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 for. 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 »
If you think about it, Netflix’s metamorphosis into a company that runs its infrastructure completely atop cloud-based resources is truly remarkable. For many companies, such as site-optimization and CDN provider Yottaa, the bigger they get, the harder it is to justify the cloud’s cost and performance. Read more »
Already a heavy user of Apache Software Foundation projects, Twitter is now giving back to the organization financially as a sponsor. It’s difficult to think of a situation where Apache sponsorship wouldn’t be the right move and, it’s definitely the right thing for Twitter to do. Read more »
Ravel Data, a promising big data startup best known for its open source graph database called GoldenOrb, has sold its assets to marketing-and-communications firm W2O Group. According to sources, the company had been winding down for about a month after expanding faster than business actually demanded. Read more »
Amazon Web Services has launched an app store that promises users one-click deployment of their favorite software programs and applications. While it’s a great move by AWS and likely good news for customers, the aptly named AWS Marketplace isn’t necessarily good news for everyone. Read more »
Skybox Imaging, a startup that wants to capture and analyze high-resolution photos and videos of the Earth, has raised $70 million in Series C funding. The money will help Skybox its lineup of software engineers and data scientists that might be its secret sauce. Read more »
eBay and Facebook are among the winners of this year’s Green Enterprise IT Awards, which the Uptime Institute doles out for advancements in the world of energy-efficient data centers. eBay won for its Project Mercury data center, while Facebook scored with its Open Compute Project. Read more »
The National Labor Relations Board has bad news for employers that want to restrict their employees’ speech rights on social media. Employers can either update their policies to allow for the same types of speech the NLRA allows elsewhere, or they can find themselves in court. Read more »
PureDiscovery, a Dallas-based big data startup, thinks it has the has the answer to outdated enterprise search technology, and it’s called BrainSpace. Its goal is to let users find information that matters without having to search for it, to bring data to users. Read more »
If you’re an amateur poet and love big data, high-performance system vendor AMAX has a deal for you. The company is conducting a contest to find the best haiku on big data. But I’m sharing my poems right here. Read more »
The Atlantic recently published an article on what politicans know about voters, complete with market research data that breaks down consumer preferences by poltical party and likely turnout on voting day. There are some strong associations that lack political explanations. I want to know why. Read more »
It’s hard to be a web user, especially since the government has gotten so interested in what we’re doing online. It’s even worse when we can’t figure out who — if anyone — is actually on our side, and what terms we’re willing to live with. Read more »
The headline might sound like buzzword stew, but it couldn’t be any truer. For companies willing to make the leap to cloud services, there will be a lot of companies willing to make big data as easy as paying your bill every month. Read more »
The EFF and Anonymous might have overblown the ramifications of the proposed Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011 — calling it SOPA 2.0 — but that doesn’t mean the bill is well-written. However, strong support means it might be hard to stop. Read more »
You might have heard of SoftLayer, but if you’re like me, you probably didn’t know the cloud provider is hosting operations for some of the web’s hottest apps. Among them are Tumblr, OMGPOP, SendGrid and even Heroku. You learn something new every day. Read more »
Social-media data aggregator Gnip is taking on its biggest data source yet — China’s Sina Weibo microblogging service. The plaform has more than 300 million users, so it only makes sense that Gnip users would want to know what people there are talking about. Read more »
Updated: Twitter has shared numerous aspects of its infrastructure over the past few years, and its decision to open source its work on MySQL might be the social media platform’s most useful contribution yet. Sure, open source big data tools are valuable, but they’re not MySQL. Used […] Read more »
Instagram is pretty proud of the infrastructure it built atop the Amazon Web Services cloud, but does an acquisition by Facebook mean goodbye to Amazon? If I were a betting man, I’d say there are already some engineers working really hard to make that happen. Read more »
While webscale data center operators such as eBay are deploying custom-built data center containers designed for maximum performance and efficiency, IO Data Centers is pushing modular data centers for the rest of us. Its IO.Anywhere modules aren’t designed for HPC, but do promise flexibility. Read more »
