If you’ve ever found yourself frustrated over the need to constantly switch between collaboration apps, Tracky wants to be your savior. The Las Vegas-based company, which just raised $1 million in angel funding, is opening its platform to the public later this month. Read more »
Twitter has been on a tear lately when it comes to open sourcing big-data tools. The latest two are Cassie, a client for managing Cassandra clusters, and Scalding, a MapReduce framework for simplifying the creation of Hadoop jobs. Big data won’t be black magic forever. Read more »
Look under the covers of almost any data-focused web application — including Klout — and you’ll find Hadoop. It helps Klout accurately measure and score its users’ social media influence. But Klout also has another important, and very not-open-source, weapon in its arsenal — Microsoft SQL Server. Read more »
On Super Tuesday, when 10 states hold their presidential primaries and 419 delegates are up for grabs, the election trackers at Yahoo and Fizziology have Mitt Romney as the favorite to win the day. The day might not go as well for Rick Santorum. Read more »
Zynga is in a tricky position technologically thanks to its new frenemy status with Facebook. Zynga claims 240 million active users, and it wants a lot more, but scaling to those heights might require one heck of a computing infrastructure. Read more »
Mark Phillip wants to save cable television, kind of. He really wants to make life easier for sports fanatics like himself, but in doing so has created something he thinks could save cable and satellite from the cord-cutting craze. The secret to his possible success: data. Read more »
Cisco and EMC have come up with a reference architecture featuring Cisco UCS server gear that’s designed to run the EMC Greenplum MR software, the company’s “enterprise-class” Hadoop distribution that features technology it OEMs from Hadoop startup MapR. Read more »
When Microsoft and VMware latch onto a technology, you know it’s for real. VMware is now pushing a project called Spring Hadoop that lets developers use the popular Spring Java framework to write big data applications atop Apache Hadoop. Read more »
Microsoft, which looked as if it might be the odd man out on Hadoop, might actually play a big role in taking the platform into the mainstream. On Tuesday, it exposed its plans to make Hadoop data analyzable via both a JavaScript framework and Microsoft Excel. Read more »
Database startup Basho on Tuesday released details of how its Riak NoSQL database underpins Bump. Bump is the seventh most-downloaded free iPhone app of all time — with more than 80 million downloads — so it has a lot of data to store and transfer. Read more »
According to business intelligence provider Jaspersoft, MongoDB and Hadoop dominate the big data landscape among its users. The company today announced a new service, called the Big Data Index, which is a monthly measure of downloads of Jaspersoft’s “big data” connectors to its flagship BI product. Read more »
With more than 45 million users already connected to his company’s cloud storage service, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston knows he has an infrastructure challenge ahead of him. That, Houston says, is a big reason Dropbox bought Cove, which brings with it Facebook engineering cred. Read more »
Rob Bearden, CEO of Hortonworks, the Hadoop startup that spun out of Yahoo in June 2011, knows a thing or two about making open source software profitable. And he thinks Hadoop has an opportunity to be bigger than the markets for JBoss, SpringSource and MySQL combined. Read more »
CrowdControl, which launched in November with the goal of improving the accuracy of crowdsourcing projects by analyzing results against a set of artificial intelligence techniques, has raised $2 million from Greycroft Partners and RTP Ventures. Read more »
Walk into the offices of most technology startups, and you’ll see lots of open space, lots of desks and lots of programmers hacking away at code. Walk into the office of a startup that’s creating physical products, and it’s a different experience. Read more »
At some inderminate time, very possibly this year, business intelligence favorite Tableau Software will file for its initial public offering. When it does, it will be in good company, along with others that were smart enough to ride the twin waves of consumerization and big data. Read more »
Big data startup Skytree emerged from stealth mode on Thursday with a product that is designed to democratize the science of machine learning while improving significantly on the speed and scale of existing options. Skytree has raised $1.5 million from Javelin Venture Partners. Read more »
Infochimps, a startup best known for its data marketplace, is now offering a cloud-based service that takes the pain out of managing Hadoop and scale-out database environments. The company hopes its new cloud-based service can do for big data applications what PaaS did for web applications. Read more »
BloomReach emerged from stealth mode a message about how it will help ensure companies get their web pages heard above the noise online. Using a potent brew of big data techniques, BloomReach says it can significantly improve traffic by making pages more relevant to consumers. Read more »
Although the idea of police officers video-recording their use of Tasers has some claiming a small victory in the quest for better transparency, the issue isn’t that simple. From providing biased evidence to possibly invading privacy, video is ultimately no different than any other data type. Read more »
