Business Intelligence

The road to SQL started with Dr. E.F. Codd's paper, "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks", published in Communications of the ACM in June 1970.

First came the breathless reporting of Google's faceoff with China over censorship and hacking. Now come the more considered opinions. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers do what they do best. Not to mention hot dogs and cats...
(GOOG)

'Twas the night before Christmas, and all over the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a USB mouse. Sounds like an ideal opportunity to look back over the biggest stories in of 2009. In IT Blogwatch, we review January to June. Not to mention pizza!..

It's been one hell of a week dealing with inaccuracies and missing data in electronic health records at a local health care provider.

ZL Technologies, an archiving vendor, is suing Gartner Group for $1.7 billion. It seems that ZL didn't like its position in Gartner's famous Magic Quadrant. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers mostly ridicule both parties -- and poke fun at anyone who bases IT purchasing decisions on a Magic Quadrant. Not to mention more from Pomplamoose...
(NYSE:IT)

Version 2.0 of the accountability Web site leverages a geographic information system so users can track stimulus spending on a map and drill down to find out the details.

If you thought the Google Voice drama couldn't get any more complex, you were wrong.  Today AT&T, the nation's second largest wireless carrier, filed a claim with the FCC complaining that Google Voice doesn't connect calls to certain rural areas of the US.

AT&T noted that press reports have suggested that Google "is systematically blocking telephone calls from consumers that use Google Voice to call telephone numbers in certain rural areas."

No longer a niche technology, geographic information systems are becoming a key tool for business decision making -- and an increasingly visible pillar in some IT shops.

GIS tools are providing visual representations of where federal stimulus dollars are going. With need-based overlays the public can see whether those dollars are going where they're needed most.

The latest KDE 4.3 is now ready for you, but are you ready for it?

Adding just a smidgen of structure to your information on the Web brings so much reader value. That's why there's so much interest these days in the intersection of journalism and technology.

The new Cloud Monitor service from RightNow lets you keep tabs about what people are saying about a brand on social network sites.

In IT Blogwatch, Wolfram|Alpha, the "computational knowledge engine," finally shows its face to the world. Richi Jennings reviews reactions to the first public outings of the not-a-search-engine that's never heard of Dolla. Not to mention some really hot cameras...

Open source business intelligence software vendor Jaspersoft rolled out a new set of social features this week on JasperForge, its community project development Web site. The newly-added options give developers additional ways to network, exchange ideas, and create projects more quickly. Companies that rely on community involvement should take note because the current trend of using social tools to enhance collaboration won't be going away anytime soon.

In Monday's IT Blogwatch, Richi Jennings watches Stephen Wolfram launch his computational knowledge engine, Wolfram|Alpha. So is it Google-killer or Cuil-emulator? Or something else? Not to mention YooouuuTuuube...