Heroku is reporting it saw more than 33,800 Facebook applications launched on its service since the social network giant unveiled new features at yesterday’s f8 conference. On the official Heroku blog, Adam Seligman notes “that’s more than 20 a minute.” Read More »
Bio:Derrick has been a technology journalist since 2003 and has been covering cloud computing, big data and other emerging IT trends for GigaOM since 2009. He has written the words “cloud” and “Hadoop” possibly more than any other person on the planet. Derrick lives in Las Vegas and has a law degree from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Away from the office, Derrick trains in muay thai and is active in animal welfare issues.
Latest Tweets
- OH at the San DIego Zoo elephant display: "Why does it have an extra leg?" (the kid wasn't talking about its trunk)
- How Intuit uses big data to ‘delight’ you http://t.co/tOLOfFOg < social media are consumers' "Batphone to your company"
- As a term that describes something, "data science" is no better than "big data." I think they're just regional variations.
My Focus
Cloud computing
Big data
Recent Posts
Hadoop is all the rage in analytics, but it still isn’t easy for mere mortals to utilize the big data framework. A handful of companies are trying to solve this problem, including Karmasphere with the latest version of its Analyst Big Data product. Read More »
Graph databases are a pretty specialized product — but as NoSQL keeps gaining mainstream acceptance, they seem to be catching on, and the latest evidence comes in the form of a $10.6 million funding found for Silicon Valley firm Neo Technology. Read More »
Storage giant EMC is adding more muscle to its Hadoop strategy with a 1,000-node cluster for testing new Apache Hadoop releases and a new analytics appliance combining EMC’s Hadoop distribution with the EMC Greenplum Database. Read More »
DataStax has created the first commercial distribution of the Apache Cassandra database and has just closed an $11 million Series B round. Neither piece of news should come as a shock because as NoSQL products have been maturing over the past year, money has always followed. Read More »
Buried in the talk about security, privacy and transnational data laws, it looks like the federal government’s cloud computing push also could bring progress on broadband accessibility. If Congress actually does push more, faster broadband, I think the promise of economic growth will drive it. Read More »
Earlier this year, rumors swirled about whether Twitter had actually moved into a new Utah data center, or if it was forced to move its operations to a different facility. Now there are reports that Twitter is leasing more data center space, this time in Atlanta. Read More »
More Must Reads
Building on his social media success in 2008, it looks like big data will be a driving force behind President Obama’s reelection campaign. To that end, his team is taking to the streets to find data scientists and engineers, including at an event Tuesday at Stanford. Read More »
As social media sites become more prevalent and individuals share more and more details of their personal lives online, we need to rethink the bounds of our right to privacy. Not to regulate technology, industries or the authorities, but to protect us from each other. Read More »
When you’re running a large web infrastructure, automation is critical to ensure that administrators aren’t spending their every waking seconds putting dealing with downed servers. Google, Yahoo and other pioneers had to figure out how to automate failover in their data centers. Now it’s Facebook’s turn. … Read More »
Facebook and Heroku have completed an integration that gives Facebook developers direct access to Heroku’s cloud Platform-as-a-Service offering for hosting their applications. It’s likely just a first step for Heroku when it comes to integrating with popular specialized development platforms. Read More »
Balancing an open-source community with commercial interests can be difficult, which is why HPCC Systems sought the help of Bruce Perens before open-sourcing its eponymous big-data-processing software. Essentially, the company either ensures the existence of a free version or pulls contributed code. Read More »
Predictive analytics provider Opera Solutions has raised $84 million from equity investors in its first-ever funding round, but that amount shouldn’t be surprising for anyone familiar with the company. I’ve called Opera the big data expert you’ve never heard of, but that’s about to change. Read More »
Cloud-storage provider Zetta has closed a $9 million Series C round. The company has now raised $31.5 million overall, an indication of just how much promise there is in the cloud storage space even, even if it’s still just relegated to backup. Read More »
A French startup called We Are Cloud thinks it has taken cloud-based BI to the next level with a feature called QueryBlender that lets users combine live data sets to let users better make sense of their business by analyzing disparate data points against one another. Read More »
AppFog, the Platform-as-a-Service startup that began life a PHP Fog, now supports both Ruby and Node.js applications. The expanded support comes as no surprise, but speaks volumes about the potential for Cloud Foundry as a PaaS equivalent to what OpenStack is for Infrastructure as a Service. Read More »
In a Silicon Valley technology landscape where young hotshots tend to make their marks with innovative new startups, Farah Giga is different. After nine years in various mangement positions at Hitachi Data Systems and HP, Giga, now 27, has joined Valhalla Partners as a principal. Read More »
MongoDB-based startup 10gen has raised $20 million in a Series D funding round. The latest round speaks to the popularity of the MongoDB document database among large companies, even though the hype around NoSQL has lessened considerably over the past year. Read More »
HPCC Systems has released the open source code of its data-processing software that it’s positioning as a better version of Hadoop. The code is available on Github, and it marks the commencement of HPCC Systems’ quest to build a community of developers underneath Hadoop’s expansive shadow. Read More »
Intel Capital announced $24 million in new investments, and cloud computing and big data companies were the big beneficiaries. They underscore Intel’s understanding that it has to prop up software partners to keep Intel dominant as computing evolves. Read More »
The Socialcast team at VMware has introduced a beta version of a new product called Strides, which aims to make task management an interactive experience. Think Basecamp, but more social, and with more visibility into what your colleagues are working on. Read More »
Dell-bashing is a fairly common pastime these days, but I actually think Dell has a golden opportunity to reposition itself as IT visionary if it treats hardware it as what it really is: a delivery mechanism for software and services. Read More »
