IntelTrax Top Stories: September 14 to September 20
September 24, 2012
This week the IntelTrax advanced intelligence systems blog delivered some interesting stories that are especially pertinent to those looking to solve the big data problem with analytics solutions.
One field that could see a great deal of benefits from data analytics is education. “The Future of Education Lies with Data Analytics” foresees an education system that is taught through computerized software programs that collect data on the length of time it takes students to master material. Unlike teachers who have limited time and availability, this software would provide instant feedback and compare students to classmates as well as other students across the country.
When discussing the value of this new system, the article states:
“In comparing these two learning environments, it is apparent that current school evaluations suffer from several limitations. Many of the typical pedagogies provide little immediate feedback to students, require teachers to spend hours grading routine assignments, aren’t very proactive about showing students how to improve comprehension, and fail to take advantage of digital resources that can improve the learning process. This is unfortunate because data-driven approaches make it possible to study learning in real-time and offer systematic feedback to students and teachers.”
In the field of data analytics, new and innovative partnerships are always coming about. “Tivo and Scripps Sign Deal to Improve Audience Analytics” announces a deal made between Tivo Research and Analytics and Scripps Networks Interactive, allowing Scripps to access TRA’s audience insights and analytics.
Here’s how it works:
“Media TRAnalytics® TV Auto Ratings launched in January 2012 and enables networks and advertisers to identify the right TV programming based on the make and model of automobile purchases by households watching specific networks and programs. By matching households of television tuning and automotive registration data from Experian Automotive’s North American Vehicle Database (NVDB), TRA provides advertisers, advertising agencies and television networks the industry’s largest household-level single-source solution to plan, buy, sell and evaluate the automotive industry’s current investment in television advertising.”
Big data analytics tools allow for companies to be able to gain valuable insights from your credit card statements, web searches, and social media activity. “Social Media Allows for Personal Analytics as Marketing Tools” explains how businesses can harness the data being put out of social media platforms like Facebook in order to gain insights in order to predict buying behavior.
When explaining the service, the article states:
“It also provides an interesting insight into the kind of machinations that Facebook itself could easily be doing with the data in house. Line this up with the output of Facebook’s own data export tool and you get a good picture for the truth of how much data is being collated. Consider combining patterns across tens or hundreds of millions of profiles with this level of detail and you start to get a picture of the power of the platform.”
Being able to uncover marketing trends and insights about customer behavior is becoming integral to the success of companies in nearly every field and industry. For those looking for an affordable solution that promotes automated understanding of big data analytics, consider Digital Reasoning’s flagship solution Synthesys.
Jasmine Ashton, September 24, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
IntelTrax Top Stories: August 31 to September 6
September 10, 2012
The IntelTrax advanced intelligence system blog provides summaries of articles pertinent to the world of data analytics and security. This week, we learned how the analytics market is continuing to grow, as well as some companies that offer excellent tools to help your company grow along with it.
“Cristobal Addition Strengthens Digital Reasoning” spotlights an important new addition to the board of the Tennessee based text analytics powerhouse, Digital Reasoning. Cristobal Conde has a rich history of working in the information technology field.
He states:
“I’ve been in information technology since the late ’70s when you had to build your own database manager. When companies like Sybase and Oracle developed commercial database managers – they made sense of structured data and allowed thousands of applications to be built on top…There is a pressing need to do something similar in unstructured data, and I believe Digital Reasoning is the company best positioned to do this.”
While the United States has a wealth of data analytics solutions to choose from, the Asian analytic market continues to gain in power and importance. According to “Asian Analytics Changing Fast” the big data analytics market in India is expected to double to $680 million by 2015.
Patrick Roland writes:
“This piggybacks on lots of other Aisa-centric analytic news. While many nations are flexing their muscles in big data, some American companies are catering to the industry, too. One prime example is the Chinese language support of Synthesys recently announced to aid the burgeoning data market in China. We expect more and more as places like the Philippines and Hong Kong begin making strides just behind power players like India and China.”
