The Lack of Digital Diversity
October 27, 2015
Tech companies and their products run our lives. Companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft have made it impossible to function in developed nations without them. They have taken over everything from communication to how we entertain ourselves. While these companies offer a variety of different products and services, they are more similar than different. The Verge explains that “Apple, Google, And Microsoft Are All Solving The Same Problem.”
Google, Apple, and Microsoft are offering similar services and products in their present options with zero to little diversity among them. For example, there are the personal assistants Cortana vs. Google Now vs. Siri, options for entertainment in the car like Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, and seamless accessibility across devices with Chrome browser, Continuity, and Continuum. There are more comparisons between the three tech giants and their business plans for the future, but it is not only them. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are starting to resemble each other more too.
Technology companies have borrowed from each and have had healthy competition for years spurring more innovation, but these companies are operating on such similar principles that it is stifling creativity and startups are taking more risks:
“Without the dual pressures of both the consumer and the stock market, and without a historic reputation to uphold, small startups are now the best engine for generating truly new and groundbreaking innovations. Uber and Airbnb are fundamentally altering the economics of renting things, while hardware designers like Pebble and Oculus are inventing cool new technology that isn’t bound to any particular company’s ecosystem. Startups can see a broader range of problems to address because they don’t have to wear the same economic blinkers as established, monolithic companies.”
The article ends on positive thoughts, however. The present is beating along at a consistent pace, but in order to have more diversity companies should not be copying each other on every little item. Tech companies should borrow ideas from the future to create more original ideas.
Whitney Grace, October 27, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
University Partners up with Leidos to Investigate How to Cut Costs in Healthcare with Big Data Usage
October 22, 2015
The article on News360 titled Gulu Gambhir: Leidos Virginia Tech to Research Big Data Usage for Healthcare Field explains the partnership based on researching the possible reduction in healthcare costs through big data. Obviously, healthcare costs in this country have gotten out of control, and perhaps that is more clear to students who grew up watching the cost of single pain pill grow larger and larger without regulation. The article doesn’t go into detail on how the application of big data from electronic health records might ease costs, but Leidos CTO Gulu Gambhir sounds optimistic.
“The company said Thursday the team will utilize technical data from healthcare providers to develop methods that address the sector’s challenges in terms of cost and the quality of care. Gulu Gambhir, chief technology officer and a senior vice president at Leidos, said the company entered the partnership to gain knowledge for its commercial and federal healthcare business.”
The partnership also affords excellent opportunities for Virginia Tech students to gain real-world, hands-on knowledge of data research, hopefully while innovating the healthcare industry. Leidos has supplied funding to the university’s Center for Business Intelligence and Analytics as well as a fellowship program for grad students studying advanced information systems related to healthcare research.
Chelsea Kerwin, October 22, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Vodafone Improves Search Management
October 20, 2015
More than 8,000 call center agents use Vodafone’s internal knowledge management platform dubbed AskVodafone to access client information. AskVodafone’s old system was not performing as well as it used, so the company decided to upgrade to Exorbyte. Motor Traffic runs down Vodafone’s upgrade process in the article, “Exorbyte Matchmaker Managed Over 2 million Searches A Month On The Platform AskVodafone.”
Vodafone wanted to shorten an agent’s processing time on phone calls. The solution required faceted search, keyword suggestions, more accurate search results, and information related to a caller’s issue. Exorbyte created an individualized solution for Vodafone and they were given the job:
“Through the experience with the Exorbyte solutions and, of course, the existing site license used in the company the contract has been awarded directly to Exorbyte. These Andreas Vieth, Product Manager Search: ‘Due to the long and successful collaboration with Exorbyte it was logical for us to continue with them in the modernization of AskVodafone portal and to develop synergies between these and the Exorbyte search on the Vodafone website.’”
The solution indexes over 25,000 Web sites and it has increased the center’s data quality and results relevancy. The end result is that over 8,000 calls and 50,000 searches performed on AskVodafone are resolved faster and with better information.
