Data & Analytics with Maple Flavour: Canadian Data & Analytics Companies. Part 2

In a continuation of my tour across the Canadian data management and analytics landscape started in Part 1, I will now describe a new group of companies from both ends of this great country that have incorporated “state-of-the-art” data and analytics technologies to their solutions

These companies, many of them startups ascending in the market ladder and  changing dramatically not just Canadian market but the global market with the introduction of innovative solutions in many key areas of the data management space, ranging from data visualization to advanced analysis and data warehousing.

So, here a complementary list of Canadian data solutions:

CrowdBabble
Solution(s): CrowdBabble

Crowdbabble is a social media analytics company from Toronto at the Ryerson Futures Technology Accelerator in the DMZ, that aims to help marketers to eliminate the complexities and time involved in the analysis performed to tie social media activities to business outcomes

With a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform Crowdbabble customers can measure, benchmark and optimize their social media performance.

With users in 450 cities around the world, including top customers, the company leverages a platform that enables customers to drill down and dig deeper to figure out, according to CrowdBabble, the “why” behind their social media performance strategies and tell a better story.

Some features offered by Crowbabble include:

• 1-Click export for charts to enable fast downloads of any chart as an image to be inserted within an MS PowerPoint or Keynote presentation
• Visual social media performance monitoring
• Growth tracking of key metrics
• Drill-Down for in-depth analysis into the details of data and identify the drivers of social media performance
• Optimizes social media content to  learn which content works best for the audience,  comparing the performance of posts

CrowdBabble’s Screencap (Courtesy of CrowdBabble)

ENVIRONICS  Analytics
Solution(s): Envision5

ENVIRONICS Analytics is another company from Toronto with a fresh look at how analytics is being done.

With its latest edition of ENVISION5, its platform for providing business intelligence (BI) on customers and markets from anywhere in ​North America the company offers an easy-to-use and powerful cloud-based platform with a complete package set of geo and segment-based routines to provide customer insights, site evaluation and media planning as well as a large set of consumer data.

Some features offered by ENVISION5 include:

• A web-services architecture
• A responsive design that makes ENVISION5 tablet and mobile compatible
• A workflow engine to enable users to define processes to follow a suggested path for importing data, analyze trade areas or create maps to locate promising prospects and develop marketing campaigns at the national, regional and local levels
• Geographic and location capabilities to allow users to geocode and map the location of their customers and create reports to better understand who they are, what they spend money on or how they consume media
• Capabilities for sharing data and share results across the organization using dashboards and micro-sites
• The ability to enable users to create target groups from any customer file, whether the targeting is based upon life stage, assets, language spoken at home or views regarding technology

ENVISION5’s Screencap (Courtesy of ENVIRONICS Analytics)

Intelli3
Solution: Map4Decision, Map4Web

With more than 20 years of experience in the field, this company from Quebec delivers cutting-edge technology in the fields of geomatics and spatial BI systems. Originated from the team’s work at the Centre de Recherche en Géomatique from Université Laval, Intelli3 develops Map4Decision and more recently Map4Web —Intelli3‘s SaaS offering— to deliver high quality geo-data analysis to analysts and business users.

Through a quick to deploy and easy to use set of solutions involving on-demand map production, Intelli3 aims to lowering the level of uncertainty of analysis results involving geomatic and map production.

Some functional highlights included within Map4Decision and Map4Web include the ability to:

• Explore aggregated views of information
• Interactively drill-down to achieve more detailed views (e.g., province, region, city)
• Dynamically intersect various themes of interest (e.g., time and territory)
• Obtain instantaneously statistical charts, diagrams and thematic maps
• Automatically create maps conforming to customer’s and official rules for visual communication and semiology (colors, symbols, patterns, etc.)
• Navigate from one visualization type to another (e.g., statistical charts to multi-maps).

Map4Web’s Screencap (Courtesy of Intelli3)

Kaypok
Solution(s): Kaypok Insight, Kaypok Briefly 

Ontario- based company Kaypok is a company devoted to the development of enterprise unstructured text analytics solutions. Kaypok’s technology analyzes data regardless of source, this includes social media feeds, customer surveys, email, blogs and internal proprietary data and others.

According to the company: Kaypok’s high-performance algorithm  processes the noisy, unstructured information extracting usable knowledge and insights about what people are saying, sentiments and the root information elements driving analytics.

With a combination of two solutions —Kaypok Insight and Kaypok Briefly— the company targets the two major aspects of text and social data analysis:

• Kaypok Insight provides content analytics technology whether it is an external unstructured data or internally residing enterprise application logs.
• Kaypok Briefly allows users to analyze large numbers of textual content, aggregate data from different resources including RSS feeds, Google alerts, Blogs and Forum, filter, summarize, sort and share the content as well as find the most negative/positive articles immediately.

Kaypok’s Screencap (Courtesy of Kaypok)

Kaypok offerings are available in both Software as a Service (SaaS) and as an integrated enterprise model and compatible with various big data platforms as well as available for working on desktop and mobile devices.

