Data and Information Management, Big Data, Data Science

Applications Insight

Online Games Leading the Way in Big Data Analytics Computer games have been front-runners in many important developments in the IT industry, including digital distribution, cloud storage, user driven design, and crowd sourcing. So it's not surprising that game developers are in a leading position when it comes to big data analytics and machine learning. Online games have the ability to monitor all aspects of player behavior, so, just as Google is able to refine your search results by analyzing your previous searches and comparing them to the billions of searches done every day, online game companies are able to modify game behavior to ensure a more optimal game experience by observing what works - and what doesn't - in the gamer's world.
DBTA E-Edition - May 2013 Issue

Facebook’s New Search Function Should Disturb Google Google's dominance of internet search has been uncontested for more than 12 years now. Before Google, search engines such as AltaVista indexed web pages and allowed for keyword search with an interface and functionality superficially similar to that provided by Google. However, these first-generation search engines provided relatively poor ordering of results. Because an internet search would return pages ranked by the number of times a term appeared on the website, unpopular or irrelevant sites would be just as likely to achieve top rank as popular sites.
DBTA E-Edition - March 2013 Issue

Windows 8 is More Than Just Metro Coverage of Windows 8 has understandably focused on the revolutionary Metro interface. Many believe that this new interface, while fine for tablets and phones, is a step backwards for desktop productivity. By forcing users to switch between two modes of operation - desktop and Metro, Windows 8 diminishes productivity and imposes steep learning curve on new users. The Metro interface itself supports only very limited multi-tasking, so, serious work often must be done in the traditional Windows desktop. Microsoft implicitly acknowledges these limitations by providing the latest version of Microsoft Office, not in Metro format, but as traditional "desktop" applications.
DBTA E-Edition - January 2013 Issue

Will NFC succeed Where RFID failed? Five years ago, Radio Frequency ID (RFID) seemed posed to revolutionize commerce. Way back in 2003, Wal-Mart announced that it would be requiring that RFID tags - so called "electronic barcodes" - be attached to virtually all merchandise. Many- myself included - became convinced that the Wal-Mart directive would be the tipping point leading to universal adoption of RFID tabs in consumer goods and elsewhere.
DBTA E-Edition - November 2012 Issue

Statistical Analysis and R in the world of Big Data The first computer program I ever wrote (in 1979, if you must know) was in the statistical package SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences), and the second computer platform I used was SAS (Statistical Analysis System). Both of these systems are still around today—SPSS was acquired by IBM as part of its BI portfolio, and SAS is now the world's largest privately held software company. The longevity of these platforms—they have essentially outlived almost all contemporary software packages—speaks to the perennial importance of data analysis to computing.
DBTA E-Edition - September 2012 Issue

Google Glass - at last! Seriously chronic geeks like me usually were raised on a strong diet of science fiction that shaped our expectations of the future. Reading Heinlein and Asimov as a boy led me to expect flying cars and robot servants. Reading William Gibson and other "cyberpunk" authors as a young man led me to expect heads-up virtual reality glasses and neural interfaces. Flying cars and robot companions don't seem to be coming anytime soon, but we are definitely approaching a world in which virtual - or at least augmented - reality headsets and brain control interfaces become mainstream.
DBTA E-Edition - July 2012 Issue

Social Networking Meets the Enterprise Websites such as MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn have brought social networking and the concept of online community to a huge cross-section of our society. Penetration and usage of these platforms may vary depending on demographic (age and geography, in particular), but no one can debate the impact of Facebook and Twitter on both everyday life and on society in general.
DBTA E-Edition - May 2012 Issue

Sentiment Analysis Could Revolutionize Market Research Knowing how your customers feel about your products is arguably as important as actual sales data but often much harder to determine. Traditionally, companies have used surveys, focus groups, customer visits, and similar active sampling techniques to perform this sort of market research. Opposition or lack of faith in market research takes a number of forms. Henry Ford once said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses," while Steve Jobs said, "People don't know what they want until you show it to them." The real problem with market research is more pragmatic: It's difficult and expensive to find out what people think.
DBTA E-Edition - March 2012 Issue

Oracle's Public Cloud Along with thousands of IT professionals, I was in the San Francisco Moscone Center main hall last October listening to Larry Ellison's 2011 Oracle Open world keynote. Larry can always be relied upon to give an entertaining presentation, a unique blend of both technology insights and amusingly disparaging remarks about competitors.
DBTA E-Edition - January 2012 Issue