Data-warehouse veteran Teradata has tightened its embrace of the Hadoop big data platform via a partnership with Hortonworks. The goal is to give customers big data environments that integrate everything from the Teradata Database for advanced SQL analytics and the Hortonworks Data Platform Hadoop distribution. Read more »
While it’s easy to be skeptical of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh’s grand vision to make Las Vegas a startup hotbed, the companies that have moved to the desert are confident they made the right decision, in part because Las Vegas isn’t Silicon Valley. Read more »
There has been a series of significant, but unannounced management changes at Hortonworks, the Hadoop startup that Yahoo spun off in June. Former COO Rob Bearden is taking over the top executive role, with some thinking his task will be whipping the company into shape. Read more »
Yesterday, I drove past the former Sun Microsystems headquarters for the first time since Facebook moved in earlier this month. It reminded me just how influential a company Sun was, despite its somewhat unfortunate fate. Innovation was never Sun’s problem: just look at its alumni. Read more »
Las Vegas is hardly Silicon Valley and currently has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, but Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh has a plan to revitalize the city. Good thing he has hundreds of million of dollars and some promising startups to help out. Read more »
Cloud platform-as-a-service provider Heroku has added a new feature to its Postgres database service that lets users share the results of an SQL query simply by sending a URL. The feature, called Data Clips, shows viewers both archived and current result sets in their web browsers. Read more »
SpaceCurve, a startup pushing a database designed for location data, has raised $2.7 million on the promise it can help developers better leverage the Internet of things. SpaceCurve is designed for apps that need to analyze lots of complex location data in a hurry. Read more »
Companies are hot on social media for a number of reasons, but perhaps chief among them should be that social platforms can create focus groups at a scale never before possible. Given the right big data tools and techniques, the insights can be fantastic. Read more »
It’s no secret that Yahoo analyzes a lot user data, but today it’s giving the world a striking peek into how all that data is used. A new tool lets visitors work their way through demographic data to see which news stories are the most popular. Read more »
Cloud computing consultancy Cloudscaling is realigning its business around the open-source OpenStack framework, and it has a message for the world: If you want to use open-source software but operate like Amazon Web Services, we’re your man. Read more »
More news from the Google-data-scientists-conduct-the-coolest-research desk: YouTube has created an algorithm for determining what videos are funniest based on the intensity of viewer comments. It sounds fairly unimportant, but YouTube’s work actually speaks volumes about the potential of social-media sentiment analysis. Read more »
Who needs an awards show to tell us which movies and actors fans prefer when we have Twitter? IBM is turning its skills in social-media sentiment analysis to Hollywood awards so the world can see which movies and stars are generating the most buzz on Twitter. Read more »
Looks like Oracle has some competition when it comes to selling big iron for big data. On Wednesday, Cray, the Seattle-based company best known for building some of the world’s fastest supercomputers, announced it’s getting into the big data game. Read more »
WibiData, a Hadoop-based startup focused on making it easier to analyze user behavior, has raised $5 million from New Enterprise Associates. The company, formerly known as Odiago, launched in late 2011 already claiming Wikipedia and Atlassian among its early customers. Read more »
Twitter is fast becoming the focus group of the 21st century, a status solidified yet again during Sunday night’s Super Bowl. The platform saw 453 times the maximum tweets per second it saw during 2008′s game, and sentiment analysis of tweets might have predicted the upset. Read more »
Hadoop features front and center in the discussion of how to implement a big data strategy, one of the biggest trends in IT. There’s just one problem that keeps cropping up: many people don’t seem to know exactly what it means when somebody says “Hadoop.” Read more »
Romanian startup Skin Scan is selling an iPhone app that lets consumers take pictures of questionable moles and get back information on its threat level. However, the company has much grander goals than helping consumers figure out whether to see a doctor. Read more »
Facebook’s S-1 filing shows the company is all about infrastructure. The ad revenue and user experience it relies on to exist mean Facebook can’t afford to take it easy on IT, which means shareholders and users will both find plenty of reasons to get upset. Read more »
If you like the idea of your analytics system’s getting more accurate with each piece of data it ingests, it looks like you are in for an exciting run, because machine learning appears to be catching fire across the ecosystem of big data vendors. Read more »
AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson isn’t shy about touting PaaS as the ideal way for developers to access cloud computing resources, but he also knows it’s not mainstream. In this inforgraphic illustrating the evolution of cloud computing, Carlson says PaaS will hit its stride in 2013. Read more »
