Squirro

We recently sat down with the head of innovation of one of the world’s largest banks discussing his bank’s approach to big data. Numbers drive a bank.

Reviewing their big data strategy he symbolically points in the direction of their data center to say that they have “landfills of unused unstructured data.” They consist, he explained, of research, market reports, client inquiries, articles, comments both from internal and external sources. And they are growing fast.

The missing link is context

Similar case at another financial institution: A search on their internal database for ‘inflation’ returns more than 250’000 results. Too many results to be useful.

“We know this information would be extremely valuable for analysis,” says the head of the market analyst team. He explains what his analysts are after: A solution, which maps their inflation research inflation data. The result provides context to the data. To quote Derrek Harris of GigaOm: “Big Data needs context in order to be really useful; it’s context that turns disparate data points into a story.” 

What is context?

Each of us immediately has a picture in our minds when hearing the word “Caterpillar”. However, without context, Caterpillar is a band, 2 companies, an insect and more than 120m results. Which of the multiple meanings of Caterpillar was the one you had in mind? Too many results to get to the relevant information quickly.

The proper definition of ‘context’ is a bit clumsy: “The circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed”, yet express well how to solve the ‘Caterpillar’ case. Add context to the initial query and you can filter down to the relevant quickly.

Others tell you ‘what’ – Squirro tells you ‘why’

This is exactly what Squirro does. Squirro reads out signals to construct a concept of the context you are in, before you actually retrieve information. This ‘profile’ – we call it digital fingerprint – is used to deliver unstructured data simply and in real time to the user in context of their own personal interests and priorities, learning and refining that precision as user interactions increase.

A great way to see the power of the concept is the integration of Squirro into Qlikview, a Business Intelligence solution. By combining the structured and the unstructured worlds, each insight uncovered in QlikView’s business discovery is used by Squirro to provide the ‘why’ behind the data.

Context Intelligence is vital

Context Intelligence solutions can crack the information retrieval problems outlined above, by streaming that unstructured data to the user in the right place at the right time. And in the process allow for better, more effective decision-making. Gartner in a research note back in 2010 identified context-aware computing as an emerging, game-changing opportunity for enterprises.

We agree. And we are only at the start of the journey.

World’s first context intelligence solution accelerates its growth

• Funding round from a consortium of new investors lead by Formula VC, a transatlantic venture fund investing mostly in B2B solutions in information technology.
• General availability of Squirro’s new context intelligence solution for Business Intelligence (BI) suites. 

Zurich May 28th, 2013

Today Squirro, the leading provider of Context Intelligence software, has announced general availability of its Context Intelligence solution for Business Intelligence (BI) suites. This disruptive integrated combination of Squirro and BI platforms delivers real-time and accurate context intelligence to any point of insight uncovered through a BI system.

For example a leading international investment bank integrates Squirro to provide a real-time stream of news and insights to the numeric data analysis provided by the QlikView BI suite. Squirro helps a number of Fortune 500 companies to unearth insights from silos of unstructured data in areas such as insurance claims, application management, social media monitoring, supply chain tracking.

Squirro also announced that the company secured additional funding from a consortium of new investors lead by Formula VC, a transatlantic venture fund investing mostly in B2B solutions in information technology and communication sectors.

Andrey Kessel, Managing Partner of Formula VC, said:

“Corporations have been gathering landfills of digital data, which they find increasingly difficult to make sense of. Squirro’s Digital Fingerprint Technology enables these corporations to put this data into context with unprecedented simplicity and significantly improve their decision-making ability. We are thrilled to be an active part of Squirro’s on-going rise to success and are honored to join such a strong syndicate of business angels.”

Dorian Selz, CEO of Squirro, added:

“We are very excited to welcome Formula VC on board. Mr. Kessel’s vast experience and strong foothold in both startup and investment communities, supported by a very strong network and level of understanding of our industry that Formula VC brings, will greatly contribute to furthering Squirro’s leadership of the new and exciting category of context intelligence software. We have already seen our new shareholder make a significant positive impact on the company.”

