The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is one of the more underrated Texan singer-songwriters on the scene these days, Adam Carroll. If there is a most-played song on my iPod over the past five years it's no doubt Carroll's "Ol' Milwaukee's Best:"

The Data Mining Group, a vendor-led consortium involved in "developing standards for statistical and data mining models," has announced the general availability of Version 4.0 of the Predictive Model Markup Language.

 

This new version of PMML is a major update of PMML Version 3.2, which was released May 2007.

 

 

The idea behind the product is to make it "straightforward" to develop a model on one system using one application and deploy the model on another system using another application. Group officials say it's supported by over 20 vendors and organizations. 

 

"PMML turns the deployment and practical application of predictive models within any existing IT infrastructure into reality. Without PMML, it would take months for models to be integrated and deployed via custom code or proprietary processes," says Cris Payne, Senior Analytics Scientist for XO Communications, Inc.

 

 

This version offers support for multiple models, which includes support for both segmented models and ensembles of models. Group officials say it also has "improved support for preprocessing data," designed to help with simplifying the deployment of models.

 

Oh, and 4.0 also has what Group officials term "survival models." In case you were worried about that.

 

"PMML simplifies the deployment of analytic models," says Robert Grossman, Chair of the Data Mining Group. "With PMML, deploying a new model is as easy as reading an XML file."

...

Jafza officials have announced that "with the help of FVC," a distributor in the Middle East and North Africa for Google Enterprise solutions, Jafza has implemented Google Apps, including the e-mail product.

 

Jafza is a flagship operation of Economic Zones World, a developer and operator of economic zones, technology, logistics and industrial parks under the Dubai World Group. The move is to provide a "standard and compatible communication channel between Jafza and its customers," company officials say.

Using Google's cloud computing capabilities, the product could be "implemented immediately, accommodating hundreds of new users without major IT infrastructure changes," Jafza officials maintain. 

 

According to Saji Mathew, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer for Corporate Information Technology at EZW, "a challenge for our business was the use of personal e-mail IDs by some customer employees for official communication."

Company officials saw the need for the change, as the company "sends out official announcements and transactional messages to its customers regularly... to audiences ranging from small businesses to large enterprises," and needed "a messaging system that was easy to use and compatible with customers of any kind."

Mathew explained that if an individual were to leave their company, "Jafza would find it difficult to continue its communication channel with the same company until a new contact e-mail ID is provided and updated in our systems. Moreover, history of past e-mail communications would be lost at the customer end which becomes concerning to us and the customer."

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Fellow iPhoners, unite! Rise up and "fight global warming" from your iPhones!

 

Available now on the iPhone App Store, Carbon Pulse Sevenchord Studios purports to tell users "exactly how their lifestyles are affecting the environment," let them "pledge to take action to help reduce their impact, and track their progress making changes."

 

The application estimates a user's carbon emissions based on his vehicle, acceleration, distance and time driven during each trip and miles per gallon, then compares that estimate to that of the average U.S. driver. 

 

The "average U.S. driver" was unidentified by Sevenchord officials, but First Coffee suspects it is, in fact, Louise F. Michaelson, a housewife in Terre Haute, Indiana with three kids, who owns a 2003 Toyota Camry and drives her kids to gymnastics, swimming, drama and volunteering at the SPCA after school.

 

Striking close to the real function of the $2.99 app, Sevenchord officials say "Carbon Pulse users can feel good about their app purchase" for another reason: Company officials say they'll donate "a portion" of the proceeds from Carbon Pulse sales to clean energy projects.

Sevenchord officials say they also built "social media features" into Carbon Pulse, as the application lets users sync their "green successes" with Facebook and Twitter and deliver "environmental news on demand." 

 

Carbon Pulse say the application "has no political agenda."

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SDN Global has unveiled its Public Safety Access Terminal connecting 911 callers to their Public Safety Answering Point, branding the product its "answer to emergency management's backup requirements."

When 911 call center demand peaks "so does their vulnerability," says Larry Jones, CEO and president of SDN Global, noting that in case of natural disaster or other causes, PSAT offers "an instantly available 911 fault tolerant backup solution for fixed or mobile applications."

The SDN 911 backup supports communication services including administrative phone lines, Internet access, and connection to data applications over the same satellite link, company officials say: "PSAT can also bridge first responders' two-way radio systems enabling emergency crews to communicate with one another regardless of technology compatibility or geographical coverage of the radio systems."

Some SDN customers have installed PSAT within mobile command units for large community events, Jones notes: "If calls spike due to visitors from surrounding areas, 911 operators can quickly light up a mobile unit, for instant capacity reinforcement."

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Boku, a product for online mobile payments, has announced that "a group of merchants and publishers" has selected Boku for its bank-grade payment product. 

 

And it's going to add a few more stamps to its international passport soon, adding payment service in Indonesia, New Zealand, Slovenia and Taiwan to total 55 countries.

 

"Mobile payments for digital goods is one of the fastest growing segments of mobility," said J. Gerry Purdy, Ph.D., VP & Chief Analyst, Mobile & Wireless at Frost & Sullivan. "We see billions of digital assets being purchase via mobile phone in the next few years."

 

The group of Boku customers spans the social and casual gaming, social networking and application spaces, company officials say, adding that these companies use the Boku service to sell digital goods and services to their global customers. 

In addition to online payments, the product offers analytics reporting, flexible billing and pricing, fraud and security management. Vu Hoang, co-founder of Aeria Games, said customers choose Boku as a payment method "because of its ease and simplicity."

 

Based in San Francisco with offices in Europe, Asia and Latin America, Boku is funded by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures.

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ASC, a vendor of products to record, analyze and evaluate communications, will introduce InspirationPro 9.0 in Birmingham, England later this month at a call center trade show.

InspirationPro 9.0 is a quality monitoring product from ASC, having speech analysis with emotion detection, keyword spotting and transcription. There's also an eLearning module to "send customized educational material directly to the agent's desktop," and increased data security to help comply with the standards set by the payment card industry.

Guenther Mueller, Chairman and CEO of ASC, said the product's speech analytics software "provides extended evaluation and reporting features based on the actual meaning of the conversation."

InspirationPro's features include real-time contact between agents and supervisors without the customer's knowledge, and a browser-based interface for access from any location. 

 

ASC's products also support the use of Citrix software for application virtualization. The company has subsidiaries and sales offices in Great Britain, France, Poland, Switzerland, the United States, Japan and Singapore.