We will hold a Webinar on online market intelligence for the hotel industry on Wed, Oct 21. We will have a guest speaker, Miguel Gonzalez, from Iberostar Hotels and Resorts with us. Miguel is responsible for Online Sales Europe and will talk about the experience Iberostar gained with using an online market intelligence solution for the hospitality industry.
In the second part of the Webinar I will talk about the needs that are addressed in the solution and how hotel chains can benefit from a systematic market observation and assessment of their own competitiveness in the marketplace. In transparent markets such as online travel this becomes an important aspect of a successful online market strategy.
Please join our webinar by registering now.
Lead the Industry with Hotel Online Market Intelligence
Oct 21, 9:00 AM PDT, 12:00 NOON EDT, 6:00 PM CEDT
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I would like to invite you to join the following upcoming webinar on integrating online market intelligence with pricing solutions and sales forecasting. This webinar will be aired on October 20 and is a joint event with colleagues from AMR Research and Symphony Metreo. I think this webinar is of particular interest to all pricing and revenue managers who are working in highly dynamic markets and who experience competitive pressure due to transparent markets and customer flexibility to substitute products with comparable options.
Please register now to participate in this webinar.
Integrating Online Market Intelligence with Pricing Solutions and Sales Forecasting
Oct 20, 9:00 AM PDT, 12:00 NOON EDT, 6:00 PM CEDT
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I recently read this quite amusing article on telegraph.co.uk (you might have read it on some other news site). Dr. Tracy Alloway, a psychologist, has claimed that using Facebook enhances intelligence while using Twitter may have the opposite effect. That is due to the training of the working memory while maintaing one’s Facebook pages. In contrast, sending tweets will reduce your working memory abilities, which also holds true for sending SMS messages. Having about 300 mio Facebook users, maybe about 4.5 million twitter users and about 3.5 billion mobile phone users, mankind is clearly doomed. That’s another take on Web Intelligence.
More seriously for those who are interested in the topic of intelligence (as in cognition) and Web 2.0 I recommend to look into the subject matter of collective intelligence. Web 2.0 lives from sharing and collaboration. Programs can use this information pool generated by contributors to distill new knowledge and to mimic intelligent behavior.
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For all those interested in a more academic approach towards Web Intelligence I recommend to attend the upcoming WI 2009 conference in Milano later this September. WI 2009 will be co-located with the 2009 IEEE/ACM/WIC International Conference on Inteligent Agent Tecnology (IAT2009). The conference will take place at the University of Milano Bicocca, September 15-18, 2009
You can have a look at the program. Program chair is Ricardo Baeza Yates from Yahoo! Research., Barcelona, Spain, well known for his work on information retrieval. On of the invited speakers is Stefano Ceri (Politecnico di Milano, Italy) who will speak on “Search Computing”.
This is how the WI community defines Web Intelligence:
Web Intelligence (WI) is a new research paradigm aimed at exploring the fundamental interactions between AI-engineering and Advanced Information Technology (AIT) on the next generation of Web systems, services, and etc. Here AI-engineering is a general term that refers to a new area, slightly beyond traditional AI: brain informatics, human level AI, intelligent agents, social network intelligence and classical areas, such as knowledge engineering, representation, planning, and discovery and data mining are examples. AIT includes wireless networks, ubiquitous devices, social networks, and data/knowledge grids, as well as cloud computing. WI research seeks to explore the most critical technology and engineering to bring in the next generation Web systems.
[Source: WI09 Homepage]
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The other day I spoke with Andy Bitterer from Gartner on potentials of Web Intelligence. Andy is a research VP with Gartner focusing on BI, data integration and data quality, with expertise in analytical applications, data warehousing and information management. This is his full profile. You can follow his tweets right here.
When I first asked him how will the market for Web Intelligence develop he replied “Which market?”. So obviously “Web Intelligence” is not a category for Andy which could be clearly nailed down. Instead it seems to be floating between different niches somewhere in the area of data integration and data augmentation. He did have a good intuition though on the value that Web Intelligence can deliver and even produced some instant ideas of where to apply these concepts.
We also discussed the main barriers for this market to take off. Still it seems that the word has not spread yet. Most people simply don’t know what is possible. So we will work on that! Maybe we even have an opportunity to speak at a Gartner event. We’ll keep you posted.
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BeyeNetwork published an interview with me. You can listen to the spotlight feature here. In this interview I explain how web intelligence fits into the overall business intelligence picture. The interview is also available as podcast. You can subsribe to the BeyeNetwork audio podcast by clicking on this link.
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Today I came across the concept of “Management Excellence” as promoted by Oracle. Frank Buytendijk runs a blog on that subject matter. The management process of strategy-to-success (S2S) is defining a value chain across the business processes. The chain consists of the following steps: understand the stakeholder environment, scan the market, strategize about the business model, manage the business plan, run the business operations, and provide feedback on all levels by measuring the business results.
What strikes me is that the second step scan the market actually reads like a blueprint for online market intelligence:
Understanding market dynamics is the first crucial step in evaluating strategic alternatives and to define the right strategic goals. New products and services are introduced, new competitors enter the market, consumer bahavior is changing, and business pace is increasing.
[Source: Journal of Management Excellence, 1(1), June 2008]
Lixto’s online market intelligence solutions exactly addresses these issues: combining external information (market intelligence) and internal information (business intelligence) to define the right strategic goals.
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Gartner today released a new report by Anthony Bradley and David Gootzit on their view on the enterprise mashup world. The authors coined the term mashup enablement which I think pretty much characterizes what Lixto is providing with its technology. Fortunately also Gartner has identified Lixto as one of the players in this field.
The end result of mashup enablement is to expose valuable system capabilities in a Weboriented “mashable” format to expand the “community” of potential mashup sources. Several vendors such as Connotate, Denodo Technologies, Kapow Technologies, and Lixto focus their offerings on this critical layer. Typically, vendors focusing on mashup enablement don’t provide all the required elements for an enterprise mashup environment, but to succeed with enterprise mashups, enterprises will need mashup enablement capabilities.
[Source: Gartner Report ID G00168619]
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Cloud Computing is a powerful concept to handle highly dynamic work loads. Due to the fact that virtually unlimited resources are available computational expensive processes can be highly distributed. Moreover, resources are only paid as they are used. This model fits very well with Web Intelligence, as large amounts of web data can be accessed at the same time. All indiviudal observations are independ and can therefore be processed in parallel. This results in a truly scalable process.
To achieve this virtual infinite scaling of its solution, Lixto has introduced a new software architecture into the latest Version 5 solution for its server-side products that supports Cloud Computing resources. This allows for linear scaling in relation to the number of processing units available in a cluster of servers. The software supports the use of Cloud Computing resources such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The server architecture also introduced intelligent load-distribution amongst the available processing units resulting in more efficient resource utilization and reduced management overhead.
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AMR Research will post a new research report on Lixto’s Online Market Intelligence (OMI) solution on its portal.
“AMR states that Lixto Online Market Intelligence(OMI) provides supply chain leaders with the exact information that consumers examine during their purchase processes. Armed with competitor offerings, market trends, product availability, brand positioning, and pricing developments, OMI users can more effectively influence the information consumer.”
said C.J Wehlage, Research Director High Tech, in the June 2009 AMR Research Report, “Information Consumers Drive High-Tech Supply Chains to Capture Competitive Insights”.
Customers of AMR Research can access the full report here: Information Consumers Drive High-Tech Supply Chains To Capture Competitive Insights
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