Whitney Grace, October 20, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Coveo Touts Secure, Intelligent Cloud Search
October 19, 2015
Security is a perpetual concern, especially for those who work in the cloud. Enterprise search firm Coveo want us to know they take security very seriously. Their press release, “Coveo Completes Security Evaluation for cloud-Based Intelligent Search Offerings,” is posted at MarketWatch. The question is, “What does secure mean?” The definition may depend on one’s knowledge of the exploit world.
The write-up states:
“Marking its commitment to be the most secure intelligent search provider in the marketplace, Coveo announced that it has completed a comprehensive evaluation of data security and compliance procedures and processes. Coveo engaged with Brightline CPAs & Associates, which conducted a series of tests to evaluate the effectiveness of operations and controls that address data integrity and security. With data security threats on the rise across various industries and around the world, Coveo recognizes how important it is to provide clients of its cloud, intelligent search offerings with the highest security standards. Over the years, Coveo has implemented a set of industry-standard operations, infrastructure and services to ensure the integrity and privacy of customer data, including:
— SOC II and SOC I examinations
— Strong logical and physical access controls
— Systematic application and source code scanning
— Comprehensive background checks on all employees
— 24/7/365 live, dedicated operations and security teams
— Formal, ongoing 3rd party compliance and security reviews”
We are reminded that Coveo was recently named “most innovative leader” for the second year running in the Gartner Enterprise Search Magic Quadrant, with that report lauding the company’s “unusually rich security functions.” Founded in 2005, Coveo maintains offices in the U.S. (SanMateo, CA), the Netherlands, and Quebec.
Cynthia Murrell, October 19, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Whitepaper: Plan for Holiday Sales Now
October 16, 2015
Marketing pros and retailers take note: semantic tech firm ntent offers a free whitepaper to help you make the most of the upcoming holiday season, titled “Step-By-Step Guide to Holiday Campaign Planning.” All they want in return are your web address, contact info, and the chance to offer you a subscription to their newsletter, blog, and updates. (That checkbox is kindly deselected by default.) The whitepaper’s description states:
“Halloween candy and costumes are already overflowing on retail stores shelves. You know what that means, don’t you? It’s time for savvy marketers to get serious about their online retail planning for the impending holidays, if they haven’t already started. Why is it so important to take the time to coordinate a solid holiday campaign? Because according to the National Retail Federation [PDF] the holiday season can account for more than 20–40% of a retailer’s annual sales. And if that alone isn’t enough to motivate you, Internet Retailer reported that online retail sales this year are predicted to reach $349.06 billion a 14.2% YoY increase—start planning now to get your piece of the pie! Position your business for online success, more sales and more joy as you head into 2016 using these easy-to-follow, actionable tips!”
The paper includes descriptions of tactics and best practices, as well as a monthly to-do list and a planning worksheet. Founded in 2010, ntent leverages their unique semantic search technology to help clients quickly find the information they need. The company currently has several positions open at their Carlsbad, California, office.
Cynthia Murrell, October 16, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Google Declares It Has the Best Cloud Service…Again
October 15, 2015
Google is never afraid to brag about its services and how much better they are compared to their competitors. Google brandishes its supposed superiority with cloud computing on its Google Cloud Platform Blog with the post, “Google Cloud Platform Delivers The Industry’s Best Technical And Differentiated Features.” The first line in the post even comes out as a blanket statement for how Google feels about its cloud platform: “I’ll come right out and say it: Google Cloud Platform is a better cloud.”
One must always take assertations from a company’s Web site as part of its advertising campaign to peddle the service. Google products and services, however, usually have quality written into their programming, but Google defends the above claim saying it has core advantages and technical differentiators in compute, storage, network, and distributed software tiers. Google says this is for two reasons:
“1. Cloud Platform offers features that are very valuable for customers, and very difficult for competitors to emulate.
- The underlying technologies, created and honed by Google over the last 15 years, enable us to offer our services at a much lower price point.”
