SharePoint and Business Intelligence Data
August 4, 2016
Lucky for me one of my dogs is a member of TechTarget. I was able to read “Three Ways to Import Power BI Data into SharePoint.” The headline caught my attention because I had just checked out the wild and crazy assertions Recommind made for importing Encase data into its patented Autonomy IDOL like system. The trick is to pay extra for the connector.
Well, no need to spend more money with SharePoint because it can import data from Microsoft’s own business intelligence systems and even urls. Now before you jump up and down about importing data from urls, keep in mind that urls often present some darned exciting information to users. Importing directly can be a thrilling experience. Make sure you have taken a deep breath and have plenty of space for the exceptions and, of course, the data.
The write up presents two methods which strike me as a bit more straightforward. One can import business intelligence data from Excel. There you do. A SharePoint installation can use Excel data. I am not eager to fiddle with the results of the import because some text, programmatic instructions, and the Fancy Dan formatting can produce interesting results. But, hey, the write up says it works. Set aside some extra time to twiddle the resulting information.
The third approach is more interesting. The use case involves importing “raw data.” Here’s the really clever trick, gentle reader:
The report data can be saved as a comma-separated values file. Now, simply upload the CSV file to a SharePoint list within your team site.
I am not sure my understanding of “raw data” corresponds to information in a report, but what do I know? Not much.
What’s remarkable is that SharePoint, after all these years of hyperbole, does not provide seamless data interchange among Microsoft’s own products. Never fear. When the import does not produce information usable in SharePoint, just call a Gold Certified consultant. That’s a user friendly way to deal with a really unusual task like sharing information with SharePoint.
Ah, Microsoft. Ask Cortana for help in locating an expert who can do the sharing thing.
Stephen E Arnold, August 4, 2016
Text Analysis Vendors: Where Are They Now?
August 4, 2016
A year ago I read “20+ Text Mining and Text Analysis Tools.” The sale of Recommind to OpenText and the lack of excitement about search gave me an idea. Where are the companies identified by a mid tier consulting firm today. Let’s take a quick look.
AlchemyAPI. The company now asserts that its powers the “AI economy.” The Web sites has been updated since I last looked. There is a demo and a “free API key.” The system is now a platform. Gartner found the company to be a “cool vendor” in 2014. The company offers a webinar called “Building with Watson.”
Angoss. The company allows a customer to “predict, act, perform.” The focus is now on “customer intelligence in a single analytics tool.” The firm offers “knowledge” products and an insight optimizer.
Attensity. The company has undergone some change. The www.attensity.com Web site 404s. Years ago a text analytics cheerleader professed to be a fan. I think portions of the company operate under a different name in Germany. Appears to be in quiet mode.
Basis Technology. The company provided language reacted tools to outfits like Fast Search & Transfer. Someone told me that Basis dabbled in enterprise search. One high profile executive jumped to a company in Madrid.
Brainspace. The company’s Web site tells me, “We build brains.” The company offers NLP technology. Gartner “recommends” Brainspace for “advanced text analytics for financial institutions.” That’s good. The company does not list too many financial institutions as customers on its home page, however.
Buzzlogix. This company’s focus appears to be squarely on social media. The idea is that the firm helps its customers “listen, learn, and act.” When I visited the Web site, the most recent “news” appeared in November 2015.
Clarabridge. The company focuses on understanding “customer needs, wants, and feelings.” The company provides the “world’s most comprehensive customer intelligence platform.”
Clustify. The company positions its text analytics tools for eDiscovery. The company’s most recent news release is dated January 2014 and addresses the Recommind championed predictive coding approach to figuring out what was what in text documents.
Connexor. The company offers “machinese” demonstrations of its capabilities. The most recent item on the company’s Web site is the April 2015 announcement of a free NLP Web service.
DatumBox. This company is a “machine learning framework” provider. It makes machine learning “simple.” The Web site offers a free API key, which knocks the local KFC manager out as a potential licensee. The company’s most recent blog post is dated March 16, 2016. The most recent release is 0.7.0.
Eaagle. This is a company focused on the “new frontier of effective customer relationship management, research, and marketing.” Customers include HermanMiller, Chubb, and Suncor Energy. Data sheets, white papers, and documentation are available and no registration is necessary. Eaagle maintains a low profile.
