Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia wants to disrupt TV pricing again, this time by rolling out movie and news packages at a fraction of the price of traditional ones. News, he said, might even be free. Read more at paidContent »
The FBI has amassed terabytes of data from sources near the terrorist attack that occured during the Boston Marathon. This raises a question about the role crowdsourcing could play in solving some crimes while protecting citizens’ privacy. Read more »
Thiel Foundation subsidiary Breakout Labs has funded two new startups called SkyPhrase and Stealth Biosciences that, respectively, are trying to reinvent natural language processing and improve our ability to interact with individual cells. Read more »
Data scientist might be the sexiest job of the 21st century, but it’s hardly an easy gig to land. Here is some advice from practitioners at Netflix, Orbitz and Hortonworks on how get hired and even do the hiring. Read more »
IDC is predicting a $6 billion big-data storage market by 2016, part of an overall big data market worth nearly $24 billion. Read more »
More than a decade ago, Gracenote received some cryptic advice from Apple to buy more servers. What followed — the launch of iTunes and iPod — blew up Gracenote’s database to epic proportions and laid the groundwork for a metadata empire. Read more »
Rackspace is taking one for the team by trying to invalidate a patent that an alleged patent troll claims covers the ability for mobile displays to rotate as the device turns. Read more »
Web performance and security startup CloudFlare isn’t as big as Google or Facebook, but it does handle a lot of traffic. And now, like its larger peers, the company is designing its own gear to solve it own unique brand of problems. Read more »
Microsoft has rolled out a new visualization feature for Excel called GeoFlow. It’s definitely pretty, and if you’re using Windows and trying to track activity over space and time, it might be useful, too. Read more »
Is Facebook serious with its new partner categories advertising program? Somehow, using offline data to target ads seems like a stretch for a company already facing a privacy backlash and that has such rich data to mine from inside its own platform. Read more »
A team of Stanford researchers has developed a method for mining the text of doctors’ notes to identify adverse reactions from prescription drugs. The technique could spot problems years before the current FDA-reporting process can. Read more »
After hearing about the applications of big data for better ads, song recommendations and social media analysis, nothing makes me happier than hearing about technologists coming together with non-profits to use data to fight human trafficking. Read more »
I took a brief tour of the National Association of Broadcasters convention show floor today. Here’s what I saw and learned. Read more »
A startup called ParElastic thinks it can change the cloud database game by helping companies scale their MySQL environments without resorting to sharding or deploying an entirely new database. Read more »
MongoDB creator 10gen is growing again, this time with the addition of Sydney Carey as the company’s first CFO. She’ll help lay the infrastructure for plans to more than double in size in two years as it eyes an eventual IPO. Read more »
The SumAll Foundation, a non-profit effort by cloud analytics startup SumAll, is trying to change the world by showing non-profits how to get the most out of their data by thinking more like businesspeople do. Read more »
A data democracy built to last needs tools that empower everyone to work with data rather than relying on apps and data scientists. Tableau helped ignite the data revolution, and its IPO could help it keep going. Read more »
Almost every tech company claims to hate patent trolls, but they certainly don’t always back up their words with actions. Recent patent activity around the Hadoop big data platform might show how companies can effectively battle trolls — if they really want to. Read more »
SiSense has been growing like mad with its analytic database and BI software that’s designed to maximize the disk, memory and CPU on even small computers in the name of low latency. Read more »
Facebook has built a new open source tool for benchmarking graph databases, called LinkBench. And although the chances are your infrastructure and workloads look nothing like Facebook’s, the good news is LinkBench was built with configurability in mind. Read more »
New research suggests that a phenomenon called biased assimilation makes people view new, inconclusive evidence in ways that support existing biases, leading to increased polarization on topics such as politics or even what we read online. Read more »
Vasu Kulkarni isn’t an NBA star; he couldn’t even make an Ivy League basketball team. But Kulkarni’s startup Krossover is trying to change the nature of coaching, scouting and even fandom by testing people’s on-the-field sports intelligence. Read more »
A new research paper shows just how easy it is to identify individuals based on supposedly anonymous mobile-phone data, and this isn’t the first time supposedly anonymous data really wasn’t. But how do we balance the need for privacy with the value of these datasets? Read more »
MapR is releasing open source code and partnering with Canonical on Ubuntu, while Netflix is releasing some data for for developers to play with. Sounds like a good day for openness. Read more »
Teradata has been around forever, and its customer base full of huge companies suggests it will probably for a while to come. Here’s how some of its customers use the company’s analytics software. Read more »
Instagram might be changing the economics of the paparazzi business, but the photo-sharing service and its social media peers can also make celebrities — willing or not — out of ordinary people. Who should pay when digital activity has real-world consequences? Read more »
Medical researchers are using a mathematical process similar to Google PageRank in order to identify organs most likely to spread lung cancer throughout the human body. Read more »
Platfora, the San Mateo, Calif.-based startup that helped spur a general rethinking of business intelligence for a big data world, is finally exiting its beta period and is generally available. It’s no wonder the company has garnered so much attention given its stated mission to make […] Read more »
A recent study found strong correlations between people’s Facebook likes and a number of personal characteristics such as sexual orientation and intelligence. But relying on correlations as proof of anything is a questionable practice. Read more »
The first week of the NCAA tournament is in, and the results would suggest that Nate Silver is yet again the man when it comes to predicting the things Americans care about. Read more »
Call it whatever you want — big data, data science, data intelligence — but be prepared to have your mind blown. Imagination and technology are on a collision course that will change the world in profound ways. Read more »
Cascading proprietor Concurrent has secured $4 million in venture capital in order to advance its efforts toward easing the development of big data applications. Read more »
Database startup Drawn to Scale has extended its Spire distributed data platform from SQL to MongoDB. That means users can get high performance from the latter even across hundreds of terabytes. Read more »
Hadoop vendor is racking up customers and on Monday it announced a $30 million venture-capital investment that brings its total funding to $59 million since launching in 2011. Read more »
Many of us yell at the TV while watching our favorite sports teams. Many of us also want to get better at working with data. Statwing thinks it can help with both. Read more »
Google now allows joins within its BigQuery analytics service, as well as support for timestamped data and massive aggregations. Valuable stuff if you use BigQuery. Read more »
The private cloud world hasn’t been the same since OpenStack sucked the air out of the room. Here’s a look at the companies doing private cloud before OpenStack and how they’ve fared. Read more »
Oracle’s acquisition of Nimbula gives it some needed private-cloud savvy and a toehold in the OpenStack camp — should it choose to keep Nimbula’s product around. Read more »
Microsoft had a handful of journalists at its new Envisioning Center last week to show off its latest and greatest technology. Here’s what it demonstrated. Read more »
Microsoft is no joke when it comes to building web infrastructure and developing techniques such as machine learning. The company thinks its heavy investment in these areas will pay off big-time in the years to come. Read more »
