16 articles in this selection

2010/11/05

A catchy headline, and I believe more accurate than Oracle Puts the Squeeze on SMBs with MySQL Price Hike (Network World) and MySQL price hikes reveal depth of Oracle’s wallet love [MySQL Jacking up MySQL Prices] (The Register). Slightly more realistic is Oracle kills low-priced MySQL support (again The Register)....

2010/11/02

Online travel firm Expedia has found that data analytics can deliver a multi-million dollar kick to a company's bottom line. The company used SAS analytics to identify a single change to a web page that generated an overnight surge in sales, Expedia's VP of global analytics and optimisation Joe Megibow told the SAS Premier Business Leadership Series conference in Las Vegas last week....

2010/03/03

Organizations love data: numbers, reports, trend lines, graphs, spreadsheets -- the more the better. And, as a result, many organizations have a substantial internal factory that churns out data on a regular basis, as well as external resources on call that produce data for onetime studies and questions. But what's the evidence (or dare I say "the data") that all of this data is worth the cost and indeed leads to better business decisions? Is some amount of data collection unnecessary, perhaps even damaging by creating complexity and confusion?...

2009/11/03

In the land of IT, the one thing you can count on is a slick vendor presentation and a whole lot of hype. Eras shift, technologies change, but the sales pitch always sounds eerily familiar. In virtually every decade there's at least one transformational technology that promises to revolutionize the enterprise, slash operational costs, reduce capital expenditures, align your IT initiatives with your core business practices, boost employee productivity, and leave your breath clean and minty fresh....

2009/10/15

As a developer, you've probably, at some unfortunate point in your life (possibly several points, actually), been handed an Excel file that has been crammed full of "data" by someone in marketing and told to "do something with it." Columns probably didn't line up, and a thousand different fonts were used. Every feature of Excel was probably abused and abused again in order to avoid having to use an actual database application for storage of the data. Of course, it's up to you to make sense of the layout, and they could just give a bleepity-bleep about what a pain in the ass it is to suck weird data out of Excel and "do something with it" when little or (more often) no thought has been given to possibly making the data consistent or, dare I say, orderly. To this end, I've put together another art project. This time, what you will see unfold before your peepers is a process of discovery - My thoughts on how these files are created....

2009/08/13

Artists and designers are turning to data visualization to interpret the deluge of information around us, often with unexpected results

2009/07/27

The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) is the standard used by Federal statistical agencies in classifying business establishments for the purpose of collecting, analyzing, and publishing statistical data related to the U.S. business economy....

2009/07/22

Very short summary of Thomas Davenport' and Jeanne Harris' "Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning"

2009/07/20

For those who work in international business, it is sometimes amazing how different people in other cultures behave. We tend to have a human instinct that 'deep inside' all people are the same - but they are not. Therefore, if we go into another country and make decisions based on how we operate in our own home country - the chances are we'll make some very bad decisions. Geert Hofstede's research gives us insights into other cultures so that we can be more effective when interacting with people in other countries. If understood and applied properly, this information should reduce your level of frustration, anxiety, and concern....

2009/07/12

I'm not sure Google's new Chrome OS announcement is that big a deal, or that the eventual product that gets released will actually have that much impact, but it's a useful milestone in marking Google's evolution towards becoming an older company with a distinctly different culture than they used to have. This is, for lack of a better term, Google's 'Microsoft Moment'. This is the point when the difference between their internal conception of the company starts to diverge just a bit too far from the public perception of the company, and even starts to diverge from reality. At this inflection point, the reasons for doing new things at Google start to change....

2009/07/08

Web-based programs like Google's Gmail will force people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that will cost more and more over time, according to the free software campaigner.

2009/07/07

The near-decapitation (by acquisition) of the BI space in 2007-8 was perfectly timed for QlikTech, whose QlikView is rapidly becoming one of the leading independent products.

2009/06/29

Openbravo is an award-winning developer of professional open source solutions for businesses, offering the industry's first real alternative to proprietary enterprise software. The company's web-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Point of Sale (PoS) solutions, the most popular in their market, have been downloaded more than a million times and are used in over 50 countries....

2009/06/25

The health-care industry's reluctance to digitize its records is rooted in a desire to keep medicine's lucrative business model hidden. Dangling $19 billion in front of a $2.4 trillion industry is not nearly enough to get it to reveal the financial secrets that electronic health records are likely to uncover - and upon which its huge profits depend. In those medical records lie the ugly truth about the business of medicine: sickness is profitable. The greater the number of treatments, procedures, and hospital stays, the larger the profit. There is little incentive for doctors and hospitals to identify or reduce wasteful spending in medicine....

2009/06/17

EnterpriseDB seems to be facing a string of management departures.

2009/06/16

A new report by the Aberdeen Group finds, amongst other things, that companies that are actively using dashboards are able to gain visibility into the metrics that are driving their business are achieving drastically higher performance than their peers.