ARMONK, N.Y. and SEATTLE, June 6, 2013 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — IBM and Brightlight today announced that Seattle Children’s Hospital is using IBM Big Data technology to improve treatment of its young patients. With over 350,000 patient visits annually and thousands of data points associated with each patient, Seattle Children’s Hospital can run queries on patient data in seconds, rather than minutes, to provide quicker, more effective care and diagnosis. Read more

SHORT HILLS, N.J.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–D&B (NYSE: DNB), the world’s leading source of commercial information and insight on businesses, today introduced the D&B Data Exchange^TM. This unique, cloud-based service provides customers one-source access to industry-specific data from select companies that join the D&B Data Exchange as partners. All of the data is linked through the D&B D-U-N-S® Number, enabling customers for the first time to confidently combine D&B information, other providers’ content, and their own information to identify new growth opportunities across multiple industries. Read more

Josh Constine of TechCrunch reports, “Does my music do better on Facebook or Twitter? Where should my next tour be? Is my new song too repetitive? Musicians can get free answers to these questions and more from BeatDeck, a Y Combinator analytics company launching today. BeatDeck plans to license this data to labels and music stores to help them sign and recommend tomorrow’s superstars. Yep, BeatDeck is an enterprise music startup. Everyone (who isn’t a cold-hearted robot) loves music. That’s led lots of entrepreneurs to start companies aiming to help listeners discover new artists and songs. Read more

[NOTE: This guest post is by Peter Haase, Lead Architect for Research and Development, fluid Operations.]

Industry engineers waste a significant amount of time searching for data that they require for their core tasks. When informed about potential problems, diagnosis engineers at Siemens Energy Services, an integrated business unit which runs service centers for power plants, need to access several terabytes of time-stamped sensor data and several gigabytes of event data, including both raw and processed data. These engineers have to respond to about 1,000 service requests per center per year, and end up spending 80% of their time on data gathering alone. What makes this problem even worse is that their data grows at a rate of 30 gigabytes per day. Similarly, at Statoil Exploration, geology and geographic experts spend between 30 and 70% of their time looking for and assessing the quality of some 1,000 terabytes of relational data using diverse schemata and spread over 2,000 tables and multiple individual databases [1]. In such scenarios, it may take several days to formulate the queries that satisfy the information needs of the experts, typically involving the assistance of experienced IT experts who have been working with the database schemata for years.

Siemens and Statoil Exploration are hardly the only companies faced with time-wasting Big Data issues, but the root of these issues is not simply the “big” aspect of their data. The real challenge is finding a way to efficiently and effectively mine data for value and insight, regardless of its volume.

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What’s next in sentiment analytics? The road’s pointing to a deeper understanding of emotions.

“We still are clearly at the nascent level regarding text and sentiment analytics,” said David Rabjohns, CEO of social intelligence company MotiveQuest, speaking at yesterday’s Sentiment Analysis Symposium, the event organized by Seth Grimes’ Alta Plana Corp. “There are much higher levels of emotional depth still to be mined.”

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NEWBURYPORT, MA–(Marketwired – May 6, 2013) – Entagen, a fast-growing software company providing Big Data analytics and collaboration solutions across the enterprise, announced today that the company has earned a spot on Gartner’s prestigious list of Cool Vendors in Life Sciences for 2013 according to the Gartner report published May 2^nd, 2013⁽¹⁾. Entagen was recognized for its TripleMap & Extera software platforms, which help life science & healthcare companies “Connect the Dots in Big Data.” Read more

SAN FRANCISCO, CA–(Marketwired – May 7, 2013) - Topsy, the real-time social analytics company, today announced that users can now act immediately on insights they uncover in their analysis by engaging directly with their audience through Topsy Pro.

Topsy Pro already gives users the best way to spot trends, track sentiment, and identify key influencers relevant to their business; Topsy’s new functionality allows users to also reply, retweet or favorite key Tweets surfaced in an analysis. Topsy Pro customers can use these features to react in seconds to emerging PR crises, find and promote the most viral content, identify and engage with local customers and generally be one click away from taking action the minute they see an opportunity. Read more

We continue our discussion from yesterday of what enterprise IT will learn to love about semantic technologies at the upcoming SemTechBiz conference (the story began here):

Another Score For Data Agility

Looked at from the data warehouse point of view by Thomas Kelly, Practice Director, Enterprise Information Management, for Cognizant Technology Solutions, semantic technology makes it possible to apply Agile development practices to the data warehouse itself. “You can start modeling, work with data, generate analytics and then start tuning based on what you learn,” says Kelly, who will be discussing semantic technology for the data warehousing practitioner at this session. Several semantic technology-based practices can be applied that support iterative, evolutionary improvements with little or no impact to data loading and analytics functions that were built before the refinements were made, he says.

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Why should enterprise IT leaders start steeping themselves in semantic technologies? The answer to that question will become apparent to anyone attending the June Semantic Technology & Business conference in San Francisco, where many sessions will explore the value CIOs and their staffs can gain from going semantic. (You can register for SemTechBiz here.)

Let’s start with the problem of forcing enterprise knowledge workers into rigid procedures to accomplish their activities, the result of having to adhere to flow-charted business processes whose silo’d components are pieced together via fixed integration points. Dave Duggal, co-founder and managing director of EnterpriseWeb LLC, will paint a picture at this session instead of a world of smart, connected business processes to stand up a team of empowered and interactive knowledge workers. Once accorded certain rules-enabled permissions and information access rights, those employees can put their smarts to work “to do their jobs in a goal-oriented way to meet the objectives of the organization,” as Duggal explains it.

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Pete Swabey of Information Age recently discussed UNIT4, “the Dutch-owned ERP vendor that acquired UK accounting software provider Coda in 2008. The company collaborated with UK semantic web consultancy Epimorphics to develop a platform that allowed customers to expose their data online as SPARQL endpoints, meaning it could be retrieved using SPARQL, the querying language for RDF. The platform was developed with local authorities in mind, facing as they are growing pressure to be transparent. ‘We were hoping we would have an audience of armchair auditors,’ recalls Pete Brown, chief technology officer of UNIT4 UK.” Read more