Cignifi Uses Mobile Phone Usage to Discern Credit Risk
February 6, 2012
There’s a new predictive analytics twist in the realm of credit worthiness. Slashdot informs, “Banks Using Mobile Phone Usage to Gauge Credit Risk.” Should’ve known—everything now comes back to the phone.
Startup Cignifi focuses on consumers who use mobile phones but have no access to formal financial services. In the absence of credit histories, the company has developed software that makes credit risk predictions based on phone usage patterns. Writer Hugh Pickens explains,
The way you use your phone is a proxy for your lifestyle say the developers. ‘We’re looking at things like the length of calls, the time of day, and the location you make them from. Also things like whether you top up [a pre-paid SIM card] regularly. We want to see how stable the patterns are. When you look at that, you can create these behavioral clusters that give you information about users’ appetite for new [financial] products, and their ability to repay a debt.’
Cignifi is currently operating in Brazil, and is looking to expand to other limited banking countries like China, India, the Philippines, and Mexico. Deployment in the US is not planned anytime soon. The company is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has offices in Sao Paulo, Brazil and Oxford, England. In fact, it was behavioral mathematicians in Oxford who developed the technology. Go figure.
Cynthia Murrell, February 6, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Social Media Analytics: Relationships with End User Consumers
February 2, 2012
Text Analytics News recently partnered with Useful Social Media to publish a series of interviews with experts in the field of Social Media Analytics. The second installment focuses on the relationships between vendors and their end user consumers.
“Social Media Analytics Expert Interview Series: Part 2” is conducted by the Chief Editor of Text Analytics news, Ezra Steinberg. The interview panel includes: Meta Brown, General Manager of Analytics at LinguaSys; Christine Campbell, Director of Marketing at Socialware; and Pirouz Nilforoush, President & Co-Founder of NetShelter Technology Media. All three interviewees will be speaking at the Social Media Analytics Summit in San Francisco in April. The interview sheds some light on customer interaction; some helpful questions and responses from the interview follow:
“USM: What do you believe the average consumer thinks about companies’ social media listening initiatives?
Nilforoush (Netshelter): I think the average consumer is confused as to why different brands are initiating conversations with them online that can resemble advertising or spam. Brands need to focus their efforts around engaging their top influencers, rather than trying to engage with every single person that has something to say about their brand. It is not a scalable model for the brands and can be annoying for the end user. Instead, brands should focus their efforts on the people that have the biggest impact on their brand. These influencers will do the work for brands on their own and impact the masses.
USM: What would you tell someone who is thinking about employing social media analytics for their company?
Brown (LinguaSys): Start with just one narrow project tied to a specific business problem. Choose something where you feel confident that quick improvement is possible. Plan carefully – what’s the path from data collection to analytics to action to returns? Give yourself the best opportunity to succeed – don’t begin until you have made a plan that gives you a way to demonstrate measurable value for your investment in social analytics!
The interview focuses on planning for implementation of social media analytics and consumer’s thoughts on the topic. Many organizations would benefit by considering the opinions and thoughts provided by these leaders in social media. The full interview can be found here and can give insight on building relationships via social media and what to anticipate during the process.
Andrea Hayden, February 02, 2012
ASG Acquires Riverglass: More Big Data Action
February 1, 2012
RiverGlass News and Media reported on their recent acquisition by ASG Software Solutions in the article “Allen Systems Group (ASG) Acquires Intelligence Search Intelligence Search Firm Riverglass.”
Based in Naples, Florida, ASG Software Solutions is a recognized innovator in IT software solutions. The company announced in October that it acquired RiverGlass, a leading provider of eDiscovery, advanced information collection, data management and analysis solutions.
We learned:
The integration of RiverGlass’ robust intelligent search technologies with ASG’s content management solutions will provide ASG customers with improved capabilities in data collection, management of structured and unstructured data, and access to meaningful analytics.
In addition to the RiverGlass acquisition, according to a December news release, ASG has also acquired Atempo, a leading provider of data protection and backup management software headquartered in Palo Alto, CA.
By acquiring these two data management solutions companies, ASG will be able to help its customers combat the exponential data growth and increasing complexity in meeting e-discovery and compliance regulations.
Jasmine Ashton, February 1, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Inteltrax: Top Stories, January 23 to January 27
January 30, 2012
Inteltrax, the data fusion and business intelligence information service, captured three key stories germane to search this week, specifically, how certain industries are gaining a foothold via big data analytics.
