The Creator's Code: Thinking Your Way to a Million Dollar Biz

The Creator’s Code teaches readers how they can find and develop their million dollar business idea.



The Creator's Code: Thinking Your Way to a Million Dollar Biz

ACI Worldwide Named a Leader in IDC Marketscape: Financial Crimes Management 2012 Vendor Assessment

ACI Worldwide Named a Leader in IDC MarketScape: Financial Crimes Management 2012 Vendor Assessment

Proactive Risk Manager™ Recognized for Real-Time Pattern Recognition Abilities, Customizable Alerts, and Reporting Options

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

(New York, N.Y. - March 21, 2012) - ACI Worldwide (Nasdaq: ACIW), a leading international provider of payment systems, today announced it has been ranked in the “Leader” category for financial crimes management by leading industry analyst firm IDC Financial Insights in the recent IDC MarketScape report, Financial Crimes Management 2012 Vendor Assessment.

ACI’s ranking is based on its flagship fraud detection product, Proactive Risk Manager. IDC Financial Insights stated, “Proactive Risk Manager's greatest strength is its integration with ACI's other payment products, particularly its BASE24-eps card processing system and its MTS wire and ACH systems. This integration enables Proactive Risk Manager to operate almost entirely in real time. Real-time alerting and decisioning continues to be a primary selling point, reflecting the product's roots in the card market.”

Shesh Gorur, vice president & product line manager, ACI Worldwide, said, “We are delighted to be recognized as a Leader by IDC in this report. Our goal is to provide a product that is both flexible and powerful, supporting our customers’ current needs while allowing them to react to the evolving world of payments fraud.”

As defined by the report, financial crime management includes the IT solutions that anticipate, detect, analyze, and prevent fraudulent transactions, money laundering, and employee financial misconduct through the use of one or more of the following: decision trees, neural networks, predictive scoring models, network link analysis, scenario matching, data mining, case management, and entity and device profiling.

Proactive Risk Manager is a comprehensive enterprise fraud detection solution to help card issuers, merchants, acquirers and financial institutions combat financial crime. By monitoring account activity across all lines of business, Proactive Risk Manager enables users to see more fraudulent activity in a shorter amount of time, minimizing losses and helping to preserve the customer relationship. Proactive Risk Manager combines the power of predictive analytics and expertly defined rules for fast, accurate and flexible response to the evolving and growing nature of fraud and money laundering.

For more information on Proactive Risk Manager please visitwww.aciworldwide.com/proactiveriskmanager.

Adobe Digital Marketinng Suite Tackles Big Data with Predictive Marketing

Adobe Digital Marketing Suite Tackles Big Data with Predictive Marketing

For immediate release

Smarter Suite Helps Digital Marketers Turn Big Data into a Big Opportunity

SALT LAKE CITY, Adobe Digital Marketing Summit — March 21, 2012 — Adobe Systems Incorporated(Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced new predictive marketing capabilities within the Adobe® Digital Marketing Suite, reducing the complexity of uncovering hidden behavioral patterns in big data. These advancements will help marketers more quickly sort through an increasing amount of data to find the most impactful insights as well as leverage vast amounts of historical data to predict future results. Adobe is putting predictive analytics and more intelligent, forward-looking decision-making into the hands of digital marketers.

“In the early days of digital marketing, analytics emerged to tell us what happened and, as analytics got better, why it happened.  Then solutions emerged to make it easier to act on data and optimize results,” said Brad Rencher, senior vice president and general manager, Digital Marketing Business, Adobe. “But the sheer amount of available data presents a challenge to quickly extract insights and act while those insights are still valuable. The new predictive capabilities within the Digital Marketing Suite address these challenges and help marketers turn big data into a big opportunity.”

Adobe runs massively parallel software-as-a-service offerings through approximately 23,500 servers and networked devices in 19 data center co-location sites. Adobe captures more than six trillion transactions per year for its 5,000+ digital marketing customers. Collectively, these transactions represent more than 27 petabytes of data.

“Historically all Web analytics have reflected data from the past which has been to a certain extent like driving a car using only the rear view mirror,” said Ken Seiff, executive vice president, Direct and Omni Channel, Brooks Brothers. “The new predictive marketing capabilities from Adobe are helping us forecast revenue and identify the most powerful levers our team can pull to have the most likely positive effect on the site's revenue. These new capabilities are both simple and fast,and for the first time we can be marketers using data in a manner that allows us to drive while facing the road ahead.”

