If you’ve ever wondered what big data means at an individual level, this realization about sums it up: “I could either keep dying my hair or retire a year earlier.” It’s those types of realizations Intuit hopes its heavy big data use will help uncover. Read More »
Bio: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.
Latest Tweets
- OH at the San DIego Zoo elephant display: "Why does it have an extra leg?" (the kid wasn't talking about its trunk)
- How Intuit uses big data to ‘delight’ you http://t.co/tOLOfFOg < social media are consumers' "Batphone to your company"
- As a term that describes something, "data science" is no better than "big data." I think they're just regional variations.
My Focus
Cloud computing
Big data
Recent Posts
According to some researchers, web companies such as Google, Amazon and Facebook are doing the research world a disservice because they won’t make their datasets available for peer review. These researchers have a point, but privacy concerns might always trump openness where openness matters at all. Read More »
What if Facebook is nothing more than a digital drug dealer and we’re all just junkies? As we head toward a future where technology is not just something we do, but a part of our biology, the answer to that question might take on grave importance. Read More »
The “Facebook generation,” as VMware CEO Paul Martiz called it in a presentation Tuesday morning, is post-PC and post-paper, and they want to experience information within the context in which they’re consuming it. And like it or not, they’re the future. Plan your IT accordingly. Read More »
Storage giant EMC has acquired cloud-storage startup Syncplicity in an attempt to compete with consumer-focused offerings such as Dropbox and for storing business users’ files. Cloud-based storage has become the primary villain in the move toward BYOD , but is also an area of strong growth. Read More »
Artificial intelligence has to be a siren’s song for application developers that want to strike it rich. It enables revolutionary apps suchs Siri, but it’s also very difficult to do well. A San Diego-based startup called ai-one wants to change that by giving apps brains. Read More »
According to some doomsayers, innovation is dead and Silicon Valley is just a muck pond where social media companies breed and reproduce like mosquitoes. That’s not entirely true, but the face of innovation has changed. Cloud computing has made innovation something anyone can do. Read More »
More Must Reads
Even if you haven’t heard of LivePerson, chances are you’ve encountered one of its products while browsing online. It’s the company behind those pop-up windows offering real-time chat with a representative, and it uses big data to decide which visitors are worth what type of attention. Read More »
It’s neither easy nor glamorous — data scientists get all the love — but making sure your Hadoop cluster is properly configured and applications are running optimally is necessary, especially as applications move into production. Here are five tools to help you do it. Read More »
Facebook’s hyperinflated valuation heading into its IPO has everything to do with its promise, and very little to do with its actual profits. Here are some numbers we know about Facebook’s infrastructure that speak to its promise perhaps as much as its 900 million users. Read More »
Google is hard at work on a cloud computing offering that will compete directly with the popular Amazon EC2 cloud, I have been told, although Microsoft probably will beat it to the punch. The timing for Google is TBD, while Microsoft should announce on June 7. Read More »
Yale researchers Daniel Abadi and Alexander Thomson think they have developed the cure for Oracle and IBM dominance in the world of database performance, and it isn’t even technically a database. The two have created a system they think can level the playing field. Read More »
There’s a principle of application design that beautiful means usable, but a new study out of Google suggests that while beauty doesn’t necessarily affect perceived usability, poor usability can negatively affect perceived beauty. Nobody wants a reputation as selling a product that’s both unusable and ugly. Read More »
Who needs a Ph.D. in statistics when you have the cloud? Machine learning is high data science, and it’s fast becoming something that anyone leverage to sell more handbags, or solve a research problem, or build the next LinkedIn or Facebook. Read More »
There’s nothing quite like a hypothetical about someone setting a whole block on fire after cutting off the fire department’s electric supply in order to slow its response. Is it comforting to know that smart people and smart analytics could help stop it from happening? Read More »
Yahoo is looking to leverage its big data prowess with a new tool for marketers called Genome. It looks like an acknowledgement that while Yahoo might not rule the the web anymore, it knows a heck of a lot about analytics. Read More »
As the world once again starts analyzing Yahoo’s myriad woes after Sunday morning’s ouster of embattled CEO Scott Thompson, I’m left wondering if its investment in Hadoop didn’t aid in the company’s demise, even if it’s a way down the long list of Yahoo’s mistakes. Read More »
If Facebook really is overvalued leading up to its IPO, privacy might be the underlying cause of the company’s missed expectations. As it turns out, pleasing both investors and users isn’t easy for a company that relies heavily on advertising and personal data. Read More »
Applied DNA Sciences thinks it has created the perfect tool for identifying attempts to counterfeit or steal goods along the supply chain. It’s mobile meets cloud computing meets big data, and it begins with QR codes that mimic physical DNA signatures. Read More »
EMC has bought Israeli flash-storage startup XtremIO for $430 million, according to Israeli news site Globes. The acquisition was expected after rumors began swirling in late April that EMC was courting the company, which sells a storage composed entirely of flash. Read More »
Of the dozens of meeting requests I received for this year’s Interop conference, the one I least expected came from Google. Interop is all about enterprise IT — networks, security, servers, stuff with gravitas. But in its own way, Google is becoming a serious IT company. Read More »
VMware CTO Steve Herrod has a message for the IT world: “[S]pecialized software will replace specialized hardware throughout the data center.” Via virtualizations and SDNs, software-defined data centers will bring the dynamic natures of Google, Facebook and Zynga data centers into the mainstream. Read More »
