Here are a few interesting KPI's:

• Average session duration
• Proportion of active versus passive behavior (active = posting a blog, inviting a thread; passive = browsing, reading articles)
• New members per week, with breakdown US vs. non US
• Average number of groups per member
• Average number of friends per member
• Number of page views per user (per member) per month
• Time to last visit (average; per user; per…

Caringo announced a partnership to provide a solution for retaining and accessing structured data in Caringo object storage software powered by CAStor. The combination allows users to store increasing volumes of structured and semi-structured data from databases, logs and other machine-generated data sources along with unstructured content such as audio, documents, e-mails, images, and videos in CAStor.

The combined solution provides a horizontal platform that enterprises…

This year has seen consolidation and engineering around improving the basic storage and data processing engines of NoSQL and Hadoop. That will doubtless continue, as we see the unruly menagerie of the Hadoop universe increasingly packaged into distributions, appliances and on-demand cloud services. Hopefully it won’t be long before that’s dull, yet necessary, infrastructure.

Looking up the stack, there’s already a line up of cool tools for data scientists and not to be left out,…

Big Data, housed in new and disruptive technologies, is expected to account for more than 50 percent of the world’s data in the next five years, according to a a new study. While it offers huge and untapped value, the inevitable result is stress and strain on the world’s Interent infrastructure as companies seek to manage this explosion of information.

The new study, released jointly by Internet Research Group and Infineta Systems a provider of WAN optimization systems, examines how…

HOPKINTON, Mass., Dec. 5, 2011 -- EMC Corporation today unveiled the findings of the largest-ever global survey of the data science community. Spanning the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, India and China, the EMC Data Science Study reveals and quantifies a rampant scarcity across the globe for the prerequisite skills necessary for a company to capitalize on the opportunities found at the intersection of Big Data and data analytics. Only one-third of companies are…

Jaspersoft announced a second-generation native connector to MongoDB, an open source database. 10gen, the company behind MongoDB, and Jaspersoft have teamed together to deliver an enhanced tool for companies to provide easier reporting, analytics, and visualization of Big Data. Jaspersoft is a sponsor of the upcoming MongoSV, to be held in Santa Clara CA today, December 9, 2011 and will be showcasing the combined solution there.

Building on the popularity of the first generation…

The Washington Education Association (WEA, in Washington State) is partnering with Aon Hewitts (Illinois), a verification company, to eliminate a specific type of health insurance fraud: teachers reporting non-qualifying people as dependents, such as an unemployed friend with no health insurance. The fraud is used by "nice" people (teachers) to provide health insurance to people who would otherwise have none, by reporting them as spouse or kids.

Interestingly, I saw the letter sent to…

What's your cloud integration strategy? If you're like most IBM i shops, much of your data interchange is handled via good old EDI or flat file transfers. But the rapid spread of cloud services is hastening the move to more sophisticated forms of data and application integration and interchange. According to EXTOL which develops integration broker software for IBM i and other platforms, the day is fast approaching when companies will need new techniques for integrating cloud…

Zettaset today announced the release of Version 4 of its big data management solution, which offers several new service management features, including the industry's first NameNode Failover, as well as JobTracker Failover, Oozie Failover and a unique visual user interface (UI). Built on Hadoop and other high-volume, open-source technologies, Version 4 offers greater stability within Hadoop while providing a solution to manage big data that is more accessible to IT pros, yielding…

Of all the ills that impede development around the world, persistent conflict may be the most pernicious and the most widespread. As the World Bank noted in its April 2011 report, insecurity “has become a primary development challenge of our time. One-and-a-half billion people live in areas affected by fragility, conflict, or large-scale, organized criminal violence, and no low-income fragile or conflict-affected country has yet achieved a single United Nations Millennium Development…

For those that haven't heard of Kaggle before, Kaggle is a team of people that provide the functionality and support to host Data Mining contests. Here is how it works : Suppose that you are working for a Telco and wish to implement a new Churn prediction model. Rather than running this project in-house, you submit your data to Kaggle. What happens next is that -hopefully- many…

When you see google ads on Google search result pages or elsewhere, the ads that are displayed in front of you eyes (should) have been highly selected in order to maximize the chance that you convert and generate ad revenue for Google. Same on Facebook, Yahoo, Bing, LinkedIn and on all ad networks.

If you think that you see irrelevant ads, either they are priced very cheaply, or Google's ad relevancy algorithm is not working well.

Ad scoring algorithms used to be very simple,…

The following table compares the standard procedures of the five packages in detail. By "standard" I mean built-in or readily available from the official or widely known and reliable public web-sites.

One of the most valuable tools that I've used, when performing exploratory analysis, is building a data dictionary. It offers the following advantages:

• Identify areas of sparsity and areas of concentration in high-dimensional data sets
• Identify outliers and data glitches
• Get a good sense of what the data contains, and where to spend time (or not) in further data mining

What is a data dictionary

A data dictionary is a table…

EMC Greenplum Modular Data Computing Appliance puts SQL and Hadoop in the same box, but is it a truly cohesive platform?

Social Media Tips for Analytics Professionals 

From Text and Data Mining to Market Research and Social Media Consulting, few are more influential than today’s guests. In advance of the West Coast Text Analytics Summit (Nov. 10-11, San Jose), Text Analytics News caught up with four analytics leaders who are helping…