Datameer Receives Third Year of Funding from RedPoint and Kleiner Perkins
October 11, 2012
Tech Crunch recently reported on the big data and hadoop analytics company Datameer in the article, “Analytics Company Datameer Raises $6 million From Redpoint Ventures and Kleiner Perkins.”
According to the article, After raising $2.5 million from Redpoint in 2010 and $9.25 million led by Kleiner Perkins in 2011, Datameer has raised $6 million as of September 25. This year’s primary donors were Redpoint and Kleiner Perkins.
Why are these two companies so interested in investing in Datameer? It may have something to do with the fact that Datameer makes a spreadsheet-style interface for Apache Hadoop and makes the big data analytics platform easier for non-developers to use.
The article states:
“That may sound simple enough, but Hadoop can be very difficult to use, especially for business users who typically work in Excel or business intelligence dashboards and don’t necessarily need to perform computationally complex problems. To help those users out, Datameer has developed an interface for Hadoop that uses a familiar spreadsheet model. It also sells a desktop edition that will enable users to run Hadoop on a single desktop machine, with no need to run a big cluster anywhere. The standalone desktop version obviously isn’t comparable to a big cluster of servers, but it can be used as an analytics tool in its own right. For more details on the company’s offerings check out Curt Monash’s analysis.”
Big Data analytics solutions are becoming a more and more integral part of strategic planning. Those companies who are interested in getting the most of their data, should look into investing in one of these solutions.
Jasmine Ashton, October 11, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
The Predictive Analytics Boom
October 10, 2012
Do you remember the horror movies with vampires. The hero might put a bag of garlic around his or her neck. In some situations, a cross would be brandished, a drape pushed aside so the sunlight would shine on the vampire. For B movie lovers, a stake through the heart of the creature would eliminate the evil blood sucker.
Many people have to make sense out of the streams of digital data flooding networks, clogging big hard drives, and collecting as log files capture activity. There is not one data vampire, sinking sharp teeth into budgets. There are legions of vampires, and the tried and true methods, like garlic and stakes through, the heart are not working.
So what’s the answer?
Today, it seems that “predictive analytics” is the next big thing in dealing with the threats of the big data vampires.c
I just read “Intelligence Agencies Turn to Crowdsourcing.” The article mentions a number of organizations; for example:
- Applied Research Associates, which is a leader in using crowdsourcing to obtain “intelligence”. See Forecasting Ace
- Darpa
- Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (Iarpa),
- Wikistrat, a massively online consultancy
The write up did not cover some of the interesting companies active in the predictive analytics space. On October 5, 2012, Aljazeera’s “Predicting the Future through Online Data Mining” ran a profile of a company funded by In-Q-Tel and Google, among others.
Several observations:
First, as a technology application gets media attention, expectations soar. The challenge of creating meaningful insights in near real time is formidable.
Second, predicative methods work when certain boundaries are defined for the application. Marketers feed customer’s natural hunger for a hope sandwich. As a result, the specific requirements for a predictive technology implementation are often pushed aside or skipped altogether. In my experience, requirements are important before the contract is signed.
Third, data volume spawns many types of vampires. Different budget sucking creatures. I am not sure there is a single solution. Even vampire movies related upon a suite of methods. None was sure fire. If Hollywood creatives cannot find a solution, will math types succeed?
Stephen E Arnold, October 10, 2012
Oracle Embraces Digital Reasoning
October 8, 2012
Digital Reasoning™, a leader in unstructured data analytics at scale is now a Silver Partner in Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Specialized program. The “silver” designation means that Digital Reasoning benefits from Oracle’s complete solutions addressing unstructured data analytics where extreme scale and high performance are key customer needs. (For more information, see “Digital Reasoning Becomes Oracle PartnerNetwork Silver Level Partner.”
Digital Reasoning has integrated Synthesys®, the company’s software platform for unstructured analytics, with the Oracle Big Data Appliance. A white paper featuring benchmark performance information on the analytics of massive unstructured data sets of documents is available on our website. With the combined power of Synthesys and the Big Data Appliance users can now analyze tens of millions of documents in only a few hours as opposed to months with traditional methods.
Synthesys uses a unique combination of machine learning, patented advanced analytics and tight integration with Hadoop to automatically uncover critical information buried in documents, email, web content and social media. Synthesys has been applied to complex big data analytics challenges in the U.S. intelligence community during the past decade and is now being applied to big data analytics challenges in finance, healthcare and legal markets.
Rob Metcalf, president of Digital Reasoning, said:
We are excited about achieving Silver Level Partner Status in OPN. We see a lot of customer interest in combining Synthesys with the Oracle Big Data Appliance for high performance unstructured data analytics.
