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„How far is Cluj Napoca from Brașov?”. „Where do I found the first oil station on my way from Brașov to Cluj Napoca?”. You may type those phrase fast, but certainly you can say it even faster. And when you`re on the go, speed is what you`re looking for. As communication needs to evolve more quickly, Google invests in development of new technologies to improve the experience of web search on mobile devices. Voice Search allows users to search on the Internet as easy as talking on the phone. The application uses a vocal technology to transform spoken words into text and then performs the query on the Google search engine like text would be entered manually. All data are processed through technologies hosted in the cloud, not on the mobile phone, which means that the application is fast and easy to use.

Business Intelligence is often defined as the array of processes and technologies that turn information into insight and action, meaning the effective application of the broad suite of data analysis tools and analytical approaches to effectively understand, predict, optimize, and prepare to take action upon current and future business activity.

Google often experimenting with new functions throughout its services portfolio. Although such features are rarely open for regular users, this time we are dealing with an exception to the rule.

Google has begun offering more details about the possibility of integrating Gmail messages, related to the searched keywords, among the results to a common search. Thankfully, personal emails aren't arbitrary slips through those results, so that can not be seen by everyone. But how does it works this new Google`s functionality? It is quite simple.

Advanced data visualization is based on the fact that 70% of the human sensory receptors are dedicated to vision while the other four senses share the remaining 30%. In addition, our brains are much more effective recognizing shapes trends and patterns than analyzing spreadsheets or tables full of numbers. There are close to a dozen applications that fall into this category from companies around the globe. The leading ones are growing their acceptance at a very fast rate. Five of them have made it to Gartner Research's 2012 Business Intelligence Magic Quadrant Report (including MicroStrategy, the largest independent provider of Business Intelligence solutions in the world) and they’re going to stay there for the foreseeable future.

„If you're not ready to ride it, you'll be swept away by a tsunami of change that will fundamentally alter the world. And mobile computing is a tipping point technology for the information revolution, a revolution that began with writing on clay tablets, and continued through the invention of the printing press and computers. Mobile will be the catalyst that brings society the most dramatic changes of the Information Revolution”.

Cloud computing has certainly disrupted the way how to make business today. And that because it offers to entrepreneurs the opportunity to start or grow a business without having to heavily invest in hardware and software solutions, and also in an army of people to maintain them. So, the money saved can be allocated to those activity`s segments that add value to the company.

There are many benefits of using cloud computing, all ultimately meaning substantial cost reductions:

Scalability: You can scale your business’ storage needs seamlessly rather than having to go out and purchase expensive programs or hardware.

Automatic Updates: There is no need for IT to worry about paying for your future updates in terms of software and hardware.

Remote Access: employees, partners and clients can access, and update information wherever they are, rather than having to run back the office.

Reduced costs: Cloud computing reduces your hardware (computers), software (all those downloaded programs), networking management and overall IT expenses. In addition, with cloud computing, you pay for what you use.

Disaster Relief: With your company’s data safely stored on secure data centers instead of your server room, losing power due to earthquakes or a construction worker cutting the power lines, you are back at work as long as you have an internet connection.

Ease of Implementation: Implementing cloud services is as easy as, well, setting up a Google+ or Facebook page, or an email account.

Response Time: Cloud computing accomplishes a better response time in most cases than your standard server and hardware.

Even playing field for small firms: This allows small companies to complete more effectively with some of the larger businesses, balancing the playing field. Your small business can utilize the same tools that multinational companies use and can do this because with cloud computing, your business will only pay for what you need.

Lego: Cloud apps allow your business to select what your company needs, when you need it and use it how you want to.

Over-capacity of a cloud, while an underestimation of the cost to people, may seem a bit misplaced for many conservative type managers. But the trend, globally, is to migrate to the cloud, and not to your own servers. And, from this perspective, the financial benefits are not insignificant. And, after all, the essential role of a manager is to lower costs and increase profits.

MicroStrategy, the largest independent provider of Business Intelligence solutions in the world, just launched the new 9.3 version of its business intelligence solution. The update enhances the platform's Visual Insight user environment, improves to its ability to handle 'Big Data', and incorporates advanced analytics from R — an open source programming language for statistical computing.

The most important upgrades in MicroStrategy 9.3 are centered on Visual Insight, a data visualization module, intuitive and accessible to business users who aren't schooled in query languages or statistical analysis. New geospatial density maps use color coding to represent geospatial concentrations, such as customers in proximity to retail stores. Image layouts let analysts depict data in context, showing, for example, sales by region, customer traffic by department in a store, or productivity on a manufacturing production line. New network diagrams show relationships among items, such website pages visited and checkout results on an e-commerce site.

R-based computational models within standard MicroStrategy reports and dashboards

As the list of data visualization possibilities grows it can become harder for users to pick the best approach, so the Visual Insight upgrade automatically suggests the best-fit visualization option. Easing access to the latest data sources, MicroStrategy 9.3 also features a new integration to Hadoop clusters. Where the BI vendor previously integrated with the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), a new Thrift connector taps into Apache Hive, which is the Hadoop framework's data warehousing component.

Access to big data fuels interest in big data analytics, so MicroStrategy 9.3 greatly expands on the 300 analytical functions the platform already supported with new support for the more than 5,000 computations available within the R open-source statistical programming language. The R language is heavily used by data scientists who also tend to store their large-scale data sets on Hadoop. The 9.3 release lets users invoke R-based computational models and visualizations within standard MicroStrategy reports and dashboards. The upgrade supports R through use of Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML) language and through direct embedding of R algorithms as MicroStrategy analytical functions.

Self-service dashboarding and System Manager administrative console

Other upgrades in MicroStrategy 9.3 include self-service dashboarding and administrative improvements. The vendor said design improvements make it possible for business users to develop dashboards in fewer than 10 minutes without help from IT. The dashboarding module is newly flexible, according to MicroStrategy, supporting both multiple data sets and multiple data visualizations on a single page. Previously it was difficult to tap multiple data sources and apply multiple data visualizations with a single dashboard.

Automation is the theme behind upgrades to the MicroStrategy 9.3 Systems Manager administrative console. For instance, the multiple steps in system restarts, or cache flushing routines, or data warehouse loading processes can be programmed with a new administrative workflow tool. Using a new scripting language and process tool, administrators can automate any series of steps that previously had to be executed manually. The tool promises to save huge amounts of administrative time and effort, according to MicroStrategy, and it can integrated with third-party tools to monitor administrative routines.

The first step to MicroStrategy Cloud

The product was revealed at the company's MicroStrategy World conference, being held in Amsterdam, along with its Facebook-focused product Wisdom Professional. MicroStrategy 9.3 will make its first appearance as part of MicroStrategy Cloud, which bundles the BI platform, databases, and data-integration capabilities as a Web-based service, under the name MicroStrategy Cloud Express. With Express, users can build, schedule, and deliver dashboards and reports to any number of users, but subscribers pay only for the services consumed each month and they can upgrade to the Platform service level as needed.

Sources: MicroStrategy, MicroStrategy Official Blog, The Wall Street Journal, mobilemarketingmagazine.com

The success of an organization depends on the method and speed of responding to changing market conditions. Therefore, Business Intelligence is often defined as the array of processes and technologies that turn information into insight and action, to effectively understand, predict, optimize, and prepare to take action upon current and future business activity.

BI applications find their way into a vast range of business areas including CRM, ERP, financial management, etc. They employ technologies such as: data mining, text mining, geographic information systems, language translation, statistical analysis, predictive modeling, simulation, and advanced visualization.

After years of data center growth and IT evolution, many businesses are left living with complex, overgrown computing platforms that are chronically underutilized. These systems take up valuable data center floor space, depreciate quickly, consume large amounts of power and cooling resources, and can cause management headaches. Plus, this rigid architecture makes it hard for an IT organization to quickly adapt or respond to changing business demands, and it makes it difficult to share resources throughout an enterprise, in order to increase utilization and improve efficiency.

By providing resources as a service, cloud computing addresses these fundamental data center challenges. Some examples of applications include software as a service (SaaS), Customer Relationship Management, file storage, file synchronization and file back-up. It's now possible for businesses to have their own private cloud, which incorporates specific services and is only accessible to specific people.

Earlier this month, Google Docs received a number of updates and new features to help improve user experience. Now Google has focused its attention on Presentations and introduced a new feature called Discussions for easy collaboration with others, and more than 50 new features.We’ve all been frustrated by technology that gets slower, less reliable and less useful over time. But Google Apps is different. It actually gets better week after week, without patches or updates to manage. People can absorb this stream of innovation without being distracted from their workflow.