Next the post explains the different features that make the cloud platform superior: live migration, scaling load balances, forty-five second boot times, three second archive restore, and 680,000 IOPS sustained Local SSD read rate. Google can offer these features, because it claims to have the best technology and software engineers. It does not stop there, because Google also offers its cloud platform at forty percent cheaper than other cloud platforms. It delves into details about why it can offer a better and cheaper service. While the argument is compelling, it is still Google cheerleading itself.
Google is one of the best technology companies, but it is better to test and review other cloud platforms rather than blinding following a blog post.
Whitney Grace, October 15, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Business Intelligence and Data Science: There Is a Difference
October 6, 2015
An article at the SmartDataCollective, “The Difference Between Business Intelligence and Real Data Science,” aims to help companies avoid a common pitfall. Writer Brigg Patton explains:
“To gain a competitive business advantage, companies have started combining and transforming data, which forms part of the real data science. At the same time, they are also carrying out Business Intelligence (BI) activities, such as creating charts, reports or graphs and using the data. Although there are great differences between the two sets of activities, they are equally important and complement each other well.
“For executing the BI functions and data science activities, most companies have professionally dedicated BI analysts as well as data scientists. However, it is here that companies often confuse the two without realizing that these two roles require different expertise. It is unfair to expect a BI analyst to be able to make accurate forecasts for the business. It could even spell disaster for any business. By studying the major differences between BI and real data science, you can choose the right candidate for the right tasks in your enterprise.”
So fund both, gentle reader. Patton distinguishes each position’s area of focus, the different ways they use and look at data, and their sources, migration needs, and job processes. If need to hire someone to perform these jobs, check out this handy clarification before you write up those job descriptions.
Cynthia Murrell, October 6, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Not Hacking, but Trickery, Lost Bitpay Almost $2 Million
September 30, 2015
The article titled How a Clever Hacker Tricked a Major Bitcoin Company Out of $1.8 Million on Motherboard shines a light on the manipulation of BitPay,a Bitcoin payment service, by a clever hacker. Apparently the attacker sent an email from BTC Media CEO David Bailey’s computer to a BitPay CFO requesting his corporate email information, which he readily supplied because the two companies were already in talks about a potential partnership. The article clarifies,
“The insurance claim on the lost funds was denied because BitPay’s computers were never hacked—instead, they just gave away their email passwords in what appears to be a classic phishing scam. Phishing is when an attacker send a scammy email in the hopes that the victim is not savvy enough to trash it immediately. …Several months after the hack, BitPay was reportedly processing more than $1 million in payments every day.”
The hacker continued using Bitpay’s executive accounts to request funds, all of which were apparently granted until an employee of the transaction software company, SecondMarket, was notified. The article and court case emphasize that this was not a hacking scenario, just a $1.8 Million phishing scam that people using Craigslist for job searches avoid every day.
Chelsea Kerwin, September 30, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Business Intelligence: A Magical Insight Machine?
September 28, 2015
I found “Thinking Outside the Big Data Black Box: Why BI Isn’t a Magical Insight Machine” interesting. The main point of the write up is that vendors well analytics platforms. The licensees learn that set up, tuning, expertise are required to make these often expensive systems deliver useful outputs.
The write up states:
Big data, or indeed any data, may indeed hold huge value, but it’s often looked at in the wrong way. When we are looking at data – collected from different sources, to address different motivations, with an ever-changing context – we can’t fast track every correlation into an actionable insight. We have to understand where the data comes from, the factors limiting its reliability, its consistency when applied across different sub-groups, and where biases may be lurking. We need to carefully interrogate any correlation, before we can understand whether it represents a truth in the real world.
Bummer. Smart software, flashy Powerpoints, and examples of Hollywood style graphics make data work fun, interesting, game like, right?
Not without effort.