Facebook Changes are More Than Twitter Envy My 20-year-old daughter recently remarked that Facebook isn't as cool as it used to be. Sure, everyone has to be on Facebook, but that very ubiquity removes its mystique. The recently released Google+ is clearly targeted at Facebook and adds some features - particularly "Circles" - that are not available on Facebook. Facebook dominance may be indisputable today, but it is not guaranteed for all time. If I were Mark Zuckerberg, I would fear losing my cool status more than anything else.
DBTA E-Edition - November 2011 Issue

Machine Learning Drives Competitive Advantage The term "machine learning" evokes visions of massive super computers that eventually turn on and enslave humanity - think SkyNet from Terminator or HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. But the truth is that machine learning algorithms are common in web applications that we use every day and have a growing relevance to enterprise applications.
DBTA E-Edition - September 2011 Issue

Voice Recognition Starting to Come of Age One of the funniest moments in the classic Star Trek motion pictures is the scene when the engineer "Scotty" - who has traveled back in time to the 1980s with his comrades - attempts to use a computer. "Computer!" he exclaims, attempting to initiate a dialogue with the PC. Embarrassed, a contemporary engineer hands him a mouse. "Aha," says Scotty who then holds the mouse to his mouth only to again exclaim, "Computer!" The idea that computers in the future would be able to understand human speech was common a few decades ago. Speech generation and recognition is so fundamental to the human experience that we tend to underestimate the incredible complexity of human information processing that makes it possible.
DBTA E-Edition - July 2011 Issue

The Rise of the Data Scientist The rise of "big data" solutions - often involving the increasingly common Hadoop platform - together with the growing use of sophisticated analytics to drive business value - such as collective intelligence and predictive analytics - has led to a new category of IT professional: the data scientist.
DBTA E-Edition - May 2011 Issue

Collective Intelligence Outsmarts Artificial Intelligence When computers first started to infringe on everyday life, science fiction authors and society in general had high expectations for "intelligent" systems. Isaac Asimov's "I, Robot" series from the 1940s portrayed robots with completely human intelligence and personality, and, in the 1968 movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," the onboard computer HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer) had a sufficiently human personality to suffer a paranoid break and attempt to murder the crew!
DBTA E-Edition - March 2011 Issue

Eventual Consistency The NoSQL acronym suggests it's the SQL language that is the key difference between traditional relational and newer non-relational data stores. However, an equally significant divergence is in the NoSQL consistency and transaction models. Indeed, some have suggested that NoSQL databases would be better described as "NoACID" databases - since they avoid the "ACID" transactions of the relational world.
DBTA E-Edition - January 2011 Issue

Oracle’s Exalogic – Private Cloud or Modern Mainframe? Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has been notoriously critical of cloud computing - or at least of the way in which the term "cloud" has been applied. He often has expressed his frustration when "cloud" is applied to long established patterns such as software as a service (SaaS), especially when this is done by Salesforce.com. While there's widespread agreement that "cloud" has become a faddish, over-hyped and often abused term, some have speculated that Ellison's obvious frustration has been fueled by Oracle's inability to fully engage in the cloud computing excitement prior to the conclusion of the Sun acquisition.
DBTA E-Edition - November 2010 Issue

Movements in the Private Cloud The promises of public cloud computing - pay as you go, infinite scale and outsourced administration - are compelling. However, for most enterprises, security, geography and risk mitigation concerns make private cloud platforms more desirable. Enterprise customers like the idea of on-demand provisioning, but are often unwilling to take the performance, security and risk drawbacks of moving applications to remote hardware that is not under their direct control.
DBTA E-Edition - September 2010 Issue

The Single Application Vendor Strategy In biology, we are taught that survival favors diversity. Organisms that reproduce without variation die out during periods of rapid change, while organisms that show variation in feature tend to survive and adapt. Likewise, ecosystems consisting of relatively few homogenous species thrive only when conditions stay static. Does IT diversity create a competitive advantage in the business application ecosystem? Predictably, large vendors with vertically integrated stacks argue that mixing software components is a Bad Thing. These vendors claim that reducing the diversity in the application stack leads to better efficiency and maintainability.
DBTA E-Edition - July 2010 Issue

Virtualization Architectures Do Make a Difference Although VMware continues to hold the majority share of the commercial virtualization market, other virtualization technologies are increasingly significant, though not necessarily as high profile. Operating system virtualization-sometimes called partial virtualization-allows an operating system such as Solaris to run multiple partitions, each of which appears to contain a distinct running instance of the same operating system. However, these technologies cannot be used to host different operating system versions, making them less appealing to enterprises seeking to consolidate workloads using virtualization.
DBTA E-Edition - June 2010 Issue