ExpertSystem. The company bought Temis, a firm based on some ideas in the mind of a former IBM wizard. ExpertSystem, a publicly traded company, is pursuing the pharmaceutical industry and performing independent text analyses of Melania Trump’s and Michelle Obama’s speeches. The two ladies exhibit strong linguistic differences. The company’s stock is trading at $1.81 a share, a bit below Alphabet Google, an outfit also in the text analytics game.
FICO (Fair Isaac Corporation). The company gives “you the power to make smarter decisions.” The company has tallied a number of acquisitions since 1992. Its most recent purchase was Quadmetrics, a predictive analytics company. FICO is publicly traded and the stock is trading at $115.60 a share.
Cognitum. The company asserts that one can “improve your business with the innovation leader in semantic technology.” The company’s main product is Fluent Editor and it offers flagship platform called Ontorion. The firm’s spelling of “scallable” on its home page caught my attention.
IBM. The focus was not on Watson in the listing. Instead, the write up identified IBM Content Analytics as the product to watch. IBM’s LanguageWare uses a range of techniques to process content. IBM is very much in the content processing game with Watson becoming the umbrella “brand.” IBM just tallied is 16th straight quarter of declining revenue.
Intellexer offers text analytics, information security, media content search, and reputation management. The company’s most recent news release, dated May 13, 2016, announces the new version of Conceptmeister “which analyzes text from a photo, cloud documents, and URL.” Essentially this software creates a summary of the source content.
KBSPortal. This company offers natural language processing as a software as a service or NLP as SAAS. A demonstration of the system processes Wikipedia content. A demo video is available. To view it, I was asked to sign in. I declined. The company provides its prices and explains what each component does. Kudos for that approach.
Keatext. The company focuses on “customer experience management.” The company offers a two week free trial of its system. The system incorporates natural language processing. The company’s explanation of what it does requires a bit of digging.
Lexalytics. Lexalytics is in the sentiment analysis business. The company’s capabilities include categorization and entity extraction. Social media monitoring can be displayed on dashboards. The company posts its prices. When I was involved in a procurement, Lexalytics prices, based on my recollection, were significantly higher than the fees quoted on this page. At one time, Lexalytics engaged in a merger or deal with Infonics. The company acquired Semantria a couple of years ago.
Leximancer. This Australian company’s software turns up in interesting places; for example, the US social security administration in Beltsville, Maryland. The firm’s “text in, insight out” technology emerged from research at the University of Queensland. The company was founded by UniQuest, a techohlogy commercialization company operated by the University of Queensland. The system is quite useful.
Linguamatics. This company has built a following in the pharmaceutical sector. The system does a good job processing academic and research information in ways which can influence certain lines of inquiry. The company now says that it offers the “world’s leading text mining platform.” the company was founded in 2001, and it has been moving along at a steady pace. Quite useful software and capabilities.
Linguasys. Surprised to see an installation profile. The outfit is maintaining a low profile.
Luminoso. The company provides “enterprise feedback and experience analytics.” The company has teamed with another Boston-area outfit, Basis Technologies, to form a marketing partnership. The angle the company seems to be promoting is that if you are using other systems, you can enhance them with text analytics.
MeaningCloud. Meaning cloud asserts that with its system one can “extract valuable information from any text source.” The company’s Text Classification API supports the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s “standard contextual taxonomy.” The focus seems to be on sentiment analysis like Lexalytics.
Popular Programming Languages
August 4, 2016
What language should you use to create digital riches? (I wager that’s a question you ponder each and every day except when you are scanning for gems on your computing device.)
How do these outfits and others program the future money gushers? “Good Ol ‘C Tops the IEEE 2016 Programming Language Ranking.”
Here’s the hit parade according to the fun loving folks who revel in tales of electrical engineering success. Check the original for the full list of 14 languages.
- C
- Java
- Python
- C++
- R
- C#
- php
- JavaScript
- Ruby
- Go
Where, you may be asking, is Assembly language? It is number 13. What about Snobol? Did not make the list. Bummer for the AT&T crowd.
Stephen E Arnold, August 4, 2016
Facebook vs. LinkedIn for Job Hunters
August 4, 2016
The article on Lifehacker titled Facebook Can Be Just As Important AS LinkedIn For Finding a Job emphasizes the importance of industry connections. As everyone knows, trying to a find a job online is like trying to date online. A huge number of job postings are scams, schemes, or utter bollox. Navigating these toads and finding the job equivalent to Prince Charming is frustrating, which is why Facebook might offer a happy alternative. The article states,
“As business site Entrepreneur points out, the role Facebook plays in helping people find jobs shouldn’t be surprising. Any time you can connect with someone who works in your industry, that’s one more person who could potentially help you get a job. Research from Facebook itself shows that both strong and weak ties on the site can lead to jobs… Well, weak ties are important collectively because of their quantity, but strong ties are important individually because of their quality.”
