Picking the cloud’s winners and losers: From SaaS to SDN
At Structure, a panel of IT execs and investors discussed the enterprise IT winners and losers of the past few years. Here’s what they had to say. Read more »
Derrick Harris
Derrick has been a technology journalist since 2003 and has been covering cloud computing, big data and other emerging IT trends for GigaOM since 2009. He has written the words "cloud" and "Hadoop" possibly more than any other person on the planet. Derrick lives in Las Vegas and has a law degree from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Away from the office, Derrick trains in muay thai and is active in animal welfare issues.
Must read
Now anyone can buy the NSA’s database tech
photo: Shutterstock / concept w
Sqrrl Enterprise, a commercial version of the National Security Agency’s Accumulo database technology, is now generally available. As one might expect, it’s all about security and analytics at a massive scale. Read more »
SpaceCurve raises $10M to make sense of our streams of location data
photo: Shutterstock / twobee
SpaceCurve has raised another $10 million for its database technology designed to make sense of massive amounts of data from sensors, social media, mobile devices and other streaming sources. Read more »
Cloudera names new CEO; Mike Olson now chairman and chief strategy officer
Cloudera CEO Mike Olson is now chief strategy officer and chairman of the board, while former Arcsight CEO Tom Reilly will take over the Hadoop pioneer’s leadership role. Read more »
Meet the heavyweight team behind Heavybit, a community for developer-focused startups
Heroku co-founder James Lindenbaum is launching a new effort focused on giving developer-focused startups the tools they need to scale. He has recruited some significant peers and investors as advisers to teach member companies the ropes. Read more »
Accel Partners putting another $100M toward big data apps
photo: Shutterstock / Dirk Ercken.
Accel has launched its Big Data Fund 2, a followup on the equally large fund the venture capital firm started in November 2011. Rather than seeking products that target data scientists, it wants those targeting business users. Read more »
GE wants to use artificial intelligence to predict the future of hospitals
photo: Shutterstock / discpicture
GE Healthcare is pushing a system called Corvix for doing agent-based simulations on complex problems. In India, the technology simulated a population of 80 million people in order to determine the best places to build medical facilities. Read more »
A real-time bonanza: Facebook’s Wormhole and Yahoo’s streaming Hadoop
photo: Shutterstock / agsandrew
This week, both Facebook and Yahoo detailed new efforts to manage real-time data flows within their myriad systems. Yahoo’s work is an open source implementation of Storm designed to run on the same cluster as Hadoop and even share resources. Read more »
Ex-Yahoo CTO launches Altiscale, hardcore Hadoop as a service
photo: Altiscale
Raymie Stata spent seven years working on the guts of Hadoop as a VP, chief architect and CTO at Yahoo. His new Hadoop startup, called Altiscale, has raised a $12 million from some prominent investors. Read more »
Why Google is the big data company that matters most
photo: Google Fellow Jeff Dean
Google Image Search just got a whole lot better, and the company’s purpose-built machine learning system infrastructure is a big reason why. No surprise, Jeff Dean helped build it. Read more »
In a cloud computing economy, the NSA is bad for business
photo: Shutterstock / ramcreations
A lot of Americans might say they support NSA surveillance of their online activities, but many other people — including folks overseas — aren’t so thrilled. Can these laws withstand pressure from a tech lobby concerned about lost profits from fleeing users? Read more »
SageCloud gets $10M to build Facebook cold storage for the rest of us
photo: Shutterstock / kubais
A storage startup called SageCloud is looking to deliver low-cost backup storage to the masses who want Facebook-like cold storage without resorting to tape, cloud services or building their own gear. Read more »
Stealth-mode 28msec wants to build a Tower of Babel for databases
28msec is about to exit stealth mode and take the covers off its database platform that lets users query data from any source in real time. Read more »
WalmartLabs keeps getting smarter with Inkiru acquisition
photo: Shutterstock / Sergey Nivens
WalmartLabs has acquired a predictive analytics startup called Inkiru to bolster its ability to create better customer experiences through data. The division of Walmart was created in 2011 on a foundation of big data. Read more »
Under the covers of the NSA’s big data effort
photo: Shutterstock / hauhu
There’s much debate still to be had over the NSA’s recently uncovered data-collection practices, but some of the technologies underlying them are out in the open. Here’s what we know already. Read more »
Here’s how the NSA analyzes all that call data
How does the NSA analyze all the data it’s collecting from cell phone users? With a massive database system built with just such scale and workloads in mind. Read more »
What cities, data and Yahoo have in common: Interaction matters
photo: Shutterstock / pio3
A recent study from MIT suggests the likelihood of face-to-face interactions within a city means more productivity. It seems to apply equally to companies and even data, which suggests engineers and architects of all types should take notice. Read more »
Heroku targets MongoDB with new Postgres V8 feature
photo: Shutterstock / z0w
Heroku has rolled out a new feature to its Postgres database service that lets users write JavaScript functions within the database. The company says this makes it comparable to MongoDB. Read more »
IBM throws its weight behind MongoDB for mobile apps
IBM and 10gen are collaborating on a standard that would make it easier to write applications that can access data from both MongoDB and relational systems such as IBM DB2. Read more »
