We hear a lot of tech words buzzing around like big data, cloud, virtualization, one more term that has been really trending lately is business intelligence. What is business Intelligence? It is a whole suite of software tools and applications that dig deep into the raw data available within an organization, analyze them and provide meaningful interpretations that could help with taking business decisions. While choosing the right BI tool, there must be something that kept in mind. They are:

·         Your Use-Case

·         Backwards Compatibility

·         Scalability

·         Training Costs

Read the complete article here: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/it-small-business/what-to-look-for-in-a-business-intelligence-tool-73303

Human element plays an important role in successful application of big data.  Companies mainly focus on the tools (like Hadoop), using the R language, MongoDB and a few others.  But, it is also very important to understand what kind of data is available, what kind of data is needed and what role an expertise in computer science and applications, modeling, statistics, analytics play. Very often single source of big data leads to incorrect conclusion. So, human power is very much needed. To know more on this topic, go through the article link by Daniel Kusnetzky (a reformed software engineer and product manager):

http://www.zdnet.com/the-human-element-is-critical-in-applying-big-data-7000028983/

Research firm Gartner has predicted that half of the large organizations will have internal Facebook-like social networks by 2016, and that 30 percent of these will be considered as essential as email and telephones are today. It also noted that 80 percent of social business efforts will not achieve the intended benefits due to inadequate leadership. A report on “unified communication and collaboration” (UCC), by another research firm, Frost & Sullivan, pointed out that employees have become accustomed in recent years to simple and user-friendly interfaces of free online communications tools, such as Gmail and Facebook, which allow them to collaborate in only a few clicks.

To know more about this talk-of-the-town topic, read Author Al Bredenberg’s article by visiting the following link:

http://www.thomasnet.com/journals/techtrends/articles/companies-want-to-get-social-in-their-enterprise-collaboration

Social media is a platform where people can create, share or exchange information and ideas through interaction. The rise of Big Data has prompted many organizations to utilize data analysis for making marketing decisions .Social media is an important way to track  vast amount of data. Organizations are now developing tools intended for this purpose.

 Some of the trending social media analytics tools are:

1. Social Report.

2. Social Mention.

3. Simply Measured.

4. Cyfe.

5. Sprout Social.

6. SumAll.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/65195-6-Social-Media-Analytics-Tools-for-Merchants