A Moment of Clarity in the Big Data Hype Noise
May 30, 2012
Which is a more beneficial tool to utilize in business, algorithms or big data? Both are useful, but when put to a test there was a clear winner. You might be surprised by the answers in the article Data Is More Important Than Algorithms.
Netflix offered to pay a million dollars in 2006 to whoever could improve their recommendation system by at least 10%. A year passed and a team improved their system by 8.43%. The company also provided the source code of algorithms utilized. After further evaluation, Netflix decided not to use the codes based on the effort necessary to evolve the code into their production environment.
Their reasoning was simple;
“Algorithms are certainly important but they only provide incremental value on your existing business model. They are very difficult to innovate and way more expensive to implement.”
“Most importantly, you should focus on your changing business — disruption and rapidly changing customer behavior — and data and not on algorithms. One of the promises of Big Data is to leave no data source behind. Your data is your business and your business is your data. Don’t lose sight of it.”
It is ironic that Netflix basically paid a high price for nothing in the end. However they did a service by proving big data to be the most beneficial tool. Netflix paid a million to allow a moment of clarity in the big data hype noise.
Jennifer Shockley, May 30, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Pingar Analyzes Tweets: Polyspot Integrates Them
May 29, 2012
Pingar set themselves up with a challenge, described in their blog post, “Making Sense of Conversations on Twitter: Lessons Learned.” The business intelligence company wanted to test themselves with some of the most nebulous unstructured data out there—data from social sites like Facebook and Twitter and, an added test, organizations that stash their data behind a firewall. They share challenges and lessons from the project in their post. The write up describes part of the process:
“First, we cleaned the tweets by removing all the duplicates, as thousands of re-tweets and spam tweets can negatively affect the results. From each tweet we removed URLs, hashtags, user names and stopwords such as RT, via, lol, lmao, while keeping the original copy for display later. Once all the tweets are cleaned and categorized into dates and sentiments, we applied the Pingar API Entity Extraction method to determine the keywords for the two sets of positive and negative tweets. The API returned two lists of keywords along with the keyword scores. Sometimes the same keyword appeared in both positive and negative list. In this case, we removed the keyword with the lower score from one of the lists.”
Naturally, though, context free content remains a challenge. A demo of the Twitter results is available here.
Pingar is headquartered in New Zealand with offices in the US, Hong Kong, India, the UK. Their roots are in research, and the company maintains ties with key universities, including the University of Waikato and the University of Swansea. Pingar API launched in 2011; the software is platform agnostic, and currently supports English and Chinese with more languages on the way.
Our question, “When you have tweets, then what?” The answer is to use Polyspot’s insight enabled infrastructure to make the data immediately accessible to users wordwide.
Cynthia Murrell, May 29, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Kyield Aims to Pilot a Big Data BI Revolution
May 29, 2012
Kyield has introduced a newly patented semantic enterprise platform. According to the article, Kyield Announces Pilot Program for Advanced Analytics and Big Data with New Revolutionary BI Platform their inviting others to hop in the co-pilot’s seat and collaborate on the take-off.
Mark Montgomery, Founder and CEO of Kyield stated:
“We are inviting well-matched organizations to collaborate with us in piloting our breakthrough system to bring a higher level of performance to the information workplace. In addition to the significant competitive advantage exclusive to our pilot program, we are offering attractive long-term incentives free from lock-in, maintenance fees, and high service costs traditionally associated with the enterprise software industry.”
Kyield was once a consulting firm but evolved into a small private lab founded by Mark Montgomery in 1995. Initially they dealt with e-commerce, but grew their focus into advanced technology with specific focus on knowledge systems, which they are known for today.
The company executed a CTO search with strong response in 2011, following up with a call for collaborative customers in enterprise prototype technology. In early 2012 the Forrester report recognized Kyield in ‘The Future Of BI’, the Top 10 Business Intelligence Predictions of 2012.
Their ground breaking artificial intelligence system will offer an almost holistic architecture. The plan is to extend advanced business intelligence and predictive analytics to all aspects of an organization utilizing an adaptive approach to data optimization. Kyield is in the driver’s seat for the big data BI revolution, and their graciously accepting co-pilots.