With its Silver status, Digital Reasoning is now able to develop, sell and implement Oracle’s 1-Click product portfolio, allowing us to increase competitive positioning and profitability with midsize companies. As an additional benefit, Digital Reasoning can now leverage the OPN Portal tools, resources and experts within the Oracle Partner Business Center to increase their market knowledge and ability to maximize customer sales and retention with Oracle. Silver Level partners are also eligible for discounts on Oracle training, lead registration via Open Market Model, entry into the Oracle Solutions Catalog, discounts on Oracle Linux and VM Support and more.
My view is that Oracle has rich capabilities which are now extended with the state of the art functionality provided by Digital Reasoning.
Stephen E Arnold, October 8, 2012
IntelTrax Top Stories: September 28 to October 4
October 8, 2012
Lately, the IntelTrax information and advanced intelligence blog has been covering a lot of stories related to risk analytics.
The October 4 post “Risk Analytics Becomes Big Business” explains how the days of manually entering data into spreadsheets are over and how risk can now be quantified and lowered with the use of analytics technology.
The article give an example of a company using analytics to mitigate risk:
“Numerix (http://www.numerix.com/), the leading provider of cross-asset analytics for derivatives valuations and risk management today announced that Banque Internationale à Luxembourg (BIL), a pioneer in the Luxembourg financial industry has selected the Numerix CrossAsset analytics platform to support its model validation and model comparison processes. With Numerix’s highly flexible, fully transparent analytics architecture, BIL can conduct rigorous model analysis to independently validate pricing and risk sensitivity outputs, as well as make comparisons between different models to analyze how the outputs vary under different assumptions.”
Another article that emphasizes the financial impacts of data analytics is, “Effective Financial Data Analytics Rely on Quality.” This article discusses how important it is to utilize statisticians and data preparation along with a business’s strategy to form predictive models.
The article states:
“A critical aspect therefore is identifying what data is needed for effective prediction – and what data ends up actually being available and used to build the models. Most analysts can’t fix data – therefore they do the next best thing statistically, which is dropping or avoiding poor quality data.
Data analytics touches nearly all aspects of a business and it’s nearly impossible to achieve effective business intelligence without it.”
The Financial sector is not the only one that is using data analytics technology. It appears that the government is jumping on board the big data wagon as well. “Government and Utilities Get Big Data” explains how analytics spending has gone up quite a bit in the business world.
The article states:
“Utilities must solve data collection and storage challenges and learn how to analyze and act on new forms of information before they even get to the point of realizing real returns on their smart grid investments.
According to a new report from Pike Research, a part of Navigant‘s Energy Practice, the worldwide market for smart grid data analytics is expected to grow steadily through 2020, with cumulative worldwide spending from 2012 through 2020 totaling just over $34 billion.”
One company that has worked to provide data analytics technology for both the government and financial enterprises is Digital Reasoning. Digital Reasoning uses automated understanding to tackle some of big data’s most messy challenges by enabling enterprises and agencies to detect fraud, uncover market trends, gain better insight into customer behavior, gain competitive advantage, and mitigate risk.
Jasmine Ashton, October 8, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Lissted Streams Tweets and Analyzes Data
October 5, 2012
Discovering what is going on in the world and tracking news stories can be difficult in an overwhelming arena of social media updates. However, Twitter-based media relations platform Lissted is making that task a little easier for journalists and PR professionals. We learn about the company’s developments in “Trend Data and Sentiment Analysis Added to Twitter Tool” on MrWeb, which reports that Lissted has added trend data and sentiment analysis to its platform. The platform currently streams and indexes Tweets from journalists across the world.
The article tells us more about the features and benefits of this technology:
“As well as displaying the top trends across its database, Lissted now enables subscribers to look for trends within a specific group, showing the most talked about topics at a specific time or within a particular field of interest.
The new sentiment analysis feature – which is powered by Lexalytics’Salience Engine – assesses the language used in a tweet, to gauge whether tone is positive, negative, or neutral.”
This increased Twitter functionality shows the capabilities that sufficient data analysis can provide to numerous business and media outlets. We think keeping pace with social networking updates is essential to managing the chaos of data.
Andrea Hayden, October 05, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Google Maps: A Prelude to Broader Predictive Search
October 4, 2012
Short honk. Google’s MoreThanaMap subsite signals an escalation in the map wars. You will want to review the information at www.morethanamap.com. The subsite presents the new look of Google’s more important features and services. The demonstrations are front and center.The focus is on visualization of mashed up data; that is, compound displays. The real time emphasis is clear as swell. The links point to developers and another “challenge.” It is clear that Google wants to make it desirable for programmers and other technically savvy individuals to take advantage of Google’s mapping capabilities. After a few clicks, Google has done a good job of making clear that findability and information access shift a map from a location service to a new interface.
