Yesterday, I nearly drowned in a sea of extraneous data. In just one hour
during an important conference call, my laptop overflowed with 300 e-mails
from an email thread I frankly didn’t care about. Imagine how much time I
could have saved if my system knew I was unavailable, and sent me only the
two notifications I truly needed: That the customer I was on the call with
owed us an invoice, and that my next appointment was delayed by half an hour.
Clearly, enterprise users need an easy and intuitive way to parse all their
data into a useful context. Just as clearly, they also need to have the right
information delivered to them at the right time, on the right device. These
days, that device is likely to be mobile — be it laptop, smartphone or
tablet — as sales of desktop computers erode and enterprises increasingly
accommodate tablets in the workplace.
I say it’s ti... (more)
Inventory levels. Sales results. Negative comments on Facebook. Positive
comments on Twitter. Shopping on Amazon. Listening to Pandora. Online search
habits. No matter what you call it or what the information describes, it’s
all data being collected about you.
Thanks to new technologies like Hadoop, once-unquantifiable data (like
Facebook conversations and Tweets) can now be quantified. Now, because nearly
everything is measurable, everything is measured. The result: companies are
spending big dollars to collect, store and measure astronomical amounts of
data.
Show me the data!... (more)
Say hello to Bashes — the first cloud-apps that enable companies to turn
Big Data into new sources of revenue
I don’t want to sound overly dramatic, but today’s the day GoodData makes
it possible for companies to finally monetize Big Data. That’s because
today we unveil our first Bashes — cloud-based business mashups — on our
platform that enable anyone, in any size business, to turn mountains of
disparate data into insight that finds new sources of revenue, boosts profit
and builds a competitive edge.
We call these new solutions Bashes because they combine the best elements of ... (more)
Elasticity of the cloud computing is a wonderful idea. You can get an
instance of networked computer exactly when you need it and you only pay for
the time when you actually use it. But while the virtual memory and hard disk
is a “clean slate” created specifically for you, the IP address assigned
to your instance may have been previously used by a spammer and it could be
already on a “spam blacklist”. In an extreme case the whole IP address
range can be marked as a source of spam. And this is exactly what happened to
Amazon’s EC2: “Go Daddy blocks links to EC2 “.
The problem is ... (more)
BI on Ulitzer
Peter Yared wrote recently a BusinessWeek guest blog post called “Failure
of Commercial Open Source Software.”
Not surprisingly his post caused a lot of angry replies from people who work
for COSS companies. “The emperor is not naked” they argued.
I believe that the COSS emperor is openly naked. And the discussion
shouldn’t be whether COSS is a complete or a partial failure just because
there are few successful exits that Peter neglected to mention. At the end of
the day Peter’s comment that “selling software is miserable” is true.
Every sales rep involved in selling ... (more)