Is there there really a model for predicting the success of Kickstarter campaigns? A new interactive model from machine learning service BigML offers a fun way to try, although the dearth of public data from Kickstarter might affect its accuracy. Read more »
GoDaddy has been undergoing a transformation lately as it tries to become more valuable to its customers by providing higher-level services than just web hosting. Its latest product is a CDN that it claims can help significantly decrease pageload times for its small-business customers. Read more »
Cloud provider Joyent has a new Hadoop offering that the company claims can outperform most others on the market. However, the company says Hadoop is just its foray into big data and is promising bigger, better things to come. Read more »
Google spent more than a billion dollars on infrastructure in the fourth quarter, representing the company’s second-biggest quarterly expenditure ever. As it competes against Facebook, Apple, Yelp and Amazon, the company can’t afford to stop building data centers now. Read more »
A startup called Syapse is trying to bring the world of “omics” — the study of all our genomes, biomes, proteomes and other “omes” — under control with a new data management platform based on some of the general techniques that also power Facebook’s Graph Search. Read more »
Amazon Web Services has introduced its latest instance — an 88-core, 240 GB SSD, 244 GB RAM and 10 GbE behemoth designed for real-time analytics with software like SAP HANA, as well as demanding scientific workloads. Read more »
Zynga has deployed nearly 100 nodes of MemSQL, the hot new database from two former Facebook engineers. It might not be a magic pill for Zynga’s woes, but it could help the company boost revenue and even build new types of games. Read more »
Flash storage vendor Violin Memory has acquired appliance maker GridIron Systems to improve performance even more for demanding applications. Even as some are calling for slower flash, Violin thinks speed, cost and reliability don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Read more »
Facebook is looking at almost all options to address the storage needs of its myriad applications that all have different requirements around performance, scalability and efficiency. Flash can be too fast and hard drives to slow, but Facebook wants something just right. Read more »
VMware CTO Steve Herrod is leaving his post to join venture capital firm General Catalyst, where he’ll be managing director. I think this is a big loss for VMware, which has already been hemorrhaging technical talent to younger, nimbler companies. Read more »
By combining machine learning with stunning visualizations, Ayasdi thinks it has created a product that could revolutionize data analysis. Its software is the latest product that tries to make humans better at their jobs by taking away the guesswork of spotting correlations. Read more »
SevOne has raised $150 million for its line of appliances that help companies capture and analyze their streams of operational infrastructure data. Its financial success, even for a relatively quiet company founded in 2005, illustrate how important it is to know your systems data well. Read more »
Netflix is at it again, this time showing off its homemade architecture for running Hadoop workloads in the Amazon Web Services cloud. It’s all about the flexibility of being able to run, manage and access multiple clusters while eliminating as many barriers as possible. Read more »
ScaleArc’s technology sits between applications and their SQL databases, claiming to provide better performance and better operational insights than running MySQL, Oracle Database or Microsoft SQL Server alone. With a $12.3 million Series C round, ScaleArc will try to withstand a glut of competition. Read more »
Streaming-data specialist Guavus has raised $30 million to help its business of helping telcos make more sense of their streams of network data. By analyzing that data on the fly, they can see in real time who how their networks are being used, and by whom. Read more »
China’s big four internet companies are big — huge, in fact — but they’re not yet technological innovators like their American counterparts. However, scalability is an an issue that knows no borders, which has spurred some cross-continental cooperation. Will it also inspire a Chinese tech awakening? Read more »
Research firm IDC is predicting a big data market that will grow revenue at 31.7 percent a year until it hits the $23.8 billion mark in 2016. However, that number could start looking a lot bigger when analytics, SaaS applications and other products are included. Read more »
There’s evidence to suggest that traffic congestion is a side effect of strong city economies, a claim furthered by recent traffic-data analysis from INRIX. However, a decreased reliance on cars might mean clearer roads are more the result of alternative transit than of slow economic growth. Read more »
A group of researchers from an Israeli university used data from Waze to determine the country’s most-accident-prone areas and how they correlate, or not, with a notable police presence. It’s just one of many efforts using ballooning data from drivers and devices to try and make sense of city traffic. Read more »
I recently spent 11 days in Beijing meeting lots of companies trying to make it in cloud computing and big data. Here are seven with which I had a chance to sit down and learn about their businesses and how to sell cloud computing in China. Read more »
