Free Competitive Analysis Advice from Digimind
August 29, 2013
Intelligence software firm Digimind is offering a free book on how to do competitive analysis; SlideShare hosts, “How to Conduct a Competitor Analysis: The Free Book.” You can take a look at the first few pages in slideshow format readily enough, but you’ll have to sign up to get past page four. On the other hand, there is a transcript below the slide show you can read if you have no need for graphics or proper formatting. The introduction sets the stage:
When creating a competitor analysis report, you should attempt to address the following questions:
- What are my competitors strategies for development (acquisitions, strategic alliances, new markets, new targets, new products, recruitment…)?
- Considering their resources and mode of operation, what are the potential offensive strategies my competitors might be planning?
- What are the most recent developments in my competitors main resources (financial, human, technological, production capacity…)?
- How are my competitors developing their organizations and management teams?
- Which activities are they most focused on?
- Who are the potential new players in our market?
Competitive Intelligence Solutions, such as Digimind, helps companies to anticipate their competitors’ strategies and tactics, by analyzing and continually tracking their resources, organization, actions and results.
The guide goes on to give advice on such specifics as assessing competitors, planning the analysis process, and cross-checking and assembling data.
Digimind‘s global client list includes high-profile organizations in a broad range of industries. The company works to save its clients time and money by automating and streamlining the collection, analysis, and sharing of data. Founded in 1998, Digimind has teams in Boston, Massachusetts; Paris, France; Grenoble, France; and Rabat, Morroco.
Cynthia Murrell, August 29, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
New Release of Apache Mahout Celebrated
August 29, 2013
LucidWorks celebrates with their open source partners anytime an Apache Foundation project makes a major announcement. The latest is a new release by Apache Mahout, and LucidWorks is encouraging people to come out and celebrate. Read more in their blog entry, “Join us to Celebrate the New Release of Apache Mahout Version 0.8.”
The announcement says:
“Mahout committer Sebastian Shelter is visiting from Berlin and will be the main speaker, with a short introduction and update from committers Ted Dunning (MapR), Grant Ingersoll (LucidWorks) and Ellen Friedman. This talk will give an overview of Mahout’s recommendation functionalities, including single machine recommenders, computing recommendations in parallel with MapReduce as well as options to deploy a recommender in a production system.”
Those who are interested in attending the Bay Area event should register online. LucidWorks creates partners across the open source community, bundling them into their award-winning solutions like LucidWorks Search and LucidWorks Big Data. The strength of the open source community lends agility to open source solutions, and ensures that open source is better suited to the fast pace of the enterprise technology world. Explore the latest on Mahout and learn about what LucidWorks can do for your organization.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 29, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
How Redundancy Can be a Competitive Advantage in eCommerce
August 28, 2013
The recent SLI Systems article, “In eCommerce Be, really, really redundant” makes the argument that, unlike most situations, in cloud computing redundancy can be quite beneficial. This is because it prevents downtime, a known cause of inefficiency. Therefore, redundancy is actually a competitive advantage.
The article explains:
“Downtime is especially detrimental in eCommerce; online buyers can be ruthless when they encounter it. Surveys by Akamai and Gomez.com show that among shoppers who have trouble with a web site’s performance, 79% will never return to buy from that site again. Plus, 44% say they would tell a friend about their poor experience. Even a few minutes of downtime can result in dozens of lost customers on an ordinary day. Imagine the effect of downtime during a peak shopping day like Cyber Monday!”
The article goes on to explain other situations where redundancy has been used to prevent both natural and technological disasters. While redundancy may be a plus for eCommerce businesses, how will it impact Google’s indexing?
Jasmine Ashton, August 28, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Connotate Broadens Partner Program
August 28, 2013
Last year, we learned that Connotate was partnering with Digital Reasoning on social media analysis. Apparently, the partnership model is working well for the web-data company, because now Connotate’s news page announces, “Connotate Expands Partner Program to Illuminate Potential of Big Data.” A key part of the program is their Data Value Showcase, which features tools designed for large-scale data analysis. The write-up reports:
“Higher quality data produces more reliable results. This is the essence of the mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationship between Connotate – the expert in precise Web data extraction at scale – and Connotate partners, who deliver Big Data analysis and visualization solutions. . . .
“Connotate’s Data Value Showcase is a win-win for customers and solutions providers alike as it makes it easier for customers to see the nuances between different analytics tools and zero in the one they really need.”
