Minitab, one of the early pioneers in statistical analytics software, has acquired another mature firm: predictive modeling software vendor Salford Systems. Salford’s specialty is tree-based methods including CART® Decision Trees, Random Forests®, TreeNet® Gradient Boosting, and MARS® nonlinear regression. Salford guides analysts through the model building process but gives them final control over most decisions.
Today's newsletter could have covered sales enablement tools (boring but real) or automated creative (fun but speculative).
No privacy issues here, folks: Dallas-based Ortus Labs has released software that lets any network-connected video camera “identify, differentiate and track people, vehicles, or objects in motion.” The breakthrough is using artificial intelligence software instead of expensive image-processing hardware, thereby reducing the cost and expanding the number of feeds. It’s not clear whether the system can identify individuals or just distinguish people from objects. Then again, it’s trainable, so the answer might change in the future. Nope, no privacy issues at all.
Salesforce has reversed course on its bid to acquire data management and integration platform Informatica a source has told Reuters. Informatica itself said that it is not in talks to be acquired. Salesforce stocks rose on this latest news while Informatica’s fell.