Highlights from the IBM Study, Analytics: The Real World Use of Big Data (by ibmbusinessanalytics)

Mike Schroeck, Partner and VP with IBM Global Business Services, shares takeaways from the 2012 IBM study, “Analytics: The real-world use of big data.” This study, from the IBM Institute for Business Value, and in partnership with the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, explores how organizations are leveraging big data to create competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Download the study: www.ibm.com/2012bigdatastudy

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Flutter Is Like Kinect For Your Computer’s Webcam Kinect may not be the best way to play games on an Xbox 360, in spite of the fact that some games for the platform are pretty good. However, one place Kinect does shine is in controlling the Xbox interface. It features all kinds of cool gestures that make it easy to control the console without touching the controller. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could get functionality like that on your Mac? With Flutter it’s actually possible, and it’s easier than you might think to get it up and running. Of course, Flutter is not as deep as Kinect, as it lacks the hardware and depth sensing technologies. However, it’s a very useful tool for listening to music and watching videos, as it allows you to skip songs, rewind, fast forward, play, and pause – all with simple gestures. Instead of digging through open windows to find and pause music, you can simply perform a gesture, and save yourself some valuable time. Plus, it feels really cool stopping music with a gesture, like something out of a sci-fi movie.

Flutter Is Like Kinect For Your Computer’s Webcam

Kinect may not be the best way to play games on an Xbox 360, in spite of the fact that some games for the platform are pretty good. However, one place Kinect does shine is in controlling the Xbox interface. It features all kinds of cool gestures that make it easy to control the console without touching the controller. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could get functionality like that on your Mac? With Flutter it’s actually possible, and it’s easier than you might think to get it up and running.

Of course, Flutter is not as deep as Kinect, as it lacks the hardware and depth sensing technologies. However, it’s a very useful tool for listening to music and watching videos, as it allows you to skip songs, rewind, fast forward, play, and pause – all with simple gestures. Instead of digging through open windows to find and pause music, you can simply perform a gesture, and save yourself some valuable time. Plus, it feels really cool stopping music with a gesture, like something out of a sci-fi movie.

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MRI Technology Detects Diseases In Seconds Rather Than Hours - PSFK A typical MRI body scan is a difficult process which involves lying motionless in a tight space often for hours at a time. Imagine if that time could be shortened not only to minutes, but mere seconds. On your next visit to the doctors office, complex scanning procedures could be accomplished quickly and painlessly. Researchers at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland say that after a decade of work they’ve developed a new MRI (magnetic resonance imagining) technique that can scan for those diseases very quickly. In just 12 seconds, for instance, it may be possible to differentiate white from gray matter in cerebrospinal fluid in the brain; in a matter of minutes, a full-body scan would provide far more data, making diagnostics considerably easier and less expensive than today’s scans.

MRI Technology Detects Diseases In Seconds Rather Than Hours - PSFK

A typical MRI body scan is a difficult process which involves lying motionless in a tight space often for hours at a time. Imagine if that time could be shortened not only to minutes, but mere seconds. On your next visit to the doctors office, complex scanning procedures could be accomplished quickly and painlessly.

Researchers at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland say that after a decade of work they’ve developed a new MRI (magnetic resonance imagining) technique that can scan for those diseases very quickly. In just 12 seconds, for instance, it may be possible to differentiate white from gray matter in cerebrospinal fluid in the brain; in a matter of minutes, a full-body scan would provide far more data, making diagnostics considerably easier and less expensive than today’s scans.

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Why the World Thirsts for Smarter Water « A Smarter Planet Blog

Eoin Lane, IBM Smarter Water Architect

By Eoin Lane

People often say that water is the new oil, but really, it’s not. Oil is a fossil fuel that takes millions of years and a lot of pressure to create. When we burn oil – for example, by driving our cars – it is gone forever (or at least for a few more millions of years before it can be created again!).

Water, on the other hand, cannot be created or destroyed (this is not strictly true, but bear with me). The same amount of water is around today that was around when the Earth was formed. The truth is there is a lot of water on Earth – just not a lot of drinking water. Here are some facts about just how little drinkable water is available:

* 97.5 percent of all water on Earth is salt water, leaving only 2.5 percent as fresh water
* Of that fresh water, nearly 70 percent is locked in ice
* Most of the rest of that freshwater is in aquifers which we are draining much more quickly than the natural recharge rate
* Two-thirds of our freshwater is used to grow food
* With 83 million more people on Earth each year, water demand will keep going up unless we change how we use it.[1]

Margaret Catley-Carlson of the Global Water Partnership has said, ”We cannot create water, but we can manage it better, much better.” [2] Take, for example, the longest water tunnel supplying NYC: it is 85 miles long, and it leaks 35 million gallons of water every day. We need to become much smarter about how we manage this precious resource and about how we collect, analyze and use water data.

