volumes of Web data at a fraction of the cost of traditional approaches, while letting companies gain a deep level of data analysis delivered in interactive user-driven visualization and dashboards from Pentaho.”
An interactive demo is available at http://webanalytics.infobright.com/ and will show users how to gain insight from detailed Web data. The trio is sure to help organizations find a way to meaningfully and easily understand digital behavior at the customer level.
Andrea Hayden, August 13, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Japanese Government Uses Social Network Data to Reduce Suicide
August 13, 2012
Technology Review recently reported on behavior analysis through social networks in the article “Spotting Suicidal Tendencies on Social Networks.”
According to the article, a history of abnormally high suicide rates among Japanese men (ages 20 to 44) and women (ages 15 to 34) have caused the Japanese government to invest heavily in suicide research and prevention in hopes of cutting the rate by 20 percent by 2017.
One of the tactics that is being discussed is by identifying people who have regular thoughts of suicide, also known as suicide ideation, through their social networks. At the University of Tokyo, Naoki Masuda and a few others have taken to researching the popular Japanese social network Mixi which has over 25 million members.
After identifying user communities that may be more prone to suicide ideation, and comparing them with a control group, Masuda found that the differences were quite subtle. There were no differences in friend numbers, age, or gender between the two groups.
Some differences included:
“People prone to suicide ideation are likely to be members of more community groups than the control group. That may be the result of spending longer online and of a desire to want to interact. But a key indicator seems to be that these people are much less likely to be members of friendship triangles. In other words, they have fewer friends who also friends of each other. This low density of friendship triangles appears to be a crucial.”
This is an interesting application of algorithms. Utilizing social networks to discover the links between online and offline behavior is still a burgeoning field and there still remain gaps in our understanding.
Jasmine Ashton, August 13, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Temis Wins Award
August 12, 2012
We’d like to offer a heartfelt shake of the pom-poms to text analytics firm Temis. Tag Line announces, “TEMIS Wins 2010 LT-Innovate Award.” From vendors to policy makers, the LT-Innovate Summit brought together the leaders of Europe’s language technology arena. The gathering’s goals were to enhance the visibility of the field and to establish language technology as a priority for Europe.
Regarding the award, the write up explains:
“31 LT companies presented their activities in front of an audience and an Expert Jury composed of major players involved in LT with a solid background and experience in the development of innovative practices in the LT arena. The Expert Jury rated each presentation based on the following criteria:
Innovativeness – Business potential – Team experience – Competitive position – Investment or partnering interest – Project profile quality.”
So congratulations, Temis. Founded in 2000 by the same team who had earlier performed their text mining magic, quite effectively, for IBM, Temis acquired XeLDA, Xerox’s linguistic engine, in 2003. The company has offices spread across Europe and North America.
Cynthia Murrell, August 12, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
New Release of OpenCalais
August 12, 2012
OpenCalais gets a new release … soon. It has not come out as of this writing, but Calais’s blog announces that “A New OpenCalais Release On the Way.” It sounds like an upgrade that any site covering current events should be looking forward to. The post describes the enhancements:
“On the user-facing side of the equation you’ll see a number of new entities, facts and events related primarily to politics and intra and international conflict. Doesn’t look like either of those will be going away soon – so we thought they were worth implementing. You’ll see new information in candidates, Party Affiliations, Arms Purchases and a number of others.
“In addition to these new items, we’ve also enhanced our SocialTags feature for greater accuracy – in fact, you’ll see a number of accuracy improvements across the board.”
For those unfamiliar with the OpenCalais Web Service, it is a nifty free tool (“powered by” Thomson Reuters) that automatically incorporates semantic metadata into content. The best way to see what it does is to past a chunk of text, any text, into their Document Viewer. The tool will tease out and insert links for topics, social tags, entities (like organizations or industry terms), and events & facts. After you’ve played with that, check out the examples of ways the technology has been implemented on the Showcase page.
It is acceptable to use OpenCalais for commercial purposes, as long as users abide by the Terms of Use, but a Calais Professional version is also available for power users.
