Squirro, My #1 Typefaces Provider
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.
Reduce research time with Squirro!
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:
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 for QlikView, your data in context
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.
How does it work
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.
How to Setup a Squirro Trigger
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:
Today we’d like to introduce you to Squirrel Fishing, our favorite past-time here at Squirro. Really great fun out there on the Uetliberg. After some testing we figured that acorns do the trick much better than pieces of Emmental cheese.
A bit of online research unearthed some fellow Squirrel lifters doing some academic work on the matter. Their performance with peanuts is encouraging and we will try this on our next outing, too.
Fighting Infobesity
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.
007 Squirro, nothing can stop him getting to his acorns!
Early this winter Google Flu Trends predicted that up to 11% of the US population would in have influenza by mid-January - the peak of the flu season.
The actual number was roughly 6% contracted influence during that peak period in January.
Why did Google Flu Trends get it so wrong?
Because Google algorithms looked at numbers only. Some researchers suggest that wide-spread media coverage inflated the flu searches by people who were actually not ill.
Looking only at numbers may produce patchy results. For a proper analysis you need context.
That’s why we started to integrate Squirro’s Context Intelligence engine into business intelligence systems such as Qlikview. Watch this short video for a preview of the Squirro-Qlikview integration.
Connecting Pebble to Squirro
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.
Pushover
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.jsonThis 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.
Get Squirro talking
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:
Outlook
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 Digital Fingerprint Technology
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.
Our white paper Squirro’s Digital Fingerprint Technology explains how the user’s digital fingerprint is constructed by gathering, analyzing, computing and combining behavioral and contextual signals.
The white paper demonstrates how Squirro’s technology is able to differentiate between ambiguous topics and how Squirro’s Digital Fingerprint Technology evolves and adapts to your needs and usage over time.
For more information, read the white paper on Squirro’s Digital Fingerprint Technology here.
To see the technology at work, try it for free for 30 days.