According to “Business Intelligence on the Rise” BI is one of the fastest growing industries and therefore smart businesses are utilizing this technology as a tool for growth.
The article explains:
“The big data opportunity is one of the biggest growth propellants for analytics. The vast amount of data that is available for analysis is exploding, however, it is housed in multiple silos of information with little or no cross-channel analysis of how the data correlates. For forward-thinking enterprises, big data can create value. Whereas BI traditionally performs structured analysis and provides a rear-view mirror into business performance, big data analytics provides a forward-looking view, enabling organizations to anticipate and execute on the opportunities of the future.”
We obviously are living in a world where BI and data analytics solutions are becoming an necessary part of business. Digital Reasoning offers a smart BI solution called Synthesis that delivers automated understanding for big data. The results are saved time and money.
Jasmine Ashton, September 10, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
Free Data Mining Book
September 1, 2012
We love free stuff! We’ve found a free data mining book from Cambridge University Press titled “Mining of Massive Datasets.” Act fast, though; the link could go bad at any time. The description tells us:
“The publisher is offering a 20% discount to anyone who buys the hardcopy Here. By agreement with the publisher, you can still download it free from this page. Cambridge Press does, however, retain copyright on the work, and we expect that you will obtain their permission and acknowledge our authorship if you republish parts or all of it. We are sorry to have to mention this point, but we have evidence that other items we have published on the Web have been appropriated and republished under other names. It is easy to detect such misuse, by the way, as you will learn in Chapter 3.”
A subtle plug, there. Version 1.0 is available for download, as is a draft of the in-progress version 1.1. Chapter titles include such topics as “Large-Scale File Systems and Map-Reduce”, “Mining Data Streams”, and “Mining Social-Network Graphs.” (See the description for a complete list.) Authors Anand Rajaraman and Jeff Ullman also throw in related course materials, with the plea that authorship be preserved, of course.
We recommend you download this gem while you can.
Cynthia Murrell, September 01, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Business Intelligence Terms in a InetSoft Technology Environment
August 29, 2012
Sometimes things can get confusing in the tech world, specifically speaking the InetSoft Technology world. This perplexity is even worse if you do not get a few key terms. In the article, Business Intelligence Terms in the Context InetSoft’s Technology readers learn meanings to some basic InetSoft words in a practical way. This article explores buzzwords and their definitions. The three major words explored are Big Data, Data Warehouses, and Data Mining. The article then investigates their relevancy in an InetSoft context:
“This post is not just for anyone just starting to learn about the business intelligence solution space…Big Data…All kinds of transactional databases are candidates for creating Big Data, some in a matter of weeks of recording….Data Warehouses…user expectations, both from internal enterprises users as well as external customer users, have been raised where real-time or near real-time access to information is expected….Data mining…It’s the act of looking for trends, relationships, and outliers in data.”
This writer shares some interesting opinions about the relevancy of this vocabulary. This article shares the view that Data Warehouses no longer make sense. It’s certainly true that InetSoft is a unique solution with its data access that offers users two modes of real-time and near real-time catching, but that does not necessarily make Data Warehousing obsolete, at least not yet. However, IntelSoft’s specialty in visual analytics cannot be denied its supremacy.
Edie Marie, August 29, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Linguamatics and the US FDA
August 24, 2012
Linguamatics recently announced that the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and research (CDER) is set to use their I2E platform, which is the company’s interactive data mining and extraction software across CDER’s laboratory research relating to drug safety.
The write-up “Linguamatics’ I2E Text Mining Platform Chosen by FDA” provides more details about why the text mining company was selected by the CDER:
“I2E’s NLP-based querying capabilities, coupled with its scalability and flexibility, mean it is ideally suited to answering many challenging, high value questions in life sciences and healthcare by unlocking knowledge buried in the scientific literature and other textual information. Rather than just retrieving documents, I2E can rapidly identify, extract, synthesize and analyze specific, relevant facts and relationships, such as those between genes and diseases or compounds and side effects. Customers include nine of the top ten global pharmaceutical companies.”
