When is it safest to visit Chicago parks? To walk the city’s streets? To be a kid? Here are three incredible anomalies I turned up in Chicago law enforcement data. I love Chicago. I’ve lived in Illinois for five years, and have come to love my visits to the city – the parks, the lake, the architecture, the music, the food, the universities, the people. It’s a city that’s truly unique in the world.

Simple enough to be embedded in text as a sparkline, but able to speak volumes about your business, time series data is the basic input of Anodot’s automated anomaly detection system. This article begins our three-part series in which we take a closer look at the specific techniques Anodot uses to extract insights from your data.

To keep you up-to-date with the latest anomaly detection news, we keep a list of companies that suffer major glitches. Here’s who made headlines in March.

When I was a kid, we would head to the city to buy things, everything from a pair of shoes to new school supplies. As I grew up in the 1990s, we were introduced to a new way of shopping: malls. They were easier, the variety was bigger, and the lights were brighter. With that, our habit of street shopping mostly “died.” Over the past few years, retail has been rattled by another development: online shopping, which, according to all indications, is now killing the mall.

Despite being one of the most important factors that affect online businesses today, downtime is also often one of the most overlooked. Many organizations realize that downtime results in immediate money loss, customer satisfaction and employee productivity, yet fail to employ measures that will efficiently prevent it and reduce it.

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in — there’s more data at your fingertips than ever before. And with that data comes an opportunity to make informed decisions that will take your business to new heights. For marketing alone, becoming best-in-class at data analytics can help you generate 20 percent more revenue than your competitors. Those benefits increase exponentially when you bring data-driven decision-making to every aspect of your business.

A couple of months ago we released the all-new Anodot.com. Following the release, I explored our Google Analytics account to see what had happened post-launch. I have always been ambivalent about Google Analytics. On the one hand, the service has helped shape web analytics as we know it today and is used by nearly every website. Not to mention it’s free and rather easy to consume. On the other hand, GA is never a slam dunk.

There’s a lot of confusion surrounding the differences between structured and unstructured data. To better understand why, let’s review which data formats the industry currently is using, and some of the challenges they pose. Simply put, structured data typically refers to highly organized, stored information that is efficiently and easily searchable. Unstructured data is not.