Revolution Analytics, the leading commercial provider of R software, services
and support, today announced that Shannon Terry and Ben Ogorek of Nationwide
Insurance have won the company’s first “Applications of R in Business”
competition and received the $10,000 grand prize. Using R, the popular
statistics language chosen by over 2 million analysts in academia and at
cutting-edge companies such as Google and Bank of America, Terry and Ogorek
built a direct marketing efficacy forecasting system that shows the
incremental benefit of a marketing tactic when only a fraction of the
marketing responses have been observed. This allows marketers to test
alternatives, evaluate their relative impact while campaigns are
“in-flight” and adjust expenditures for maximum return. Additionally,
Jeffrey Breen was awarded $5,000 and named the first runner up for his
application that... (more)
All the myriad commentators who monitor Internet technologies and the
i-Technology companies on the NASDAQ doubtless have their own private cluster
of indicators that they use to take a weather-check on the overall state of
the industry. For some, it's as simple as looking at the NASDAQ index level.
This (wholly understandable) approach is the one adopted by SYS-CON's own
Roger Strukhoff, who wrote recently:
After going over 5000 at the height of the dot.com bubble, we all know that
it plunged precipitously and consistently for the next 18 months. Any hope of
a quick recovery wa... (more)
As software developers we have enjoyed a long trend of consistent performance
improvement from processor technology. In fact, for the last 20 years
processor performance has consistently doubled about every two years or so.
What would happen in a world where these performance improvements suddenly
slowed dramatically or even stopped? Could we continue to build bigger and
heavier, feature-rich software? Would it be time to pack up our compilers and
go home?
The truth is, single threaded performance improvement is likely to see a
significant slowdown over the next one to three yea... (more)
Web Services Journal strives to bring the latest information regarding Web
services to you in a variety of ways. In addition to our printed journal and
digital edition, we have begun a series of Point/Counterpoint sessions with
leading industry executives to determine their viewpoints and issues with
various facets of Web services. Here is the second in an ongoing set of
conversations regarding the industry. WSJ spoke with Mark Herring, Director,
Sun Microsystems' Java, Web Services & Tools Business; and Dare Obasanjo, a
member of Microsoft's WebData team. (The opinions stated he... (more)
I've been hearing lately that Bluetooth is making a comeback. Considering
that it had hardly gotten started when it was written off in certain
quarters, it's amusing to see a comeback prediction so soon. In any case, I
can see that short-range wireless protocols, such as Bluetooth, will
eventually be enormously useful in the device market.
The other day I was watching someone on the Underground play a game on a
Nintendo Game Boy Advance. To play a different game, he had to rummage
through his pack to find the cartridge, then plug it in; by the time he'd
accomplished this, he had... (more)