One story, “Marketing Analytics Makes for a Wide Open Field,” showcases how smart marketers are getting a better understanding of potential customers with BI.
“Human Resources is Not Helpless With Big Data” acts as a rebuttal of sorts to a spate of news saying HR offices aren’t properly utilizing big data. We think they are and can do even more with a little help.
However, not all the news is positive. “Avoiding Obsolete Analytics” deals with SPOTS, an acronym for obsolete analytics, of which some say are more prevalent than we think. We, though, disagree, and showcase some finely evolving tools.
Big data is storming the castle of industry, changing the way nearly everyone does business. From the cutting edge HR work to stepping around potentially obsolete tools, there is an entire world of news waiting for you. We’re going to give you all you need to stay current in the big data world.
Follow the Inteltrax news stream by visiting www.inteltrax.com
Patrick Roland, Editor, Inteltrax.
January 30, 2012
Social Media Analytics: What are Industry Leaders Doing?
January 23, 2012
Social media analytics are vital in today’s business world because it allows companies to provide personalized customer service and improves brand and reputation in easy-to-find profiles.
Text Analytics News recently partnered with Useful Social Media to publish a series of interviews with experts in the field of Social Media Analytics. The first installment focuses on digital research and what leading organizations are doing in the area of social media analytics.
Social Media Analytics Expert Interview Series: Part 1” is conducted by the Chief Editor of Text Analytics news, Ezra Steinberg. The interview panel includes: Dana Jacob, Sr. Manager of Social Media Insights & Analytics, Yahoo!; Judy Pastor, Principal Operations Research Manager, American Airlines; Tom H. C. Anderson, Managing Partner, Anderson Analytics (OdinText); Usher Lieberman, Director Corporate Communications, TheFind; and Marshall Sponder, Founder, WebMetricsGuru. A couple of intriguing questions and responses from the interview follow:
“USM: What parts of the business (CRM, Research, CS, HR etc.) do you think can benefit most from social media analytics?
Jacob (Yahoo!): ‘Every part of the business can benefit from social media analytics, but the needs and focuses vary. For marketing, social media analytics provide measurement of campaign effectiveness, brand image and association, and reactions to marketing messages. For product teams, social media could provide insights into users’ mindset as to why they use one brand or type of product versus another, and could help uncover unmet needs in the market place. For the research function, social media is becoming an important data source to compliment traditional market research.’
USM: What skillsets do you feel are most critical in a social media analytics department?
Sponder (WebMetricsGuru): I think having an industry knowledge is important to the social analytics department within an organization and here’s why: Social Data, by its nature, is mostly unstructured (some have said that 90% of the social data is ‘unstructured’) and it takes a lot of additional work to provide meaning to the data in context to what a client actually needs.’
The interview focuses on the importance of social media analytics and how to integrate, and many organizations would be benefited by considering the ideas and opinions provided by these industry leaders. The full interview can be found here and can give insight on developing a social media analytics department and leveraging social media for clients. Before gobbling the social media analytics Cheetos, be sure to check out what constitutes a valid data set.
Andrea Hayden, January 23, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Glassbeam: Fusion and Analysis
January 20, 2012
Formerly known as Orchesys, Glassbeam, Inc. provides software-as-a-service (SaaS) based solutions for product analytics. Its namesake technology lets organizations view a continual stream of data regarding product use and configuration. In 2009, the company was included in Gartner Inc.’s “Cool Vendors in BI and Performance Management” report. In 2011, it was a winner of TiEcon’s TiE50 award, which recognizes leading start-ups, and received $6 million in funding from TiE Angel investors. The firm was one of six on IDC’s “2011 Innovative Business Analytics Companies Under $100M to Watch” list.
Glassbeam’s technology enables users to gain insights from large quantities of product operational semi-structured data, such as log data, contained in any intelligent device. The solution converts the product operational data into actionable information using the company’s patent-pending Semiotic Parsing Language (SPL) technology, which scales to analyze terabytes of data using next generation data warehousing techniques.
The firm’s Glassbeam Server includes a parsing engine and an extraction and load engine that process information from terabytes of raw unstructured data. The Glassbeam Support Portal, provides data to departmental portals using information from its data warehouse. The company also provides Glassbeam Workbench, an analytics toolkit that enables users to build and run queries, share saved queries and results with other users, and publish the queries as dashboard widgets embeddable into other applications. Glassbeam Views provides a reporting toolset and infrastructure to design and build reports and insights from its data warehouse. In addition, it offers SPL maintenance, business analytics, enterprise application integration, and report management and delivery. Glassbeam’s Product Analytics solution uses OpSource Inc.’s OpSource Cloud to process large amounts of unstructured data.
