It appears as if Apple users’ willingness to shell out a little more cash for a premium experience doesn’t stop at computers. Orbitz’s data-crunching has found that Mac users also spend about $20 more a night on hotels than do Windows users. Read more »
Platform-as-a-Service provider Heroku is expanding its horizons by offering an on-demand version of the PostgreSQL Database-as-a-Service. Heroku Postgres is a commercial version of what Heroku has been providing for years, only it’s now available to all developers regardless where they host their applications. Read more »
If a recent blog post by Gartner analyst Lydia Leong is telling, it looks as if cultural hurdles are impeding private cloud adoption as well as public cloud adoption — at least when it comes to doing it right. It takes sacrifice to operate like Google. Read more »
We often ascribe life-changing powers to high-speed Internet connections in our personal lives, but can they cure cancer? The Chan Soon-Shiong Institute for Advanced Health thinks so, and it’s investing hundreds of millions of dollars in a nationally distributed computing system to make it happen. Read more »
According to one expert, hacktivism gets a bad rap when it comes to web security, but those sites generate a lot of attack data to feed security systems. However, the proposed SOPA antipiracy legislation could end up playing right into hackers’ hands. Read more »
IT services company Unisys recently released its biannual Unisys Security Index. The latest study found that many have already been victims of cybercrime, but this infographic shows that companies charged with protecting consumer data might be the biggest losers when it gets exposed. Read more »
New Relic, the cloud-based startup that has become synonymous with the term “lean startup,” has raised a $15 million expansion round. It actually closed a $10 million round in October 2010 and has now raised $35 million in total, the venture funding belies New Relic’s success. Read more »
Marketo, a SaaS startup focusing on revenue performance management, has raised a $50 million round with Battery Ventures leading the way. Marketo has been on a roll, totaling $107 million in VC investment, and now earning upward of $40 million a year in revenue. Read more »
A new startup called CrowdControl is launching today, and it aims to bring order to the world of crowdsourcing by using artificial intelligence to judge workers’ accuracy. Think Amazon Mechanical Turk, only with a quality control mechanism in place to help ensure jobs get done right. Read more »
According to a Harvard Business School professor, cloud startups can thank a copyright law decision for increased funding in the past few years. The case’s timing certainly aligns with an uptick in cloud funding, but it’s tough to see how the two are related. Read more »
It might sound like science fiction, but Jawbone Founder and CEO Hosain Rahman says we’re headed to an era where our bodies can be connected to everything in our worlds, including our air conditioners. But it all starts with gathering data and understanding what it means. Read more »
Although it appears significant venture capital investment in Platform-as-a-Service startups is drawing to a close, Standing Cloud was able to raise another $3 million, it announced on Thursday. The money comes from Foundry Group and Avalon Ventures, bringing Standing Cloud’s total investment to $8 million. Read more »
The Supreme Court of the United States heard oral arguments in a case that could decide how connected the concept of big data is to constitutional expectations of privacy. How much data is too much before allowable surveillance crosses the line into an invasion of privacy? Read more »
Amazon Web Services is making available a new US West region located in Oregon, which it is positioning as a lower-cost alternative to the company’s existing Northern California region. AWS says services in the Oregon region costs about 10 percent less than in Northern California. Read more »
Does your business rely on email to communicate with your customers? If the answer is yes, then you should know that your messages may not be reaching their inboxes. Learn about the best practices that will get your email delivered every time. Read more »
VMware’s Cloud Foundry is already catching on among companies wanting to become PaaS providers, and now it might start finding a home in private data centers too. ActiveState has created a commercial Cloud Foundry distribution called Stackato that’s meant to give customers their own private PaaS. Read more »
Cloud provider CloudSigma has become the first to add solid-state-drive storage to its public cloud computing service. It’s designed to better CloudSigma’s price-performance ratio overall, which will bring in more and bigger customers that want to do things in its cloud that they can’t do elsewhere. Read more »
Splunk has integrated its product with Apache Hadoop to enable large-scale batch analytics on top of the product’s existing capabilities around real-time search, analysis and visualization of machine-generated data. Users can bring Hadoop data back into Splunk for visualization or run MapReduce jobs from Splunk. Read more »
Accel Partners is trying to capitalize on the popularity of big data with a $100 million Big Data Fund. The VC firm’s office across the globe will invest in applications that help form an ecosystem around existing big data building blocks such as Hadoop and NoSQL. Read more »
SaaS startup New Relic made its name monitoring application performance, but it has added server monitoring to the mix to make the service more functional. It’s actually a natural fit, though, as server issues can have a big impact on how an application is running. Read more »
