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 »
A group of British researchers recently analyzed 2.5 million newspaper articles in order to prove that new data analysis techniques, such as machine learning and natural-language processing, can accurately classify media content. They hope their approach can save academicians untold hours of manual labor. Read more »
Netflix has forged a cottage industry building tools to fill gaps in Amazon’s cloud infrastructure or otherwise add value to it. Now the company is open sourcing its Hystrix libraries, which manage interactions between the myriad distributed services that power its applications. Read more »
According to the New York Times, National Football League teams are often years behind their peers in other professional sports when it comes to data analysis. Machine learning could help teams make more sense of the myriad variables that currently keep them relying on human intuition. Read more »
Online dating startup Zoosk uses big data techniques and technologies for a lot more than just computing which members might make the best mates. Data from its young audience well versed in social media lets the company design a user experience that matches their expectations. Read more »
In the fight about royalties from streaming media services like Pandora, Popular cellist Zoë Keating says she’s willing to give up the money in exchange for data. It’s an idea that’s gaining traction elsewhere, too, as more companies are paying consumers for their truly valuable data. Read more »
Eight years after forming, a startup called BeyondCore is finally launching publicly with a product it claims can revolutionize analytics. Rather than making analysts search for the needle in the haystack, BeyondCore says it remove the human element and deliver that needle on a silver platter. Read more »
Even if you don’t agree with ZestFinance’s business, it’s hard to argue with its grasp of big data and applied mathematics. Now, the company has added a human touch to machine learning in order to make its models for assessing repayment risk even more accurate. Read more »
Mortar Data has raised $1.8 million for its cloud-based service that wraps Hadoop in a custom — and supposedly developer-friendly — blend of Pig and Python, meaning even novice Hadoop programmers can be writing jobs in about an hour. Read more »
Companies such as Inrix are making their money helping commuters and commercial drivers find the fastest routes through traffic, but their reach could go much further. Creative organizations can apply the data in entirely new areas, and crowdsourcing means seeing how the world moves. Read more »
What’s true in the rest of the world is true for security software, as well: more data means more intelligence. Thanks to the emergence of new techniques for storing, collecting and analyzing data, there’s a new wave of security companies looking smarter than ever. Read more »
Web-hosting giant GoDaddy is trying to grow into a products company to help its small business customers move into the modern computing era rather than just hosting their websites. A conversion to mobile websites is first, but cloud services are on the horizon. Read more »
HBase is a great option for developing big data applications, but it’s not necessarily easy to use. WibiData is addressing this by open sourcing a portion of its predictive analytics infrastructure that adds structure to data, followed eventually by a whole HBase development framework called Kiji. Read more »
Hadoop is nothing without applications, and Continuuity aims to deliver those apps by making Hadoop something developers can work and innovate with. Its efforts haven’t gone unnoticed — the company just closed a $10 million Series A round from a who’s who of big data VCs. Read more »
DataSift raised another $15 million in venture capital, bringing its total investment to nearly $30 million. In this video from Structure: Europe, DataSift Founder and CTO Nick Halstead describes how the company handles the firehose of social media data it receives. Read more »
Zoomdata has a plan for business intelligence that involves tacking the difficult problem of streaming data, and doing so with a mobile-device-first mindset. The result is pretty and compelling in theory, but it’s technologically challenging and will face tough competition from new and old vendors alike. Read more »
Less than a month after unveiling its Hadoop analytics engine to great fanfare, Platfora has raised $20 million to realize its mission of displacing the business intelligence and data warehouse incumbents. It’ll need every dime: although the competition is old, it’s also rich, entrenched and determined. Read more »
Obama for America CTO Harper Reed had helped build Threadless, a site for selling hip t-shirts, but he had never done anything like this. Here’s how he and his team built a tech platform that might forever change how presidential campaigns are built. Read more »
The largest players in the Hadoop market are already raising money and sky-high valuations, employing hundreds of people and, in some cases, looking at nine-figure revenues. If you’re trying to get a sense of whether Hadoop is for real, these details might help. Read more »
Facebook has open sourced a new system called Corona for scheduling and managing Hadoop jobs. Corona attempts to do away with many of the problems that come along with massive-scale Hadoop operations, and soon looks to take Facebook’s Hadoop deployment beyond just MapReduce. Read more »
