ECT News Network Broadcast

The power of Big Data technology is being successfully applied to understanding such complex unknowns as consumer sentiment and even intent. That understanding then vastly improves how retailers and myriad service providers manage their users' experiences -- increasingly in real time. Fortunately, today's consumers are quite willing to share their intents and sentiments via social media, if you can gather and process the information. Hence the rapidly developing field of social customer relationship management, or Social CRM.

Delivering information as an actionable asset in a widely collaborative and increasingly mobile environment has become a top business priority. Business architects need the agility enabled by such unshackled information sharing and contextual collaboration to keep pace with distributed services and a boundaryless enterprise approach to their operations and commerce.

Adventure games, which play out much like an interactive story, have had an adventure in their own right. These games peaked in popularity during the late 1980s to the mid-1990s but in recent years have been in decline. When action and online role-playing games gained mass market appeal, story often became secondary. However, story-driven adventures could be making a comeback. Jane Jensen, game designer of the popular and critically acclaimed Gabriel Knight series in the 1990s, is back with Moebius: Empire Rising.

Heartland Payment Systems has successfully leveraged software-assurance tools and best practices to drive better security within its IT organization -- and improve its overall business performance. In this podcast, Ashwin Altekar, director of enterprise risk management at Heartland, shares his insights and knowledge with Amir Hartman, the founder and managing director at MainStay. They discuss how Heartland has improved governance results across the organization, thanks to both security best practices and HP's Fortify tools.

As developers are pressured to produce mobile and distributed cloud apps ever faster and with more network unknowns, the older methods of software quality control can lack sufficient predictability. And as Agile development means faster iterations and a constant stream of updates, newer means of automated testing of the apps in near-production realism prove increasingly valuable. Fortunately, a tag-team of service and network virtualization for testing has emerged.

One of the UK's go-to spots for selling entertainment products online, Entertainment Magpie is now setting its sights on the U.S. with the launch of Decluttr.com. In this podcast, we chat with CEO Steve Oliver about how the digital revolution affects a business model predicated on physical entertainment media; the global network that underpins his company's business model; and how Americans' unfamiliarity with a black and white bird that collects shiny things forced Entertainment Magpie's stateside name change.

In the past, "it was about detection, and you had reaction technologies," said HP Network Security Architect Jim O'Shea. "Then we evolved to trying to detect things that were malicious with intent by using IDS. But that was a reactionary-type thing. It was a nice approach, but we were reacting: Something happened, you reacted. But if you knew it was bad, why did we let it in in the first place?"

"Many organizations have experimented with numerous approaches," said Tom Kendra, Dell Software's vice president and general manager for systems management. "Now we've gotten to the point where we have the unique opportunity to think about how we consolidate these approaches into a more integrated, holistic mobility solution that elevates data security and mobile workforce productivity."

Earlier this month, researchers published a report discussing global forest coverage. While that alone might not be eminently noteworthy -- a lot of scientific papers get published about a lot of topics -- these findings were supplemented by a first-of-its-kind interactive mapping tool that was created in partnership with Google. In this TechNewsWorld podcast, we discuss the research, the findings and the use of cutting-edge technology with the study's lead author, Matthew Hansen, a geographer at the University of Maryland.

Aggressive use of cloud-computing strategies can significantly improve delivery of applications to end users. Healthcare patient-experience improvement provider Press Ganey and project and portfolio management provider Planview are both exploiting cloud efficiencies and agility. Their paths have been different, but the outcomes speak volumes for how cloud transforms businesses.

"The self-publishing revolution is really only a few years old, so what was surprising to me about this sort of material is not that it exists -- that's always existed, I guess -- but more where it was sold," said author Jeremy Duns. "This seems to me to be more the material that you would have found in a sex shop. So to find it on iTunes or Amazon or Barnes & Noble or these kinds of places -- that's what was surprising."

Visible Measures measures via a massive analytics capability an ocean of video at some impressively high scales. By creating very deep census data of everything that's happened in the video space, Visible Measures uses unique statistical processes to figure out exactly what patterns emerge within video usage at high speed and massive scale and granularity. Chief Technology Officer Chris Meisl explains in this podcast just how Visible Measures measures.

Researchers at George Mason University's Mercatus Center recently launched a website, PiracyData.org, to determine whether or not there are legal alternatives for viewing the world's most pirated movies. Drawing upon TorrentFreak's weekly list of the 10 most pirated movies, the researchers will quantify the validity -- or invalidity -- of copyright holders' claims that pirates are thieving material that is indeed available elsewhere, as well as claims that search engines like Google should quit linking to pirated content. In this TechNewsWorld podcast, we are joined by Jerry Brito, a research fellow at the Mercatus Center and a cofounder of the site.