Jennifer Shockley, May 29, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Inteltrax: Top Stories, May 21 to May 25
May 28, 2012
Inteltrax, the data fusion and business intelligence information service, captured three key stories germane to search this week, specifically, the latest happenings with some of big data’s biggest names.
Our story, “Data Analytics Expert Points to the Crux of Big Data Issues,” looked at the CEO of Revolution Analytics and Digital Reasoning, catching up with their latest moves.
“EMC Provides a Lot of Analytic Good,” shows all the positive ways in which EMC is moving the analytic game ahead.
While, “MicroTech Wins Military Intelligence Contract” shows this up-and-coming firm making a name for itself with defense.
There are a million different directions that analytics are moving in at any given moment, but we’ll be providing snapshots of the scene, just like this, every day. Be sure to tune in.
Follow the Inteltrax news stream by visiting www.inteltrax.com
Patrick Roland, Editor, Inteltrax.
May 28, 2012
Angoss Trumpets New Features
May 27, 2012
Angoss is upping their predictive analytics game with new features, MarketWatch informs us in “Angoss KnowledgeSEEKER and KnowledgeSTUDIO Version 8.0.” The additions aim to boost analytic and data mining capabilities. The press release explains:
“The new features within KnowledgeSEEKER and KnowledgeSTUDIO version 8.0 enhance companies’ ability to improve business processes and decisions by increasing the types and volume of data that can be analyzed. Data scientists are able to import and prepare massive amounts of data—both structured and unstructured—into memory with 64-bit addressing; and to perform in-database analytics using extremely large datasets and numbers of predictive variables so data can be mined and analyzed faster and more accurately.”
Angoss has teamed up with text and sentiment analysis firm Lexalytics to advance the text mining, extraction, and sentiment analysis capacities in KnowledgeSTUDIO. KnowledgeSEEKER introduces new powers of data preparation and manipulation; graphical wizards transform the data for analysis, eliminating the need to write code.
See the write up for details on these new features, but some highlights include: the optimization of the In-Database (big data) Analytics module for use with Oracle databases; 64-bit in-memory analytics; aSQL Function Code Generator; and an ODBC Import Wizard.
A leader in delivering predictive analytics to businesses looking to improve performance in sales, marketing, and risk management, Angoss offers desktop, client-server, and in-database products as well as cloud-based solutions. The company boasts that their tools are user-friendly and agile. Leading financial, insurance, retail, health care, communications, and technology organizations use Angoss to grow revenue and reduce risk. Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, Angoss also has offices in the US and UK.
Cynthia Murrell, May 27, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Big Thoughts on Big Data
May 26, 2012
CorrelSense recently reported on one of the hottest IT trends to date in the article, “Big Data is Truly Transforming the Enterprise.”
According to the MIT’s principal research scientist, Andrew McAfee, Big Data can be likened to the invention of the Microscope in the sense that it exposes information that we couldn’t have found before the way that the Microscope allows you to view things that previously could not be seen.
The article states:
“As IT Pros, you are going to have to learn to process this big data and find tools for the non-technical experts and suits in the C-Suite to mix and match the data. The big difference between this and traditional business intelligence is that with BI you were looking back where you were at a given point in time, whereas with Big Data, you can analyze data in real time and begin to make more intelligent decisions about where to put your resources at any given moment.”
Rather than reducing jobs, as many people fear that technological progression may do, it rather will create them. We’re obviously going to need more people to decipher through this growing pile of data.
Jasmine Ashton, May 26, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Palantir Receives Seventh Round of Funding
May 24, 2012
Palantir is in the money again, TechCrunch informs us in “Palantir Technologies Nabs $56M in New Funding, SEC Filing Shows.” According to the article, this is the seventh round of venture capital funding for the data management company.
What is the company doing with this money?