What’s great about the I2E platform is that unlike other text mining systems, I2E provides businesses with full control over what information is to be extracted, what query definitions are, and the kind of output. With it, users can obtain information in a short period of time even from large documents.
Again, another company from the science sector has opted to use Linguamatics’ I2E platform. CDER joins Pfizer, Selventa, AstraZeneca, and others from the company’s roster of prestigious clients. Linguamatics has truly evolved from being a small player to being the industry leader in NLP-based text mining within just a few years. We’re excited to see what the company will become two to three years from now.
Lauren Llamanzares, August 24, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
IntelTrax Top Stories August 10 to August 16
August 20, 2012
This week the IntelTrax blog published some excellent articles on data analytics and search technologies.
One of the most notable analytics developers for Web sites is the search giant Google. “eGoogle Analytics Is No Longer the Only Game in Town” discusses some other options for those companies that are not satisfied with what Google is offering.
The article explains:
“If you operate your own website, analytic software can be crucial in order to track exactly how well your site is doing. Without this software, you can do whatever you want with your site, but you will never know if it is getting more visitors, aside from the amount of comments. When you look at the possible options you have for analytic software, the most popular choice is Google Analytics. However, if you’re not a fan of Google or its Analytics package, there’s no need to fear. There are still a handful of options for you to try out.”
Another article of note discusses the recent dramatic increase of unstructured data in almost every industry. “Growth of Text Analytics in Response to Unstructured Data” discusses the fact that there has also been an explosion of data analytics solution to make sense of all this new data.
When discussing some great solutions available, the article states:
“The Text Analytics market is rapidly consolidating with numerous mergers and acquisitions over the past year. Oracle purchased Endeca for its technology to mash up unstructured data from many different data sources. HP acquired similar technology from Autonomy. IBM picked up Vivisimo and Lexmark for their rich search features. Popularity of Big Data is driving huge interest in the area of text analytics, and that interest is causing the technology to evolve quickly. Text analytics techniques, for example, are becoming increasingly richer and more sophisticated in the information and insight which they can provide.”
While there are a lot of amazing data analytics solutions on the market, many companies are also feeling the effects of a downtrodden economy, so choosing an affordable solution is a very important part of their decision making process. “CFOs Demand a Reduction in Costs and Increase in Competitive Edge” argues that companies are utilizing data analytics solutions as a way to cut costs and create new growth opportunities.
Here are some qualities that companies in New Zealand and Australia are looking for in their products:
“As a discrete process, like CRM, corporate performance management is particularly well suited to a cloud delivery model. It provides organizations greater flexibility, lower capital costs and fast implementations that take weeks rather than six plus months. The end result is customers fast-track uncovering business opportunity. We’re excited about partnering with Host Analytics as it provides our clients a unique value proposition at a time when CFOs and CIOs are telling us that their number one priority is to reduce costs and gain competitive advantage with business analytics.”
The three articles that I have highlighted drive the point home that companies, regardless of their industry, are looking for text analytics solutions that will efficiently make the most of their limited resources and time. Digital Reasoning is a relatively young provider that understand the unique needs of small and midsized companies and offer their Synthesys platform as a solution that provides all the necessary data crunching tools and apps needed for most industries.
Jasmine Ashton, August 20, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
IntelTrax Top Stories: August 3 to August 9
August 13, 2012
This week, the IntelTrax blog delivered some informative posts that discuss the issues surrounding big data analytics technology in today’s workforce.
While many articles discuss the prevalence of analytics technology in various industries, “Troubling News for the Analytics Needy” looks at those that are not using it.