The write up points out:
A straightforward analysis of historical data will spot factors that consistently cause cost overruns. But more sophisticated techniques and a bit of intuition can go much further – for example you may find short planning time is not generally correlated with cost overruns, but it is more strongly correlated with overruns in projects over a certain size. Most importantly, you need to understand why these relationships exist. If one factor consistently reduces costs, can you be confident it will continue to do so in a new market where conditions are different? If you don’t understand your data you can’t make such predictions.
After reading the article, I was shocked. I thought that today’s nifty systems eliminated the requirement to understand data, understand the mathematical option, and provide ready to use outputs.
Disappointed. I thought the quip about business intelligence as an oxymoron was a cheap shot.
Stephen E Arnold, September 28, 2015
A New Wave of Old School BI Outfits Are Agile, Maybe Juicy
September 27, 2015
The mid tier outfit Forrester has released another report about enterprise business intelligence platforms” for the third quarter of 2015. These reports cost about $2,500, so you know the information is red hot, spot in, and objective. Always objective. in the write up “The Forrester Wave: Agile Business Intelligence Platforms 2015”, the report is described as “juicy.” Imagine. Juicy applied to IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. Let me refresh your memory of juicy’s official definition:
1: having much juice : succulent
2: rewarding or profitable especially financially : fat <juicy contract> <a juicy dramatic role>
3a : rich in interest : colorful <juicy details>
b : sensational, racy <a juicy scandal>
c : full of vitality : lusty
I am not sure mid tier consulting firms’ reports are “rewarding or profitable especially financially” for the reader. At a couple of thousand per authorized copy of the report, the mid tier firms are likely to be drenched in juiciness. Will this report be lusty, sensational, colorful, and succulent? Nah. This is marketing pulp, gentle reader.
Which are the companies which make the cut? According to this write up, there are a baker’s dozen of agile, BI vendors:
- Birst
- GoodData
- IBM
- Information Builders
- Microsoft
- MicroStrategy
- Oracle
- Panorama Software
- Qlik
- SAP
- SAS
- Tableau Software
- TIBCO Software.
Scanning this list, I wonder how “agile” IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and SAS really are. I know that TIBCO acquired some nifty technology for its analytics functions, and that the founders of Spotfire have moved on to even more interesting analytics at their new company, funded in part by Google and In-Q-Tel. The other firms are ones which have run around the BI bases for years and may have a touch of arthritis; for instance, Information Builders which kicked off its career 1975. Qlik was founded in 1993. MicroStrategy flipped on its lights in 1989 and spawned at least one outfit (Clarabridge) which strikes me as slightly more agile than the mother ship. Tableau, now a publicly traded outfit, hung out its shingle in 2003.
GoodData may be the most spry among this group, not because it was founded in 2007, but because the firm landed another $25 million in funding in 2014.
According to the blurb about the report, each of these companies are agile because of several special features each of these vendors offer their customers. These characteristics are:
First, these 13 vendors’ products allow their business users to be self sufficient. I am not sure I agree, that SAS stuff requires a person to be SAS-sy, which means able to navigate the companies’ programming methods with some skill. IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle provide many different ways to skin the business intelligence cat. In my opinion, these companies’ business intelligence technology require that the business user have the equivalent of a fighter jet maintenance crew to assist them on the flights into analysis and visualization.
Second, each company generates knock out visualizations. My thought is that for zippy visualizations, more specialized tools are required. The companies highlighted in this report can deliver slides and graphs which are niftier than those in Excel, but far short of the Hollywood style outputs which come from Palantir and Recorded Future, among other firms not included in the agile list.
Third, each of the 13 companies offers its licensees and customers options and additional features. This is definitely a must have function. Most of the firms in the list of agile BI companies sells services. Some have partners, lots of partners. The business model may be less to be agile and more to sell billable work, but that’s okay. I am not sure inking a six figure services contract delivers agility.
I assume the complete $2,500 report will become available from the companies listed in the report. For now, think agility. Think IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, along with the 10 other companies.
Remember, these are 13 juicy and agile outfits. Remarkable. Juicy.
Stephen E Arnold, September 27, 2015
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