Cloudera adds search to Hadoop distro and says it’s just getting started
Cloudera’s new search feature, based on the Apache Solr project, is the latest move by the company to expand the utility of its Hadoop distribution. It’s also far from the last. Read more »
Google takes on Parse with new service for mobile-app backends
Google has announced a new service called Mobile Backend Starter that lets Android developers create and launch mobile apps on Google’s cloud with just a few clicks. Read more »
First, they gave us targeted ads. Now, data scientists think they can change the world
photo: DataKind
Sure, a lot of data scientists spend their days trying to optimize ads or movie recommendations, but a growing number are spending their free time tackling bigger causes. Read more »
It’s a beautiful thing when free data meets free analytics
Machine learning service BigML and open data service Quandl are collaborating to make it easy to build predictive models around economic data. More importantly, though, is how easy Quandl makes it to find and use data. Read more »
Why Hortonworks is riding a faster Hive to the bitter end
photo: Shutterstock / vblinov
While the rest of the Hadoop world is trying to distance itself from Hive with new interactive engines, Hortonworks is trying to make it faster. It might actually be a sound strategy. Read more »
As robots get smarter, they’ll be pouring our coffee (and beer)
photo: Shutterstock / Ociacia
Researchers at Cornell University have created a robog capable of predicting human gestures. In theory, smarter robots are better at everything, from pouring drinks without spilling to just seeming more human. Read more »
If you’re disappointed with big data, you’re not paying attention
photo: Shutterstock / alri
The big data skeptics have been getting louder over the past few months, but the message doesn’t resonate too loudly. No one said big data was perfect data. Read more »
BYOD is for amateurs. Try bring-your-own-laboratory
University of Illinois researchers have created an app and a sensor-filled cradle that turn an iPhone into a mobile spectrophotometer. The combination of that mobile lab data and metadata such as location might prove very valuable. Read more »
Big data at work: 12 stories about reinvention
photo: Thinkstock Images
Big data is cool and all, but is it really changing the way companies function? Yes. Here are 10 stories that show that transformation. Read more »
WibiData gets $15M to help it become the Hadoop application company
photo: Christophe Bisciglia (left) and Aaron Kimball (right)
Startup WibiData has raised another $15 million and wants to turn the lessons it has learned in the field into generic software that can let anyone build predictive applications on Hadoop. Read more »
Concurrent is building a Hadoop assembly line in open source
photo: Shutterstock / PENGYOU91
Cascading creator Concurrent has developed a new open source tool called Pattern for running machine learning models on Hadoop clusters. When combined with its SQL tool called Lingual, users can move data from one stage to another easily. Read more »
New algorithm maps cancer cells like nodes on a social network
photo: Columbia University
A group of researchers from Columbia and Stanford have created a method for turning complex cellular datasets into visualizations that map the similarities between tens of thousands of cells within a tissue sample. Read more »
Alteryx raises $12M to make predictive analytics user-friendly
photo: Shutterstock / ramcreations
Analytics provider Alteryx has raised another $12 million as it tries to make statistical analysis a more consumer-friendly experience. Read more »
Tableau closes Day 1 as a $2.9B public company, up 64 percent
photo: Yahoo Finance
Tableau had a successful IPO, closing the trading day up 64 percent and raking in $254 million. CEO Christian Chabot says the company is now set to make itself known around the world. Read more »
Database startup Drawn to Scale is closing down
Database startup Drawn to Scale, creator of the SQL-on-Hadoop technology called Spire, is closing down. The company’s product, Spire, was one of the first SQL-on-Hadoop technologies. Read more »
AWS is the McDonald’s of the cloud. Who’s the Burger King?
photo: Wikipedia Commons
It’s easy to characterize the cloud computing market as being Amazon Web Services’ to lose, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. McDonald’s dominates the fast food world, but life isn’t exactly bad for its dozens of competitors. Read more »
Tableau prices its stock at $31 per share for Friday’s IPO
Tableau’s initial public offering is on Friday, and expectations are high. The company has inspired much of the next-generation analytics space, and how it fares could be telling about just how powerful the data movement is. Read more »
Google’s growing cloud just got a NoSQL database
photo: Shutterstock / z0w
Google is expanding its cloud platform with a “NoSQL-like” database called Cloud Datastore. It’s a fully managed database that’s replicated across data centers and built to scale. Read more »
This is why big data is the sweet spot for SaaS
photo: Shutterstock / Andrea Danti
When it comes to using big data technology effectively, there’s a lot to like about SaaS. When companies like BloomReach create and analyze massive web-wide data sets, they automate insights that almost no individual company could discover on its own. Read more »
We’re witnessing the rise of the graph in big data
Graph databases and graph-processing applications have been popping up all over the place lately, and now they’re starting to go commercial. On Tuesday, popular open source project GraphLab joined the ranks of graph startups. Read more »
With Lucky Sort creators on board, Twitter is officially a data company
photo: Lucky Sort
With its acquisition of Lucky Sort, Twitter seems to be acknowledging that it’s a data company after all. The plan appears to be building a services that would do for Twitter equivalent to services such as Google Trends and Google Analytics. Read more »