It remains to be seen whether “big data” is the the flavor of the month or something more profound. What’s indisputable is that more data is available than ever before and we now have the tools to help us make sense of that data. Read More »
Many IT professionals find migrating corporate applications to the cloud a difficult, time-consuming and altogether painful task, according to results of a new survey from Cisco. While the majority of respondents expressed relative comfort with their cloud migrations, some took rather extreme negative positions. Read More »
Rackspace is the Dr. Jekyll of hosting. For the last few years, it has been a legacy managed hosting provider by day that dabbled in cloud computing at night. As Dr. Jekyll ultimately did, though, Rackspace is becoming Mr. Hyde for good. Read More »
Market research firm IDC released the first legitimate market forecast for Hadoop on Monday, claiming the ecosystem around the de facto big data platform will sell almost $813 million worth of software by 2016. But Hadoop’s actual economic impact is likely much, much larger. Read More »
According to former Heroku CEO and current Salesforce.com VP of Platforms Byron Sebastian, Heroku is hosting more than 1.5 million applications — an increase of approximately 15x in less than 18 months. It’s success is part of an industry trend toward PaaS acceptance for new apps. Read More »
In Oren Etzioni’s world, telling you where to buy a product is so 20 years ago. Today, Etzioni wants to tell you when to buy. Tomorrow, well, maybe he can let you know when you’re in the vicinity of a great deal. Read More »
The legal profession has undergone a lot of change over the past few years, but don’t dismiss it as an anachronism just yet. As the web changes the way citizens consume and digest information, including on important legal issues, lawyers should remain as important as ever. … Read More »
The lead developers behind open-source storage system Ceph have launched a company, called Inktank, to commercialize the software. The company describes Ceph as a “fully open source, distributed object store, network block device, and POSIX-compatible distributed file system designed for reliability, performance, and scalability.” Read More »
When your business is to insure farmers against the effects of bad weather, you’d better have some seriously accurate data on your side. Mother Nature, after all, can be somewhat unpredictable. The Climate Corporation thinks the answer is lots of data and lots computing power. Read More »
Data warehouse veteran Teradata announced on Wednesday it is buying German software company eCircle in an attempt to gain a stronger presence in fast-growing world of marketing data. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but this is the second marketing-specific acquisition Teradata has … Read More »
Birst, a San Francisco-based business intelligence company with its roots in the cloud, has raised $26 million from Sequoia Capital, Hummer Winblad and DAG Ventures. The new money comes as Birst tries to become a BI heavyweight by pushing its way into the software world, too. Read More »
Although the storage world is awaiting an M&A explosion if EMC actually acquires flash startup XtremIO, Violin Memory and Fusion-io are keeping the hits coming in the meantime. Fusion-io is bringing in new software partners, while Violin brought in another $30 million. Read More »
Bina Technologies emerged from stealth mode last week and is bringing an Apple-like business model to genomics. The company relies on its Bina Box to make genome analysis faster than ever before possible without the benefit of having a supercomputer and a research network on hand. … Read More »
The moods of men can be captured by a web app, which can then recommend the appropriate spiciness of chicken wings they should eat, and even suggest appropriate mood music thanks to Spotify. Welcome to the data-driven future. Adjust your personal privacy setting accordingly. Read More »
The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act is a lot like your old college buddy who used to get way too drunk and then puke in your lap: it claims to mean well, but its actions suggest otherwise. Here’s how to improve it. Read More »
The concept of webscale computing gets a lot of attention thanks to the impressive scope of operations at companies like Google and Facebook, but one could argue there’s an even more-impressive tier of IT infrastructure: bank-scale. Here’s what scalbility means at Citigroup. Read More »
If you don’t think venture capitalists and other investors love all things big data, think again. In the past three days alone, companies claiming some connection to big data — either analyzing and/or storing large volumes of data — have announced at least $56 million in … Read More »
In a cloud computing market dominated by large, well-known companies such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace, it’s difficult to find much upside investing in the competition. However, Battery Ventures has done just that, leading a $27.5 million round in SingleHop, a Chicago-based infrastructure-as-a-service provider. Read More »
VMware has acquired Cetas, a startup that provides analytics atop the Hadoop platform. Terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed, but Cetas is an 18-month-old company with tens of paying customers that didn’t need to rush into an acquisition. So, why did VMware buy it? Read More »
DataPop, a startup using big data to deliver custom online ads, has raised a $7 million Series B round. The company’s technology uses big data techniques such as natural-language processing and semantic association to automatically generate online ads based on what a web user has searched … Read More »
Big data and the marketing world go together like peanut butter and jelly. Marketers want to present their brands in the most-effective manner possible and always put the right ad in front of the right person. Big data makes that possible at a whole new level. Read More »
The rumor mill is adamant that storage giant EMC is in serious talks to buy Israeli flash-storage startup XtremIO, a move that could trigger an avalanche of flash acquisitions rivaling the scale-out-file-system feeding frenzy a couple years ago. Here’s who might get bought. Read More »
The marketplace concept does a good job of bringing the simplicity of the Apple App Store model to server applications. It has the potential to revolutionize IT consumption. And if no one else steps up, Amazon is going to own this part of the cloud, too. Read More »
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