Squirro is the category leader in Context Intelligence. Squirro correlates unstructured data from any digital source to structured data of already existing enterprise systems. The precision and relevance of the information delivered by Squirro is achieved through the patent pending Digital Fingerprint Technology. Squirro works with inputs, which already exist within BI and CRM platforms and analyses and learns to prioritize the information based on user interactions.

Sachin Mitra, UK institutional market coverage at Evercore Private Fund Group said of Squirro’s:

“Squirro has added a layer of real-time integration, ultimately adding value to our research and follow-up capabilities.”

The funding will be used to support Squirro’s growth through the development of its global partner network and further develop the adaptability of its Context Intelligence solution to multiple Business Intelligence platforms.




For further press information please contact:

Cesare Allavena
Marketing Director
Tel: +41 44 586 98 98
cesare@squirro.com

Great article in BigDataForFinance by our partner Granger Smith Consulting.

Simon Smith, Chief Executive, writes:

“When it comes to big data, being able to bring together structured and unstructured data is a vital process to understanding what that information actually means and the effect it is having on a share price.”

Read the full article on data and context here.

Squirro for QlikView helps you reduce the time spent searching for information by 90%.

Squirro delivers the context you need from any unstructured data source in a continuously updated information stream. Squirro combines the structured and unstructured data worlds to provide the why behind the data. Your data-driven decision-making process is therefore better, faster and more effective.

This video shows how Squirro gets you to the information you need in no time. Squirro is perfect to understand trends, track competitors and monitor customers. 

Nick Harrison of DoesWhat did an interview with Dorian and asked among other things how the 4 co-founders of Squirro met.

Granger Smith Consulting has joined forces with Squirro, a leading context intelligence product and search technology that enables users to get results based on exact interests, without the need to search for them at all. The partnership will see Granger Smith Consulting working with Squirro and QlikTech to provide a natural extension to the data discovery paradigm that has been so successfully created.

One of the most time consuming roles for an information worker is to search the for the information you need, whether that’s struggling with information overload or simply not finding the answer you are looking for. QlikView, the Business Discovery Platform helps identifying patterns in data.  However data needs context in order to be really useful; it is context that turns disparate data points into a story. By scanning the open internet, news sites, blogs, social media and feeds and combining this with company internal sources, Squirro filters away the noise and contextualises that data into what you need to hear, directly within QlikView.

Speaking about the new partnership Simon Smith, CEO at Granger Smith Consulting said: “Being able to identify patterns in big data collection is all part of the Business Intelligence system, what a business will find is that the data itself is unable to explain why a change or a dip has occurred. What you need behind the data to truly understand its context and this is what Squirro provides.

“This partnership is great news for our existing clients already using QlikView, as we can now offer that much needed context behind their data. For example, if you notice an unusual variation in a chart, Squirro provides the necessary context to understand it.”

Dr. Dorian Selz, Co-Founder, CEO at Squirro added: “We are delighted to welcome Granger Smith Consulting as one of our partners. Its commitment to its customers to not only gathering their data but helping them contextualise it is one of the main reasons we are now working together.” 

For further press information please contact:

Lisa Watts                                                                                Cesare Allavena

PR Account Manager – Granger Smith                                        Marketing Director  - Squirro

lwatts@grangersmithconsulting.com / 07572122166                     cesare@squirro.com / +41445869898

Last week we held a series of webcasts to present Squirro for CRM and Squirro for Business Intelligence (BI) in a demo format.

Squirro for CRM was presented through a Salesforce integration use case.  Squirro seamlessly integrates in Salesforce to deliver real-time context intelligence for your leads, contacts and accounts.  It dramatically reduces the time spent on research, thus freeing up time to focus on value-adding activities.  The end result is a 15% increase in win rates and up to 15% increase in revenues.

Squirro for for Business Intelligence was presented through a couple of QlikView integrations for Financial Stock Analysis.

Squirro delivers unstructured data simply and in real time to the user in context of their own personal interests and priorities learning and refining that precision as user interactions increase.

