Big Data.. How'd You Get So Big?

Article from NY Times "How Big Data Became So Big"

We love the term 'Big Data', it is changing the way the world sees (and uses) data and that is creating big opportunities for growth, development, business, marketing - the list goes on. This article by the New York Times goes into detail looking at how data became so.. big.

“The term itself is vague, but it is getting at something that is real,” says Jon Kleinberg, a computer scientist at Cornell University. “Big Data is a tagline for a process that has the potential to transform everything.”

Read More..

BIS² becomes World Leader in Advanced Analytics!

TDWI Names BIS² World Leader in Advanced Analytics in 2012 Best Practices Awards

BIS² as Solution Sponsor for Seminole Gaming Named 1st Place in the Advanced Analytics Category of the TDWI 2012 Best Practices Awards

BIS² announced today that it has been recognized by The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) as the world-wide winner of the Advanced Analytics category in the 2012 Best Practice Awards. BIS² was the Solution Sponsor for Seminole Gaming of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, in the Advanced Analytics category.

TDWI is the premier provider of in-depth, high-quality education and training in business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW).

“This award truly validates BIS² as a world leader in advanced analytics,” said Andrew Cardno, BIS² Chief Technology Officer. “The powerful visual queries, our innovative Super Graphics, and the ability to exploit the power of detailed data really put the BIS² technology on the world stage. Our customers are really enjoying one of our latest innovations of being able to dig deep into their data and truly understand customer preferences. In addition, our “War Room” strategy for big data analytics is a huge success with our customers and is changing the way the world looks at big data,” Cardno added.

“We are very excited to receive this prestigious award from TDWI recognizing what we have achieved with our Advanced Analytics at Seminole Gaming,” said Ralph Thomas, Seminole Gaming Vice President Strategic Analytics and Database Marketing. “BIS² has been a fantastic business intelligence technology partner for us. Their collaboration and thought leadership enables us to deliver well beyond expectations. It has been an amazing time for us with BIS²,” added Thomas.

"It was a tremendous honor to sponsor Seminole Gaming and to be named the world-wide winner of the Advanced Analytics category of the 2012 Best Practice Awards,” said Mukesh Gordhan, BIS² CEO. “With the BIS² software, under the analytics leadership of Dr. Ralph Thomas, Seminole Gaming has achieved some amazing results. It is a true accolade to the world-class BIS2 software, the Seminole Team, and also reflects what our other customers have also been able to achieve with our software,” Gordhan added.   

“As the premier provider of BI/DW education, TDWI is pleased to honor organizations that have developed and implemented innovative solutions,” said Richard Zbylut, president of TDWI. “This year’s Best Practices Awards winners showcase an array of bold, new strategies in our industry, and TDWI is happy to help share that work with a larger audience. BI/DW teams looking to take their solutions to the next level can look to the award winners for ideas and inspiration to continue innovating in the field.”

TDWI's Best Practices Awards program is designed to identify and honor companies that have demonstrated excellence in developing, deploying, and maintaining BI and DW applications. Companies from diverse industries and sponsoring solution providers submitted entries that were judged in a variety of categories. The nominated solutions were evaluated based on business impact, maturity, innovation, and relevance.

The Best Practices Awards winners will be honored at the TDWI World Conference, which will take place July 29 -
August 3, 2012 at the Manchester Grand Hyatt Hotel in San Diego, CA.

 

About TDWI

TDWI, a division of 1105 Media, Inc., is the premier provider of in-depth, high-quality education and research in the business intelligence and data warehousing industry. TDWI is dedicated to educating business and information technology professionals about the best practices, strategies, techniques, and tools required to successfully design, build, maintain, and enhance business intelligence and data warehousing solutions. TDWI also fosters the advancement of business intelligence and data warehousing research and contributes to knowledge transfer and the professional development of its members. TDWI offers a worldwide membership program, five major educational conferences, topical educational seminars, role-based training, onsite courses, certification, solution provider partnerships, an awards program for best practices, live Webinars, resourceful publications, an in-depth research program, and a comprehensive website: tdwi.org

