intelligence

How open source levels all software market segments

In a new study on open-source adoption in the business intelligence (BI) market, it's becoming clear that both the benefits and shortcomings of open source software are nearly universal across all technology segments.

According to the study by Third Nature (sponsored by Jaspersoft and Infobright), "the top reason for adopting is still cost savings, although reduced vendor dependence and ease of integration were close to the same level. The limiting of vendor technology lock‐in and freedom from deployment restrictions were key elements of reducing vendor dependence. Some companies used open source deployments as a means of keeping … Read more

Social networks--the new front in war on terror

Unnamed intelligence agencies and certain academics have yet to give up on data mining to identify terrorists and predict attacks, despite a 352-page tome published last year pronouncing the practice a waste of time.

The U.S. is spending "hundreds of millions of dollars" to develop techniques to mine the mountains of information gleaned from e-mails, telephone calls, interviews with suspects, and now social networks to build-up Facebook-style databanks on international terrorists, according to a recent piece in the British newspaper, The Independent.

The result has been the arrest and interrogation of "many thousands of innocent people&… Read more

Imagining a Google in physical retail

What would Google look like if you took it offline and forced it to set up in physical space?

Google's tens of thousands of commodity Linux servers would need to be scattered around the globe so as to collect and then aggregate consumer interest. A lot like Path Intelligence, in other words.

Tim O'Reilly invested in Path Intelligence back in 2007. After lunching with Path Intelligence CEO Toby Oliver Friday in London, I can see why. The idea is to set up receivers in shopping malls and other retail areas to collect mobile data and analyze consumer behavior … Read more

Business Intelligence moves to the cloud

One of the most difficult aspects of cloud computing is dealing with the integration of various applications that run between your enterprise and a cloud provider or data center. Application integration is arguably the biggest challenge to enterprises attempting to adopt cloud principles.

To that end, Jaspersoft, Talend, RightScale, and Vertica have teamed up to offer a joint solution stack that delivers complete Business Intelligence (BI) in the cloud.

Business intelligence has been the No. 1 technology spend for the last three years running, according to reseach firm Gartner. And, despite the the recession, Madan Sheina from Ovum has called BI … Read more

Smart cabinets eliminate need for hardware

I have a roommate that has a habit of leaving the cabinet doors open. As small of an issue as this is, it leads to visual inconsistency, opens the potential for pests in the food, and provides a tempting hiding place for the house cats. AnvilMotion has offered an elegant and cutting-edge solution in their new intelligent kitchens, using combined sensor technology and modern mechanical design to take the guesswork out of opening and shutting your kitchen cabinetry.

If you've ever seen Batman, then the frame-in-frame concept that makes opening the cabinets possible is reminiscent of the automated outer … Read more

Business intelligence is nice, personal data apps are better

The business intelligence community has made much of its ability to transform the way enterprises operate, and even the way the world works. Open source takes this to the next level, as OStatic recently described. And yet, as exciting as open-source business intelligence is, it's not what gets me out of bed every morning before sunrise. What drove me out of bed to climb 2,474 feet on my mountain bike this morning is the personal intelligence movement or, more accurately, the personal data movement.

Tim O'Reilly talks eloquently about " data as the Intel Inside" of … Read more

Reading machine to snoop on Web

What if the wisdom of Web could be yours, without having to read through it one page at a time? That's what the military wants.

DARPA has hired a company to develop a reading machine to reduce the gap between the ever increasing mountain of digitized text and the intelligence community's insatiable appetite for data input.

BBN Technologies was awarded the $29.7 million contract to develop a universal text engine capable of capturing knowledge from written matter and rendering it into a format that artificial intelligence systems (AI) and human analysts can work with. (PDF)

The military … Read more

SaaS BI player LucidEra to call it quits

Monday's rumor that on-demand business intelligence provider LucidEra was shutting down has turned out to be true.

I received a number of pitches from competitors about why their solution is better, cheaper, etc., and one particularly well thought-out e-mail from Brad Peters, CEO of Birst, another on-demand BI provider. I've pasted the e-mail below with permission and it will end up on their blog sooner or later.

My understanding is that while LucidEra's shutdown is unfortunate and a bit of a drag for customers, there are multiple providers that customers can easily switch to and that LucidEra are being helpful with the data transference.

LucidEra, right and wrong Brad Peters, CEO, Birst

It's always unfortunate to see a fellow startup shut its doors, even when you compete with it, since strong competition validates an overall concept--in our case, on-demand business intelligence. The benefits are real. The value to customers is real. Unfortunately for LucidEra, their particular approach--specific applications, instead of general BI solutions--proved weak in the marketplace. … Read more

Beyond the iPhone: What open source means for mobile

The launch of Apple's iPhone 3G S has justifiably caught the media's attention, what with its elegant design and speedy performance. But for all the noise that Apple is making in mobile, open source--not Apple--may well be doing the most to define the future of mobile communications, as two leading open-source projects suggest.

No, I'm not talking about the Palm Pre, with its Linux-based operating system and its new open-source applications portal. Nor am I referring to Google Android.

Rather, I'm referring to the InSTEDD project, which The Economist recently highlighted, as well as GNU Radio, … Read more