Squirro goes beyond that powerful first level, by combining the structured and the unstructured worlds together in harmony. Each insight uncovered in QlikView’s Business Discovery experience is used by Squirro to provide the ‘why’ behind the data.

Ultimately this reduces searching time by 75%, significantly reducing cost and allows for better, more effective decision making where unique context and speed to action delivers better business all round.

You can watch the full webcast here under: 

The disruptive integrated combination of Squirro in QlikView delivers real-time, accurate, context intelligence to any point of insight you uncover while doing business discovery in QlikView.

To showcase how Squirro delivers relevant context to any data point you discover while working with QlikView, watch the video below.

This example of financial stock analysis shows how by simply selecting a variation in a stock analysis graph at a specific time, Squirro delivers directly into the application the relevant intelligence you need for that period to understand why this fluctuation occurred. 

Of course Squirro can deliver relevant context across all industries not just financial stock analysis.

If you want to know about about Squirro for QlikView you can register for today or tomorrow’s webcasts, which will be presented by our CEO, Dorian Selz and our Sales Director UK, Laurent Zambelli.

Register for the April 29th webcast at 3PM GMT.

Register for the April 30th webcast at 5PM GMT.

On April 25th, 29th and 30th our CEO Dorian Selz and our Head of Sales UK Laurent Zambelli will host a webcast on Squirro and context intelligence. 

Context intelligence delivers the whole story behind your data. 

Already working with a business intelligence suite like QlikView?  Seamlessly integrated in it Squirro will:

• Bring context to data
• Get visibility on past, current and future significant events that highly impact your business
• Dramatically reduce research time
  
  

If you use a CRM, Squirro will supply you with real-time news to support your sales effort by:

• Giving visibility on your prospects and clients key business objectives
• Improving your business development calls conversion rates
• Reducing sales cycles
• Supporting your solution selling methodology
  
  

To register please click on the following link: http://info.squirro.com/webcast_registration 

Squirro - Your Data in Context

by Maximilien George

As a designer I am very interested in typography and typefaces, but the time I can dedicate to research and stay on top of typographic news is limited.

There are famous information sites like I Love Typography, Typographica and Smashing Magazine delivering fresh news, great feature articles and follow-ups as well as comprehensive fonts reviews. These websites basically allow to discover typefaces and foundries by chance if ever you are following their feeds or social presence. As far as I am concerned, “by chance” is definitely not an option in terms of efficiency and time consumption.

Through these sites I might have discovered the House Industries foundry through the review of one of their releases, which is great, but what were my options to stay on top of their activities? Get the new released font and bookmark the type foundry site? Add one more foundry in my records - one more rss feed, one more Twitter account to follow. 

Considering that I have listed over the years dozens of type foundries that produce really and only high-quality fonts, having to follow updates from all of them involves getting huge amount of information and news delivered to me… not to mention that: 

• This information may be ‘re-feeded’  and re-tweeted by generic typography-related websites and therefore appear duplicated in my information stream.
• I am not interested in Finnish adventure cycling design educators.

Now Squirro solves all this for me by allowing to partition effortlessly the typography-related information daily delivered to me. 

Playing with Source and Topics lets one create several specialised information streams about what I would have called a subject when I was still struggling against information overload… these were the dark times of the pre-Squirro era.

Filters let me take control over the huge amount information from my seeders, so that only a specific kind of thematic information is displayed in a certain Topic; as an example, I don’t want news about releases and discounts made by foundries when I am looking for some inspirational content.

Trigger alerts are sent to my inbox whenever a foundry releases a new typeface!

This is the best part about it: I have now the ability to stay tuned to my favourite type foundries just the way a marketer would follow his leads and accounts using Squirro embedded in his favourite CRM.

This points out that whoever you are, whatever you do - Business Intelligence for a huge international corporation or silk-screen printing business - Squirro will be your trustful and personal digital assistant, as it is for me, amongst other things, my centralized interface for every typography-related information that is relevant to me here and now. 

by Matej Petrik

Do you spend a lot of time researching information?  Are you fed up with having to search and research for the sames intelligence?

