Analytics

Retailers are quickly realizing the value of adopting technologies that provide insight and analysis of their customers' behavior and experience. There's no ignoring the value of a technology that provides a new generation of intelligence and agility, but the hundreds or even thousands of transactio...

The finals of its highly publicized "Jeopardy" tournament found IBM's "Watson" computer system handily winning with a total of $77,147 -- upwards of $50,000 more than the sums amassed by Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, its grand champion adversaries. Watson's $1 million grand prize will be split equal...

Monitoring online conversation can provide insights that are relevant to a range of functions and activities, and that drive different types of value to a company. Companies need to understand what these sources of value are and then design their social media monitoring program so that the findings ...

As I reported in this space earlier this year, a growing number of IT professionals are putting aside their apprehensions about Software as a Service and cloud computing, and investigating how they can utilize these "on-demand" solutions to address their day-to-day IT management requirements. Now, a...

Mobile operators are facing a revenue dilemma these days. The numbers may vary according to which research you read, but the conclusion is the same: Data revenues are not even close to meeting escalating usage patterns. By way of example, AT&T estimates that mobile data traffic grew 50-fold betw...

IBM has made a $1.7 billion offer to acquire Netezza, a data warehouse specialist that allows users to analyze huge amounts of data very quickly by integrating hardware with analytics applications. Since IBM announced its offer, Netezza's stock price has risen past the $27 per share price it reflec...

Nokia on Friday announced that it will purchase San Francisco-based mobile analytics firm Motally. The Finnish mobile phone giant did not disclose what it's paying for Motally, but it said the transaction is scheduled to close in the third quarter. The purchase is aimed at helping Nokia, which is lo...

One of the most vexing problems facing organizations for years has been knowledge management. In the past, the task of capturing, organizing and disseminating valuable information so it could be properly utilized by end-users and business executives was an herculean effort that produced limited resu...

Most successful companies invest in marketing. Marketing budgets are utilized differently depending on factors such as industry and company goals, and results are contingent on how well an organization understands and interacts with its customers. However, what many organizations don't know is tha...

Facebook, thanks to its 400 million status-updating, link-sharing, asparagus-farming, party picture-posting denizens, has risen to the top of the Internet heap once again, surpassing -- at least according to one ranking -- search giant Google in total U.S. visitors for the third time this year. Face...

With the plethora of available technology tools promising to improve the customer experience, it's safe to assume that many of you have deployed more than one of them to increase your chances of success. The implementation of myriad technology applications can provide significant benefits if they ar...

IBM's recent Connect 2009 analyst conference provided fascinating insights into one of the company's most valuable assets -- its software group organization. IBM has long been recognized as a purveyor of enterprise-class computing systems, but during the past decade, the company's global services or...

One of the biggest challenges in today's rapidly evolving cloud computing market, if you're an aspiring vendor, is how to clearly differentiate your offerings in an increasingly competitive environment. This is especially difficult because of the Web's knack for sucking the value out of everything i...

Facebook, meet Facecard -- a digital-age marriage of e-commerce and social networking, and that's what the founders of Edo Interactive intended in 2008 when they came up with the idea of prepaid debit cards, or Facecards. In fact, if you ask Edo Interactive CEO Ed Braswell the classic Facebook statu...

You may have seen the link recently sent to you by one of your Facebook friends: If the social network were its own country, it would be among the five largest in the world, thanks to its 300 million members. That "country" includes fertile, undiscovered territory for online advertisers, as represen...