Connotate, based in New Brunswick, New Jersey, was founded in 2000. The company strives to lead the field of web-data extraction and monitoring, providing their clients with the best possible business insights through a user-friendly platform. Connotate continues to flourish; it has been named a KMWorld “Trend-Setting Product” for the past eight years, and last year acquired Fetch Technologies. Will their expanded partnership program help accelerate the company’s ascent?
Cynthia Murrell, August 28, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Best Social Monitoring Tool Depends on Who Is Asking
August 28, 2013
Confused about social media monitoring? A thread at Quora, “Which Are the Best Social Media Monitoring Tools?” suggests that like search, social media monitoring is pretty tricky. The overall consensus statement makes it clear there is no simple answer: “No overall best tool. Pick the best fit for your needs.” Hmm.
Several respondents share their thoughts. One had compared Radian6 and Sysomos, and found the latter much easier to use. Another liked Engagor for its low price point. Perhaps the most comprehensive (though admittedly promotional) answer comes from Web Liquid account executive Ben Semmar, who shares:
“[. . .] Over the past couple of months, I’ve been involved in the creation of a Social Media Monitoring Buyer’s Guide. We began with a list of over 40 vendors, and based on a variety of criteria, whittled it down to a list five ‘finalists’ that we then conducted hands-on trials with. We found that some tools perform better than other tools in certain areas (but, really, doesn’t everything?) and so we don’t proclaim one tool king of them all; suffice it to say, though, that the five tools we tested are, based on our experience with and objective evaluation of the market, the best out there. You can find the study here: http://www.webliquidgroup.com/social-media-monitoring-tool-buyers-guide.”
Note that the guide he mentions is free, but requires a name and email address to view. Semmar goes on to assert one important caveat: We have not reached the point where algorithms can make reliable judgments about which insights a business should focus on, and how to use them. Though quality monitoring software can be a useful tool, the human mind is still required to wield it. (For now.)
Cynthia Murrell, August 28, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Lucene Solr Has First Female Committer
August 28, 2013
CMS Wire has a new edition of Big Data Bits that features a lot of exciting news for the open source community. Read the latest in their article, “Big Data Bits: Featuring Facebook, Apache Giraph, Continuuity, LucidWorks, Hortonworks & Infochimps.”
The article begins:
“Talk about leaning in, Apache Lucene/Solr’s newest core-commiter is female! Out of the 43 individuals in this prestigious group, Cassandra Targett is the only woman. From what we can tell, she didn’t have to break through a glass ceiling to claim her place, instead she used a great deal of her talent and time to create the Solr reference guide and to update it after each release. While Targett did much of this work as an employee of LucidWorks, now that the company has donated the Lucene/Solr documentation to the Community, she’s ‘volunteering’ there.”
This is good news for women in the open source community. It also bodes well for LucidWorks. They are the commercial entity behind the Apache Lucene Solr community and they employ one-quarter of the core committers on the Apache Lucene Solr project. They build LucidWorks Search and LucidWorks Big Data on top of the foundation of Apache Lucene Solr, which leads to an agile, cost-effective solution that is renowned in the industry for its support.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 28, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Text Analytics and Semantic Processing Fuel New Web Paradigm
August 27, 2013
Often, we look more specifically at various apps and applications that address search needs. Sometimes, it is refreshing to find articles that take a step back and look at the overall paradigm shifts guiding the feature updates and new technology releases flooding the media. Forbes reports on the big picture in “NetAppVoice: How The Semantic Web Changes Everything. Again!”
Evolving out of the last big buzz word, big data, semantic Web is now ubiquitous. Starting at the beginning, the article explains what semantic search allows people to do. A user can search for terms that retrieve results that go beyond keywords–through metadata and other semantic technologies associations between related concepts are created.
According to the article hyperconnectivity is the goal for promised meaningful insights to be delivered through semantic search:
For example, if we could somehow acquire all of the world’s knowledge, it wouldn’t make us smarter. It would just make us more knowledgeable. That’s exactly how search worked before semantics came along. In order for us to become smarter, we somehow need to understand the meaning of information. To do that we need to be able to forge connections in all this data, to see how each piece of knowledge relates to every other. In the semantic Web, we users provide the connections, through our social media activity. The patterns that emerge, the sentiment in the interactions—comments, shares, tweets, Likes, etc.—allow a very precise, detailed picture to emerge.