 

About Seminole Gaming

In addition to its two Seminole Hard Rock Hotels & Casinos in Tampa and Hollywood, Fla., the Seminole Tribe owns and operates five more Seminole-branded Florida casinos in Coconut Creek and Hollywood on the Southeast coast, in Immokalee near Naples, on the Brighton Reservation north of Lake Okeechobee and on the Big Cypress Reservation south of Lake Okeechobee. The Seminole Tribe has long been recognized for innovation in its gaming and other businesses. It opened the first high-stakes bingo hall and casino in the United States in 1979. That facility was the forerunner of the Indian Gaming movement throughout North America.

The Seminole Tribe of Florida acquired Hard Rock International, Inc. and other related entities from The Rank Group Plc in 2007 for approximately $965 million. The purchase is the first of a major international corporation by a Native American Indian Tribe and marks a milestone in the growing economic power and prominence of the Seminole Tribe of Florida and other Indian tribes in today's business world. For more information, please see, Seminole Gaming.

 

About BIS²

BIS²’s multi-award winning gaming industry solution, called gameViz™, enables casino operators to better understand player behavior and how to optimize the gaming floor to gain a greater competitive advantage. The innovative Super Graphics™ contained within the BIS2 technology enable casino operators to rapidly identify, action and monitor changes to improve both revenue and profit performance. BIS² is an innovative leader in enterprise-ready, standards-based, visually-centric analytics with solutions that reveal the trends and patterns in volumes of operational data so organizations can understand what actions are required now and tomorrow. The BIS² software products have been recognized with multiple awards such as Gaming and Leisure Magazine’s Technology Impact award and their Product Interoperability award, and Casino Enterprise Managements Top 10 Slot Floor products to name a few. Other industry specific solutions available from BIS² include airViz™ (for airlines), clubViz™ (for premiere clubs), resortViz™ (for resort operators), telViz™ (for telcos), insuranceViz™ (for insurance companies), retailViz™ (for retailers), entertainmentViz™ (for entertainment companies), makeViz™ (for manufacturing companies) and moneyViz™ (for financial institutions). BIS2’s most recent product release, crmViz™ (for customer analytics) is receiving outstanding customer acclaim. For more information, please call 1-877-592-2472 or visit www.bis2.net.
Contact: Veronica Ruffo, email: veronica.ruffo@bis2.net, phone: 1-877-592-2472

 

 Article Link: UN commits to use of ‘big data’

Article Via The Information Daily (formerly eGovmonitor)

Great to see that the global leaders who are dealing with such immense issues are jumping on the big data band wagon – as Jim Barksdale (former CEO of Netscape) said:

"If we have data, lets look at data. If we all have opinions, let's go with mine." (Quote via Romain Lacombe: ‏@rlacombe)

Read more here. 

Article via Theodore Angelus: ‏@teddy777

BIS2 on Twitter: @BIS2Media 

IBM's City Forward Project

A beautiful video introducing IBM's new City Forward initiative. Collaboration is an exciting way forward, and it's great to see another platform for sharing, learning and co-operating between people and business to indeed, move cities forward.



Read about the project here on the City Forward website or here on techli

Find the City Forward project on twitter: @cityforward
Find Bis² on twitter: @BIS2Media

7.0 Earthquake Shakes New Zealand 5/07/2012

In light of last nights earthquake, we've got tremors on the brain, and several powerful visualizations of earth shaking data have come to light.

This one on the Christchurch quakes is distressingly varied, intense and lengthy. Our hearts go out to everyone dealing with both the quakes themselves and the trying aftermath.

This video shows the progress and intensity of the Japan earthquakes that caused the devastating tsunami in March of last year. It just goes to show how powerful visualizations are, where no language is necessary to describe the magnitude of the shaking. Frightening stuff.

Pictured: From this article on  the work of data visualizer Josh Nelson, a visualization of global earthquake data collected since 1898.