Adobe’s predictive marketing capabilities enable marketers to improve a variety of digital marketing strategies, including personalized engagement, multi-channel campaign execution, and media monetization. Specifically, digital marketers can:

·         Change key metrics in various what-if scenarios to see how those changes will potentially impact business outcomes, such as orders and revenue

·         Forecast campaign results across search, social and display, and develop optimized media mix models, generating higher returns on multi-channel advertising initiatives

·         Identify leading indicators that point to upcoming risks and anomalies and adjust marketing strategies before a problem occurs or to take advantage of an opportunity

·         Identify interactions (leaving a comment, reviewing a product, etc.) with the highest probability to convert

·         Move from testing content to prescribing content based on what the predictive model predicts will be best

The predictive marketing capabilities of the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite are now delivered through the following products and services:

·         The virtual analyst, the predictive modeling engine for the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, intelligently identifies metrics with anomalies that need further review, forecasts those metrics for up to three weeks, and performs a correlation analysis to find other metrics that contributed to the anomaly

·         The advanced algorithms from the acquisition of Efficient Frontier are used to forecast campaign results and develop optimized media mix models, which may be leveraged to generate higher returns on multi-channel advertising initiatives

·         A predictive marketing dashboard allows marketers to change key metrics in various what-if scenarios to see how those changes will potentially impact business outcomes, such as orders and revenue

Customers interested in these predictive marketing capabilities can contact an Adobe account manager. Virtual analyst is currently in development and expected to be available later this year. All other capabilities are currently available.

About the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite
The Adobe Digital Marketing Suite offers an integrated and open platform for online business optimization, a strategy for using customer insight to drive innovation throughout the business and enhance marketing efficiency. The Suite consists of integrated applications to collect and unleash the power of customer insight to optimize customer acquisition, conversion and retention efforts as well as the creation and distribution of content. For example, using the Suite, marketers can identify the most effective marketing strategies and ad placements as well as create relevant, personalized and consistent customer experiences across digital marketing channels, such as onsite, display, email, social, video and mobile. The Suite enables marketers to make quick adjustments, automate certain customer interactions and better maximize marketing ROI, which, ultimately, can positively impact the bottom line.

About Adobe Systems Incorporated
Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.

News Release from Adobe

Adobe Technology Powering Massive Growth in Digital Publishing

For immediate release

Data from Nearly 1,500 Tablet Publications and 600 Publishers Shows Latest Trends in Tablet Readership

BARCELONA, Spain — Feb. 27, 2012 — At Mobile World Congress, Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced that more than 16 million digital publications were powered by Adobe® Digital Publishing Suite across tablets over the last year. The company also released key insights about digital magazine and newspaper application usage, based on anonymous data aggregated from nearly 600 publishers worldwide who have created around 1,500 tablet publications using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. In addition, Adobe announced new innovations that add more enterprise-class functionality and extensibility to the Digital Publishing Suite, helping organizations drive digital revenue and brand engagement through digital publications. Key enhancements include new in-app merchandising, provisioning of targeted content based on user role, and accelerated app creation.

The anonymous, aggregate data is derived from publications delivered using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite and shows shifts in reading patterns, willingness to pay for tablet applications, accelerated purchase funnel and advertising engagement. Tablets are driving new revenue for publishers as consumers pay for digital media content. Business publishers are also using tablet applications to drive awareness of their brands as well as the purchase of goods and services. Specific data points include:

Sixty-eight percent of readers worldwide currently pay for digital magazines and newspapers built with the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. This is made up of single issue purchases (15 percent), subscriptions (26 percent) and bundles of print and digital issues (27 percent).

Readers are highly engaged with both editorial and advertising content. Every fifth page view in a Digital Publishing Suite magazine app is an advertisement. Interactivity, which includes Web views, videos, slide shows, audio clips, image sequences, hyperlinks and other overlays can also have a profound impact on a reader’s digital content consumptionand engagement, with readers interacting with nearly half (48 percent) of all interactive features in Digital Publishing Suite apps. Out of the variety of interactive overlays included in applications, Web views and videos are the two types most frequently accessed by readers.

Over half (56 percent) of readers spend between 25 minutes to 2.5 hours a month reading their digital titles. Time spent consuming content has increased 70 percent over the last six months, which can be attributed to more sophisticated and engaging content as well as the continued adoption of tablets. Consumers tend to open a Digital Publishing Suite application up to five times per month on average, and nine percent of readers spend more than five hours per month reading digital titles, which suggests that they are frequently engaging on a tablet with the brands they love.

“We saw 16 million digital publications downloaded over the last 12 months, with no signs of fatigue,” said Zeke Koch, senior director of product management, Digital Publishing, Adobe. “As digital issues grow significantly, Adobe will continue to fuel this evolution by providing innovative features that allow publishers and corporations worldwide to drive digital revenue, accelerated readership and purchase of content.”

Publishers like Rodale Inc. and Active Interest Media and companies like Sotheby’s have recently published magazine, merchandising and customer loyalty applications. Similarly, enterprises now have the opportunity to add digital content into their mobile marketing mix by creating a broad range of digital publications using Digital Publishing Suite, including sales and marketing collateral, corporate communications, as well as brand loyalty, customer acquisition and customer retention materials.