In a webscale data center, peak efficiency feels like a blast furnace. I stepped into the hot aisle of Dell Modular Data Center and 1,920 servers blasted 115-degree air right in my face. If eBay’s Dean Nelson has his way, that was just the beginning. Read more »
Social and mobile analytics startup Kontagent has expanded its business to include a data-mining service powered by Hive, the SQL-like interface for querying data stored within Hadoop. It’s a smart move by the company, and one that other cloud-based analytics providers would be wise to replicate. Read more »
The federal government talked a lot about grand scientific visions when it unveiled its big data agenda last week, but the government has consumers on its mind, too. Specifically, it doesn’t want to unduly hinder innovation, and it might even be willing to provide data. Read more »
According to analysts at Morgan Stanley, Amazon’s cloud computing division could be a shining star (even if not too bright) on the company’s long road toward increased profit margins. While margins are flat, there’s opportunity for growth as Amazon Web Services keeps evolving. Read more »
If you have a lot of unstructured data, don’t have (or want) a Hadoop cluster and can write Python jobs, Mortar Data has got the service for you. The New York-based startup is jumping into the fray with possibly the most lightweight Hadoop service yet. Read more »
Managed hosting provider Sungard is getting into the big data space with a new Hadoop service that gives users on-demand access to the popular data-storage and processing platform. Called Unified Analytics Service, Sungard’s new offering joins the growing ranks of cloud-based Hadoop offerings. Read more »
It looks like OpenStack won’t have the open-source cloud spotlight to itself anymore. Citrix has released the CloudStack software it acquired along with Cloud.com to the Apache Software Foundation, creating a competitive option to the OpenStack project of which Citrix was an early member. Read more »
Google has been on the receiving end of some particularly egregious privacy complaints lately, stemming from its revised privacy policy. However, most of these efforts to call out Google seem like little more than attempts to make a quick payday in the court or with voters. Read more »
Violin Memory is a force to be reckoned with in the storage world. It’s not just the industry shift toward solid-state drives replacing slower, less-efficient hard disk drives that’s driving Violin’s value through the roof, though, it’s also the company’s very strategic set of investors. Read more »
By pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into big data research and development, the Obama administration thinks it can push the current state of the art well beyond what’s possible today, and into entirely new research areas. It’s a noble goal, but also a necessary one. Read more »
Last summer, Yahoo’s investments in big data brought us Hadoop startup Hortonworks, and now those same investments brought us predictive-marketing startup InsightsOne. The company, founded by the team responsible for building Yahoo’s consumer analytics platform, launched on Thursday with $4.3 million in Series A funding. Read more »
The White House released the details of its $200 million-plus annual big data strategy, which includes lots of access to funding and data for researchers.The administration is banking on big data having revolutionary effects on par with the Internet, which federal dollars financed decades ago. Read more »
A court is about to decide whether a juror who posted Facebook status updates about the trial can be forced to turn over his activity data during the trial. But the case is just a microcosm of the greater concern over online privacy. Read more »
If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if the top two teams in the Netflix Prize competition united and put their predictive analytics skills to work together, you’ll soon find out. On Tuesday, big data service provider Opera Solutions acquired Austrian predictive analytics specialist Commendo. Read more »
In the latest dispatch from the too-much-information bureau, on-demand ride service Uber has calculated the prevalence of one-night stands among its customer base. It’s another example of what companies can find out if they’re just able to think of the right questions. Read more »
The technological hurdles to embracing big data are well-known at this point, but strong anti-data corporate culture might be an even bigger obstacle. The changes required to listen to the data and, possibly, to transform a company’s business model take a lot of work. Read more »
OMGPOP can thank the cloud for its acquisition by Zynga on Wednesday. The gaming startup, whose Draw Something iPhone used cloud computing and a NoSQL database to scale from zero (relatively speaking) to more than 35 million downloads in three weeks and never miss a beat. Read more »
According to former CIA director James Woolsey, the utility companies don’t want to think about issues like data security, so it’s up to the people working on smart grid technologies to do that. Life won’t be so fun if the grid goes down. Read more »