Be safe!

Article Link: Platforms for Big Data

Article Via CUBRID Blog

A compelling and comprehensive look at big data platforms. Read more here.

BIS2 at The Canadian Gaming Summit

BIS2 recently attended the Canadian Gaming Summit in Niagara Falls, ON. It was a beautiful location, and a great chance to talk to some of the key players in the field.

We've made a short video with some of the photos from the event.

Thank you to everyone involved!

Article Link: Make Data Work Throughout Your Organization

Article Via Harvard Business Review

Some great insights into the social and organizational benefits of adopting data into your business.

Read more here.

Infographic: How Much Data is Created Every Minute?

Via Visual News


Infographic by Visual News

Great job by the creative thinkers at Domo.

Infographic: Venus Transit of the Sun: A 2012 Observer's Guide 

Via Space.com

Great example of portraying complex ideas in pictorial form. Love this infographic from Space.com on the transit of Venus across the Sun as seen from our vantage point.

Article Link: 7 Opinions on Big Data: Defining It, Using It, Storing It and More

Article Via Insurance Tech 

Nice to hear some thoughts on Big Data from the community. Read more here.

"It's estimated that there's a 66% probability that at least one of the cars involved in an accident with a lawsuit involved has an event data recorder. We have the ability to import the data from that into a claim file. It would turn every adjuster into a sort of CSI investigator."

—Greg Horn, VP of Industry Relations for Mitchell International

Infographic: Big Data

Infographic Via The Next Web

Well, we love infographics, and we love Big Data—and here's a combination of the two! Click on the image to see the full infographic over at The Next Web.

Article Link: Big Data Problem Plagues Government Agencies

Article via CIO

Government agencies are collecting vast amounts of data, but they're struggling just to store it, let alone analyze it to improve efficiency, accuracy and forecasts.

"Government has a gold mine of data at its fingertips," says Mark Weber, president of U.S. Public Sector for NetApp, underwriter of MeriTalk's report. "The key is turning that data into high-quality information that can increase efficiencies and inform decisions. Agencies need to look at Big Data solutions that can help them efficiently process, analyze, manage and access data, enabling them to more effectively execute their missions."

Read more here

Article Link – Bankers want big data analytics

Article via Jaspersoft

"...the area that will define the financial sector over the next few years is big data analytics..."

Click here to read the full article.

Article Link – Benefits of Using Data to Make Decisions: Guest Post by Erin Palmer

Article via Smart Data Collective

A wonderfully well-written article by Erin Palmer outlining some of the benefits of using data to make better business decisions. Click here to read the full article.

Data Anatomy by Ryoji Ikeda

Berlin, 19 April – 1st May

"data.anatomy [civic] is a new audiovisual installation by Ryoji Ikeda, arising from a unique collaboration with Mitsuru Kariya, the development leader of the new Honda Civic.
Exhibited as a 3-screen video projection, data.anatomy [civic] immerses viewers in an intricate yet vast audiovisual composition derived from the entire data set of the car... "

For more images and videos of the exhibition, see here.

In the comments of this Creative Applications article, someone suggests that this project is "beautiful but at the end its really really flat", apparently referring to the fact that the installation is fairly commercial in purpose and lacking in depth. But regardless of the purpose of the installation, it remains just that. An installation. Art is subjective by nature.

In this day and age where data is such a relevant hot topic, it's interesting that companies are adopting creative means of associating with the data deluge. Information design seems to becoming a popular aesthetic, and businesses taking advantage of this popularity also means those artists and creators such as Ryoji Ikeda who contribute to the field are being given a platform to share their work.

It's also interesting to see the increasing adoption of art and creativity as a means of reaching an audience, both to explain and discuss products and to reach customers on an emotional level.