“Adobe Digital Publishing Suite has allowed us to amaze and satisfy our readers with technological innovation that they crave and expect,” said Anthony Cerretani, deputy editor and digital director, Backpacker Magazine. “We've been able to integrate interactive maps, adventure videos from all over the world, and touch-point-powered content that inspires and enables our readers to experience outdoor adventure in incredibly dynamic ways. They’re even contributing multimedia to our editions on a regular basis. With the flexibility of Adobe’s tools, we’re finding new ways to optimize the experience every month.”

“As we focus on reaching our increasingly global client base, Adobe Digital Publishing Suite provides an elegant platform and enjoyable user experience,” says Amy Todd Middleton, worldwide director of marketing, Sotheby’s. “Our Sotheby’s catalogue app combines the visual aesthetic of our print catalogues in a new convenient digital format. Analytics show that people are spending more time browsing our content offline in a more interactive environment. With zoom, original videos, and 360 degree photography, it is a great alternative to being in the room with a work of art.”

The Adobe Digital Publishing Suite is the market leader in the delivery of digital publications and includes robust functionality that enables traditional media and business publishers to quickly create content that drives greater digital revenue. Innovative features include:

Restricted Distribution – Publishers can provision specific content to a variety of customer, reader or member groups within one branded application.

Custom Notifications – Customers can leverage in-app notifications to cross promote and market availability of publications and other content. Already embraced by select Condé Nast publications, publishers and brand organizations can use custom notifications as in-app marketing to drive demand for magazine issues.

HTML5 Support – Publishers such as The New Yorker and National Geographic are using HTML5 within their digital publications for in-app custom store fronts, inline content, and complete articles. Similarly, advertisers are including HTML5 within interactive advertisements to drive consumer engagement.

Other enterprise-class features include Direct Entitlement (publishers can provide digital content to existing subscribers in one click), Analytics (Digital Publishing provides both Base Analytics as well as the ability to integrate with an existing SiteCatalyst® account) and Custom Content Viewer (publishers can create a Content Viewer for multiple devices that that supports full-screen viewing of content).

About Adobe Digital Publishing Suite

Digital Publishing Suite is a set of turnkey hosted services and viewer technology that tightly integrates with Adobe Creative Suite® 5.5 products. Using Digital Publishing Suite in combination with Adobe InDesign® CS5.5, allows traditional media publishers, corporate organizations, ad agencies as well as individual freelance designers and small design firms to publish, distribute, monetize and optimize a new class of innovative digital magazines, newspapers, ads and corporate publications on leading tablets including the Apple iPad, Kindle Fire, Barnes & Noble Nook, Samsung Galaxy and other Android™ tablets. The Digital Publishing Suite includes Enterprise, Professional and Single Editions.

Pricing and Availability

To access product information including features and pricing, visit www.adobe.com/products/digitalpublishingsuite. A list of partners in the Digital Publishing Suite worldwide reseller network is available at www.adobe.com/products/digital-publishing-suite-family/buying-guide-resellers.

For a list of customer apps, please visit the Digital Publishing Suite gallery at blogs.adobe.com/digitalpublishinggallery/. Please visit the Adobe Digital Publishing Blog at blogs.adobe.com/digitalpublishing/ for additional information.

About Adobe Systems Incorporated

Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.

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Big Data

Excerpt from an article in The New York Times
Monday, February 20, 2012

I.B.M.: Big Data, Bigger Patterns 

By QUENTIN HARDY It's not just about Big Data. For the big players in enterprise technology algorithms, it's about finding big patterns beyond the data itself.

The explosion of online life and cheap computer hardware have made it possible to store immense amounts of unstructured information, like e-mails or Internet clickstreams, then search the stored information to find some trend that can be exploited. The real trick is to do this cost-effectively. Companies doing this at a large scale look for similarities between one field and another, hoping for a common means of analysis.

When it comes to algorithms, "if I can do a power grid, I can do water supply," said Steve Mills, I.B.M.'s senior vice president for software and systems. Even traffic, which like water and electricity has value when it flows effectively, can reuse some of the same algorithms. Mr. Mills, speaking at a Goldman Sachs technology conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, called it "leveraging the cost structure of new mathematics."

That kind of cross-pollination is reminiscent of the way Wall Street, starting in the 1990s, hired astrophysicists and theoretical mathematicians to design arcane financial products. Now the cost of computing has come down so much that it is useful to bring such talent to other industries. I.B.M., Mr. Mills said, is now the largest employer of Ph.D. mathematicians in the world, bringing their talents to things like oil exploration and medicine. "On the side we're doing astrophysics, genomics, proteomics," he said.