Trends and Outliers
TIBCO Spotfire's Business Intelligence Blog
2012
Using Cell Phone Data for Social Good
When is cell phone data not just cell phone data? When it’s being mined to solve some of the world’s biggest social problems – that’s when.
Which is exactly what Nathan Eagle is doing.
Eagle, a professor at Harvard’s School of Public Health and the MIT Media Lab, and his team are collecting and analyzing millions of phone records generated each day by mobile phone subscribers around the world. Although the data is typically collected for billing purposes, it can also be used to do a lot of social good, according to the article.
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2012
Is Big Data Causing a Big Brother System in Healthcare?
As we approach the landmark Supreme Court decision next month of whether Obamacare’s individual mandate for health insurance is constitutional or not, we’re seeing a move from health insurance companies, hospitals and pharmacy plan providers to cut costs with data analytics.
But there’s a looming question in all of this – is big data causing a big brother system in healthcare? Let’s explore.
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2012
How Business Analytics Can Lead to That ‘Aha’ Moment
Does your company know why it does what it does? Does it have a clear sense of the products and services that can help it blast past its competitors?
Many companies don’t, argues Adam Richardson in this Harvard Business Review blog post. And when they try to innovate they’re hobbled without the “core insights” to successfully differentiate themselves from their competitors.
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2012
Meet Your Company’s New Virtual Assistant – Big Data
While it’s true that big data can help your business gain insight into your customers, be more competitive and build new products, did you know it can also revolutionize the way your company looks at itself?
Well, that’s the idea behind AutoPilot, a sort of virtual assistant from Frankfurt-based IT automation and managed services company Arago. AutoPilot combines data and artificial intelligence to take over the most boring and repetitive tasks of managing a large IT infrastructure – effectively becoming a new “hire” on your sysadmin team.
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2012
Big Data Requires an Extreme Information Management Makeover
Many companies have been struggling for years to stay afloat amidst the deluge of data created by internal systems.
But now, big data or extreme data is pouring into organizations in higher volumes, faster, from a wider variety of data sources, and in more formats than ever before.
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2012
FTC Report Puts Data Privacy in the Spotlight
From tweets to transactions, online activity produces huge volumes of data – and while businesses are primarily focused on how to use the data, consumer groups are increasingly concerned about how data collection affects personal privacy.
At the end of 2010, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published a preliminary set of recommendations to address these concerns. Then the agency reviewed more than four hundred public responses from businesses, privacy advocates, technologists and individual consumers. Recently, the final version was released.
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2012
How BI & Data Analytics Pros Used Twitter – Meet the Boulder BI Brain Trust
We have a special edition of our Twitter recap for you this month on the Spotfire blog. Today, we’ll introduce you to the Boulder BI Brain Trust. Next week, we will be presenting this group of leading BI analysts, experts and practitioners to you in a half-day focus group setting.
According to founder Claudia Imhoff, “The trust members get briefed on leading edge tools and technologies, and the vendors get valuable feedback from us, including our ideas on where BI is going, our advice on their marketing direction and message, and our critique of their offering(s).”
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2012
Big Data Goes to School
Online education is certainly not new. But what about classes with tens of thousands of students, participating from locations all over the world? That’s MOOC (Massive Online Open Education) – and it’s opening new doors for data analytics.
For example: Last fall Stanford University offered three free computer science courses online, and about 100,000 enrolled in each one. With so much data available, analyzing student answers on assignments and tests revealed patterns that would never have been noticed in conventional classes.
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2012
5 Sure-Fire Ways to Use Analytics to Become a Social Business
Many executives see social media as another way to connect with customers and prospects.
Indeed, most organizations have created social media accounts with Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites to help attract “fans” and “followers.” Some organizations even go so far as to engage customers and prospects with games, contests, challenges, and offers.
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2012
Tips To Get Your Organization Ready For Big Data
With all the hype about big data many organizations are trying to figure out how to fully and immediately capitalize on its arrival.
And although there are plenty of articles that highlight the successes of big data initiatives experienced by large data-producing organizations (Google, Facebook, etc.), how they achieve that level of success currently evades most companies.
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