There are too many sources and not enough time to read through all of them. Let Squirro be your first class research assistant.

As an example, let’s look at this story on DePuy Synthes’ hip replacement technology recall:

http://www.depuy.com/usmedia

This is the official information from the DuPuy Synthes perspective.

Let’s now imagine that for your research you need to get different sides to the story. You have a variety of options to do your research, but there is a great likelihood that many of the results you will get from search engines for example will have little relevance to the actual topic you are interested in (a quick search for DePuy Synthes in different search engines returned on average more than 200’000 results).  Reading through all these results be just waste of time. All you need is to filter the noise and read just the relevant material.

Here is a video that shows you how to setup your own research topic in Squirro and filter the noise:

Once you start interacting with the early results from your topic search in Squirro, our Digital Fingerprint Technology will automatically learn which content is relevant for you, and will display it to you as seen in the following video:

As you can see, setting up the noise regulator to lower levels enables you to focus only for relevant results - but in the background Squirro keeps investigating all possible sources.  Your research time is no much shorter and the outcome much more relevant!

Squirro now brings you context delivery directly into QlikView.

QlikView helps identifying patterns in big data, coupled with the context intelligence Squirro delivers, you now get the whole story behind the numbers.

Squirro for QlikView delivers the context behind any data in your dashboard.  

For example:

• Select a specific quarter and Squirro provides the relevant contextual information for that time period. 
• Interested in a specific business unit? Squirro supplies intelligence about that division. 
• You notice an unusual variation in a chart, Squirro gives you the necessary context to understand it.

Squirro for QlikView, your data in context.

by Felix Hürlimann

A few weeks ago I’ve written about how Squirro helped me finding a flat. It was quite easy, I just had to setup a topic and configure the different webpages that provide information about available flats and then wait for my daily digest email to show these flats. This is very handy as you do not have to check all the housing websites by hand on a regular basis. But then waiting for the email to arrive for up to 24 hours might be too long, as someone else potentially saw the perfect announcement quicker.

Now there is a solution to this: we added the triggers that were so far only available in the salesforce integration to our standalone version. Triggers is a notification feature that allows you to act on specific conditions directly.

Let me explain you how they work with the following example: as I am interested in all sorts of news about elasticsearch I’ve setup a Squirro topic on this subject. Let’s assume that I am fine with catching up on the subject whenever I feel like, but if e.g. a new version is released or a meetup in Switzerland is announced I want to be notified immediately, without having to wait for my next digest email, so I set up a trigger alert for these conditions.

Here’s a short screencast and a description to show how to configure triggers:

Step 1: Setup a topic (if you haven’t already done so)

Got to https://squirro.com/app/#add and type ‘elasticsearch’ into the input field. Press the ‘discover’ button and save the result as a new topic, name it e.g. Elasticsearch

Step 2: Setup the trigger

In the library view select your newly created topic ‘Elasticsearch’ and change to the ‘Triggers’ tab.

Click ‘Add Trigger’, then give your trigger a name and define the condition(s) is which this trigger should fire by setting words or phrases that need to match any items.

By default the trigger only fires on matches within this topic, but you can change the scope to all your objects if you want. 

Currently we only allow for one type of action: sending out an email. But we will add more in the future. You can however set the frequency of how often the trigger email will be sent out. We will set it to every hour in this example.

Step 3: You’re done

Now you just can lean back and wait for the first Squirro trigger email to appear in your inbox. Here is the trigger mail for our example:

by Alexander Sennhauser

Have you ever heard of the word “infobesity”? It is a nickname for the term  “information overload” which was popularized by Alvin Toffler in the 1970s. Quoting Wikipedia, the term refers to “the difficulty a person can have understanding an issue and making decisions that can be caused by the presence of too much information.”

In a previous post I argued in favor of data driven decisions in a business context. But information overload is not only present in a business environment.

At Squirro we all have a variety of interests besides working on context intelligence and creating a new category leader. Some of use like to read popular blogs such as Techcrunch or Lifehacker. Others fancy to stay updated on the latest recipes from Foodgawker. These sites publish huge amounts of content and it is not always easy to get to what is relevant to you. As a follower you often simply don’t have the time necessary to filter all this information manually and decide which article or recipe to read.