Mobile-application development specialist Appcelerator bought big data startup Nodeable on Wednesday, although the deal wasn’t exactly what Nodeable was planning for when it launched in 2011. Founder and CEO Dave Rosenberg shares some of the lessons he learned trying to break into the big data space. Read more »
Guess what, accurately predicting the outcomes of elections really isn’t a partisan affair. What Nate Silver and several others accomplished in perfectly predicting the election isn’t about finding data to support their desired outcomes. It’s about processing reams of imperfect data and figuring out what matters. Read more »
There’s shift happening in the world of online data collection, meaning consumers might expect to get paid for access to their data rather than always playing the role of uncompensated mark. Done right, it’s a system where both sides of the equation stand to win. Read more »
It’s one day before the presidential election, and the results from computer models and other data analyses are in, with most experts giving President Obama a higher probability of winning than challenger Mitt Romney. That’s no lock, however: while data doesn’t lie, models sometimes do. Read more »
In just a few years, big data has turned from a buzzword and concept best left for large web companies into a force that drives much of our digital lives. Here are five technological trends that will change how data is processed and consumed going forward. Read more »
Graph database startup Neo Technology has raised another $11 million, providing more fuel to the fire of specialized databases. Whether they’re graph databases organizing data by relationships, or geospatial databases concerned with where stuff is located, everyone is trying capitalize on myriad new data sources available. Read more »
An MIT researcher says he has created an algorithm that can identify Twitter trends hours before the service can itself. If the algorithm works as he says, it could help Twitter — and many more companies — make a lot of money. Read more »
A new research paper from Google highlights the importance of big data in creating consumer-friendly services such as voice search on smartphones. More data helps train smarter models, which can then better predict what someone say next — letting you keep your eyes on the road. Read more »
MongoDB startup MongoLab has built a seemingly solid business delivering the popular NoSQL database via the Platform as a Service model. The trick, CEO Will Shulman says, is knowing how to sell to developers and understanding why someone would use MongoDB in the first place. Read more »
Dell’s Data Center Solutions group recently shipped its 1 millionth server just five years after coming into existence. It’s proof of how important webscale buyers have become to the server market, as well as how different their demand are than those of traditional IT buyers. Read more »
EMC is beefing up its RSA security division with the planned acquisition of big-data-focused startup Silver Tail Systems. The company’s software detects malicious activity by monitoring and analyzing site visitors’ behavior in order to determine whether it’s harmless or potentially harmful. The company claims multiple large […] Read more »
Sandy is certainly living up to its promise as a destructive force, but it’s also serving as a teaching tool for companies whose business is big data. They’re releasing new dashboards, products and case studies demonstrating how data analysis before can save lives and money later. Read more »
Rackspace is busy building a Hadoop service, giving the company one more avenue to compete with cloud kingpin Amazon Web Services. However, the two services — along with several others on the market — highlight just how different seemingly similar cloud services can be. Read more »
When companies such as Google and Facebook design their own servers, switches and data centers, it’s more a business decision than it is a test of their hardware-hacking skills. Custom gear means lower power bills, better performance and the flexibility to adapt to unforeseen situations. Read more »
Dell is donating an ARM-based server to the Apache Software Foundation so contributors can test their projects on new, energy-efficient hardware architectures. Big data projects such as Hadoop and Cassandra are low-hanging fruit, but many webscale applications likely could use them to save power. Read more »
Cloudera has joined the fray of Hadoop companies trying to turn the big data platform into an engine for exploring data interactively using standard SQL. As the biggest company in the space, its new technology called Impala could go a long way toward changing Hadoop’s image. Read more »
Former Yahoo cloud VP Todd Papaioannou and Facebook engineer Jonathan Gray are trying to big data for programmers with a new platform service called Continuuity. It’s a development environment and runtime layer that sits atop a company’s Hadoop infrastructure and abstracts the complexity of writing apps. Read more »
Analytics startup Platfora is finally showing off its next-generation business intelligence software to the world, combining Hadoop, in-memory processing and HTML5 into an impressive product. It’s entering a competitive market full of large incumbents and other innovative startups all trying to change how we do BI. Read more »
Hadoop is getting closer to business intelligence thanks to a slew of new products ranging from a SQL database built atop Hadoop to an appliance packaging the two alongside a full complement of servers. On Wednesday, Birst, Teradata and Splice Machine got into the act. Read more »