Klipfolio
Solution: Klipfolio

Klipfolio is the company behind the eponymous cloud-based application for developing and deploying real-time business dashboards to be used on many types of devices including web browsers, TV monitors and mobile devices.

The Ottawa based company claim it can virtually connect to any data source, on-premises or in the cloud: From web services, to files stored a computer, server, or in a data warehouse.

Klipfolio’s simple and flexible data architecture enables data sources to live outside the platform and allows users to create connections with data sources and allowing defining which portions of data to connect and to be pull into the application, as well as its load frequency.

From there, users can easily and quickly add pre-built data visualizations and dashboards, build data visualizations from scratch, or edit pre-built data visualizations and dashboards.

Some major functional features from Klipfolio include:

• Support connection to over 100 cloud applications including Facebook, Twitter, Moz, Pingdom, Salesforce, Marketo, Google Analytics, Google Adwords, Xero, HubSpot and others, as well as different web services
• Connection to local and server Excel, CSV and XML, FTP, SFTP files as well as data from DropBox, Box, and Google Drive file sharing services
• Connection to all major database management systems including MSSQL, MySQL, Oracle Thin, Oracle OCI, Sybase SQL Anywhere, PostgreSQL, Firebird and DB2
• Multiple ways to upload computer files including pulling the data from web services like Facebook and Google Analytics, pushing the data in from and API, as an email attachment or access the data from databases and servers
• Share visualizations and dashboards within the organization or externally as well as define the periodicity of updates.  

Klipfolio’s Screencap (Courtesy of Klipfolio)

(post-ads)

KNOMOS
Solution(s): KNOMOS

West coast (Vancouver) company KNOMOS employs modern app design principles grounded in the user experience to deliver software tools for the legal industry. From law students learning in the classroom, to lawyers better serving their clients, and engaged citizens managing their practical legal affairs.

Focused on technology-driven solutions, KNOMOS has developed a data driven solution to provide effective search, analysis and visualization of legal information. Built for law students, lawyers and engaged citizens managing their practical legal affairs, KNOMOS a single access point for legal information and the tools for its management and analysis.

Some important features offered by KNOMOS’ data solution include:

• A single access point for Federal & British Columbia (BC) laws, regulations and cases all accessed within an interactive visual navigation interface
• A dual search display to provide an instant overview, with the size of visual search results from matches clustered by document type and relevant text previews
• Visual navigation capabilities to help identify key information in context of a legal source’s structure, including frequency heat maps for keyword search results in a law or case
• Citation heat maps to display the frequency of cross-references between legal sources including when a law cites, or is cited by, another law or a case, along with unique color coding for incoming & outgoing links
• A centralized location to organize and save all content, personal notes, favorites, tags, and highlighted texts for future reference
• Ability to pinpoint citations and link documents at the specific paragraph or section level with direct access to related content
• Ability to filter and sort personal annotations

KNOMOS’ Screencap (Courtesy of KNOMOS)

Mnubo
Solution(s): Mnubo SmartObjects

Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) developer company Mnubo is an innovative company from Montreal. Mnubo delivers out-of-the-box insights, automated reports and advanced IoT data science solutions.

It offers a SaaS solution to enable product manufacturers to connect their products with its platform to ingest, enrich and analyze their product’s generated data.

Mnubo’s SmartObjects offering is a complete SaaS solution developed to avoid long roll-out plans, extensive IT resources or additional development skills with an approach to serve customers in consumer, enterprise and industrial verticals.

Major functional feature of Mnubo’s SmartObjects include:

• Big Data storage and archival
• Data cleanup & enrichment
• Rich, flexible API’s that integrate with fully documented JSON REST APIs that include an advanced query language
• Data visualization & reporting features to access pre-built dashboards and reports or create new customized dashboard without additional coding
• A hosted and managed solution with a multi-tenant solution available on multiple cloud environments (e.g. Azure, AWS, Google, etc)
• Plug & Play features to eliminate months of software integration and machine learning models training
• An integrated view of data to enable real-time data is delivered to the appropriate stakeholder
• Supports self-service to query at scale users big data repository of sensor data and enable ROI-driven insights
• Out-of-the-box Insights to understand operations, faults, product usage, customer engagement/churn, etc. fast and easy
• Security features including OAuth2 authorization framework, HTTP secure JSON REST API, data encryption at rest, no personally identifiable information (PII) stored
• Cloud platform neutral design to support AWS, Azure, Google, and other cloud providers

Mnubo’ Screencap (Courtesy of Mnubo)

Nexalogy
Solution(s): Nexalogy Free, Nexalogy Enterprise

Founded by astrophysicist Claude Théoret along with an experienced team, Montreal based company Nexalogy applies Claude’s algorithms and developed technology for studying black holes and how stars interact between them, to analyze connections between words and the people who write them throughout the social Web.

