At this week’s SAP Sapphire conference. NetBase will be taking its relationship with the enterprise vendor to the next level. Last December the two paired up to bring NetBase’s social intelligence (SI) to SAP BusinessObjects’ business intelligence (BI).

Coming up now is a complete integration of the NetBase technology into SAP’s Social On Demand customer relationship management (CRM) console. “Having access to social data is becoming critical to every part of the organization,” says NetBase chief marketing officer Lisa Joy Rosner. So, “social media [becomes] just one more data point” for which the enterprise must account.

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SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !

FirstRain has launched “a powerful iPad app that enables customers to quickly scan and understand critical market developments impacting their businesses with the convenience of a tablet device. FirstRain for iPad delivers precise and instantaneous intelligence on a user’s key customers, competitors and significant trends impacting their market. Delivered in a streamlined visual format, FirstRain’s release of the app continues a trend for the company of delivering highly specific, personalized, Business Web intelligence and analytics directly into the customer’s workflow of choice, including powerful Web-based applications, email, iPhone and Android devices, or right into a customer’s own intranet or social collaboration platform — and now tablets.” Read more

Digimind has released Digimind 9, “the new updated Digimind software release designed to accompany forward-thinking organizations throughout their intelligence workflows. Digimind 9 comes in response to a growing demand from companies willing to complement their CI apparatus with such features included as advanced semantic analysis, social media monitoring, and intelligence profile management. Indeed, beyond the conventional intelligence workflows, more intelligence requirements surface nowadays to leverage on social networks, unstructured data, and related analysis.” Read more

At the SemTech San Francisco 2011 conference, Chris Testa of Adly spoke about a platform they used internally for Business Intelligenge analytics. There was great interest from the audience, and this week, Adly announced the release of “Blingalytics” as free, open-source software. While not explicitly semantic itself, Blingalytics works WITH Adly’s semantic system, serving as the underlying billing and business intelligence infrastructure they use to manage the business. I caught up with the Adly team (Arnie Gullov-Singh, CEO; Chris Testa, Director, Engineering; and Krista Thomas, VP Marketing) to hear more about the platform.

Q: So what is Blingalytics?

A: Simply put, Blingalytics is the first and only open source business intelligence platform in Python.  The Blingalytics Python package makes it easy to slice and dice your business KPIs, no matter what data you’re looking at: retweets, click-through rates, net revenue, etc.

Blingalytics takes care of the gritty details of optimally crunching the numbers, so that you can jump straight to defining your view into your business stats and performance analytics.

Blingalytics was built by Chris Testa and Jeff Schenck

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On the way from Saplo – that’s the company whose tradeshow trademark is the wearing of shocking green suits by CEO Mattias Tyrberg and his co-founders – is a Prediction API for its text analytics platform. The vendor already provides through its API access to services for entity and topic tagging, related and similar articles, sentiment analysis and contextual recognition upon which developers can build applications.

The Prediction API, due around summer’s end, seeks to predict outcomes from text, as Tyrberg describes it. That is, it assesses how a company name or any other word has been described in text and  finds a correlation between that and expected outcomes, such as sales volumes.

It works by having the user submit historic text and historic data points, from which the technology analyzes the relationship between the meaning of the text and the data that the user wants to have predicted (it also will return data of how good it believes it can predict the outcome, Tyrberg says). After that, the user submits new text data to Saplo for a new time period, and based on that text Saplo returns a prediction of the next outcome.

“Think of it like BI,” says Tyrberg. “You might be able to predict new numbers based on previous numbers, but a lot of information that is available is in written text, and we can find the correlations between the meaning of that text and numerical data.”

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Cambridge Semantics says it’s aiming at moving organizations from business intelligence to operational intelligence. “The data is real and you can bring in new data in minutes. And business users can create and change reports and ask ‘what if’ questions themselves,” explained EVP Steven Kludt at the SemTech conference. “We can be event based—if something changes in the data we can respond to that with rules around the data, like kick off a workflow. We can accommodate on the spot so that the business is constantly tuning things right away.” (Video after the jump)

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Ensuring national security is often a matter of connecting the dots – of discovering and digging into the relationships between individuals (recent evidence: Osama bin Laden being tracked down through one of his couriers), and among people and organizations. Businesses might want to take a page from that playbook, finding within their own data and that of external sources such as social media unexpected relationships that can lead to new markets, clients, or even employee leads.

Data Intelligence Technologies is hoping to exploit the data relationship expertise it developed in the national security consulting arena — “building bad guy networks,” as founder and CEO James Kraemer puts it — to the commercial enterprise space (as well as continuing to serve the national security market). “On a high level we allow business intelligence where you get insight into data. All BI offers that,” Kraemer says. What sets this solution apart, he says, is supporting knowledge networks with targeting features that an organization can use to search, look for profiles, and discover additional relationships inside the data.

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With the Text Analytics Summit about to get underway, we’re seeing a wave of vendor announcements hit, such as Clarabridge’s news earlier this week. SAS also said today that it’s introduced Industry Taxonomy Rules starter kits, prebuilt add-ons to SAS Enterprise Content Categorization for speeding text analytics implementation efforts. Also on the agenda: Attensity’s announcement of Analyze 6 and its latest vertical out-of-the-box analytics capabilities, aimed at the retail banking industry.

The focus for Analyze 6 was to take the key capabilities of Attensity’s core engine and use that to put text analytics on the desktops of business users who want to understand and respond to customer data – at the speed of social media, which means without waiting for IT experts to create reports for them. “The thing about social media and customer data is it is like a tidal wave,” Attensity CMO Michelle de Haaff says.

Building on its Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) Platform Data Grid computing system for helping enterprises quickly analyze large-scale data sets, end users can select from over 100 report templates (with multiple kinds of analytics for each), or they can choose what questions to ask through its new Exploration environment. Basically, that’s a wizard-based way to drill deeper into a category set, leveraging Attensity’s pre-defined semantic classes tailored for each specific vertical industry rather than having to predefine taxonomies themselves to look at data.

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UK researchers tap semantic web for BI innovation V3.co.uk The Combining and Uniting Business Intelligence with Semantic Technologies (CUBIST) project is being led by SAP and promises to develop a platform that will …

Sheffield scientists lead £4m semantic web search project ComputerWeekly.com The project will develop methodologies and a platform that combines essential features of semantic technologies and business intelligence. … and more »