That’s a lot of investment. What are these folks inventing? Writer Colleen Taylor doesn’t seem quite sure, noting that TechCrunch has requested more information from the company. She plans to update her post when she gets a response. For now, she writes:
“The company provides high-powered software platforms that let users integrate, visualize, and analyze large quantities of data. Perhaps most importantly, Palantir specifically has targeted its products to two sectors that need to parse large amounts of classified information, and require super solid security: Government and finance. The company counts governmental organizations such as the FBI and financial institutions such as JP Morgan as customers. Palantir has doubled in size each year since it was founded, according to its website.”
With founding members from such promising pools as PayPal alumni and Stanford computer science grads, Palantir launched in 2004. Its two products, Palantir Government and Palantir Finance, work with a wide range of data types. The company is based in Palo Alto, CA, and has offices in Virginia, New York, and London. Despite its growth, Palantir strives to retain its startup attitude and maintain the highest of standards.
But. . . just what are they working on now? Try turning back to the TechCrunch article to see whether Taylor got her answers. Other companies are able to push forward without sucking tens of millions in cash. Check out www.ikanow.com and www.digitalreasoning.com.
Cynthia Murrell, May 24, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Myth and Reality about Predictive Coding
May 23, 2012
The myth of a technology can often differ from its reality, especially in one that is still evolving. Predictive coding is currently experiencing controversy regarding its cost versus efficiency according to Will Predictive Coding Live Up to the eDiscovery Hype?.
Predictive Coding has been hailed a technology which provides lower costs with lighter burdens. The unfortunate results that deem it myth fall to the process necessary for it to function. It is an evolving technology.
Its reality is evolving as:
“With the promise of transparency and simpler workflows, predictive coding technology should eventually live up to its billing of helping organizations discover their information in an efficient, cost effective and defensible manner. As for now, the “promise” of first generation predictive coding tools appears to be nothing more than that, leaving organizations looking like the cash-strapped “Monopoly man,” wondering where there litigation dollars have gone.”
Reality is that Predictive Coding can’t exist without human’s providing the data, and then the program optimizes it. The process combines people, technology and workflow to find documents referencing keywords. The three basic components are:
- To predict utilizing predictive analytics.
- To code, utilizing a keyword to locate relevant documents.
- To process a proven workflow.
Improvements are possible given the technological advances in the industry. This new technique has potential and may yet evolve into a functional, efficient means to acquire data. For now, Predictive Coding is stuck in between myth and reality.
Jennifer Shockley, May 23, 2012
Inteltrax: Top Stories, May 14 to May 18
May 21, 2012
Inteltrax, the data fusion and business intelligence information service, captured three key stories germane to search this week, specifically, how unstructured data is shaping the way vendors operate.
In “A Mountain of Unstructured Data” the problem of collecting tweets, posts, pictures, videos and more and making analytic sense is laid out.
“Unstructured Data Investment on the Horizon” shows how many companies are investing in solving their own unstructured data crises.
Finally, “Another Analytics Partnership is Born” showed companies joining forces to tackle this massive problem.
We’ve talked about unstructured data before, but we keep returning to the well because it’s such a massive concern for companies. Thankfully, those problems are being solved and we’re monitoring it every step of the way.
Follow the Inteltrax news stream by visiting www.inteltrax.com
Patrick Roland, Editor, Inteltrax.
May 21, 2012
Inteltrax: Top Stories, May 7 to May 11
May 14, 2012
Inteltrax, the data fusion and business intelligence information service, captured three key stories germane to search this week, specifically, hot trends among the industry.
The hottest trend in most businesses is change and “How an Analytic Firm Handles Challenges” highlights the rapidly evolving Petri dish of data analytics.
The law has been a major topic of talk and “Google Indiscretions Prove Need for Secure Data Mining” looks at how the search giant’s analytics arm might be violating laws and trust.
Partnerships have been the biggest trend in big data this year and “Clients Win When Big Data Partners” examines Cloudera’s recent teamwork.
These are just a sampling of the big time changes moving this industry forward at a frantic pace. It’s exciting and you can catch the thrill every day as we cull analytic news from around the globe.
Follow the Inteltrax news stream by visiting www.inteltrax.com
Patrick Roland, Editor, Inteltrax.
May 14, 2012
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