A recent survey found:
“Fifty-six percent of respondents indicated they will not be deploying big data analytics applications even beyond 2013, the survey of 255 IT professionals found. Half of those surveyed were data storage professionals at the analyst level; the other half comprised IT managers, vice presidents and CIOs…Survey respondents with no plans to roll out Hadoop or other big data analytics software said doing so requires a specific business case, and in most instances they didn’t see a need for it, according to Marco Coulter, managing director of TheInfoPro’s Cloud Computing Practice.”
Another interesting piece is “Big Data Law Might Be Changing.” It discusses the fear that many have of data analytics technology falling into the wrong hands. One suggestion has been to grant the legal right to accessing personal information of third parties as a way to incentivize transparency.
Writer Patrick Roland concludes:
“This is promising news for a population concerned with the potentially invasive nature of data mining and analytics. After last year’s surprising Supreme Court ruling that basically let Vermont sales reps mine doctors’ patient lists, we are pleased to see reasonable thought return to the table. We can only hope they further find ways that help us utilize this strong technology, while still keeping wrongdoers away.”
One industry that is already seeing lucrative returns on its investment in data analytics technology is Wall Street Investors. “Big Data Promises Big Returns for Stock Investors”
references an article that discusses why savvy stock traders should pay attention to the latest analytics technology.
The article states:
“At the heart of the feed from ORATS is the use of “implied dividends” – the dividend levels implied by prices within the options markets. In the case of equities that have both dividends and exchange-traded options on their stock, the dividend price is a major component in the calculation that traders use to compute a fair price for those options. ORATS runs that calculation backwards to compute “implied dividends”, a measure that reveals the broad consensus of all players in the options market about how much a company will pay as a dividend along the entire option expiration calendar”.
All three of these stories provide different avenues to get to the same conclusion. Investing in data analytics technology is an integral way for companies to make the most out of the unstructured data that is being put out on a daily basis. It is important that you find a reputable company with affordable solutions like Digital Reasoning.
Jasmine Ashton, August 13, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
Information Builders Cages the Columbus Zoo for Business Intelligence
August 10, 2012
In an unusually informative press release, Information Builders crows, “Columbus Zoo and Aquarium Selects Information Builders to Gain a Consolidated View of Business Operations.” The write up goes into unusual detail on how the organization is taking advantage of the software. It quotes zoo V.P. of Technology Services Gregg Oosterbaan:
“We’ve grown at a rapid rate in recent years, expanding our operations to include several new entities. We needed tools capable of capitalizing on our vast data assets, from point-of-sale, membership, and ticketing data to donations and animal health. We have a lot of different information systems, and we lacked a unified view across all of these entities, which made it difficult to make knowledgeable decisions. Information Builders is supplying the technology and services that we need to provide the best possible experiences for our animals and guests while continuing to grow our operations.”
The new unified data warehouse, created together by Information Builders and zoo staff, initially supports two reporting portals: a membership and a revenue portal. The software company’s WebFOCUS BI platform pulls from disparate data sources to produce valuable reports.
The Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, located in Columbus, Ohio, houses over 9,000 critters. The organization also spends over $1 million a year to support more than seventy conservation projects worldwide.
Headquartered in New York, Information Builders has offices around the world and remains one of the largest independent, privately held companies in the industry. The company has been in operation since 1975, possibly because of their stated focus on customer success.
Cynthia Murrell, August 10, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
IntelTrax: Top Stories July 27 to August 2
August 6, 2012
Data analytics solutions and other Business Intelligence tools were the primary focus of many of this week’s IntelTrax stories.
Big Data is a continued source of controversy within the analytics community, particularly regarding its existence and whether or not it is something old or new. “Big Data is Analytics for Dummies” argues that big data is simply the rebranding of an old concept.
The referenced article explains the reasoning behind the rebranding argument:
“Cloud computing, for instance, offers much the same thing “ASPs” offered ten years before, with the difference that this time round it is going to work. Similarly, analytics has been available for many years, as a high-cost service using high value supercomputers, and operated by white-coated high priests who have come into the field from linguistics, philosophy and computer science. If you have a big data set, and the money to have it explored, analytics has been there to reveal the secret trends within you information, which might give your business an edge.”
