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Saturday, December 31, 2011
Friday, December 30, 2011
Book recommendation: The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology [Paperback]
For over three decades, Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines, he argued that computers would soon rival the full range of human intelligence at its best. Now he examines the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: the union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our creations.
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get it while it's Hot!!!!
iPhone And iPad Account For A Whopping 92% Of All Online Mobile Purchases [STUDY] http://www.businessinsider.com/iphone-ipad-mobile-retail-sales-2011-12?utm_source=twbutton&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=tools via @sai_tools
Please support @gatorbeefs Vote like us at Urban spoon and receive a free appetizer coupon http://urbns.pn/W10V
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
minethatdata Brad Stevens, Butler Mens Basketball Coach, on Analytics: http://t.co/PJH7SikF via @courtneybolton
Big data is definitely here to stay Check out this article http://ewasterecycler.blogspot.com/2011/12/big-data-analytics-get-even-bigger.html
New Book: Keyword Intelligence: Keyword Research for Search, Social, and Beyond http://tinyurl.com/bovcuhb
New book: A unique book on the art and science of keyword research
This is a great book that anyone looking to find ewaste could use to their benefit. Offline marketing is still very effective but a lot can be missed online if you don't know how to market effectively. I'm not suggesting you take a whole course in marketing but knowing a few simple concepts in keyword research will set you apart from your competition. Havn't you noticed an ewaste recycler popping up on every corner in your town? There is ewaste everywhere, knowing how to find it is essential. I just picked this book up and can't wait to see what strategies the authors use. Whether you are a recycler, scrapper, or trader this book is essential for finding electronic waste and marketing your ewaste service.
Description: Keyword research can make or break a marketing campaign, an optimization strategy, and pay-per-click ad campaigns. Written by a keyword research expert, this essential resource drills home the importance of targeting the right keywords or phrases in order to get traffic from search engines and social media channels. Author Ron Jones imparts his wisdom and experience for determining which keywords will work based on a searcher's intent and he shows you how to research social, mobile, and video marketing tools that can ultimately become the foundation of a marketing campaign.
•Boasts detailed how-to information from one of the world's leading keyword research experts
•Helps you learn how to craft a successful keyword campaign and capture a coveted spot on the first page of a results page
•Pares down the essential information you need to know to use available tools to get keyword suggestions, forecast web site traffic, perform competitive research, and analyze results
•Walks you through how to best apply keywords to SEO and PPC campaigns as well as gain visibility with mobile marketing and integrate with traditional marketing efforts
•Features case studies, examples, tutorials, tips, and previously undocumented techniques
No matter your level of experience working with keywords, Keyword Intelligence is the ultimate guide for learning how to best conduct keyword research and craft winning marketing campaigns.
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
The Electronic Waste Recycler: fantastic Blog I'm Following: Simplified Analytics http://ping.fm/NcKai
Big Data, Analytics Get Even Bigger, Hotter in 2012
By Chris Kanaracus, IDG News
Every enterprise software vendor will tell you how hot and in-demand their products are, but the notion rings fairly true with respect to BI (business intelligence) and advanced analytics. The products just kept selling throughout the global recession, as companies looked to gain insights into their business and subsequently, more efficiency as well as new ideas.
Similar Articles:
Google Offers Real-Time Site Analytics.
How Twitter Web Analytics Will Help Your Business.
AT&T May Switch to Throttling with iPhone 5's Arrival, Says Report.
EMC Harnesses Cloud Data with Greenplum Purchase.
Verizon CEO: Shared Data Plans Coming Next Year.
Ice Cream Sandwich Destined for Samsung Galaxy S II in Early 2012.
Toss in this year's rise of the "Big Data" buzz-phrase to near-ubiquitous status, and it seems like 2012 could be the biggest year yet for the analytics market. Here's a look at what some experts, as well as a reading of the tea leaves, suggest will be the hottest topics in analytics next year.
