Machine learning, embedded analytics and big data march ahead in 2014
Will we look back on 2014 as the year that marked a new era in business? According to faculty at the International Institute for Analytics (IIA), advances in big data, along with machine learning and embedded analytics, will drive new products, reinvent old business processes, and quite possibly mean a lot more work for lawyers. The Portland, Ore.-based advisory and research analytics organization released nine official predictions for the new year...
New French surveillance law: From fear to controversy
Even though France's actions haven't been talked about anywhere near as much as the NSA scandal has, the French government says it has begun working on new ways to legitimize these widespread powers of surveillance. A new law just passed by the French Senate defines the conditions under which intelligence agencies may survey citizen’s data - including telephone conversations, email correspondence, web browsing activity, and personal location data.
Preparing for PCI-DSS Version 3.0
Among the new requirements of version 3.0 are steps to mitigate payment card risks posed by third parties, such as cloud providers and payment processors. The new version also stresses that businesses and organizations that accept and/or process cards are responsible for ensuring the third parties they rely on for outsourced solutions and services use appropriate security measures, says Leach, the council's chief technology officer. "Many of the breaches have involved the integrity of the third parties," Leach says. "Organizations need to help those types of entities understand their PCI responsibilities."
Seagate Crams 500 GB of Storage into Prototype Tablet
Of course there's plenty of reasons we don't already have hard drives in tablets. The compromise that immediately leaps to mind when you add a spinning hard drive is, of course, battery life. Seagate's solution in this prototype was to hybridize the storage with the addition of 8GB of flash memory. The vast majority of the time, the tablet is just running on flash, and the magnetic drive is powered off. If you want to play a movie, though, the drive will spin up, swap the movie onto the flash memory through a fast 6 gb/s SATA interface, and then spin down again.
Lenovo expects to benefit from CYOD trend
"For the average small business, it's not a productivity loss or big concern to them if they have to reimage one of their 10 PCs every now and then, but for a company which has a 100,000 of them, they absolutely want commonality of the image and we have the internal labs to do that," explained Beck. He added Lenovo's portfolio expansion in recent years into tablets and convertibles has made its proposition even more compelling. At CES, the company further ramped up its product range to include Android desktops.
Information technology budgets are stable or growing
Data suggests 2014 will provide another year of stability and even growth for IT departments, with 32% of respondents indicating they're fully staffed and another 39% indicating they're looking to make new hires. The relative stability and uptick of budgets and headcounts, however, doesn't mean IT leaders have left their penny-pinching ways behind. All the CIOs and IT leaders interviewed for this article, including those whose budgets and staffs increased in 2013, stressed that they continue to look for ways to cut costs without sacrificing service or innovation.
The Keys to Leadership: Your Brain and My Grandmother
If you’re stressed or facing a critical decision, get out of your office! ... Even concentrating on a photograph of nature can help. There’s wisdom in taking time for a regular stroll at lunch. In Your Brain and Business, Pillay cites studies showing that physical movement can have a profound effect on how you think: Getting into a box-like structure and then stepping out of it actually improves your ability to get creative and think “outside the box,” so don’t expect your next big idea to come during the hours you spend in a conference room.
Personalization Is Back: How to Drive Influence by Crunching Numbers
What marketers usually call a response model doesn't simply predict who will buy, per se. Rather, more specifically, it predicts, "Will the customer buy if contacted?" It is predicting the result of one treatment (contact) without any consideration for or prediction about any alternative treatment, such as not contacting or contacting with a different marketing creative. ... Therefore, a response model suffers from a sometimes-crippling, common limitation: The predicted outcome itself doesn't matter so much as whether the marketing treatment should be credited for influencing that outcome.
CIOs Must Balance Cloud Security and Customer Service
"Customer expectations are higher now," said Shawn Kingsberry, CIO of the Recovery, Accountability and Transparency Board. "Everyone's so mobile, and at home they do so many things and have access to so much information, the expectations in the office are even higher when you look at the services that have to be delivered." ... "It's that balance that you have to get," Kingsberry said. "You want to deliver the service, but there are tradeoffs."
Standards in Predictive Analytics: PMML
PMML has particular value for organizations as they move away from a batch scoring mindset to a more real-time scoring approach. When scoring was done in batch it was generally done using the same technology as was used to build the model. With real-time scoring it has become essential to be able to move models from their development environment to a more real-time, interactive scoring environment and PMML has emerged as the primary way to do this.
