Amazon's announcement of a cloud-based data mining and analysis service, using the eHadoop implementation of MapReduce, potentially opens advanced business intelligence activities to many more businesses and organizations. It's an excellent example of just how much cloud computing can change the w...

There may not be a white lab coat big enough for Adam, the newest and most expensive member of the scientific department at Aberystwyth University in Wales, UK. Adam, a $1 million robot-computer amalgam about the size of a large pickup truck, carried out genetic experiments on yeast and reached grou...

Internet-scale data sets and Web-scale analytics have placed a different set of requirements on software infrastructure and data processing techniques. More types of companies and organizations are seeking new inferences and insights across a variety of massive data sets -- some into the petabyte sc...

Social media outsourcing will be the next big business opportunity for India after business process outsourcing and knowledge process outsourcing, contends Gaurav Mishra, Yahoo fellow in residence at Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. "Some functions are best handled by a ...

Personalization -- the purported long-sought Holy Grail of Web content management -- just might have finally arrived via Web applications that make Web sites responsive in real-time to the unique needs of individual visitors. At the heart of recommendation and personalization technologies are active...

The Federal Trade Commission has essentially shut down the largest spam operation in the world, freezing the assets of two of its accused ringleaders. Lance Atkinson, a New Zealand citizen living in Australia, and Jody Smith of Texas, deceptively marketed a variety of products through spam messages,...

Microsoft gave audience attendees at the 2nd annual Microsoft Business Intelligence conference a sneak preview of its forthcoming SQL Server this week, code named "Kilimanjaro." It was an appropriate venue for its debut, given its increased emphasis on BI. New functional areas of emphasis in the ser...

All companies have similar problems, with one of the biggest being the ongoing challenge of growing their revenues. In today's declining economy, companies are seeking new ideas, new solutions, and proven advice to fight off competition and stay above water. The most successful organizations are not...

Since the first supercomputers came online in the 1960s and '70s, they have earned a reputation as high-powered workhorses helping researchers conduct complex calculations. Typically found at major universities and research facilities, the massive machines -- which at one time could occupy more than...

With the political election season ramping up, spammers are again using news headlines about the candidates to saturate in-boxes. Researchers have uncovered two new spam clusters with subject lines relating to Barack Obama. At certain points, one of these spam runs accounted for up to 18 percent of ...

A new health-mapping system crawls the Web's disparate news sources and aggregates the information it finds there into a unified view of the world's health. HealthMap, which was launched by a team of researchers from Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, provides a comprehensive vie...

Attracting and retaining fans are the keys to success in the crowded and competitive online games industry. The Net's growing multimedia communications capabilities are providing not only games developers but businesses of every size and stripe a vastly richer yet less structured environment for CRM...

The growing reliance on business analytics at the enterprise level to improve strategic operational decision making and increase corporate competitive advantage is driving what IDC estimates to be a $20 billion market for business analytics development tools and packaged intelligence applications. O...

Business "intuition," popular in the days of pen, ink and paper, was the first "BI" -- keen and quick insight rooted in trading experience and utilizing heightened observation with direct perception of commercial reality, all aided by strong inferences and at least some minimal amount of basic infor...

Oh customer, so mysterious ... what have you done ... what will you do ... and what decisions should a business make to keep you or get rid of you? Seeking answers to these key questions, the commercial world has turned in a big way to analytics -- the science of logical analysis. Analytics involves...