Hadoop-based startup Platfora has raised $5.7 million from Andreessen Horowitz and military intelligence–focused strategic investor In-Q-Tel. Investors are excited because Platfora promises big things around making big data analytics obtainable by anyone needing to parse large volumes of unstructured data, not just data scientists. Read More »
Cotendo is leveraging Equinix’s global data center footprint to give itself 30 points of presence, letting Cotendo focus on differentiating elsewhere. The companies released details of their partnership Thursday morning, including a quadrupling of Cotendo’s customer base to 400 from 100 in the past two years. Read More »
Google App Engine is growing up by changing both its service model and its pricing, and many developers who have been using the service under the old model are none too happy about it. Perhaps they should just be happy that App Engine is sticking around. … Read More »
On Wednesday HP released its first two public cloud computing services for private beta, based in part on the open-source OpenStack code. The services, some details of which were leaked in the spring, are HP Cloud Compute and HP Cloud Object Storage. Read More »
Cloud computing and big data are a match made in heaven. Although it’s still very early in the evolution of this combination — experts predict major investment in this area going forward — several companies have already melded the two into a variety of unique services. Read More »
Mashape, an API marketplace catering to both application developers and providers, has raised a $1.5 million seed round from a who’s who of technology investors, including Index Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Ignition Partners, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. Read More »
VMworld can be a lot to digest, but it also can be a good barometer of where IT is and where it’s going. A couple days removed from the show, I gave some thought to the interesting trends I noticed and the insightful discussions I had. … Read More »
CloudSpokes, an Appirio-led community that hosts contests in which developers compete on projects for cloud companies with the goal of winning a monetary prize, recently re-architected the site from Microsoft Windows Azure to Database.com, and its team couldn’t be happier with the results. Read More »
During VMworld this week, VMware introduced a new Dropbox-like application called Project Octopus that will let users safely store, access and share corporate documents. It all so sounded so promising, and then someone asked me whether it will actually get used. Read More »
In the world of Software as a Service, integration is critical. It gets small SaaS providers in front of new potential customers already predisposed to buying cloud-based services, and it gives individual SaaS vendors a fighting chance against large software vendors with lots of products and … Read More »
VMware this morning announced VXLAN, the company’s attempt to allow virtual machines to span geographical data centers as part of the same LAN. Herrod said it will create “software-based networks that can be created on-demand, enabling enterprises to leverage capacity wherever it’s available.” Read More »
It was an eventful first day at VMworld, highlighted by Paul Maritz’s keynote to thousands of attendees and Fusion-io’s superhero-themed party featuring Marvel Comics creator Stan Lee and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Here’s VMworld Day 1 as I experienced it outside the press room. Read More »
MapR Technologies, the San Jose, Calif.-based startup that sells it own Hadoop distribution for analyzing large volumes of unstructured data, has raised a $20 million Series B round, which will helps its positioning as a worthy alternative in a space that Cloudera has dominated since 2009. Read More »
Speaking to a jam-packed room of thousands, VMware CEO Paul Maritz kicked off today’s VMworld conference by declaring, once again, the advent of the cloud era. If you don’t believe him, just look at the number of virtual machines deployed. But cloud is more than virtualization. Read More »
Dell has officially become a cloud provider with the launch of an Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud built atop VMware technology. The move is just the first in Dell’s three-pronged IaaS attack, which will soon include clouds based on the Microsoft Windows Azure and OpenStack platforms. Read More »
Heroku, the popular Platform-as-a-Service offering initially for Ruby developers only, now supports Java. Actually, Heroku has added support for both the Node.js framework and the Clojure programming language over the past few months, but Java is in a whole other league. Read More »
Verizon is buying cloud computing startup CloudSwitch in a move that will give Verizon, as well as its subsidiary Terremark, a software-development edge to complement its service-provider expertise. CloudSwitch will lead software development beyond its core product, which will give Verizon additional cloud intellectual property. Read More »
VMware has added support for the PHP and Python programming languages to Cloud Foundry, it open source Platform as a Service. Such news isn’t necessarily groundbreaking considering the project’s focus on multi-language support, but how it added PHP, at least, is very noteworthy. Read More »
Eucalyptus Systems released the third generation of its pioneering private cloud computing software on Wednesday, complete with high-availability capabilities to ensure maximum uptime. Rumors of Eucalyptus’s demise have been circulating since OpenStack launched its open-source cloud project last summer, but the company isn’t slowing down. Read More »
VMware has released Micro Cloud Foundry, a fully functional version of its open-source, Platform-as-a-Service software condensed into a virtual image that runs on developers’ personal computers or laptops. The aim is to make it easier to create cutting-edge applications without the hassle. Read More »
Google, which serves about 7 percent of the world’s overall web traffic, isn’t any ordinary company. Google Research Director Peter Norvig recently shared some of the considerations that Google takes into account when designing its infrastructure and systems to operate at Internet scale. Read More »
Platform-as-a-Service veteran Engine Yard is getting on board with the recent trend of multi-language support by acquiring Dublin, Ireland-based PHP PaaS startup Orchestra. An industry shift toward supporting more than one language and/or framework likely influenced the decision to close the Orchestra deal now. Read More »
Hopper wants to make searching for travel options a more complete experience using big data tools, and it has raised millions to do it. Hopper lets users enter keyword searches, but it provides results far beyond those typically found in a keyword search. Read More »
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