Big Data is not going away
Big Data seems to be the new SOA (service oriented architecture) as industry terms go, with seemingly every other vendor product pitch attempting to hitch a ride. All are professing to help with the same problem: getting something useful out of ever-larger mountains of information, not only from transactional business applications but unstructured data from social networking sites, sensors and other sources.
MORE ON 2012: Gartner: The top 10 strategic technology trends for 2012
The Hadoop open-source programming framework is closely associated with the Big Data movement. The market can expect that Hadoop-based data warehousing appliances "will become the hottest new platforms in the coming year," said Forrester Research analyst James Kobielus. Also look for more companies to roll out Hadoop-related consulting services, modeling tools and other products.
In-memory processing will be the belle of the ball
SAP has spent the past 18 months touting the virtues of its HANA in-memory database, which it says can dramatically speed up data exploration and analysis, since it puts information to be processed in RAM instead of reading it off traditional disks.
While Oracle CEO Larry Ellison once pooh-poohed SAP's plans, his company has since announced the Exalytics in-memory machine, a new member of its family of specialized hardware-software appliances.
Smaller companies such as Qlikview and Tableau, both of which use in-memory technology for their BI and visualization tools, should also boost their profile next year. Some could also be acquisition targets for larger vendors looking to ride the in-memory wave.
But "enterprise-friendly" features such as support for third-party ETL (extract, transform and load) tools will be key to their growth, Curt Monash of Monash Research added.
Will analytics-as-a-service take off?
Next year could bring out "a great many vendors" offering large-scale analytics as an on-demand cloud service, and there's a market for it, Kobielus said. "Petascale analytics is not necessarily something a lot of companies want to bring in-house.
But Monash isn't so sure. "Remote computing BI that focuses on hardware cost sharing is problematic," he said. "Moving data in and out of the cluster is a big part of the overall cost, at least if you plan to process it only occasionally once it gets there. I haven't seen a plan yet that gets around that point."
HP can finally be a big player in analytics -- if it's careful
With its Neoview platform, Hewlett-Packard wanted to stand alongside the likes of Teradata as a top player in data warehousing. But that effort never gained much traction despite HP's efforts. But with this year's acquisition of analytic data warehouse vendor Vertica under its belt, the only thing HP has to do to be relevant in that market is "avoid stupidity," Monash said.
MORE NEWS: Gartner: 16 long-held IT business practices you need to kill
"I don't think trying to force Vertica beyond its natural growth, the way EMC is with Greenplum, is necessarily a good idea," he added. "Natural growth in Vertica's case is plenty fast anyway. Obviously, making good Vertica hardware would be nice. But being hardware-independent is crucial to Vertica, not least because of cloud deployment, an option many buyers want to at least have in their hip pockets."
Mobile BI will gain momentum
The software industry's move to support mobile devices won't leave analytics behind, especially with the extra space for slicing-and-dicing data provided by the larger screens on tablets like the iPad. Mobile BI in fact will go mainstream next year, Forrester Research analyst Boris Evelson said in a recent blog post. "One needs to make decisions when and where they need to be made. Not 'when I get back to the office,' which may be too late."
BI and analytics start showing up everywhere
"Pervasive" analytics capabilities are a crucial aspect of Oracle's next-generation Fusion Applications. Instead of logging into a separate BI platform, or getting canned reports created by IT sent to them, users are presented with analytics within the context and workflows of the various Fusion apps. Other ERP (enterprise resource planning) vendors may start mimicking Oracle's approach if the concept is a hit with customers.
In the meantime, BI users will start demanding -- and vendors will start delivering -- BI tools integrated with email and collaboration platforms, Evelson wrote in his blog post. "Just integrating BI with Excel is no longer enough."
Buffer
Every enterprise software vendor will tell you how hot and in-demand their products are, but the notion rings fairly true with respect to BI (business intelligence) and advanced analytics. The products just kept selling throughout the global recession, as companies looked to gain insights into their business and subsequently, more efficiency as well as new ideas.
Similar Articles:
Google Offers Real-Time Site Analytics.
How Twitter Web Analytics Will Help Your Business.
AT&T May Switch to Throttling with iPhone 5's Arrival, Says Report.