Big data technologies are like manufacturing robots: they let people do what they’re already trying to do, only faster than before and at a much greater scale. But as with any other product, that analyzed data is nothing without humans to do something with it. Read more »
Both Amazon Web Services and Netflix — its most-prominent customer — have released details on AWS outage that took down Netflix’s streaming service on Christmas Eve. AWS attributes the issue primarily to human error. Netflix just wants to avoid this situation again, whatever the cause. Read more »
Placed Analytics has published a blog post showing which retailers had the most in-store visits during the holiday season. Placed can’t track sales, but its mobile-phone-derived location data can give a glimpse into who’s attracting the most physical shoppers, and when. Read more »
Big data might not be able to predict when a mass murderer is about to strike, but perhaps it can shed some light on why certain countries have such high murder rates. Are there factors not related to gun control that inspire a willingness to kill? Read more »
Congress is supposed to write our laws, but it’s looking inadequate at doing so in the face of a rapidly evolving technology industry. The near-term passage of a bill allowing Netflix to share user data is too little, too late — and altogether too common. Read more »
A lot happened in the world of data analysis this year. Here’s a list of the most-popular and generally most-interesting things I’ve had the fortune to cover in 2012 — from Hadoop to the Supreme Court to Bollywood stars. Read more »
Whether they’re building big data applications or just trying to gather some insights from their mobile apps, developers have more need than ever for analytics tools. It’s a good thing so many companies are building tools designed with developers’ needs and skills in mind. Read more »
Everyone’s talking about the greatness of big data, but we’re nowhere near the promised land of what’s possible when we turn data loose on our lives. Here are three things to watch that could affect how companies and everday people consume all that info. Read more »
In the latest case of researchers using the cloud for good, Google is highlighting the six projects to which it awarded grants via its Exacycle for Visiting Faculty program. Ranging from genomic research to astronomy, the researchers received 100 million computing hours apiece. Read more »
Crowdsourcing is a great idea in theory, but it hasn’t really lived up to its potential, says Alegion CEO Nathaniel Gates. He thinks with some fundamental tweaks, Alegion can change all that for the better. Read more »
As voters increasingly spend their leisure time with things other than newspapers and television, political campaigns need new methods of making sure their messages reach those people. Obama for America’s Rayid Ghani took to Facebook to find not just possible voters, but possible campaign workers. Read more »
ClearStory Data has raised $9 million from from KPCB, Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures in an attempt to plant its stake in the world next-generation analytics platforms. Big data is presenting a big challenge for business users, and they need help making sense of it. Read more »
Everywhere you look, there’s another option for sharing your medical data in the name of the greater good. These efforts are not for nothing: Because of there scale and geographic reach, crowdsourced data banks have the potential to revolutionze how medical research is conducted. Read more »
At the AWS Re: Invent conference, engineers from Pinterest, Flipboard and Yelp detailed some of the strategies their companies employ in order to keep costs low as computing demand increases. The keys are keeping an eagle eye on usage and using the right types of resources. Read more »
According to Amazon Web Services Chief Data Scientist Matt Wood, big data and cloud computing are nearly a match made in heaven. Limitless, on-demand and inexpensive resources open up new worlds of possibility, and a central platform makes it easy for communities to share huge datasets. Read more »
A startup called BitDeli is trying to democratize analytics by letting developers create custom metrics and dashboards using Python scripts instead of having to try Hadoop. What frameworks like Rails were to web development, Co-founder and CEO Ville Tuulos says, BitDeli is to analytics. Read more »
AWS CTO Werner Vogels and I sat down at the AWS re:Invent conference yesterday to talk about whether large companies are actually using the cloud to innovate through new styles of applications. Vogels says they are, and has plenty of examples to prove his point. Read more »
Writing Hadoop queries doesn’t have to be hard and neither does sharing data according to Mortar Data, which just released an open source framework for Hadoop applications. The idea is that groups of people can more easily collaborate on building apps around giant data sets. Read more »
Log management startup Sumo Logic has secured a $30 million Series C funding round from Accel Partners along with existing investors Greylock Partners and Sutter Hill Ventures. The company, which competes primarily with Wall Street darling Splunk, has now raised $50.5 million since its creation. Read more »
There’s no shortage of great minds using big data techniques to improve the quality of our medical treatments, but sometimes they can’t get access to the data they need most. Improving access to genetic data, for example, might just help cure cancer. Read more »
