Clarabridge is a leading text-analytics vendor, delivering voice of the customer and related business solutions. The C3 conference's Orlando-Disney venue lent itself to a bit of Goofy-ness, and CEO Sid Banerjee indeed riffed off the magical journey theme in his post-conference write-up. Forrester analyst Bruce Temkin, who titled his conference summation It's Time For Text Analytics, used a different magical kingdom, that of the Wizard of Oz, to illustrate a customer-experience voyage of discovery in his conference keynote, although a panel he later moderated wasn't immune to an intrusion of Disneyicity.

Sentiment analysis represents a huge opportunity and it presents technical and solution challenges. That's why I've created a new conference, the Sentiment Analysis Symposium, slated for April 13 in New York.

Score one for Netflix' publicists: The Times imprimatur validates the data, relative 2009 popularity of movies for rent by ZIP code, yet the data is incomplete and therefore not what is claimed. The result is a pretty but false picture. It does NOT present correct relative Netflix rental popularity for 2009 as claimed. Do check out the visualization, which does offer nice interactive features, and I will explain where Netflix and the Times went wrong.

Closed systems are well-defined and profitable, but only for those who control them. Open systems are chaotic and profitable, but only for those who understand them well and move faster than everyone else. Closed systems grow quickly while open systems evolve more slowly, so placing your bets on open requires the optimism, will, and means to think long term. Fortunately, at Google we have all three of these.

My response: "'T ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it." Let's talk value, not feature lists.

• Information from every customer touch point
• Past behaviors, current interactions, and likely future actions
• Information from sources that have only recently come on-line, and
• Larger market views that contextualize information about individuals

This current follow-on was prompted by a tweet of Manya Mayes's, "Text mining/social media analysis-there are at least 4 ways to misspell a word, and in some cases (company/brand names) upwards of FIFTEEN!" Indeed, in an article On Text Data Quality Manya posted to SAS's "The Text Frontier" blog -- Manya is chief text mining strategist at SAS -- she provides examples that recap "The Ten Transgressions of Text" per a presentation she gave at last June's Text Analytics Summit.

• Some slick, supposedly easier-to-use dashboard
• Reports routed to mobile devices.
• Excel, no matter how many new capabilities Microsoft and third parties stuff in there.

While what counts most is great, affordable software, an understanding of market trends helps everyone concerned make strategic choices. In this spirit, I'll present perspectives that complement mine, from Pentaho and from the Pentaho community, regarding the importance of the open source base to Pentaho and the company’s users and regarding a new community development, the open source Pentaho Analysis Tool (PAT).

RATB spokesperson Edward Pound confirmed that the relaunched site no longer offers the feeds. Pound did not know if notice had been provided to users, on-site or through another mechanism, of the discontinuation of the data-feed interface. He stressed that the Recovery Board is working hard to meet emerging user needs and improve site capabilities in furtherance of its non-political mission of promoting open government.

Every Twitter user gets the same on-site visibility and capabilities. As a result, celebrities excluded, authority chez Twitter derives from your network and from your tweets and only after that from your extra-Twitter identity (a.k.a. your biography and employment). Since open publishing is an independent-analyst ethos, we independents have taken to wide-open Twitter like, well, whales to the air.
It's the big-firm analysts, habituated to rarefied, invitation-only venues, their identities subjugated to their firms', who have generally been slower to get into the game: Twitter and even basic blogging. The net effect is a big boost in stature for independent analysis. Writing as one myself, that's a good thing!

The definition of "open source" (as applied to software) is almost universally accepted as that of the Open Source Initiative. Per the OSI, "open source doesn't just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open-source software must comply with [certain] criteria" that are outlined on the OSI's Web site. Open-source software, per the OSI, is free, "free" as in "free beer" rather than necessarily as in "free speech," which latter usage of "free" carries with it certain responsibilities. Those responsibilities are "vitally important" according to Richard Stallman and other free-software movement proponents.

SPSS brings other, less-visible assets to the pending IBM deal. Readers whose interest goes beyond analyses of the "IBM gets to check off another capabilities box" variety may be interested in learning about one of them. SPSS provides an open stats platform that allows users to patch Python and R code into their SPSS routines. SPSS's Bring Your Own Analytics is a clear competitive differentiator. Whatever you call it, SPSS's stats platform is a pioneering example of hybrid commercial-open source analytical computing, with benefits for users and the company alike.

Interest in streams and events has definitely picked up in the last few months -- I've reported on novel applications for "continuous transformation" and otherwise done a bit of writing to promote awareness -- and next year could very well be the break-out year for BI on data and event streams.