Wednesday, July 08, 2009

History of Business Intelligence

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This afternoon, I was looking for some good business intelligence use cases as i worked on a client presentation on integrating external news, financial data, social media and internal business data to create what i am calling a 'one-page' executive leadership view and I came across this video presentation on the 'History of Business Intelligence' by Nic Smith.

Nic is a senior marketing manager for business intelligence solutions at Microsoft and obviously has some killer presentation skills.
Definitely worth the 10 minutes- including a couple of chuckles.
View more documents from Nic Smith.


Where did i start my search? Slideshare of course. A great resource of smart people, with excellent presentation skills that feel that sharing with the community is more beneficial then hording their knowledge. thanks folks.

Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Bit.ly on This

1 comment :
I have been using the URL shortener service bit.ly for a couple of months now and love it. bit.ly allows users to shorten, share, and track links (URLs). Reducing the URL length makes sharing easier when you are using Twitter or even sending links via email.

Aside from the convenience and usability issues it resolves, my favorite thing is being able to track the shortened links i publish. Great for seeing how many clicks i get from a Tweet post with a shortened URL but also for tracking who has clicked on the link i sent them. Recently i sent a shorten URL to a coworker, a couple days later in conversation i asked what they thought of the link i sent them, they answered that it was great. yes. i believe it that is, that is why i sent it to you. but not that you actually read it. nope according to my bit.ly tracker you never clicked on it. oops.


Image|Flickr|Janrito Karamazov

Monday, July 06, 2009

Speaking at eComXpo Free Virtual Show This Week

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This Thursday at 11:20EST, i will be conducting a session with Jonathan Kranz on day two of eComXpo which is virtual show for "e-commerce and affiliate marketers that addresses the latest trends and issues in marketing for retailers, affiliates and networks". [registration is free so join us!]

The title of our session is "Now You’re Cooking: How A Dow Jones eBook Boosted Brand And Tripled Lead-Gen Expectations" which is a case study of the ebook i published last June with Dow Jones titled "The Taxonomy Folksonomy Cookbook: Finding the Right Recipe for Organizing Enterprise Metadata".

Jonathan was instrumental in the copy writing and concept design of that ebook as well as the most recent one "The Conversational Corporation: How Social Media is Changing the Enterprise" that i cowrote with Robert Scoble, Shel Israel and Greg Merkle. Jonathan is spectacular to work with and in this session he will share with the audience some of the tips that he shared with us as we were putting together and publishing our own successful ebooks.

The session summary from the conference agenda reads as follows:

If content is king on the Web, then what’s the royal road to online success? For Dow Jones, the secret was an ebook strategy that positioned them for leadership--and resulted in three times the number of downloads and leads than they had expected. Co-hosts Jonathan Kranz, author of Writing Copy for Dummies, and Daniela Barbosa, Business Development Manager for Dow Jones’ Synaptica, share their insights on:
  • How a traditional company is reinventing its content/copy through ebooks
  • Uncovering opportunities for competitive distinction through thought-leadership
  • How to leverage expertise to build brand, generate leads and lubricate the sales process pipeline
  • The crucial power of killer graphics — why ebooks are more than mere whitepapers
  • Promotional power — leveraging Web ads, social media, webinars, personal appearances and more to accelerate success

I am really looking forward to conducting this session with Jonathan, he certainly has a lot to share with everyone based on what he has learned over the years in producing projects for various types of clients and we will be sharing some real stories that came out of the two ebooks i have written over the last year. 'See' you there!

Sunday, July 05, 2009

Siri, a Virtual Personal Assistant

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Ever so often i see an iPhone application that makes me want to go off and buy one (i am still on Blackberry because it is the work standard). I have an iTouch in which i test and play with applications, etc. but since it requires wifi it is limited as to the universal use for applications.

I got to see the 2nd public demo of Siri, a Virtual Personal Assistance at the Semantic Technologies conference a couple weeks back that i have been mentioning to a lot of folks. I just found the slide deck that Tom Gruber used as well as the keynote video which is worth a view if you want to see what the future holds for us in regards to connected information retrieval and delivery.

During the presentation Tom Gruber outlines what it takes to put an application like the Siri Virtual Personal Assistant together and why the time is right for Siri and others. The enabling conditions that he outlines include: [@minute 6:49]
  • Location Awareness
  • Time Awareness
  • Task Awareness
  • Conversational Interface
  • Speech to Text
  • Text to Intent (natural language processing)
  • Dialog Flow
  • Semantic Data
  • Services APIS
  • Task & Domain Models
  • Access to Personal Information (data portability)
Video demo starts at about 8 minutes:


Interested in learning more? See additional coverage of Siri.