Power Efficiency: A New Application Design Goal Until recently, IT professionals have been conditioned to regard response time, or throughput, as the ultimate measure of application performance. It's as though we were building automobiles and only concerned with faster cars and bigger trucks. Yet, just as the automotive industry has come under increasing pressure to develop more fuel-efficient vehicles, so has the IT industry been challenged to reduce the power drain associated with today's data centers.
DBTA E-Edition - May 2010 Issue

Microsoft PowerPivot Adds to Excel's BI capabilities Spreadsheets, which have long been a disruptive force to enterprise IT, to some extent are the "killer" applications that helped drive the adoption of personal computers (PCs) in the enterprise. Spreadsheet products such as Lotus 1,2,3 - and early versions of Excel on the Mac - saw rapid adoption by business users. Inevitably, these users pushed the boundaries of the spreadsheet model, using spreadsheets as databases, and even to develop simple business applications. In the late 1980s, it was typical to see corporate IT rolling out massively expensive mainframe-based solutions, while departmental users got their real work done on spreadsheets running on cheap PCs.
DBTA E-Edition - April 2010 Issue

The Application Decade in Review Open source applications were somewhat niche at the beginning of the decade but now are clearly mainstream. Credible open source alternatives now exist for almost every category of application, as well as every component of the application.
DBTA E-Edition - March 2010 Issue

Web-Based Applications Gaining Ground In 1995, Netscape founder Marc Andreessen famously claimed that applications of the future would run within a web browser, relegating the role of the operating system - Windows, in particular - to "a poorly debugged set of device drivers." Fifteen years later, we can see that although rich applications such as Microsoft Office are still dominant, the web browser has become a platform that can deliver almost any conceivable type of business or consumer application.
DBTA E-Edition - February 2010 Issue

Hadoop Sets its Sights on Enterprise Computing Google's first "secret sauce" for web search was the innovative PageRank link analysis algorithm which successfully identifies the most relevant pages matching a search term. Google's superior search results were a huge factor in their early success. However, Google could never have achieved their current market dominance without an ability to reliably and quickly return those results. From the beginning, Google needed to handle volumes of data that exceeded the capabilities of existing commercial technologies. Instead, Google leveraged clusters of inexpensive commodity hardware, and created their own software frameworks to sift and index the data. Over time, these techniques evolved into the MapReduce algorithm. MapReduce allows data stored on a distributed file system - such as the Google File System (GFS) - to be processed in parallel by hundreds of thousands of inexpensive computers. Using MapReduce, Google is able to process more than a petabyte (one million GB) of new web data every hour.
DBTA E-Edition - January 2010 Issue

.NET 4.0 and the Future of Windows Programming When a company like Microsoft talks about the future of computing, you can expect a fair bit of self-serving market positioning - public software companies need to be careful to sell a vision of the future that doesn't jeopardize today's revenue streams. But, when a company like Microsoft releases a new version of its fundamental development framework - .NET, in this case - you can see more clearly the company's technical vision for the future of computing.
DBTA E-Edition - December 2009 Issue

Electronic Device Provides a Good Reading Experience There's an old but clever internet parody describing the "Built-in Orderly Organized Knowledge device (BOOK)." This device is described as a "revolutionary breakthrough in technology" that is compact and portable, never crashes and supports both sequential and indexed information access. Though satirical, the article makes excellent points: the printed book is indeed an information technology device, arguably the oldest in widespread use today
DBTA E-Edition - November 2009 Issue

Augmented Realities Show Real Promise The idea of "virtual" reality—immersive computer simulations almost indistinguishable from reality—has been a mainstay of modern "cyberpunk" science fiction since the early 1980s, popularized in movies such as The Thirteenth Floor and The Matrix. Typically, a virtual reality environment produces computer simulated sensory inputs which include at least sight and sound, and, perhaps, touch, taste and smell. These inputs are presented to the user through goggles, earphones and gloves or—in the true cyberpunk sci-fi—via direct brain interfaces.
DBTA E-Edition - October 2009 Issue

MapReduce for Business Intelligence and Analytics Google introduced the MapReduce algorithm to perform massively parallel processing of very large data sets using clusters of commodity hardware. MapReduce is a core Google technology and key to maintaining Google's website indexes.
DBTA E-Edition - September 2009 Issue

Experiments in Web Search Performance Attendees at the O'Reilly Velocity conference in June were treated to the unusual phenomenon of a joint presentation by Google and Microsoft. The presentation outlined the results of studies by the two companies on the effects of search response time. Aside from the novelty of Microsoft-Google cooperation, the presentation was notable both in terms of its conclusions and its methodology.
DBTA E-Edition - August 2009 Issue

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