Time Series Journal

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)

It's Official: Welcome to the 'Technology Bounce Back'

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)

Multi-Core and Massively Parallel Processors

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)

Point/Counterpoint - September

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)

Chasing the Sun

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)