"The most important realization that we made was that it wasn't going to be a huge technology effort that was going to make this happen," said Chris Wegrzyn, director of data architecture at the DNC. "It was going to be about analysts. It's about people who were going to understand the political challenges, understand something about the data, and go in and find answers."

A team of investigative journalists in Russia have suggested that the Russian government will be embarking on an ambitious surveillance regimen for the upcoming Winter Olympics, which will be held in Sochi, Russia, next February. In this podcast, Andrei Soldatov, one of the journalists who helped break this story, joins us from Moscow. Soldatov talks about what, exactly, Russia has planned for the Games, how the 1980 Moscow Olympics still informs the nation's surveillance philosophy, and more.

The agility goal of real-time responses is no longer good enough. What's apparent across more business ecosystems is that businesses must do even better, to become so data-driven that they extend their knowledge and ability to react well into the future. When you take a data-driven approach, you have to give up some of the older approaches around intuition, gut instinct, or some of the metrics that used to be important. That really requires you to change your thinking and not just rely on the highest-paid person's opinion when you need to make a decision. It's really now becoming more of a science.

"If you view analytics as a cost center, that's the wrong view. It should be aimed at optimizing revenue streams," explained Pete Fishman, director of analytics at Yammer. "We micro-optimize the product, we micro-optimize sales and marketing, the business. Analytics is about improving everybody at their job, making data available to allow people to be more effective."

"It transcends the standard gaming demographic," explained Jon Hicks, editor for Xbox 360 - The Official Xbox Magazine (UK). "I think that's one of the reasons why it's so successful: Everybody who buys video games buys GTA, and many other people who don't routinely buy video games will also buy it. It's got to that level of sort of cultural weight."

While so-called BYOD isn't necessarily new -- IT departments, after all, have been supporting mobile road warriors since the 1980s -- the rising tide of end users seeking the use and support of their own consumer devices is different. It's so different that IT departments are grasping for any standard or proven approaches that make BYOD access of enterprise resources both secure and reliable.

CSC and HP have entered a strategic partnership to help companies and governments better understand and adapt to the tough cybersecurity landscape. "We've got to change the paradigm here," said CSC's Dean Weber. "We've got to get better at threat intelligence. We've got to get better at event correlation. We've got to get better at the business of cybersecurity. And it has to be a public-private partnership that actually gets us there, because the public has an interest in the private infrastructure ... . That's not just U.S. -- that's global."

"The fact that people were walking through Square Mile, a really historic part of London in the heart of the Financial District, and people didn't know it was happening; you couldn't tell it was happening when you walked past," noted London reporter Siraj Datoo. "If you walked along the street, you really had no idea that your phone was essentially giving this recycling bin your information, and I think that's really what was the craziest part about it."

"There have been other companies that have been licensed to take these photos in Oslo, but they are Norwegian companies and they follow Norwegian regulations, so the national security authorities are able to, for instance, have control over photos," explained Aftenposten security reporter Henning Carr Ekroll. "And if they want to blacken out areas that are sensitive, they can do so."

About six years ago, the World Trade Organization sided with the itty-bitty Caribbean island of Antigua on its claim that the United States' ban on overseas remote gaming violated international trade agreements. Following years of failed negotiations between the U.S. and Antigua, the WTO upheld its ruling last winter, confirming once and for all that -- as compensation for the erosion of Antigua's online gambling sector -- the island could suspend its obligations to certain U.S. intellectual property rights. The U.S. has stood pat on its ban, so Antigua announced this summer that it is forming a committee to implement the country's suspension of U.S. copyrights.

"Big Data -- it's really a trend that has happened as a result of digitizing so much more of the information that we all have already and that we all produce. Machine data, sensor data, all the social media activities and mobile devices are all contributing to the proliferation of data. It's added a lot more data to our universe, but the real opportunity is to look for small elements of small datasets and look for combinations and patterns within the data."

Britain's crusade against online pornography has ramped up. Prime minister David Cameron recently gave a speech saying the pornography was "corroding childhood," and declared that every household in the UK should have pornography blocked by Internet service providers -- unless, that is, the homeowners specifically opt in to pornographic content, which seems like it could make for some awkward dinnertime discussions. In this TechNewsWorld podcast, we talk with Internet law expert Abhilash Nair, who joined us from the UK to break down the situation.