Potential clients include those in the server, storage, network, software, telecom, medical, and industrial sectors. While there are no established players in its market, Glassbeam faces competition from firms wanting to build their own solutions.
Rita Safranek, January 20, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
SAP HANA Spreads Its Wings
January 19, 2012
We learn more about SAP HANA from PR Newswire’s “SAP HANA™ Opens Up to Wider Industry and Partner Adoption.” Leading software vendors are tapping the speed and power of SAP HANA, a storage and data management system, for both existing products and for new applications. The press release boasts:
SAP also showcased the latest customers to experience the power of SAP HANA across industries, giving them instant access to massive amounts of information and the ability to make real-time decisions, in the process achieving breakthrough performance improvement by factors of thousands, even tens of thousands, compared to existing systems in their landscapes.
The article lists the vendors and describes how SAP HANA will help each. The companies represent fields from telecom to business visualization to healthcare. Examples include UFIDA, TIBCO, Tableau Software, and T-Mobile.
SAP serves up business management software to organizations of all sizes around the world, allowing workers to collaborate efficiently and to gain an edge on the competition. The company, founded back in 1972, is headquartered in Walldorf, Germany. Will HANA triumph in the fierce storage and data management wars? Uptake, according to our research, has been plugging along.
Cynthia Murrell, January 19, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Inteltrax: Top Stories, January 9 to January 14
January 16, 2012
Inteltrax, the data fusion and business intelligence information service, captured three key stories germane to search this week, specifically, the fluctuating relationship between economics and big data analytics.
Starting off was our story, “Financial Analytics Will Be Big Competition in New Year” which predicts 2012 will be the year that the financial industry straightens itself out via analytics. We can only hope we’re right.
The curious case of “As Italian Economy Flounders Analytics Flourishes” shows how some Italian big data firms are finding a lot of business while its government and economy collapse around it.
In America, we spotted a trend in “Data Scientist Jobs on the Rise” that shows while a lot of industries aren’t hiring, big data is opening its doors to more and more workers.
Economics is a growing, mutating beast, that’s no news. But the impact analytics is having across the globe on the bottom line is helping tame that beast in unsuspecting ways. Keep tuned in to discover all the ways we see these amazing connections happening.
Follow the Inteltrax news stream by visiting www.inteltrax.com
Patrick Roland, Editor, Inteltrax.
January 16, 2012
Digimind Offers Resolutions for Intelligence Managers
January 14, 2012
In honor of the new year, competitive intelligence software developer Digimind shared five tips on how to better manage your intelligence processes in the article “Top 5 New Years Resolutions for Competitive Intelligence Managers.”
According to the write-up, effective managers should focus on: developing a social media strategy, making better use of intelligence data, establishing early warning systems, managing reports, and emphasizing collaboration.
When discussing social media monitoring, the article states:
Adopting a social media engagement strategy should be a key cornerstone of your intelligence activities in 2012. Conversations which impact your corporate reputation and influential chatter about your brand or products are taking place on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. If you’re not paying attention you are missing a huge chunk of intelligence.
We think it is a good idea to understand the characteristics and freshness of the underlying data. Visualization, however, is not as important as having the right information needed to answer real life questions.
Jasmine Ashton, January 14, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
American Exteriors Embraces Visual Mining NetCharts
January 13, 2012
The Information Management.com article “Visual Mining NetCharts Performance Dashboard V2.0” gives readers a look into Visual Mining NetCharts Performance Dashboard (NCPD) through the eyes of Michael C.Hurst, director of IT at American Exteriors, LLC. American Exteriors, LLC is a well -known vinyl replacement window and siding company and they currently run the NCPD on Windows Server 2008. The company was experiencing problems with the accuracy of their report data. American Exteriors wanted a tool that could provide “quick insight into KPIs and the flexibility of assessing current activities against budgets and historical trends. “ They were initially attracted to NCPD “primarily due to its cost and ease of use for the end user.” Hurst comments “A primary strength is the ability to immediately access the most relevant drivers of the business in real time via Web-based reports.” Hurst praised the company’s vendor support especially their responsiveness to customer suggestions and improvements. His one gripe is that programming script knowledge is necessary for dashboard customization. Overall American Exteriors seems to be pleased with the NCPD benefits. Looks like another satisfied customer.
April Holmes, January 13, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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