As we highlighted before, context matters. In fact it matters a lot. This is why Squirro looks at the context of your interest to filter popular news sources for articles and recipes that matter most to you. Here is how this works step-by-step with the examples illustrated above:

• Use the “Add Topic” dialog in Squirro to subscribe to a popular RSS feed or simply click the links below.
  Techcrunch
  Lifehacker
  Foodgawker
• Save the resulting view as a new topic.
• Start reading your topic in your library view.
• If you like a particular story or fancy a beautiful recipe simply click on it to read the original, share it with others, or even star it.

As soon as you start interacting with Squirro you provide the platform with the context that matters for your particular interest. You can use the noise regulator in the view options to adjust the noise level and reduce the information overload.

Check out our example video on YouTube. The noise reduction regulator is based on Squirro’s patent pending Digital Fingerprint Technology.

by Patrick Stählin

Last week I’ve received my Pebble, a smart watch that had its roots on Kickstarter. As any watch it displays the time, but it can also notify you on certain events like incoming mails. It doesn’t talk to Squirro out of the box, but here is how I got it to.

The only way the Pebble can communicate is via Bluetooth, so there is no way to talk to it directly from the Internet. It is however, paired with my Phone which is always online. Not wanting to write (or rather learn how to write) an App that talks to the Pebble, I’ve searched for a generic solution and discovered Pushover.

Pushover is a paid application available for Android/iPhone. It lets you register your own Apps and pushes notifications directly to your phone. As Squirro, it has an open API which makes it very easy to integrate.

I’ve registered an App that’s called ‘SQ Alert’ (you see where this is going). This gave me an application token which can be used in combination with any user-token to send messages. As you can see from the following lines it’s very easy to use:

curl -d 'token=pushover_application_token' \
     -d 'user=pushover_user_token' \
     -d 'message=Testing' 
     -d 'title=World is ending' \
     https://api.pushover.net/1/messages.json

This is how it looks on the phone:

And it also gets pushed to the Pebble:

The only thing left to do, is to connect Pushover and Squirro.

In my previous post I’ve described how to use webhooks to talk to your application, now we’re going to use the same technique to talk to Pushover and display Squirro Alerts on the Pebble. Although we don’t have a nice user-interface to configure webhooks yet, we do have an API for setting up triggers.

Each trigger consists of a query, and various actions that get executed should an item match the query. The action type we’re looking at here is webhook (documentation). A webhook calls a uri for each item that matches the query. It takes a dictionary of fields to be sent along. These fields are a template for the request sent out for each item. What we’re ending up with is:

curl -X POST http://topic-api.squirro.com/v0/linkedin-vmr1SvM-kp/filters \
  -u 3806c71b3bd520...: \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"query": "squirro",
       "name": "Pebble trigger",
       "operator": "OR",
       "type": "trigger",
       "actions": [
         {"type": "webhook", 
          "config":
            {"uri": "https://api.pushover.net/1/messages.json",
             "method": "POST",
             "fields": {"token": "pushover_application_token",
                        "message": "{summary}",
                        "user": "pushover_user_token",
                        "title": "{title}",
                        "url": "{link}",
                        "timestamp": "{created_at_timestamp}"}}}]}'

The part after -u is your user token. If that doesn’t ring a bell, this blog post might get you up to speed.

All we need to now is to wait for some articles being published that contain the word “Squirro”. Sure enough after testing the first item quickly arrived:

…and on the Pebble:

It still requires command-line access to configure these kind of notifications. Once we have a nice GUI and some service templates we should be able to make this a one-click solution.

Squirro’s patent pending Digital Fingerprint Technology offers the next evolutionary step in search technologies.

Broader than feeds and more specific than search, Squirro scans multiple sources from Internet channels and social media, private databases and even internal systems such as Salesforce.com and SAP to find the most relevant information on your topic of interest and update it continuously and automatically.