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

Semantic Tech & Business Conference Returns to San Francisco

Semantic Tech & Business Conference returns to San Francisco in June! Join us from June 3-7 for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. We're offering a special early rate when you register by February 17. Sign up now!

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 »

Pioneering Partners Include Moreover Technologies, Morris Communications, Magus Ltd. and Prefix Technologies

SemTech 2010 – San Francisco, Calif. – June 24, 2010 – Thomson Reuters today cited four innovative companies that are pioneering the large-scale and commercial use of its OpenCalais service to enrich and optimize digital content. They include Moreover Technologies, a world-leading media aggregation and monitoring provider; Morris Communications, a top-tier regional publisher; Magus Ltd., the British pioneer of enterprise website governance, and Prefix, South Africa’s leading Content Management System (CMS).

“Two and a half years in, we are extremely pleased to be part of leading publishing platforms and media monitoring solutions around the world,” said Tom Tague, OpenCalais Initiative lead, Thomson Reuters. “We’re processing five million documents per day and storing 90 billion triples, which may well be the world’s largest collection of structured facts and events. It reflects a growing percentage of the English language news articles, blog posts and social media status updates posted every day.”

Joining CBS Interactive / CNET, Huffington Post, The New Republic, The Nation and more than 50 other publishers, entrepreneurs and service providers using OpenCalais are:

Moreover Technologies. One of the original news aggregators on the Web, Moreover provides companies with “news and views” in a comprehensive solution for business intelligence, mainstream media and social media monitoring. It aggregates, refines and delivers millions of daily articles, blog posts and social media updates from more than a million editorially vetted sources spanning 800 searchable industries in 100-plus countries, and 50-plus languages.

Moreover Technologies uses OpenCalais to categorize and tag news and blog content as well as social media status updates to provide superior mainstream and social media monitoring services to clients of all kinds.

"Equally important to quantity of information is quality," said Paul Farrell, President of Moreover Technologies. “It’s imperative to be able to retrieve rapidly the most relevant and pinpointed results possible from vast repositories of business intelligence. Our partnership with OpenCalais substantially enhances our ability to make sure clients get the right results at the right time.”

Morris Communications. A leading southeastern media company, Morris Communications has newspaper, magazine, outdoor advertising, radio, book publishing and online properties. Its digital arm, Morris DigitalWorks, turned to OpenCalais while digitizing the archives of its 13 daily newspapers, including the Augusta Chronicle; the Florida Times-Union; the Savannah Morning News; the noted local Journalism experiment Bluffton Today and more.

"We strive to be unrivaled in the delivery of local news and information to our readership in every possible medium. So it is essential to be able to repurpose our content for any number of uses – including digital distribution on the Web, mobile, etc.,” said Michael Romaner, President, Morris DigitalWorks. “OpenCalais has helped us achieve that mission in two ways. By improving the relevancy of our content for Web searches, we have increased both our overall page-views from search engines, and our retention of those readers once they arrive. We look forward to expanding on this successful alliance."

Magus Ltd.Magus Ltd.  Magus is the pioneering UK company behind ActiveStandards™: the market-leading SaaS platform for enterprise website governance used by Unilever, Shell, Philips, ING and more. ActiveStandards takes web content governance to a new level by enabling companies to coordinate the policies, processes and people that underpin their web presence within a single integrated framework, and monitor and manage compliance.

Magus uses OpenCalais to power ActiveStandards’ “Content Insight Reports” – a suite of powerful semantic reports which extend the reach of online governance by providing visibility and control over unstructured content.

“Semantic Web technologies are revolutionizing the way people find and use information online,” said Simon Lande, CEO, Magus Ltd. “Our alliance with OpenCalais enables us to leverage this technology to bring about a step-change in the way that companies monitor and manage their online content. We see it as a revolution in content governance.”

Prefix Technologies. Provider of South Africa’s most popular off- and online CMS, Prefix is a trusted Web-applications development company. Prefix solutions enable magazine, newspaper and online publishers to collect, store, share and monetize content in new ways that increase competitive advantage while improving efficiency and reducing costs.

Prefix uses OpenCalais as a processing layer for Preditor’s Semantic Tagging Engine. With a powerful tagging rules toolkit on a per-magazine basis, Preditor customers with multiple magazines on Preditor are able to draw content out of their archives and build smart links across a the network for their readers. In one case study, they’ve scanned through and linked over 10 years of archives.

“We’ve seen significant increases in archive monetization for our customers with our OpenCalais implementation. Equally, it’s been incredible to explore new ideas in both the print and digital worlds to create content packages through semantic discovery,” said Josh Adler, CEO, Prefix. “We feel we’ve interpreted the semantic opportunity in a unique way for traditional media and OpenCalais opened that door for us."

About the OpenCalais Initiative
The OpenCalais initiative supports the interoperability of content and advances Thomson Reuters mission to deliver intelligent information by connecting all the world’s business-relevant content. It offers free metadata generation services, developer tools and an automatic connection to the Linked Data cloud.  Found at OpenCalais.com (http://www.OpenCalais.com), OpenCalais is the fastest, easiest and most accurate way to tag the people, places, companies, facts and events in content to increase its value, accessibility and interoperability on the Web.  For a quick and easy demo of how OpenCalais can add intelligence to your content, visit http://viewer.opencalsis.com, paste in a news story and hit submit."

About Thomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters is the world's leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals. We combine industry expertise with innovative technology to deliver critical information to leading decision makers in the financial, legal, tax and accounting, healthcare and science and media markets, powered by the world's most trusted news organization. With headquarters in New York and major operations in London and Eagan, Minnesota, Thomson Reuters employs 55,000 people and operates in over 100 countries. For more information, go to thomsonreuters.com.