Enterprise organizations are in a unique position to achieve this hyperconnectivity and they also have a growing list of technological solutions to help break down silos and promote safe and secure data access to appropriate users. For example, text analytics and semantic processing for Cogito Intelligence API enhances the ability to decipher meaning and insights from a multitude of content sources including social media and unstructured corporate data.
Megan Feil, August 27, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Replicant Hopes to Free Mobile from the Tyranny of Proprietary Software
August 27, 2013
Citing freedom and security concerns, the makers of Replicant are calling for donations, we learn from “Fundraising a Fully Free Fork of Android” at Boing Boing. The project hopes to give us all the choice to run our Android-based mobile devices entirely upon free software.
But wait, you ask, isn’t Android is already open source? Well, most of it, but a few “key non-free parts” keep our Android devices tethered to proprietary programs. Such parts, they say, include the layer that communicates with hardware; yes, that would be pretty important.
Also of concern to Replicant developers are the pre-loaded applications that some of us call “bloatware,” but upon which many users have come to rely. The team plans to develop free software that provides the same functionality. (I hope they also include the option to delete applications without them returning uninvited. That would be a nice change.) Furthermore, they have set up rival to the Google Play store, their app repository called F-Droid. That repository, the article notes, works with all Android-based systems.
The write-up summarizes:
“Mobile operating systems distributed by Apple, Microsoft, and Google all require you to use proprietary software. Even one such program in a phone’s application space is enough to threaten our freedom and security — it only takes one open backdoor to gain access. We are proud to support the Replicant project to help users escape the proprietary restrictions imposed by the current major smartphone vendors. There will still be problems remaining to solve, like the proprietary radio firmware and the common practice of locking down phones, but Replicant is a major part of the solution.”
Replicant is underpinned by copyrighted software that has been released under an assortment of free licenses, which their site links to here. This is an interesting initiative, and we have a couple of questions should it be successful: Will Google’s mobile search revenues come under increased pressure? What happens if Samsung or the Chinese mobile manufacturers jump on this variant of Android? We shall see.
Cynthia Murrell, August 27, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Here Comes Another Buzzword
August 27, 2013
By reading the title, you might be asking what the new buzzword is. Take a look at Information Week’s article, “Big Data Ushers In ‘Virtuous Cycle Of Computing’” for the answer. The beginning of the article mentions that we are heading into an age of cloud computing that increase the amount of users and devices. Intel is responsible for the term “virtuous cycle of computing” that means a “system of events that reinforces itself in a continuous loop. Right now this refers to big data. Intel senior VP Diane Bryant that recent big data surge is because of the growing demand of end-user and machine-to-machine devices.
Business-to-business hardware is in high demand, which then causes the sharing of large data amounts of data.
“Bryant estimated that more than 14 billion devices will come online by 2016. Five billion of them will be consumer machines such as tablets and smartphones; the other 9 billion will be machine-to-machine hardware. ‘As those devices come online, they require a connection back to the data center,’ she said. ‘For every 600 phones, you’re going to need another server in a data center. For every 120 tablets, you’ll need a server.’ “
Data in the palm of your hand with reliable Internet services everywhere. Can anyone else say magic? At least it feels like it. The perpetuation of the virtuous cycle of computing only means more reliable devices and better transference of data. Wait until they develop the holographic UI.
Whitney Grace, August 27, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Do Not Disregard Salience
August 27, 2013
Here is a story for all of you object relational fans out there from the Lexalytics Development Blog: “Exploratory Text Analytics Using Object-Relational Mappings.” The post starts out explaining how salience, a process that examines content such as mention of a specific item or detecting a document’s tone, is a business intelligence tool with a lot potential. Many users, however, do not know what salience can actually do with their data. There is another problem is that salience is a low-level engine in any customer application and the user needs to design a better application to extract and analyze the data.
The good news is that there is a viable solution:
“…[A] couple of enabling technologies have been developed that allow customers to take the initial data analysis phase back into their own hands. The first enabling technology is that of automated object/relation mapping (ORM) frameworks. ORM frameworks store the internal data objects produced by object-oriented programming languages (like Java or C#) into a relational database, where they can be made accessible to any application. ORM frameworks have been around for decades, but they required (painful) manual configuration to set them up. Modern ORM frameworks now have automated mapping capabilities that them to configure themselves from the structure of the data objects. What this means for Salience is that is now easy to dump everything that Salience extracts—everything—into a database.”
The post runs through an ORM implementation and how to get a salience application set up. Salience sounds a lot like big data. Could this be the next big data trend, salience detection apps?
Whitney Grace, August 27, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
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