analytics

LTE phone shipments to hit record 67 million this year

A record number of smartphones will jump on the LTE bandwagon before the year is over.

Eyeing a "breakout year" for 4G technology, Strategy Analytics expects LTE phone shipments to grow 10-fold in 2012, rising to 67 million units from just 6.8 million last year. The push is being driven across the entire industry.

"Multiple operators and multiple phone vendors will be launching dozens of LTE models across numerous countries worldwide," Strategy Analytics analyst Neil Mawston said in a statement. "LTE has quickly become a high-growth, high-value market that no operator, service developer, device … Read more

The end of the server-versus-storage wars is nigh

There's always been tension between server and storage bigots.

Scott McNealy, former CEO of the former Sun Microsystems, once infamously opined that storage was a (mere) feature of the server. The problem was that at the time he made that comment, the storage industry was writing its declaration of independence. Fibre Channel-based SANs were consolidating and replacing direct attached storage (DAS) architectures in many of the world's large data centers. IP-based network attached storage (NAS) systems were consolidating and replacing print and file servers, much to the chagrin of both McNealy and Steve Ballmer.

Vendors with a server … Read more

Kno teaches textbooks to get smart

Digital textbook reader and marketplace Kno wants you to get smarter, and today it released an update that creates robust flash cards and adds study-habit analytics.

"In digital learning, things should be in context, so instead of going out to the Web, the facts should come to you," said Kno CEO and co-founder Osman Rashid in an interview last week at the 2012 Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas. The analytics are available in a dashboard called Kno Me, which tracks a student's studying habits within the Kno app. This includes the time spent in a given … Read more

What makers of business apps can learn from Angry Birds

Editor's note: This is a guest post by Quinton Alsbury, president of MeLLmo, which makes of mobile applications for businesses.

We've all been there--squinting at a spreadsheet on a mobile device, zooming in and out in attempt to make sense of the information. Each swipe of the finger triggers a blank screen as the data renders and slowly reappears and our frustration builds.

It shouldn't be that way.

Think about it. We've all also been on the opposite end of the spectrum, launching a game or social networking app so beautiful, fast, and interactive it's … Read more

Twitterize Yourself makes visual sense of big data

A tool from Visual.ly that analyzes and visualizes users through Twitter posts demonstrates one way make easy-to-understand visualizations of big data.

One example of the increasingly important trend of combined analysis and visualization is evident in Visual.ly Labs' Twitterize yourself application, which provides a good representation of how companies can use large data sets to quickly identify user characteristics to increase engagement or upsell goods and services.

I spend most of my time in my day job looking at data across the extended software development life cycle (design, develop, deploy, maintain, etc.), looking for the patterns that show … Read more

The joys of real-time data analysis for online retailers

Re-reading a piece I wrote a few weeks back about the uptick in online sales during Black Friday, I started to wonder if real-time customer intelligence is what is driving online retail growth.

There are undoubtedly a number of aspects to the growth in online sales. But after spending some time with a few of the major online retailers last week--including one who might not be considered a "retailer" in the traditional sense, I realized that the online world has a huge competitive advantage in its predilection toward data analysis with actionable near real-time results.

Amazon's suggested … Read more

HTML5-enabled phones to hit 1 billion in sales in 2013

HTML5-compatible mobile phones will reach sales of 1 billion in 2013, up from just 336 million this year, says research firm Strategy Analytics.

That 1 billion number refers specifically to phones whose mobile browsers fully or at least partially support HTML5, such as the iPhone 4S and Android phones. And it includes some feature phones as well as smartphones.

"We expect almost all smartphones to support HTML5 by 2013 and this makes up the largest chunk of the 1 billion total," Strategy Analytics analyst Neil Mawston told CNET yesterday. "Android, iOS, and other smartphone OSes already support … Read more

YouTube's new Analytics: How popular are your videos?

YouTube users can now tap into a new analytics feature that lets them see just how popular their videos really are.

Detailed in a blog post today, the new YouTube Analytics feature will replace the site's current Insight page in providing reports and stats on uploaded videos.

As a step up from Insight, YouTube Analytics is designed to offer data in a more user-friendly format and make it easier to find and view specific information. Borrowing a trick or two from Google Analytics, the YouTube Analytics page begins with a quick overview of the basic stats on your videos … Read more

What if you could collect all of the world's data into one place?

Occasionally we see some learned organization counting the number of bytes of data that humans have produced to date. And I've been known to scoff at these projections.

Seriously folks, even if you think that the number is 789.332 yottabyes on some given day--let's say today--the number is bigger tomorrow. And it gets bigger the next day. Even the rate of growth of the world's collective data is meaningless. Who would ever try to collect it all in one place and do something with it?

Oops. Someone actually is trying to collect all the data in … Read more