Cynthia Murrell, August 12, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Power and Behavior: Amazon, Apple, eBay, Google, and Microsoft
August 11, 2012
I like the yip yap about choice. Search means Google for most of the 99 percent who know about online. Amazon means books. Sure, there is push back from publishers and Barnes & Nobile, but Amazon is the game. Too bad about the company’s inability to control its costs as it searches for world domination. eBay has been hanging in there. There is the wonderful PayPal service. I pay and maybe the Account information displays what I did. Well, maybe not. And there is adorable Microsoft. The IBM to the generations of computer users born after 1980.
Let’s take a quick look at the possible correlations between power and behavior.
Fights are simplified when there is one antagonist and one protagonist. Child-like in their simplicity.
First, navigate to the PCMag.com, a publication which does fewer product reviews and more “I wanna be a pundit” writing than when I worked at Ziff Communications, the outfit which owned the original PC Magazine. The story is “Microsoft’s Massive Metro Mistake.” The main idea is that Microsoft did not do a trademark search. The more interesting information in the write up is the allegation that Microsoft wants to shove the new pointy-and-clicky interface down the developers’, the users’ and the enterprise licensees’ throat. Got it. Power. Microsoft is a big outfit, a slightly updated version of IBM. Microsoft once was computing. The fear of losing market share, revenue, and clout seems to be the motivation behind the Draconian actions assigned to Microsoft. My view? Er, what’s new here?
Second, check out “The Bottom Line on Apple and YouTube.” A real journalist turned video management wizard asserts that Apple’s dumping of YouTube in the next Apple mobile operating system is a good thing. Yep, lemons become lemonade. My view is that Apple is throwing its considerable weight around. Neither Samsung nor Google intimidate the Infinity boys and girls. Apple pretty much has money and the idea that it can do what it wants. No problem. My view? Er, what’s new here?
Rapid-I and Radoop Partnership: Working Toward User-Friendly Big Data
August 11, 2012
A new partnership announced between a business intelligence firm and a big data problem solver is one to put on your radar.
Rapid-I, a leading provider of open source solutions, and Radoop, an interface for big data analytics, have joined forces, according to a blog post on Rapid-I, “Partnership Between Rapid-I and Radoop.” Both parties are excited about the collaboration and state the development of the RapidMiner extension offered by Radoop is just the first step in a long-term business partnership. CEO of Rapid-I, Dr. Ingo Mierswa, states about the move:
“The extension is assuming a pioneering role and is already being used with great satisfaction. The best of two worlds is brought together by Radoop: The analysis of large data volumes enabled by Hadoop and an intuitive user interface brought in by RapidMiner. The real-time insights offered by the solution make a tight interlocking with operational business processes possible and therefore give enterprises a real benefit, e.g. for the early detection of customer churn or sales optimizations through combining CRM data with social media analyses.”
With a whirlwind of nonsense and heavy words surrounding the big data trend, it is refreshing for us to see two companies working toward user-friendly big data analytics. We look forward to the possibilities that will be sure to arise out of this collaborative effort.
Andrea Hayden, August 11, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Ami Revamps Web Site
August 11, 2012
Ami, the enterprise intelligence software company, has refreshed its Web site. If you navigate to the UK version of the company’s site here, you can learn about the firm’s current positioning. (Be warned, though: there is an auto-run video explaining the firm’s approach.) There is also an “old” Web site which is still online at this link.
The new site is more slick and sleek than the old. The color combinations are less jarring, and there is much less clutter on the page. The auto-run video, though, could be a problem. A software company should be aware that, yes, even now, not everyone’s system can handle such an imposition.
The company’s mission as described on the new site reads:
“Our mission is to enable our customers to develop the most far reaching insight and intelligence about the markets and sectors in which they operate through the optimised acquisition, analysis and presentation of information from both internal and external sources. . . .
“AMI Enterprise Intelligence specialises in the development of information and content processing software designed to capture, organise and analyse information from both internal and external software using horizon scanning techniques that are widely considered as best practice in competitor analysis.”
Ami was formed in 1999 by some individuals from the areas of aviation and electronics. These professionals applied the rigorous standards from those fields to the development of their software; those standards, they say, impart an unrivaled level of reliability to their products.
Cynthia Murrell, August 11, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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