Obviously, knowing someone in the industry you seek to work in is the key to finding and getting a job. But a site like Facebook is much easier to exploit than LinkedIn because more people use it and more people check it. LinkedIn’s endless emails eventually become white noise, but scrolling through Facebook’s Newsfeed is an infinite source of time-wasting pleasure for the bulk of users. Time to put the networking back into social networking, job seekers.
Chelsea Kerwin, August 4, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Semantify Secures Second Funding Round
August 4, 2016
Data-management firm Semantify has secured more funding, we learn from “KGC Capital Invests in Semantify, Leaders in Cognitive Discovery and Analytics” at Benzinga. The write-up tells us primary investor KGC Capital was joined by KDWC Venture Fund and Bridge Investments in making the investment, as well as by existing investors (including its founder, Vishy Dasari.) The funds from this Series A funding round will be used to address increased delivery, distribution, and packaging needs.
The press release describes Semantify’s platform:
“Semantify automates connecting information in real time from multiple silos, and empowers non-technical users to independently gain relevant, contextual, and actionable insights using a free form and friction-free query interface, across both structured and unstructured content. With Semantify, there would be no need to depend on data experts to code queries and blend, curate, index and prepare data or to replicate data in a new database. A new generation self-service enterprise Ad-hoc discovery and analytics platform, it combines natural language processing (NLP), machine learning and advanced semantic modeling capabilities, in a single seamless proprietary platform. This makes it a pioneer in democratization of independent, on demand information access to potentially hundreds of millions of users in the enterprise and e-commerce world.”
Semantify cites their “fundamentally unique” approach to developing data-management technology as the force behind their rapid deployment cycles, low maintenance needs, and lowered costs. Formerly based in Delaware, the company is moving their headquarters to Chicago (where their investors are based). Semantify was founded in 2008. The company is also hiring; their About page declares, toward the bottom: “Growing fast. We need people;” as of this writing, they are seeking database/ BI experts, QA specialists, data scientists & knowledge modelers, business analysts, program & project managers, and team leads.
Cynthia Murrell, August 4, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Google: The Crimea Name Thing Part 2
August 3, 2016
I kid you not. Google is changing place names on its Crimean map. I assume the write up “Here’s Why Google Maps Changed Some Town Names in Crimea—And Is Now Changing Them Back” is the digital equivalent of the tablets Moses toted down from the mountain. The mountain, as I recall, was not in the Crimea, but anything is possible.
The write up informed me:
Google told RBC news website that they were aware of the changes made in accordance with Ukraine’s “decommunization” law and of Russia’s displeasure. Google told RBC they were “actively working to restore the previous version of the names on the Russian version of Google Maps.”
For an outfit with smart software doing many things, I assume that the scripts are busy working their magic. But what if the changes are made by humans? I thought that Google was into the algorithmic approach to objectivity.
What is Google called? Ah, Alphabet. I wonder if smart software or smart people decided this name change. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Thank goodness for Snapchat images of flowers. No words required. Perhaps Google will change the name of Harrod’s Creek to Herod’s Sewer? It is indeed possible.
Stephen E Arnold, August 3, 2016
Map Spelling a Thing for Google Part 1
August 3, 2016
I read “Russia Decries Google’s Use Of Ukrainian Spellings for Crimean Places.” I know that the Google smart software operates without humans, well, most of the time except when it does not. According to the objective write up:
Google Maps has adopted Ukrainian versions of some 900 place names in Crimea in line with a “decommunization” law Kyiv passed last year.
Russia is not happy. The Russian Minister of Communications Nikolai Nikiforov allegedly said:
“I think it’s a short-sighted policy.[I hope] the mistake is corrected. If Google pays so little attention to Russian law and the names of Russian localities then it will not be able to do business effectively on Russian territory.”
Perhaps the minister does not understand the Google smart software approach to name conventions? Personally I think Google Maps should present place names in Kentucky’s version of English. I know this is a minority position. My hunch is that Google will use its China tactic and tell Russia what to do. That works pretty well.