Several observations:
First, Google wants to keep its mapping capabilities front and center. Second, the challenges iPhone’s native maps present to some users is a subtext in this subsite. Third, Google Maps are important. Google does not connect the dots to voice search, online advertising, and predictive information display. The “global community” approach underscores Google’s desire to wrap the glob with its maps and overlaying and predicting technologies. Those aspects of MoreThanaMap will become available as Google nudges its Maps forward. Interesting stuff.
Stephen E Arnold, October 4, 2012
LexisNexis Embraces Open Source
October 2, 2012
LexisNexis has been anchored in commercial, for fee search and retrieval for decades. I fondly recall watching the red Lexis terminals double space each line. I saw the white space as a way to charge for data and special paper. The search system was proprietary. When the company talked about search, most of the information was about how to extract information from the LexisNexis system, not about the details of the systems and subsystems.
I found “How LexisNexis Competes In Hadoop Age” quite fascinating because the story included some high level information along with a bit more detail about LexisNexis’ approach to data management for its risk businesses. The idea is that LexisNexis has quite a bit of data from different sources. These data become the raw material for analyses which allow users of the for fee products and services to assess risk.
The big news in the story is that LexisNexis has developed a high performance computing cluster. The foundation is HPCC. Here’s the key phrase, “an open source platform. Those critics of open source who question the security and stability did not dissuade LexisNexis from an open source path.
HPCC charges an annual subscription to the platform software and includes enterprise support.
The other high level items in the story included:
- The decision to shift to open source was taken over a span of several years
- The market for a big data platform such as LexisNexis is new. This means that LexisNexis and its corporate parent Reed Elsevier are pushing into uncharted territory.
- The Hadoop platform is viewed as becoming fragmented. The strategy seems to be to offer an fragmented alternative.
The data management system is HPCC. Some of the details about this platform are:
- The data transformation methods are implemented via an open source Enterprise Control Language
- The system includes a social graph (relationship analysis) component
- HPCC will be easier to use.
The community edition is available via download. There is a fee for the enterprise edition of the system. Modules which extend the basic system are also available. Information about how to buy a subscription is available on the HPCC Web site. There was no pricing information on the HPCC Web site on October 1, 2012. You may want to call HPCC or check the Web site to see if more cost information is posted.
In my opinion, the shift to open source makes sense due to the cost efficiencies the approach can deliver. The technology of open source software can be excellent for operating systems and search. For data management, the proprietary data management vendors assert that systems like Oracle’s database and IBM DB2 offer advantages which many organizations find attractive.
Will LexisNexis embrace open source technology for its commercial search and retrieval service? Perhaps LexisNexis, like Microsoft, is moving more quickly in the open source sector than I know. IBM has been a leader in tapping open source technology within its commercial business model.
As I write this, Reed Elsevier, according to Google Finance, has been able to grow its top line revenue modestly since early 2010 while tripping total operating expenses by a percentage point or two. My view is that open source software offers one way to trim certain licensing fees and possibly some of the restrictions that vendors of proprietary software vendors impose on their customers.
Stephen E Arnold, October 2, 2012
Sponsored by Augmentext
GoodData Has More Offerings for Business Analytics
October 1, 2012
GoodData has already made a name for itself by offering SaaS cloud service that also provides its users with a healthy batch of big data analytics. Gigaom reports that, “GoodData Targets Big Business Data With New Offering.” The new service is called GoodData Bashes and it allows users handling marketing, sales, or subscription data to connect the sources into one analytics tool. The primary purpose of GoodData Bashes is to be a simplistic data analytics to the business world.
Even if everything referring to analytics these days is tied to big data, GoodData is actually doing it:
“And despite some reservation over the overuse of the term “big data,” that’s exactly what GoodData is doing — even if its customers don’t know it. As they connect more data sources and expect deeper, faster analytics, GoodData has to step up its operations. Stanek said his company’s infrastructure, which runs on the Amazon Web Services cloud-computing platform, handles about 20,000 data feeds per day from its 6,000-plus customers. GoodData is running Hadoop, in-memory databases, analytics software and everything else necessary to ingest, process, analyze and visualize data so customers don’t have to.”
Cloud computing is an essential part of GoodData’s plan to give its users real-time analytics. Most big data plans are heading in the cloud direction as mobile access grows in higher demand. It means more streams of opportunity to tap into generating more profit.
