Hadoop startup Hadapt has made its unified Hadoop-and-SQL analytic architecture even easier by adding native advanced analytic functions and integrating tightly with Tableau’s powerful BI software. It’s a sign of things to come as Hadoop and traditional SQL-based BI become cozy across the board. Read more »
Several novice programmers who signed up for a free machine-learning class on Coursera have gone on recently to win predictive-modeling competitions. Maybe it’s not that hard to mint new data scientists after all. Read more »
A team of University of Notre Dame researchers has developed an algorithm for solving Sudoku puzzles that doesn’t require it to guess at all. Rather, it’s able to discern patterns even with sparse available information and automatically determine which numbers go where. Read more »
Rent prices are higher than ever, but a growing number of startups are working to analyze our homes’ energy use so we can save money by using less power. Their approaches might differ, but data and analytics are the ties that binds them all. Read more »
A study of 500 patent lawsuits found that those brought by patent trolls, which the study’s authors call “monetizers,” account for nearly 40 percent of the cases brought in 2011. Of course, their study doesn’t account for the untold thousands that never make it to court. Read more »
IO Data Centers has raised $90 million for its suite of offerings that rethink the way data centers are built and managed. Its IO.Anywhere units are fully contained data centers in a small package, and its OS software can manage a data center from a smartphone. Read more »
When last year’s hard drive shortage threatened Backblaze’s all-you-can-store cloud backup service, the company had to get creative to keep up its 50TB-a-day hard drive habit. The solution: external hard drives from retail stores and an army of volunteers making sure they kept coming. Read more »
Campaigns have been profiling potential voters for decades, but the glut of data available online changed the game in terms of how much they collect and how it’s used. Now, thanks to complex models and real-time ad platforms, poltiical advertising is becoming a personal affair. Read more »
Seville, Spain-based startup Besol is trying to take on companies like RightScale with a new cloud-management platform called Tapp. The company is currently honing its skills providing management interfaces for European telcos’ cloud offerings, and will start a push into North America in 2013. Read more »
It’s not home to Google, Amazon or Facebook, but from plucky entrepreneurs to the world’s most-advanced computing systems, Europe has a lot more to offer the world of cloud computing and web infrastructure than might meet the eye. Here are seven reasons why it matters. Read more »
A new startup called Trifacta, founded by UC-Berkeley professor Joe Hellerstein and Stanford professor Jeffrey Heer, wants to eliminate much of the hassle of making messy data usable. The company combines machine learning and human-computer interaction, and has raised $4.3 million from Accel Partners. Read more »
Big data company RainStor has raised $12 million is Series C funding for its database that’s designed to shrink data footprints by at least 95 percent. It also plays nice with Hadoop, meaning a system can handle ad hoc SQL queries as well as MapReduce jobs. Read more »
NASA and a couple other government agencies have kicked off a series of TopCoder challenges designed to find innovative solutions to the government’s big data problems. The first contest is all about making disparate, incompatible data sets usable and actually valuable across agencies. Read more »
A startup called Entelo is trying to make résumés a thing of the past by aggregating profiles of tech workers from their public data, and then feeding those results to recruiters. The secret sauce is an algorithm for spotting when someone might be looking for work. Read more »
Although Twitter is pushing itself as a platform to gauge public opinion around popular events — including the upcoming presidential election — not everyone is buying the hype. Stats about sentiment and tweet velocity are certainly interesting, but man cannot live on tweet data alone. Read more »
GoDaddy has decided to close its Cloud Servers cloud computing product. The offering had been around for less than a year, although the company is attempting to integrate some of the technology into the next generation of its flagship hosting service. Read more »
Interest graph specialist Gravity has raised $10.6 million to expand its business of personalizing the web for consumers. Thanks to a semantic engine that associates the content site visitors read with related topics, Gravity says it can show readers just what they want to see. Read more »
Building a robotic bee that acts like a real bee is a lot more complicated than programming a robot to fly around from flower to flower. A project called Green Brain aims to build an artificial intelligence system that can actually mimic a bee’s brain. Read more »
The more-wood-behind-fewer-arrows Google has announced its latest round of retired products, among them Insights for Search, which has been merged into Google Trends, and Google News Badges. Additionally, storage accounts will be consolidated across Picasa and Drive, giving users one pool of capacity. Read more »
Facebook knows something about big data — it collects more data and has built more tools than almost anybody else. Here, Facebook’s Jay Parikh and Accel Partners’ Ping Li talk about what lessons big data startups can take from Facebook to build businesses that can succeed. Read more »