Stephen E Arnold, August 3, 2016
Legal Drugs Turned Illegal Primed for Dark Web Marketplaces
August 3, 2016
A few drugs that were once able to be legally sold will be outlawed in Britain. Express released an article, Legal high dealers to be forced onto DARK WEB by blanket ban, top police officer warns, that shares the story. Several deaths were linked to substances called “spice” and “hippy crack” which led to a ban on the sales of these items. The article’s source, a police chief Commander Simon Bray, says because of the future unavailability in brick-and-mortar stores, he suspects users will turn to the Dark Web to purchase these drugs. The article tells us,
“Commander Bray of the National Police Chiefs Council added: “Clearly, there will be some movement onto the dark net. “People find it lucrative to sell substances and where people are going to buy them. But of course, it is not going to be so easy for the average person to get hold of them.” Other experts have warned the ban will just drive use and sale of the drugs into the hands of criminal gangs. Tejinder Reehal, who manages Scorpion, a shop that has sold legal highs, said: “We have seen it before with mushrooms and mcat.”
At a bigger-picture level, this story is interesting in that it is one more artifact that lends toward the perspective that illegal activity will take place on the Dark Web when it cannot take place elsewhere. This may in fact happen, but what about the illegal activity that takes place in real life outside of brick-and-mortar stores?
Megan Feil, August 9, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
There is a Louisville, Kentucky Hidden /Dark Web meet up on August 23, 2016.
Information is at this link: https://www.meetup.com/Louisville-Hidden-Dark-Web-Meetup/events/233019199/
The Less Scary Applications of Artificial Intelligence: Computer Vision
August 3, 2016
The article on The Christian Science Monitor titled Shutterstock’s Reverse Image Search Promises a Gentler Side of AI provides a glimpse into computer vision, or the way a computer assesses and categorizes any image into its parts. Shutterstock finds that using machine learning to find other images similar to the first is a vast improvement, because rather than analyzing keywords, AI analyzes the image directly based on exact colors and shapes. The article states,
“That keyword data, while useful for indexing images into categories on our site, wasn’t nearly as effective for surfacing the best and most relevant content,” says Kevin Lester, vice president of engineering at the company, in a blog post. “So our computer vision team worked to apply machine learning techniques to reimagine and rebuild that process.”
The neural network has now examined 70 million images and 4 million video clips in its collection.”
In addition, the company plans to expand the search feature to videos as well as images. Jon Oringer, CEO and founder of Shutterstock, has a vision of endless possibilities for this technology. The article points out that this is one of the clearly positive effects of AI, which gets a bad rap, perhaps not unfairly, given the potential for autonomous weapons and commercial abuse. So by all means, let’s use AI to recognize a cat, like Google, or to analyze images.
Chelsea Kerwin, August 3, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Need a Mentor? See Here
August 3, 2016
Does your business need a mentor? How about any students or budding entrepreneurs you know? Such a guide can be invaluable, especially to a small business, but Google and Bing may not be the best places to pose that query. Business magazine Inc. has rounded up “Ten Top Platforms for Finding a Mentor in 22016.” Writer John Boitnott introduces the list:
“Many startup founders have learned that by working with a mentor, they enjoy a collaboration through which they can learn and grow. They usually also gain access to a much more experienced entrepreneur’s extensive network, which can help as they seek funding or gather resources. For students, mentors can provide the insight they need as they make decisions about their future. One of the biggest problems entrepreneurs and students have, however, is finding a good mentor when their professional networks are limited. Fortunately, technology has come up with an answer. Here are nine great platforms helping to connect mentors and mentees in 2016.”
Boitnott lists the following mentor-discovery resources: Music platform Envelop offers workshops for performers and listeners. Mogul focuses on helping female entrepreneurs via a 27/7 advice hotline. From within classrooms, iCouldBe connects high-school students to potential mentors. Also for high-school students, iMentor is specifically active in low-income communities. MentorNet works to support STEM students through a community of dedicated mentors, while the free, U.K.-based Horse’s Mouth supports a loosely-organized platform where participants share ideas. Also free, Find a Mentor matches potential protégés with adult mentors. SCORE supplies tools like workshops and document templates for small businesses. Cloud-based MentorCity serves entrepreneurs, students, and nonprofits, and it maintains a free online registry where mentors can match their skill sets to the needs of inquiring minds.
Who knew so much professional guidance was out there, made possible by today’s technology, and much of it for free? For more information on each entry, see the full article.
Cynthia Murrell, August 3, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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