There are three ways we can become smarter about water management:  Instrumentation, Big Data analytics, and cooperation

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Announcing the IBM Customer Experience Lab Yesterday IBM announced the creation of the IBM Customer Experience Lab, an exclusive Research and GBS capability aimed at the front-office agenda of clients in the world of Big Data.  One hundred Research scientists worldwide will work with thousands of GBS business consultants to address the emerging C-Suite Front Office Digitization priorities.In her remarks at IBM’s annual briefing for financial analysts, Ginni called the front-office transformation of functions like sales, marketing and customer service the most significant wave of business change since the advent of ERP in the 1990s.  To lead in this opportunity, we are scaling access to the highest levels of expertise for CEOs, CMOs, CxOs, public officials, and other global business leaders who recognize the urgency to create new models of engagement and move at the speed of individual attitudes and preferences. Banorte-lxe, one of the leading banks in Latin America, and Nationwide, the world’s largest building society, are among clients already engaged with the Research and consulting experts of the new lab. During its start-up phase, the Lab will focus on six priority industries — Banking, Insurance, Retail, Consumer Products, Telco and Energy & Utilities — and we are going to select and manage the engagements coming into the Lab through GBS Global Industry Leaders and partners. The Lab will be co-led by Sarah Diamond, general manager, Global Consulting Services, and Mahmoud Naghshineh, vice president, Services Research, with support across all 12 of IBM’s Research labs globally and a team of innovation leaders selected from the GBS Centers of Competence. Jade Nguyen Strattner has been named director of the CXLab, with overall responsibility for its day-to-day operations and the ongoing integration of Research and GBS capabilities.

Announcing the IBM Customer Experience Lab

Yesterday IBM announced the creation of the IBM Customer Experience Lab, an exclusive Research and GBS capability aimed at the front-office agenda of clients in the world of Big Data.  One hundred Research scientists worldwide will work with thousands of GBS business consultants to address the emerging C-Suite Front Office Digitization priorities.

In her remarks at IBM’s annual briefing for financial analysts, Ginni called the front-office transformation of functions like sales, marketing and customer service the most significant wave of business change since the advent of ERP in the 1990s.  To lead in this opportunity, we are scaling access to the highest levels of expertise for CEOs, CMOs, CxOs, public officials, and other global business leaders who recognize the urgency to create new models of engagement and move at the speed of individual attitudes and preferences.

Banorte-lxe, one of the leading banks in Latin America, and Nationwide, the world’s largest building society, are among clients already engaged with the Research and consulting experts of the new lab. During its start-up phase, the Lab will focus on six priority industries — Banking, Insurance, Retail, Consumer Products, Telco and Energy & Utilities — and we are going to select and manage the engagements coming into the Lab through GBS Global Industry Leaders and partners.

The Lab will be co-led by Sarah Diamond, general manager, Global Consulting Services, and Mahmoud Naghshineh, vice president, Services Research, with support across all 12 of IBM’s Research labs globally and a team of innovation leaders selected from the GBS Centers of Competence. Jade Nguyen Strattner has been named director of the CXLab, with overall responsibility for its day-to-day operations and the ongoing integration of Research and GBS capabilities.


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IBM Research: IBM Customer Experience Lab To help its clients successfully navigate these changes, IBM has established the IBM Customer Experience Lab to invent new ways for them to provide best-in-class customer experiences across their many channels. Located at the T.J. Watson Research Center, with additional virtual collaborators around the world, the IBM Customer Experience Lab is a partnership between IBM Research and IBM Global Business Services. A dedicated team of researchers and consultants will work with clients on customer insights, customer engagement, and employee engagement through the use of mobile, social, cloud and analytics technologies.

IBM Research: IBM Customer Experience Lab

To help its clients successfully navigate these changes, IBM has established the IBM Customer Experience Lab to invent new ways for them to provide best-in-class customer experiences across their many channels. Located at the T.J. Watson Research Center, with additional virtual collaborators around the world, the IBM Customer Experience Lab is a partnership between IBM Research and IBM Global Business Services. A dedicated team of researchers and consultants will work with clients on customer insights, customer engagement, and employee engagement through the use of mobile, social, cloud and analytics technologies.

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Visualize Global Health | Humanosphere It’s a new dawn for global health data borne of necessity, mind-numbing numbers, Netflix and a desire to avoid insanity. “For our own sanity, we needed to create a new way to look at this stuff,” said Peter Speyer. Speyer, head of data development at Seattle’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, explained why he and his colleagues are transforming a massive collection of health data known as the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) into a stunning collection of powerful online and interactive visual tools. Go to the link; below is just a screen grab. Seriously, go there and try these out. You’ll have fun even if you don’t know yet what you’re doing.

Visualize Global Health | Humanosphere

It’s a new dawn for global health data borne of necessity, mind-numbing numbers, Netflix and a desire to avoid insanity.

“For our own sanity, we needed to create a new way to look at this stuff,” said Peter Speyer.