Consequently, Nexalogy can reveal undiscovered risks, opportunities, and hidden intelligence. Nexalogy’s cloud-based solution provide different social media intelligence services to companies of all sizes and industries to make better decisions.

Some capabilities and services offered by Nexalogy includes:

• A scalable distributed system behind the analysis and data management
• Data collection capabilities from many data sources around the web
• Reports and visualization capabilities
• The ability to routinely process millions of social media posts
• Algorithms to identify themes, people, relationships, topics and content
• Easy visual interaction with all social data including posts, topics and influencers via a set of dynamic visualizations.

Nexalogy's Screencap (Courtesy of Nexalogy)

PHEMI
Solution(s): PHEMI Central

PHEMI is a big data warehouse company from Vancouver that with its PHEMI Central solution allows organizations to easily access and mine data from any variety or volume.

PHEMI Central is, according to the company:

“a production-ready big data warehouse with built-in privacy, data sharing, and data governance. PHEMI Central delivers the scalability and economics of Hadoop with indexing, cataloging, fine-grained access control, and full life cycle, enterprise-grade data management.”

Built on Hadoop, PHEMI Central Big Data Warehouse aims to unlock data silo-ed and make it available for analytic and operational applications.

With the incorporation of Big Data technology, PHEMI allows users to scale to petabytes of data with cluster economics, additionally PHEMI Central adds simplified deployment and out-of-the-box operations, as well as the ability to integrate immediately with existing data sources and analytics tools.

Main features of PHEMI Central include:

• Availability of the solution on-premises or as a managed service Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, or ClearData HIPAA Compliant clouds
• Ability to integrate with most leading analytics tools including:  Tableau, Qlik, Power BI, R, SAS and SPSS
• Availability of data processing functions including: Excel/CSV Reader, Genomics Reader, (VCF/gVCF), JSON Reader, XML/HL7 Reader, Custom DPFs
• An strong emphasis on security so that:
• PHEMI’s access control strategy takes into account both and user attributes and data characteristics
• Metadata and user attributes are brought together into simple yet robust rules to indicate who can see and do what with the data
• A policy-based enforcement so access control is implemented automatically and uniformly
• On site processing to provide the ability to securely process data so it can be presented as different views to different users based on their authorizations, without a person having to intervene

PHEMI Central Architecture (Courtesy of PHEMI)

Rubikcloud
Solution(s): RubiCore, RubiOne, Promotion Manager, Lifecycle Manager

This Toronto-based startup has been able to work with more than a dozen global, multi-billion dollar retailers and investors include Horizons Ventures, Access Industries, and the MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund.

Rubikloud’s big data architecture aims to gather retailer data from online and offline consumer behavior and use it to help retailers gain insight into their preferences: product affinity, price sensitivity among others to enable better demand prediction and forecasts.

The Rubikcloud data platform includes a series of solutions to provide easy to use yet effective analysis and data management functions for retailers to help them take control over their data and improve decisions with data.

Some key features coming from Rubikloud include:

• The ability to discover the connections and insights within internal data
• Collaboration capabilities to share work with other data scientists and analysts
• The ability to deploy and manage multiple users through a built-in authentication service
• Capabilities to develop proprietary models, at scale
• The ability to connect models in pipelines to deploy multi-stage systems into production
• The possibility to incorporate or benchmark against Rubikloud’s own models, trained on several years of retail data
• A set of visualization libraries to compare and monitor the performance of models
• Ability to gain a complete view into historical performance
• Functionality to forecast the outcomes of promotional decisions before taking in-market action
• Fine-tuning capabilities for pricing and promotional strategy

Rubikloud Screencap (Courtesy of Rubikloud)

ThinkCX
Solution(s): ThinkCX

ThinkCX is a company devoted to deliver advanced automated, massive-scale analytic solutions for detection of consumer switching events in the smartphone OEM and wireless carrier marketplace across North America.

The company, from Langley, B.C. uses a patented machine learning solution that locates and confirms millions of device and carrier switching events yearly which then are used to put to work a series of analytical models.

Some key advantages of ThinkCX’s cloud-based platform considers:

• Offering a complete Market View to, in addition to the internal churn activity, ThinkCX can provide similar insights about the competition’s subscribers
• The platform uses commercially available external data as its only inputs, so no requirement for integration with a CRM is required
• Simple deployment, to enable solutions to be deployed in minutes, with no heavy lifting required from IT and business teams
• ThinkCX’s carrier and device insights can be delivered via a custom dashboard or integrated into Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions or DCM.

A final Note

As I mentioned in the first part, it is possible I’m still leaving some companies out, so please feel free to use the comment space to let me know your comments or the name of new Canadian analytics solution we all should know about.

P.S. As a note to Kevin Smith, I’ve decided to leave Keboola out of this group but, I will include them in another post devoted to data companies from Europe, as Keboola is actually based actually in the Czech Republic.

* All logos and images are trademarks and property of their respective owners