Rather than rely on Hadoop or any other popular data-management tools to build a platform for democratizing data science, Precog decided to build its own system from scratch. That makes Precog stand out from the crowd, but it also means there’s little room for error. Read more »
It’s not for everyone, but if you’re storing petabytes of data Hadoop, Quantcast thinks it has the cure to your woes. Its newly open sourced Quantcast File System promises smaller clusters and better performance, and it has proven itself over exabytes of data inside Quantcast. Read more »
Much of the data center industry is upset about a recen report exposing some wasteful energy practices. However, eBay’s Dean Nelson says the data center industry isn’t perfect and it’s up to companies like his to lead the charge on bringing everyone else up to speed. Read more »
The Todai Robot project has received attention because of its goal to build a system capable of passing a college entrance exam — a tough test for a supercomputer that’s all the more difficult when confined to a single laptop computer. Read more »
Nasdaq OMX is offering a new service called FinQloud for financial services clients that want to store regulatory data or analyze trade data using on-demand resources. Built atop Amazon Web Services, the service seems to be the result of a close partnership between the two companies. Read more »
Orbitz has transitioned a major system off of Oracle’s Coherence database and onto the NoSQL Couchbase Server, but the database giant still has a significant footprint in Orbitz’s data centers. It’s all part of being a big company trying to roll with the IT punches. Read more »
The internet of things is for real, even if it’s nowhere near the nirvana of devices that speak with each other and take care of our every waking need automatically. The only way it will get there, says RIM’s Sebastian Marineau-Mes, is with industry-wide standards. Read more »
Carter S. won his first-ever Kaggle competition — our own GigaOM WordPress Challenge — using a brute force method of data science he calls overkill analytics. Rather than spend untold hours perfecting complex models, Carter used simple algorithms and let powerful microprocessors do the rest. Read more »
Yes, 4G and LTE networks are huge improvements over previous-generation mobile networks, but they’re not about to cure mobile-data woes without some smart development to help them. Speaking at GigaOM Mobilize on Thursday, Aspera’s Serban Simu and Akamai’s Kris Alexander espoused the value of both intelligent […] Read more »
Nokia Research Center has developed a new system for finding parking spots that rewards users for sharing information on primo spots. It’s a smart approach to a common problem, as users might be more willing to share if they know they’ll get privileged information in return. Read more »
Targeting consumers with relevant ads on their mobile devices is still an inexact science, but new data sources should make the process much more accurate. Knowing precisely where users shop and whether ads influenced their purchases could help everyone get what they expect from mobile ads. Read more »
Space-Time Insight has raised $14 million for its technology that visualizes geospatial data on a map so users can actually see what they’re dealing with and start to see correlations in entirely new ways. Although the energy sector drives business, the company is catching on elsewhere. Read more »
1010data has launched a new service called the Analytical Dataspace, which is essentially a marketplace for buying and selling data and accessing analytics applications. 1010data has been providing a cloud-based analytics service for years, but this is a chance to add value by adding data. Read more »
MongoDB proprietor 10gen has raised more money, this time an undisclosed sum from intelligence-agency strategic investor In-Q-Tel. 10gen is the firm’s first foray into NoSQL databases, although certainly not its only investment in the next-generation data-management space that also includes big data technologies like Hadoop. Read more »
I spent two days last week watching experts on big data and data science discuss how their companies are building businesses around data, or at least rethinking how they do business. Although most came from the web, these five ideas should matter across industries. Read more »
The big data world is full of small, scrappy startups using their ingenuity to build complex systems out of open source software, but the Walt Disney Company is not one of them. Here’s what goes into building a big data platform in a Fortune 100 company. Read more »
Photojournalist Rick Smolan has a new book coming out called The Human Face of Big Data. Far more than a book, it’s part of a project to show how much data each one of us generates, how it’s all connected and how it’s changing the world. Read more »
Data science competition platform Kaggle is opening up the leaderboards for its invitation-only private competitions, meaning anyone can watch and see how the world’s best data scientists are faring in these special challenges. Can data science actually become a spectator sport in the analytics community? Read more »
Autodesk now offers a cloud-based version of its simulation software for a fraction of the cost of most similar on-premise options. While large enterprises might not being willing to make the jump yet, some innovative startups are already on board and testing the future. Read more »
Hosting giant GoDaddy has completed its investigation of Monday’s outage and deemed it was not the result of a DDoS attack as originally rumored, but rather the result of network failures within GoDaddy’s system. The outage crippled hundreds of thousands of web sites. Read more »
