ReadWriteWeb

Yesterday SMART@znmeb (SMART stands for "social media analytics research toolkit"), a SUSE Linux appliance created by Ed Borasky, added sentiment analysis to its set of features. The toolkit now includes texttir, a sentiment analysis package created in the statistical programming language R. SMART@znmeb includes other open source tools that include data mining, dashboarding and data visualization.

Borasky says textir is the first open source sentiment analysis library he's found that he thinks may actually work. "Most of the vendors sell a sentiment analysis tool of some kind or another, and the customers that have tested multiple tools spend a lot of time trying to figure out why they give different answers," he says. He also cautions that sentiment analysis is vulnerable to spam and other gaming tactics and requires a large investment in hardware.

Last week we took a look at several business analytics related predictions from analysts from Forrester and Gartner. This year's analytics product announcements are off to an interesting start, even if they're not confirming those predictions yet. The main trend we see in the three announcements we're covering this week is integration. Oracle is announcing a new module for integrating with SAP, RJMetrics is integrating with MongoDB and Jaspersoft is setting itself up for easier integrations.

Keeping up with every RSS feed item and tweet is hard enough for anybody, let alone someone trying to run a business. That's why at the end of every week, ReadWriteBiz rounds up the week's most important tech news and insights for small and medium-sized businesses.

The Web conferencing service DimDim was acquired by Salesforce this week, marking the beginning the end of an affordable service favored by small businesses. DimDim users were notified that their free accounts would be disabled by March 11, 2011, as Salesforce prepares to integrate the technology into Chatter, their real-time collaboration product. Our own Alex Williams used the occasion to discuss the inherent risk in using a free service and outlined some of the logistical details of DimDim's impending demise.

Data Day Austin will be held January 29 at the Norris Conference Center in Austin, TX and include classes on Cassandra and Hadoop and other big data subjects. The event is hosted by Austin Hadoop/BigData Meetup, GeekAustin and Riptano and will include workshops taught by developers from Argia, IBM, InfoChimps and Riptano. Admission is $50.

As part of its Predicts 2011 series, Gartner has made four predictions for the near future of business intelligence and analytics. Also, Forrester analyst James Kobielus has written a lengthy article outlining his own predictions for business analytics in Information Week. Both see analytics being embedded in more business processes, particularly in collaborative and social software.

We just looked at some potentially disruptive technologies that fall outside the usual domain of the enterprise.

In this post, we'll look at some of the more near-term challenges facing the enterprise as seen by Constellation Research Group. In the first report from this newly formed consulting organization, co-founder R "Ray" Wang lists a set of five core disruptive technologies: social, mobile, cloud, analytics and unified communications. Together, these technologies could form a working definition of "enterprise 2.0." I'd add next-generation network and storage technology to that list and perhaps swap analytics with "big data," of which analytics is a subset, but these five serve as a good starting point.

In Constellation's Research Outlook For 2011, the consulting group's analyst team identifies generating business value as the core issue for enterprises taking advantage of its five listed core enterprise 2.0 technologies. To this end, the report identifies three main challenges for decision makers.

InfoQ has released a video of Twitter's Kevin Weil speaking at Strange Loop earlier this year on how the company uses NoSQL. Weil is quick to point out that Twitter is heavily dependent on MySQL. However, Twitter does employ NoSQL solutions for many purposes for which MySQL isn't ideal. According to Weil, Twitter users generate 12 terrabytes of data a day - about four petabytes per year. And that amount is multiplying every year. Read on for our notes on Weil's talk.

As 2010 draws to a close we're taking a look at a few cloud startups that show promise and that we haven't covered on ReadWriteCloud.

Netuitive is an automated, cloud-based IT monitoring system for both traditional and virtualized IT environments. It applies predictive analytics to IT management by using algorithms to determine the "normal" state of various systems and then issuing alerts whenever a system deviates from the norm. For example, if your ERP system suddenly starts processing more transactions than usual, Netuitive can notify the appropriate admin. The idea is to catch problems before an outage occurs.

Socialtext just released version 4.5.2 of its enterprise social media suite to hosted customers. The new version features several new features including an OpenSocial widget builder for both developers and non-developers, Google Analytics integration and a new HTML5-based mobile interface. The new features fit into the ongoing trends of putting development tools into the hands of non-developers, the increased role of analytics and HTML5 making its way into the enterprise.

Mashery, a provider of API services, recently conducted a survey of attendees of its Business of APIs conferences in London, New York and San Francisco.The survey found that 64% of respondents cite "fostering third-party innovation" through APIs as a high priority for 2011. This was the most popular goal for API providers. The second most popular goal was "getting on as many devices as possible," which 41% of respondents cited as a high priority.

Mashery also announced new analytics capabilities this month, which will help API providers measure the business value of APIs as developers use those APIs to spread web services to multiple devices. Disclosure: Mashery is a sponsor of the main ReadWriteWeb site.