Sweden hosts BI conference

The second International Workshop on Business Intelligence (BI) will take place on 25 March 2011 in Uppsala, Sweden, writes Cordis.

Over the past decade, society has experienced increasing use of BI solutions. These allow companies and individuals to query, understand, and analyse business data in order to make informed decisions.

A new trend is emerging, though, where BI applications no longer limit their analysis to the data inside one company, the report says. Increasingly, they also source their data from the outside, such as the Internet, and complement company-internal data with value-adding information in order to provide richer insights into the dynamics of today's business.

At the same time, BI applications are also moving from company-internal information systems to service-based platforms on the Internet, the report says.

Qlik Technologies has filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission to sell 11.5 million shares of its stock in a secondary public offering, says Biz Journals.

The Radnor, developer of BI software, listed its proposed maximum offering price for the shares at $22.70. At that price, the offering would produce gross proceeds of over $26 million if all 11.5 million shares were sold. QlikTech plans to sell 10 million shares initially and offer the underwriters of the offering an option to purchase an additional 1.5 million shares.

According to the report, QlikTech won't receive any proceeds from the offering as the stock being sold is owned by its venture backers, board of directors and employees.

Smartphones are redefining the concept of BI, states The Globe and Mail.

Tech-savvy entrepreneurs are tricking out their mobile handsets with applications designed to ease and improve every conceivable facet of their professional lives, according to the report.

The sheer quantity of mobile applications optimised for entrepreneurs is impressive, but the quality, not so much, the report disputes. There may be an app for everything except for identifying the small-business apps worth downloading. As of mid-2010, Apple's pace-setting App Store had more than 225 000 iPhone applications, but the number of innovative and useful apps is far smaller.