EMC Harnesses Cloud Data with Greenplum Purchase.
Verizon CEO: Shared Data Plans Coming Next Year.
Ice Cream Sandwich Destined for Samsung Galaxy S II in Early 2012.
Toss in this year's rise of the "Big Data" buzz-phrase to near-ubiquitous status, and it seems like 2012 could be the biggest year yet for the analytics market. Here's a look at what some experts, as well as a reading of the tea leaves, suggest will be the hottest topics in analytics next year.
Big Data is not going away
Big Data seems to be the new SOA (service oriented architecture) as industry terms go, with seemingly every other vendor product pitch attempting to hitch a ride. All are professing to help with the same problem: getting something useful out of ever-larger mountains of information, not only from transactional business applications but unstructured data from social networking sites, sensors and other sources.
MORE ON 2012: Gartner: The top 10 strategic technology trends for 2012
The Hadoop open-source programming framework is closely associated with the Big Data movement. The market can expect that Hadoop-based data warehousing appliances "will become the hottest new platforms in the coming year," said Forrester Research analyst James Kobielus. Also look for more companies to roll out Hadoop-related consulting services, modeling tools and other products.
In-memory processing will be the belle of the ball
SAP has spent the past 18 months touting the virtues of its HANA in-memory database, which it says can dramatically speed up data exploration and analysis, since it puts information to be processed in RAM instead of reading it off traditional disks.
While Oracle CEO Larry Ellison once pooh-poohed SAP's plans, his company has since announced the Exalytics in-memory machine, a new member of its family of specialized hardware-software appliances.
Smaller companies such as Qlikview and Tableau, both of which use in-memory technology for their BI and visualization tools, should also boost their profile next year. Some could also be acquisition targets for larger vendors looking to ride the in-memory wave.
But "enterprise-friendly" features such as support for third-party ETL (extract, transform and load) tools will be key to their growth, Curt Monash of Monash Research added.
Will analytics-as-a-service take off?
Next year could bring out "a great many vendors" offering large-scale analytics as an on-demand cloud service, and there's a market for it, Kobielus said. "Petascale analytics is not necessarily something a lot of companies want to bring in-house.
But Monash isn't so sure. "Remote computing BI that focuses on hardware cost sharing is problematic," he said. "Moving data in and out of the cluster is a big part of the overall cost, at least if you plan to process it only occasionally once it gets there. I haven't seen a plan yet that gets around that point."
HP can finally be a big player in analytics -- if it's careful
With its Neoview platform, Hewlett-Packard wanted to stand alongside the likes of Teradata as a top player in data warehousing. But that effort never gained much traction despite HP's efforts. But with this year's acquisition of analytic data warehouse vendor Vertica under its belt, the only thing HP has to do to be relevant in that market is "avoid stupidity," Monash said.
MORE NEWS: Gartner: 16 long-held IT business practices you need to kill
"I don't think trying to force Vertica beyond its natural growth, the way EMC is with Greenplum, is necessarily a good idea," he added. "Natural growth in Vertica's case is plenty fast anyway. Obviously, making good Vertica hardware would be nice. But being hardware-independent is crucial to Vertica, not least because of cloud deployment, an option many buyers want to at least have in their hip pockets."
Mobile BI will gain momentum
The software industry's move to support mobile devices won't leave analytics behind, especially with the extra space for slicing-and-dicing data provided by the larger screens on tablets like the iPad. Mobile BI in fact will go mainstream next year, Forrester Research analyst Boris Evelson said in a recent blog post. "One needs to make decisions when and where they need to be made. Not 'when I get back to the office,' which may be too late."
BI and analytics start showing up everywhere
"Pervasive" analytics capabilities are a crucial aspect of Oracle's next-generation Fusion Applications. Instead of logging into a separate BI platform, or getting canned reports created by IT sent to them, users are presented with analytics within the context and workflows of the various Fusion apps. Other ERP (enterprise resource planning) vendors may start mimicking Oracle's approach if the concept is a hit with customers.