Another notable post from last week is “Data Miners and the Need for Certificates Debunked.” According to the article, due to the fact that every field has been infiltrated by data mining, the need for experts and certifications in the field has come about as a result.
When discussing whether or not certifications have value, the article states:
“The “data mining” definition has been created by marketing industries just to summarize in a buzz word techniques of applied statistics and applied mathematics to the data stored in your hard disk. I don’t want say that tools are useless, but it should be clear that tools are only a mean to solve a problem, not the solution. In the real world the problems are never standard and really seldom you can take an algorithm as is to solve them! …maybe I’m unlucky but I never solved a real problem through a standard method.”
A story that explains the importance of data analytics technology within the insurance industry is “Insurance Doubles Down on Analytics.” According to the article, insurance companies looking to detect fraud are strongly impacted by data and statistics which is one of the reasons why they are embracing the big data revolution.
The story cited:
“The report, which covers the spectrum of tools from business intelligence tools to advanced analytics tools, finds that the average insurer invests 9 percent of the IT budget on data and analytics. This amounts to almost $10 billion per year, and while the insurance industry has long used analytics for traditional risk-centric analysis, there is a shift in the ‘how, where, and when’ the industry leverages data and analytics, according to the report.”
As you can see, text analytics and big data analysis are becoming increasingly important for companies looking to manage their content in a way that makes the most out of a multitude of different types and structures of data. Digital Reasoning is an analytics company with experience providing affordable solutions for both the government and private sector.
Jasmine Ashton, August 6, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Inteltrax: Top Stories, July 23 to July 27
July 30, 2012
The growing availability of cloud based and open source analytics and the resulting beefed-up security demands surrounding such easily accessible software are the topics pervasive in this week’s posts on Inteltrax. As usual the nature and existence of ‘big data’ was discussed and the post, “Big Data is Analytics for Dummies”, accurately gets to the heart of the matter using text from the Tech Week Europe article as evidence.
“The author is probably spot-on with his analysis of the ‘big data’ hype invading industries around the world. Being right doesn’t change the fact that thanks to open source and cloud technologies more companies than ever before now have access to analytics. If the sage analysts need to dumb down their definitions then so be it. Thankfully, there are analytics providers committed to the industries and companies previously not invited into the analytics club.”
All that talk of openness among comrades came to a point with the announcement that Datameer was offering their analytics free of charge to academics mired in the muck of unstructured data. As the post, “Datameer Offers Free License to Academic Researchers”, quotes Market Watch,
“Academic researchers are particularly challenged by the massive amounts of data needed for their research. Collecting and analyzing data requires enormous computational effort and has typically been slow and tedious, often requiring a computer science background. Datameer offers an end-user focused tool that enables researchers themselves to integrate large quantities of data, do complex analysis in a familiar spreadsheet-like interface, and then visualize their results to easily understand, communicate and share their findings.”
Open and free are great especially in the world of costly analytics but both come with a price – heightened security risks. Inteltrax author Catherine Lamsfuss tackled security concerns with the post, “Security Top Concern for Cloud Based Software”. Live Mint compared cloud breaches to a door lock – it’s not a question of if the door will be broken down, but when. The article summarizes the state of security surrounding today’s cloud.
“These security issues should be at the forefront of companies’ decision making process when it comes to choosing a cloud based analytics provider. All cloud based software is protected to some degree but if protecting sensitive information is important than a thorough investigation into a provider’s security background is due.”
Whether one’s company is struggling with finding affordable cloud based analytics, applying open-source to existing systems or trying to strengthen security Digital Reasoning is a solid analytics provider more than capable of helping. With an extensive relationship with the intelligence community they understand the need for security but also are realistic about budgets, especially those of small and midsized businesses.
Follow the Inteltrax news stream by visiting www.inteltrax.com
Patrick Roland, Editor, Inteltrax.
July 30, 2012
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