First Retail has been named a “Cool Vendor in Analytics and Business Intelligence by Gartner: “The report, issued on April 27, 2012, highlights five vendors selected by Gartner for their solutions in the analytics and business intelligence market.” The report states, “Selecting Cool Vendors in the analytics market this year was difficult. New providers of analytic solutions abound, especially in the popular areas of mobile, social, cloud and big data. We, as an industry, are building silos of analysis that will eventually have to be integrated, but the benefit of specialized analysis for problems that have not been addressed before outweighs most organizations’ needs for a holistic view, at least for now.” Read more

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 !

Brad Reed of PCWorld recently shared his insight into why Google is wise to integrate more semantics into their search algorithm. Reed writes, “Google is still master of the search domain, but that hasn’t stopped the company from looking over its shoulder. The latest survey from the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 83% of American Internet users say they use Google as their primary search engine, vastly more than any other individual search engine. Yet despite this, Google is constantly implementing changes to its model, most recently in its efforts to increase its semantic search capabilities and its attempts to provide more direct answers to user queries rather than the standard list of websites.” Read more

 

 

 

 

 

Photo credit: Flickr/Hamed Parham

If your business hasn’t yet begun exploring how it can better understand and respond to the thoughts and opinions about it that consumers share with the world on social media, it may not be long before it does.

Gartner recently released its list of the top ten strategic technologies for 2011, and among the categories on that list was social analytics. The research firm describes social analytics as including techniques ranging from social filtering to social-network analysis to sentiment analysis and social-media analytics.

Those categories – or at least a fair number of the offerings falling into them – owe a lot of their existence to semantic web technologies and standards, from NLP to RDF. As Gartner sums it up, “social network analysis tools are useful for examining social structure and interdependencies” and “involves collecting data from multiple sources, identifying relationships, and evaluating the impact, quality or effectiveness of a relationship.”

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Back when I was an industry analyst (VP, E-Business Strategies at the META Group, since acquired by Gartner), I often had to critique emerging markets.  Unlike venture capitalists, industry analysts are privy to product roadmaps from publicly-traded companies, including the industry giants (Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, IBM).  And unlike i-bankers, they are privy to product roadmaps from start-ups.  And as a kicker, some analysts (actually, only those with the largest firms; back then, primarily limited to those analysts with Gartner, Forrester, META and Giga) get a lot of great feedback from CIOs and other end users.

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