About Ryoji Ikeda

Japan’s leading electronic composer Ryoji Ikeda focuses on the minutiae of ultrasonics, frequencies and the essential characteristics of sound itself. His work exploits sound’s physical property, its causality with human perception and mathematical dianoia as music, time and space. Using computer and digital technology, Ikeda has been developing particular “microscopic” methods for sound engineering and composition. Since 1995 he has been intensely active in sound art through concerts, installations and recordings: the albums +/- (1996), 0 degrees (1998) and Matrix (2000) have been hailed by critics as the most radical and innovative examples of contemporary electronic music. With Carsten Nicolai, he works the collaborative project ‘cyclo.’, which examines error structures and repetitive loops in software and computer programmed music, with audiovisual modules for real time sound visualization. The versatile range of his research is also demonstrated by the collaborations with choreographer William Forsythe/Frankfurt Ballett, contemporary artist Hiroshi Sugimoto, architect Toyo Ito and artist collective Dumb Type, among others. Ryoji Ikeda received the Golden Nica prize at Prix Ars Electronica 2001 in the Digital Music category.

Journalism in the age of data
A documentary from Geoff McGhee, Produced during a 2009-2010 John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University.

Journalism in the age of data is a fantastic documentary from Geoff McGhee on data journalism. If you're interested in data visualization or want to gain a better understanding into its place in today's world, this video gives a wonderful insight into the growing industry from some of the most prominent figures in the field.

The hour long documentary covers trends and different approaches to the subject, highlighting the growing popularity in the genre of information graphics across many sectors, with organizations from governments to cable television stations seeking interactive visualizations of their data in an effort to communicate multitudes of business information.

As more and more data becomes available, the importance of condensing and articulating that data is increasing. Also pertinent to the influx of data are privacy issues; where does the data come from? What is public information and how can it be used? As Sarah Slobin suggests in the documentary "Transparency is the new black".

It's exciting to see the leaps and bounds made by the talented and passionate people driving this movement, with advances in technology and software programming giving rise to pushing the envelope of communication and information derived from data.

See the video below, on Vimeo here, or watch the full version with annotations and links here.


 

About Geoff McGhee

GEOFF McGHEE is an online journalist specializing in multimedia and information graphics. Over the past decade he has worked at The New York Times and ABCNews.com, and in France at Le Monde Interactif. In 2009-2010, he spent a John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University studying data visualization. In July 2010, McGhee began a new job developing visualizations and interactive content for the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford

Article Link: "Data explosion and big data demand new strategies for data management, backup and recovery, say experts"


Article via Briefings Direct

Excerpts from an interview with John Maxwell and Jerome Wendt. The full interview is available to download as a podcast or as a transcript.

To share insights into why data recovery needs a new approach and how that can be accomplished, the next BriefingsDirect discussion joins two experts, John Maxwell, Vice President of Product Management for Data Protection at Quest Software, and Jerome Wendt, President and Lead Analyst of DCIG, an independent storage analyst and consulting firm. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Read and listen here.

Article Link: Big Data Reality Check

Article Via Health Data Management

"The promise of business gems from big data may be more of a long-range goal as enterprises work through their own issues with BI systems and unstructured content uses, according to a new report from non-profit information management professionals group, AIIM."

Read more here

Field.io

Marcus Wendt of Field Studio is one of the speakers this year at Eyeo Festival. Looking through Field's projects, we came across the making of the video 'Ariel' for Stateless. The music video itself is a beautiful piece of information design, creating and extending organic digital shapes over a dancer's choreography: "Letting it dance based on the motion data"– Vera-Maria Glahn


See the final video here.

FIELD is a creative studio for digital art and generative design in London, founded by Marcus Wendt and Vera-Maria Glahn. In search of a new digital aesthetic, their dynamic and expressive artworks take shape in large scale installations, animation, print, and on mobile platforms.

FIELD is a new type of creative team with a strong artistic agenda and an entrepreneurial spirit. With a diverse range of collaborators, FIELD has created work for clients and institutions such as Deutsche Bank, GF Smith, the Museum of London, Ninja Tune, and the Red Bull Music Academy, while their experimental films and installations have been shown at festivals and galleries around Europe and in the U.S.