
Visualisation – the key that unlocks data’s value?
As the Big Data hype machine continues its relentless attempt to gobble everything in its path, new business units and entire new domains buying into the promise find themselves faced with unanticipated data volume and complexity. They see the potential for data-based decision making, but still face (short-term?) challenges in actually managing, analysing or interpreting […]

On Organizations’ Real Requirements Around BigData
Every time another vendor takes the “big data” moniker and applies it to some legacy system a cat somewhere on the internet dies. Like “cloud” a couple of years ago, big data has become the term de jour – and vendors seem to think that simply using it will give them some magic power to […]

Zyrion Launches Predictive Analytics for IT Monitoring
Seemingly every day another vendor launches a service that promises to revolutionize the way they monitor their IT infrastructure. Generally these launches comply with all the buzzword – cloud, big data, predictive analytics etc. While I’ve no doubt that IT infrastructure monitoring is vitally important, it seems that vendors, in

Does Your Organization Face Data Obesity Problem?
Recently, I wrote a report for GigaOm Pro (behind Paywall) commemorating their Structure:Big Data conference and introduced a term which is going to hurt many organizations in a big way in the near future. I thought I will write about it here and get the thoughts of practitioners and vendors on the problem. In the world […]

4 Big Data Myths – Part II
This is the second and the last part of this two-post series blog post on Big Data myths. If you haven’t read the first part, check it out here. Myth # 2: Big Data is an old wine in new bottle I hear people say, “Oh, that Big Data, we used to call it BI.” One […]

Battle in the Clouds: Intelligence on Google Apps
Google Apps is used by more than 40 million people and signs up 5,000 new businesses every day according to numbers recently cited by Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. But what do all those millions of people actually use Google Apps for, and how heavily do they use it? At Spanning we have a unique view into […]

Gmail’s Most Ridiculous, Idiotic, Intrusive, Useless Feature Ever. Google Apps, Too.
Google keeps on coming up with new features at a rapid pace, some making it to adulthood soon, others stuck in “labs” mode forever, some we like, other’s less so – to each their own. But I’ve never thought the day would come I would write the words utterly ridiculous, iditiotic, intrusive, with absolute certainly […]

How Does the Web See You? Find Your Internet Persona.
The other day I was watching a movie of my life. Well, sort of. Courtesy of Peter Kim who pointed to this experiment by MIT PhD student Aaron Zinman, I got to peek into the process of how his algorithm analyses my digital footprint: Wow, a lot of old activity, and I’m really surprised […]

Cloud based Business Intelligence as a Service
While Business Intelligence is not a new issue, cloud based business intelligence as a service (BIaaS) is a topic worth noting – because it is starting to catch on equaling the playing ground between big players in ERP and CRM with smaller players wh…

MinTuit: a Second Look. (You Will Be Assimilated).
TechCrunch50 could not have asked for a better start: they get to announce that personal finance startup Mint winner of the $50K grand prize @ TC50 two years ago just got acquired for $170M. Great exit for a startup – not so sure about concerned users. But the big question today is why it made […]

Use of Aggregate Data – It's Not Hidden and We Should Get Over It
Image by crazynd via Flickr News recently that online personal finance application Mint is considering selling anonymized aggregate information. We can see this as a tacit acceptance of the fact that in these trying economic times, free services have no option but to find alternative revenue streams. Zoli commented on this in his post, using […]