Speyer, head of data development at Seattle’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, explained why he and his colleagues are transforming a massive collection of health data known as the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) into a stunning collection of powerful online and interactive visual tools. Go to the link; below is just a screen grab. Seriously, go there and try these out. You’ll have fun even if you don’t know yet what you’re doing.

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IBM uses ‘big data’ tech to keep horse out of your meatballs | VentureBeat Imagine this scenario: A dinner guest to The Cheesecake Factory in Louisville, Ky. informs his waiter about some funky tasting ketchup. Simultaneously, across the country in Palo Alto, Calif., a customer complains about the color and consistency of the ketchup on his burger.  Are these two scenarios related and potentially linked back to a bad batch from a supplier? And if so, will The Cheesecake Factory be able to prevent such incidences from occurring? “You need to take structured data like a restaurant’s location and combine it with unstructured data like the color of the mustard or taste of the ketchup,” said Paul Chang, a program director for the consumer products team at IBM. For restaurant chains with dozens of locations and hundreds of suppliers, it’s a near impossible task to maintain the consistency of ingredients. One screw up from a supplier and they risk unhappy customers, or worse still, a rogue meatball infected with horse meat.

IBM uses ‘big data’ tech to keep horse out of your meatballs | VentureBeat

Imagine this scenario: A dinner guest to The Cheesecake Factory in Louisville, Ky. informs his waiter about some funky tasting ketchup. Simultaneously, across the country in Palo Alto, Calif., a customer complains about the color and consistency of the ketchup on his burger. 

Are these two scenarios related and potentially linked back to a bad batch from a supplier? And if so, will The Cheesecake Factory be able to prevent such incidences from occurring?

“You need to take structured data like a restaurant’s location and combine it with unstructured data like the color of the mustard or taste of the ketchup,” said Paul Chang, a program director for the consumer products team at IBM.

For restaurant chains with dozens of locations and hundreds of suppliers, it’s a near impossible task to maintain the consistency of ingredients. One screw up from a supplier and they risk unhappy customers, or worse still, a rogue meatball infected with horse meat.

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Breezing: Portable Metabolism Tracker | Indiegogo

Meet Breezing.

For the first time ever, a metabolism tracker that syncs with your smartphone. Brought to you by a team of dedicated researchers and engineers, Breezing combines innovative design with proven science.

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The Digitalization of Healthcare: A Status Report for American Health Information Technology

Speaker/Performer: Michael Minear, CIO, UC Davis Health System

Sponsor: CITRIS (Ctr for Info Technology Research in the Interest of Society)

Michael Minear, Chief Information Officer at the UC Davis Medical Center, is a national leader in health-care information technology. He has an extensive record of leading transformations of large, complex organizations in the use of modern information technology.

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A New Era of Computing Will Bring the Power of Watson to the Masses « A Smarter Planet Blog

image

Colin Parris, GM IBM Power Systems

By Colin Parris

Westside Produce, a harvester and distributor of fresh melons in California’s Central Valley, probably isn’t the kind of company that comes to mind when you think about cutting-edge computing technologies. Yet this outfit, with just a few hundred employees, uses sophisticated technology to predict how many melons will be ready for harvest on any given day and to trace the movement of its produce—down to the case level—all the way from the field to grocery shelves.

Westside Produce is emblematic of a major shift that’s coming—a new era of computing that will deliver the power of big data analytics to organizations of all sizes and to all sorts of people within them.

You remember Watson, the IBM computer that beat two former grand-champions at the TV quiz show Jeopardy. That kind of data-crunching power is coming to the masses.

The combination of massive amounts of information and the tools to make sense of it has huge implications for businesses and society. Today, computers are everywhere—thanks, in large part, to the revolution in communications that has brought us all manner of smart phones and digital tablets. Now, data analytics is on its way to becoming pervasive, as well.

Big Data isn’t the sole province of big companies. Organizations of all sizes are challenged to make sense of huge amounts of data from mobile devices, video cameras, sensors and social networks. A medium-sized fashion retailer in South Africa needs access to big data insights just as much as a giant rail freight hauler based in the United States.

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Mobile Internet data traffic to grow 13-fold by 2017, says Cisco One point also worth highlighting is that it appears researchers are forecasting mobile data traffic to increase sharply because of more devices online — not users. By 2017, Cisco is predicting there will be 5.2 billion mobile users — up from 4.3 billion in 2012. But they also predicted that there will be more than 10 billion connected devices (including more than 1.7 billion M2M connections) within four years — up from 7 billion total in 2012. » via CNET

Mobile Internet data traffic to grow 13-fold by 2017, says Cisco

One point also worth highlighting is that it appears researchers are forecasting mobile data traffic to increase sharply because of more devices online — not users.

By 2017, Cisco is predicting there will be 5.2 billion mobile users — up from 4.3 billion in 2012. But they also predicted that there will be more than 10 billion connected devices (including more than 1.7 billion M2M connections) within four years — up from 7 billion total in 2012.

» via CNET

(via infoneer-pulse)

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