In the meantime, BI users will start demanding -- and vendors will start delivering -- BI tools integrated with email and collaboration platforms, Evelson wrote in his blog post. "Just integrating BI with Excel is no longer enough."
Buffer
A startup’s plan to sell solar like cell phones: Simpa networks
By Katie FehrenbacherDec. 27, 2011, 5:00am PT
Cell phones are one of the few products that have found mass success in developing countries; there are 600 million mobile subscribers in India out of the 1.2 billion population. So why not use the model to sell other stuff, like solar power? That’s the idea behind Simpa Networks, a startup based in Bangalore, India.
Simpa Networks is taking advantage of the popularity and standardization of pay-as-you-go cell phone plans and mobile payments in developing countries like India, and the group has launched a home solar system for off-grid customers controlled by a mobile, pay-as-you-go system. Customers pay for only the electricity produced by the solar panel at their home, in addition to a small upfront payment for the system.
The basic solar system size Simpa sells is around 25 watts to 50 watts, which can power a couple of CFL lights, a mobile phone charger and maybe a fan or a TV cable box, Simpa Co-Founder Jacob Winiecki told me in a phone interview. Remember, these are off-grid, often rural homes that don’t have access to the power grid, and the households commonly live on $4 or less a day. These customers often don’t have predictable income and are often farmers who only get paid when they sell their goods at the end of the growing season.
Simpa doesn’t make or install the solar panels, but works with a partner – Selco India – which installs a Simpa-powered solar system for Simpa’s customers. The customer pays a certain amount of their choosing as a down payment for the hardware — say, 10 percent of the total cost of the solar system (the total cost of the system can be between $200 and $300).
The customer then also pays for the solar power as they go, using purchased pay-as-you-go cards (similar to the kinds you’ll find for cell phone minutes in every gas station) commonly in the increments of 50, 100, or 500 rupees. Customers type the code on the cards into the keypad on the Simpa box, which unlocks the system. Over time — usually two or three years — the customer has paid off the system, then owns it outright and can use the solar power for free.
Simpa’s business model
The payment system is attractive to these customers, because many of them don’t have enough savings to buy a solar system outright, or can’t take out a loan to buy a system outright. Getting into debt isn’t something that many of these customers are willing to do, so pay-as-you-go makes sense to them. These customers are also very used to paying for cell phone minutes with cards.
But these customers are really interested in getting a better option for energy. Most of them currently use kerosene for lamps, or diesel or wood burning — all these things are more hazardous to health and more expensive than grid power and off-grid solar. These customers often end up paying a lot more per capita and per their income than someone with grid-connected power.
There are a few things that need to happen for Simpa to actually make money off this philanthropic-sounding business model. Simpa screens potential customers for those who will use a certain amount of electricity — for instance, those who have a few cell phones per household instead of one. That’s because if the customer gets a solar system installed but then doesn’t use the power and pay off the system, Simpa doesn’t make money. Simpa makes money by taking a small cut of the watt hours used per system, as well as the markup on the hardware.
Since Simpa is the payment system as well as the solar business model I could see the company working as the enabler for all sorts of clean power products in the developing world, like rural wind turbines.
Simpa is about a year old and has raised a seed round of $1.3 million from angel investors (which it is calling a Series A round) to launch its product commercially. Winiecki tells me that there are about 50 Simpa systems installed in the Bangalore area so far, and about 8 customers are within months of paying off the systems.
Up next: Simpa is looking to raise a next round of equity funding of $4 million, which the company is looking to close by March, and which Simpa hopes will get them to the break-even point of selling 5,000 solar systems a year. Simpa also needs to borrow money to pay for the solar systems.
fantastic Blog I'm Following: Simplified Analytics
Check this blog Out. I've been fascinated with text analytics, big data, social media analytics, and data mining for quite some time. Found a great blog with lots of good links. Here's the description: "Business Analytics is the hottest term around, with lot of confusion even in matured organizations. This is an effort to simplify the area."
The author is Sandeep Raut Check it out: http://simplified-analytics.blogspot.com/
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