Hadoop isn’t the only thing going in big data, but it’s driving the bus at this point and it seems to have a reverse Midas touch: everything that touches it turns to gold. The latest to experience this is Cloudera, which has raised another $40 million. Read more »
Minneapolis-based cloud computing startup enStratus has raised $3.5 million in Series A funding to grow its business of managing all types of clouds across a common interface. EnStratus’ technology provides a secure platform for managing and monitoring numerous cloud offerings through a single interface. Read more »
Targeting customers demanding more-reliable and efficient Hadoop clusters to power their big data efforts, NetApp has partnered with Cloudera to deliver a Hadoop storage system called the NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop. It combines Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution and management software with a NetApp-built RAID architecture. Read more »
Google, IBM, Citi and a handful of other large U.S. technology and banking companies are pushing the U.S. government to take the lead on establishing global treaties that would assure the free flow of information across international borders. If the government is smart, it will listen. Read more »
Cloudera founder Christophe Bisciglia launched a new company today called Odiago, whose WibiData product utilizes Hadoop and HBase to let businesses make the most of online user data. Big-name investors aside, under the covers WibiData shows the future of how Hadoop-based products will look. Read more »
E-commerce site Etsy has grown to 25 million unique visitors and 1.1 billion page views per month, and it’s generating the data volumes to match. Using tools such as Hadoop and Splunk, Etsy is turning terabytes of data per day into a better product. Read more »
Save for Hortonworks’ foray into the product space, none of today’s myriad Hadoop announcements are particularly earth-shaking, but they’re very meaningful when taken as a whole. They’re part of a larger trend in which anyone with a data-driven business has a Hadoop story to tell customers. Read more »
Viber Media, provider of iPhone and Android apps that let users talk and text for free over 3G and Wi-Fi networks, is built upon a foundation of the MongoDB NoSQL database running atop the Amazon Web Services cloud. Read more »
Hortonworks is getting into software after all with today’s release of the open-source Hortonworks Data Platform. This is a smart move by Hortonworks, which will need more than name recognition to displace Hadoop elder statesman Cloudera as well as mega-vendors EMC, Oracle and IBM. Read more »
Calling a company’s customer service department can be a frustrating experience. If only there was a way to make it a more rewarding experience for everyone involved and perhaps even save everyone some time. That might be coming, and big data might be leading the charge. Read more »
We often laud big data when it’s capturing and storing all sorts of new data types, but would the positive tone change if we we’re talking about monitoring your every digital interaction while at work to discover questionable behavior? Cataphora CEO Elizabeth Charnock doesn’t really care. Read more »
Managed-hosting provider turned cloud provider Internap now has an OpenStack-based cloud ready for public consumption, beating even OpenStack founder Rackspace to the punch. It’s a big day for OpenStack, the open-source cloud computing platform, but it’s likely only the first of many. Read more »
“Other,” the revenue category in Amazon’s reports that encompasses Amazon Web Services, is growing like mad — 70 percent over last year, in fact. This matters because it likely means AWS is outpacing its projected growth and is rapidly approaching a $1 billion run rate. Read more »
Monday, I sat down with Steve Mills, IBM’s SVP of Software & Systems, to discuss what IBM has in the works around big data, and he didn’t mince words in asserting IBM’s ambitious revenue plans and slamming rivals such as Oracle. Read more »
Any lingering fantasies of the web as a no-man’s land where content is free from the restraints of geographical boundaries probably should be put to rest. Google released a treasure trove of data relating to content-takedown requests, showing that requests are up and Google often complies. Read more »
Nutanix just closed a $25 million Series B round for its system that puts computing and storage on the same node, allowing companies to scale their storage layer without investing in a SAN. Khosla Ventures led the round, along with Lightspeed Venture Partners and Blumberg Capital. Read more »
SpringSource, the application-platform arm of VMware, has been working closely with NoSQL startup Neo Technology to produce a version of the Neo4j graph database optimized for Spring environments. Additionally, SpringSource founder and GM Rod Johnson is now chairman of Neo’s board of directors. Read more »
IBM joined the big-data-in-the-cloud fray, announcing Monday that its Hadoop-based InfoSphere BigInsights product will be available as a service on the IBM SmartCloud platform. Big Blue’s timing is good, as Hadoop will likely have a far greater presence across public clouds within the next year. Read more »
Opscode has brought it cloud-configuration-management technology, Chef, to Microsoft Windows environments. Chef lets users create “recipes” for configuring and managing infrastructure in an automated and scalable manner, which has made it popular for a variety of complex use cases such as cloud computing and scale-out clusters. Read more »
The federal government has been gung ho over cloud computing in the past few years, but is it ready to do big data in the cloud? Federal contractor GCE Federal is offering a cloud service based on Hadoop and designed for federal agencies to outsource analytics. Read more »