Quote for the day:
"I don't believe in taking foolish chances. But nothing can be accomplished without taking any chances at all." -- Charles Lindbergh
Will we look back on 2014 as the year that marked a new era in business? According to faculty at the International Institute for Analytics (IIA), advances in big data, along with machine learning and embedded analytics, will drive new products, reinvent old business processes, and quite possibly mean a lot more work for lawyers. The Portland, Ore.-based advisory and research analytics organization released nine official predictions for the new year...
New French surveillance law: From fear to controversy
Even though France's actions haven't been talked about anywhere near as much as the NSA scandal has, the French government says it has begun working on new ways to legitimize these widespread powers of surveillance. A new law just passed by the French Senate defines the conditions under which intelligence agencies may survey citizen’s data - including telephone conversations, email correspondence, web browsing activity, and personal location data.
Preparing for PCI-DSS Version 3.0
Among the new requirements of version 3.0 are steps to mitigate payment card risks posed by third parties, such as cloud providers and payment processors. The new version also stresses that businesses and organizations that accept and/or process cards are responsible for ensuring the third parties they rely on for outsourced solutions and services use appropriate security measures, says Leach, the council's chief technology officer. "Many of the breaches have involved the integrity of the third parties," Leach says. "Organizations need to help those types of entities understand their PCI responsibilities."
Seagate Crams 500 GB of Storage into Prototype Tablet
Of course there's plenty of reasons we don't already have hard drives in tablets. The compromise that immediately leaps to mind when you add a spinning hard drive is, of course, battery life. Seagate's solution in this prototype was to hybridize the storage with the addition of 8GB of flash memory. The vast majority of the time, the tablet is just running on flash, and the magnetic drive is powered off. If you want to play a movie, though, the drive will spin up, swap the movie onto the flash memory through a fast 6 gb/s SATA interface, and then spin down again.
"For the average small business, it's not a productivity loss or big concern to them if they have to reimage one of their 10 PCs every now and then, but for a company which has a 100,000 of them, they absolutely want commonality of the image and we have the internal labs to do that," explained Beck. He added Lenovo's portfolio expansion in recent years into tablets and convertibles has made its proposition even more compelling. At CES, the company further ramped up its product range to include Android desktops.
Data suggests 2014 will provide another year of stability and even growth for IT departments, with 32% of respondents indicating they're fully staffed and another 39% indicating they're looking to make new hires. The relative stability and uptick of budgets and headcounts, however, doesn't mean IT leaders have left their penny-pinching ways behind. All the CIOs and IT leaders interviewed for this article, including those whose budgets and staffs increased in 2013, stressed that they continue to look for ways to cut costs without sacrificing service or innovation.
The Keys to Leadership: Your Brain and My Grandmother
If you’re stressed or facing a critical decision, get out of your office! ... Even concentrating on a photograph of nature can help. There’s wisdom in taking time for a regular stroll at lunch. In Your Brain and Business, Pillay cites studies showing that physical movement can have a profound effect on how you think: Getting into a box-like structure and then stepping out of it actually improves your ability to get creative and think “outside the box,” so don’t expect your next big idea to come during the hours you spend in a conference room.
Personalization Is Back: How to Drive Influence by Crunching Numbers
What marketers usually call a response model doesn't simply predict who will buy, per se. Rather, more specifically, it predicts, "Will the customer buy if contacted?" It is predicting the result of one treatment (contact) without any consideration for or prediction about any alternative treatment, such as not contacting or contacting with a different marketing creative. ... Therefore, a response model suffers from a sometimes-crippling, common limitation: The predicted outcome itself doesn't matter so much as whether the marketing treatment should be credited for influencing that outcome.
"Customer expectations are higher now," said Shawn Kingsberry, CIO of the Recovery, Accountability and Transparency Board. "Everyone's so mobile, and at home they do so many things and have access to so much information, the expectations in the office are even higher when you look at the services that have to be delivered." ... "It's that balance that you have to get," Kingsberry said. "You want to deliver the service, but there are tradeoffs."
Standards in Predictive Analytics: PMML
PMML has particular value for organizations as they move away from a batch scoring mindset to a more real-time scoring approach. When scoring was done in batch it was generally done using the same technology as was used to build the model. With real-time scoring it has become essential to be able to move models from their development environment to a more real-time, interactive scoring environment and PMML has emerged as the primary way to do this.
Quote for the day:
