Articles and News

Some form of textual analysis has become a standard feature among services that offer summaries of large volumes of documents.  Natural Language Processing (NLP), deep learning and neural nets are buzz words we often hear.  But when you look under the hood, most of the functionality is based on keywords, word counts and rigid taxonomies. …

Guest Author – Tom Marsh, CTO of Boulder Equity Analytics. At Boulder Equity Analytics (BEA), “Our mission is to build an intelligent, enriched and fully interactive database from all the publicly available reports to improve the productivity and insight of the analyst covering an industry sector.”  We call it O.A.K.L.E.Y, collaborative artificial intelligence, a 2nd…

Guest Author – Tom Marsh, CTO of Boulder Equity Analytics AI, artificial intelligence, has been through several boom and bust cycles.  Today the pronouncements are everywhere with AI coming soon to everything from medicine to your underwear.  For those of us laboring in the dark for years, it feels good to be the most popular…

KDD Analytics is offering free access to its annually updated ZIP Pointe™ Market Sizer. ZIP Pointe™ Market Sizer offers a quick and comprehensive way for B2B marketers to estimate the relative potential size of US private sector markets.  Offered as Tableau dashboards, ZIP Pointe™ Market Sizer is based on the most current US Census data…

As we saw in an earlier article, the Information Services industry is the most “intensive” user of information technology (IT).  In 2015, the Information Services industry invested (per worker) over 8 times has much as the average and nearly 300 times as much as the least intensive industry. This is not just a single year…

“It is sometimes very difficult to decide whether trend is best modeled as deterministic or stochastic, and the decision is an important part of the science – and art – of building forecasting models.” ― Diebold,  Elements of Forecasting, 1998   A times series can have a very strong trend. Visually, we often can see it.…

According to US government data (US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA)), Healthcare industry investment in computers, software and communications equipment has grown by a compound annual rate (CAGR) of 6% since 2000.  For the rest of the private (non-government) US market, such investment has grown at a slightly lower rate of 5% per year. Interactive…

Investment in information technology by US businesses varies dramatically across industries.  On a per worker basis, the top industry invested over 300 times that invested by the bottom industry in 2015. Why does information technology investment per worker matter? While information technology (IT) investment per worker has grown over time across all industries, there clearly…

“84% of B2B buyers are now starting the purchasing process with a referral, and peer recommendations are influencing more than 90% of all B2B buying decisions.” (Harvard Business Review) Wow! Why are buyers shying away from salespeople?  According to this same article, salespeople “tend to prioritize a sales agenda over solving a customer’s problem.” To…

Data availability can limit the quality of B2B prospect scores.  We are not talking about sample size, which is important.  But about the characteristics of the businesses the prospect score is meant to rank. A client’s customer was using an “off the shelf” application for prospect scoring.  This application used a very limited set of…