Anyone Can Use It: "IBM's Watson Analytics Enters Public Beta"

From ZDNET:

IBM has launched the public beta of Watson Analytics, its set of cloud-based predictive and analytics tools.
The move to public beta for Watson Analytics on Thursday follows its private beta launch this September. IBM said at the time of the beta releas the service will be made available under a freemium model through iOS, Android mobile devices and the web.

Watson Analytics is a cognitive service that's meant to bear some of the load executives face when preparing data, while making it easier to run predictive analyses and use 'visual storytelling', such as using graphs, maps and infographics to illustrate a point.

Watson Analytics is one piece of IBM's $1bn gamble that it can commercialise Watson. The company claims it has 22,000 registrations for Watson Analytics since launching in September.

Users of Watson Analytics feed in their own raw data, say, in the form of a spreadsheet, which the service then crunches with its own statistical analysis to highlight associations between different variables. It saves execs from needing to know how to write their own scripts or understand statistics in order to derive meaning from their data....MORE