Tomorrow is my birthday — always an opportunity for reflection, but especially this time. For several weeks now, I've been thinking about what I've learned during the past six decades that really matters. Here's a first pass: 1. The more we know about ourselves, the more power we have to behave better. Humility is underrated. We each have an infinite capacity for self-deception — countless unconscious ways ...

Social media analytics and tracking can be very time-consuming and expensive. You’ll find quite a few smartsocial media monitoring tools, but what if you can’t afford them? That’s why many social media marketers and power users are in constant search of free, efficient alternatives. Here, we’ll share a few ready-made spreadsheets you can copy (navigate File + Make a copy) and use for social media analytics. ...

Oracle is hoping to carve out a prominent place in the world of R, the open-source statistical modeling language with roots in academia but an increasingly high profile in enterprise IT shops. It announced a new Advanced Analytics product on Wednesday that ties R to its database and family of software-hardware appliances. Oracle Advanced Analytics consists of Oracle R Enterprise, along with the vendor's exi ...

It looks like Oracle has some competition when it comes to selling big iron for big data. On Wednesday, Cray, the Seattle-based company best known for building some of the world’s fastest supercomputers, said it’s getting into the big data game. A new division within Cray, called YarcData, will leverage Cray’s experience working within data-intensive environments for customers such as Boeing in order to woo ...

Forrester published its first-ever Wave report for the emerging Hadoop market late last week and the results were surprising, both in terms of the "leaders wave" assessment and the absence of big vendors, including Microsoft, Oracle, and Teradata. The first surprise in "The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Hadoop Solutions, Q1 2012" report is that it includes such a wide variety of vendors. In the "leaders" wave ...

Big data is among the hottest trends in IT right now, and Hadoop stands front and center in the discussion of how to implement a big data strategy. There’s just one problem that keeps cropping up: many people don’t seem to know exactly what it means when somebody says “Hadoop.” The problem surfaced again Monday in the form of complaints over Forrester’s new report titled “Enterprise Hadoop Solution, Q1 2012 ...

So you’ve got a great job that’s waiting to be filled at your company, and you decide you want to tap into thealready measured power of social media recruiting. You start to wrestle with the big kahuna, LinkedIn, and you’re also covering niche social media sites for your industry. But you may be ignoring an intensely powerful tool hiding right under your nose — Facebook. The social media mega-site has prove ...

It seems to me that many of the marketing predictions and advice I see (or am nearly forced to see thanks to my Twitter buddies’ links) from consultants, pundits, and gurus are focused on social media — oops, I mean social business — and big data. Writing on the topic of social business, one guru recently wrote: Companies of all sizes will need to transform their business and existing infrastructure, and re ...

BigDataCloud’s theme of “Hadoop Powered Predictions & Recommendations Engines” attracted over 100 people to the meetup last night, sponsored by LexisNexis & ThirdEyeCloud. The attendees thronged the LexisNexis’s booth about its newly debuted HPCC Systems & got an understanding of how its Hadoop alternative can actually solve “Big Data” challenges in enterprises. The attendees also had a chance to “meet & gr ...