Whitney Grace, October 01, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Intel Trax Top Stories September 20 to September 27
October 1, 2012
This week the IntelTrax advanced intelligence blog published a series of articles that explained the importance of integrating analytics solutions to increase performance efficiency within the workplace.
Big data can be quite confusing. That is why it is always great to listen to the opinions of experts in the field. “John Whittaker on the Need for Data Integration for Big Data Analytics” explains why successful big data analytics requires integrating data from a multitude of sources.
When explaining why big data integration is necessary, Whittaker said:
“One of the big aspects that people are trying to get a handle right now, and one of our major uses, is big data analytics. Once you get beyond the Google or Facebook use cases and start talking about how the rest of us will use big data, it is going to be analytics. Whenever you’re doing analytics, you want to marry information from different sources. You might want to be able to correlate what’s happening within your ERP and the operational data that might exist there, with experiential data from your website. The operational data often tends to reside in relational databases, but when you’re talking about experiential data, about how people are utilizing your website or what people are saying on social media about you, that sort of data resides within the unstructured big data world of Hadoop. It’s really about being able to marry these sources together into one environment and drive better decisions based on the information there is the primary value that the big data environment is going to provide for the normal enterprise.”
Along with integrating big data, many experts are also making predictions regarding the future of big data. “Predicting the Next Big Thing in Big Data” talks about some of the new up in comes in the industry that may make a big impact.
When explaining a new report that has come out, the article states:
“Big Data – The Next Big Thing”, a first-of-its-kind report on the ‘Big Data’ industry, focusing on the opportunities, challenges, and its impact on businesses globally. ‘Big Data’ relates to rapidly growing, structured and unstructured datasets with sizes beyond the ability of conventional database tools to store, manage, and analyze them.
The report identifies five key insights on global ‘Big Data’ trends and the opportunity it throws up for IT and analytics players in India. First, Big Data has become all-pervasive with the potential to create significant benefits for a number of sectors. The early adopters driving the business with appetite for Big Data analytics are industries such as Manufacturing, Retail, Financial Services, Telecom and Healthcare.”
In “Marketing Analytics Industry Expected to See Dramatic in India” references a report that shows companies are increasingly using marketing analytics technology as a way to stay ahead of their competition. This is particularly relevant in India because the marketing analytics industry is expected to grow from $200 million to $1.2 billion by 2012.
The report explains:
“Over the past few decades, the evolution in traditional media and the emergence of digital media has revolutionized the way products are sold to the customers. Marketing analytics play a pivotal role in helping marketers take informed data-driven decisions and effectively reach out to the audience. The marketing analytics industry is poised for exponential growth and India will be one of the foremost forces leading this revolution. This report is an effort to showcase potential of analytics to organizations, analytics players and prospective employees and will help pave the way for concerted effort to increase the usage.”
While these articles may discuss different aspect of big data, they all have one thing in common. They all call for a need for companies to invest in solutions that evolve with the times. Digital Reasoning is a big data analytics company that works within nearly every business sector to promote automated understanding over human effort.
Jasmine Ashton, October 1, 2012
Sponsored by ArnoldIT, developer of Augmentext.
Predictive Search: Are You Ready?
September 28, 2012
We read “A New Google App gives You Local Information—Before You Ask for It.” The idea is that smart software knows where you are and what you probably will want to know. Years ago I heard Scott McNealy, the former Sun Microsystems CEO, describe a system in an automobile which would display the location of filling stations and highlight the gas pump with the best price. The Google app seems to be a step in this direction. According to the write up:
Google, along with other companies and researchers, dreams of so-called ubiquitous computing or ambient intelligence — computers woven into the texture of life as opposed to being separate machines. Eventually, the theory goes, computers will be part of the environment, know where people are and anticipate what they want to know. The Field Trip app is a small step in that direction, and an example of what Google is capable of doing.
The good news is that Google is making the predictive system available as an app, not a default setting in a mobile device’s browser. That step would not be one I would welcome. For those who are keen to have smart software think for them, the Field Trip app will be extended to meet market demand.
My personal view is that “smart” software is, like semantic technology, most helpful if it is kept behind the scenes. We are moving to an information access model in which run-and-gun decision making is the norm. The time and effort required to formulate a query, analyze the results, and then check the provenance of the information is becoming irrelevant for some people.
Progress in search marches on. I just worry that those who define progress are the handful of math wizards who decide which algorithms to use and what threshold settings to implement. Smart software in my experience can make some pretty dumb decisions.
Stephen E Arnold, September 28, 2012
Sponsored by Augmentext
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