Graphic design startup Walls360 has teamed with Zazzle to let consumers create and sell their own custom wall graphics via Zazzle’s self-service customization platform. With more than 10,000 designs already uploaded, the partnership reinforces the power of an on-demand, long-tail business model online. Read more »
Cloud analytics provider GoodData has a new suite of offerings that let users connect their various data sources into a single platform that handles the analysis and visualization for them. It’s made possible by a confluence of technology trends that enable analytics as a service. Read more »
Flash storage startup Nimble Storage has raised another $40 million in preparation for an IPO within the next two years. The company, which builds appliances fusing both flash and hard disk drives, is part of a hot flash market that’s raking in venture capital. Read more »
Cisco wants to rethink the big data business model by putting infomediaries at the center of vast data-sharing networks. It’s a vision of easy access to data and resources, where analyses can be conducted and acted upon in real time, but it’s a long way off. Read more »
Thanks to the popularity of everything from social media sites such as Twitter to email to mobile phones, it’s easier than ever to get data about who’s connected to whom. With the right tools, we can apply it solve certain problems faster and easier than ever. Read more »
A Boston startup called Predilytics is trying to meld machine learning and administrative data from health care companies to help the run more efficiently. It’s the latest case of big data techniques being applied to health care, where insights can both lives and lots of money. Read more »
Heroku CEO and Salesforce.com EVP of Platforms Byron Sebastian has left the company. Sebastian was key to Heroku’s fast growth as a platform-as-a-service provider, which included a $212 million acquisition by Salesforce.com in December 2010. Read more »
Hosted memcached provider MemCachier is expanding like crazy, moving from its homebase on Heroku into the AppFog, CloudBees, DotCloud and Amazon EC2 platforms. It’s impressive growth for a bootstrapped company that launched in April and was little more than an idea a year ago. Read more »
Some of the largest companies in the world use Tenable Network Security’s vulnerability-management software, and now the company has a $50 million investment from Accel Partners. Between its voluminous vulnerability database and its ability to track mobile devices, Tenable thinks it’s poised to grow even more. Read more »
Etsy shared the details of its hardware architecture on Friday, showing the world a whole lot of Supermicro servers running everything from web servers to Hadoop. At this point, software is the name of the game at webscale, so hardware openness is just welcome community service. Read more »
A handful of Intel servers just emerged from a yearlong bath in an oil-based coolant, and the results were remarkable. The servers ran at a PUE just above 1.0, and showed no ill effects from the oil. Is oil immersion coming to a rack near you? Read more »
South Bend, Ind., is using a sensor network and IBM software to prevent its sewer system from dumping sewage into rivers or backing up into citizens’ home, but it’s just a microcosm of global trend toward solving urban maladies using big data. Read more »
Google designed BigQuery as a cloud service for running fast queries against massive datasets, but with lofty ambitions there’s always room to take a step back. Now, users that don’t require super speed can run batch queries, and can connect to the service using Microsoft Excel. Read more »
Placed is broadening its horizons by letting mobile web developers take advantage of its unique approach to location analytics. Previously available for mobile apps, Placed cross-references location data against a massive database to paint a picture of where apps or sites are being used most. Read more »
John McCain and Ron Wyden are among the dozens of congresspeople people from Oregon, Arizona and New Mexico lobbying the ITC against harming the economy by banning the import of computers containing some of Intel’s most-popular processors. But saving the IT economy goes beyond patents. Read more »
Splunk is taking its machine data show to the cloud with a new SaaS offering called Storm. It’s essentially Splunk’s flagship software tuned for cloud-generated data, but it plays into a big opportunity for fusing cloud computing with big data. Read more »
Even though Twitter has convinced the world that it’s a vital source of information, it’s only as good as its infrastructure allows it to be. In the third part of our look at Twitter’s big summer, we turn to the servers. Read more »
A Y Combinator company called Filepicker.io wants to change the world of accessing cloud-stored content by giving developers the power to connect their apps to everywhere users store content. And because the service deals in URLs rather than files, a slow mobile network won’t kill it. Read more »
Etsy, Airbnb and the Climate Corporation are all using a combination of Cascading and Amazon Elastic MapReduce to make creating Hadoop jobs as simple as possible. But they’re not the only options for doing so — simplifying Hadoop usage is big business in the IT world. Read more »
Although it’s still a work in progress, 0xdata thinks it has the answer to the problem of doing advanced statistical analysis at scale: Build on HDFS for scale, use the widely known R programming language and hide it all under a simple interface. Read more »
In yet another move to simplify the process of patent search, Google is now tackling the particularly tough problem of prior with a new feature. But all this innovation begs the question of whether Google, not the USPTO, should become the de facto patent search engine. Read more »
German startup ParStream raised a $5.6 million Series A round for its analytic database that goes head to head with larger vendors such as HP Vertica, EMC Greenplum and ParAccel. It’s a highly competitive database market right now, so we’ll see if ParStream has legs. Read more »
SpaceCurve has raised another $3.5 million for its technology that should allow users to analyze mountains of geospatial data. Although the company has yet to deliver product code, it already has Fortune 50 customers waiting in the wings to test it on some difficult problems. Read more »
A team of Swiss researchers thinks it has created an algorithm capable of tracking almost anything — from computer viruses to terrorist attacks to epidemics — back to the source using a minimal amount of data. The trick is focusing on time to figure out who “infected” whom. Read more »
Satyamev Jayate, one of India’s highest-rated television shows, is using data as a means to effect meaningful change. The show’s producers are aggregating and analyzing the millions of messages they receive on controversial issues to do everything from planning future episodes to pushing for political change. Read more »
Big data and the ability to analyze unstructured data enable all sorts of great applications, but it’s debatable that monitoring employees is among them. Analyzing emotion like Microsoft Yammer does, or spotting fraudulent plans in emails, make nice stories, but where do we draw the line? Read more »
A group of researchers have created a computing system capable of identifying the unique features that help create a city’s look and feel, beyond just its famous landmarks. Their project is just the beginning, however, as the researchers note numerous artistic and commerical applications. Read more »
Data Collective is a new venture capital firm focusing on seed-round investments in big data startups, from the infraastructure level up to analytics and applications. Among its collection of portfolio companies are Kaggle, MemSQL, Continuuity, Parse, Keen.io, Meteor, MongoHQ, Citus Data and Piston Cloud. Read more »
Google has opened its Knowledge Graph to the English-speaking world and has made intelligent voice search possible on mobile phones. Underneath it all, of course, are ever more-complex methods of analyzing data to make search smarter and easier than it has any business being. Read more »
We previously detailed the test architecture that NASA built to ensure the live stream of the Curiosity landing could handle traffic, and now Amazon Web Services is showing what the final architecture looked like. NASA scaled up its test build and monitored traffic in real time. Read more »
OpenStack has had a great week with eBay coming out as a user and Rackspace rebranding around the open source cloud project, but life isn’t all good in OpenStack world. There are still plenty of questions over its governance and development models that keep skepticism strong. Read more »
Infochimps has released version 1.1. of its platform that the company has described as Heroku for Hadoop. The new version takes things a step further, though, turning the platform into an engine for easily creating streaming workflows that don’t require using Hadoop at all. Read more »
Tea Party favorite Senator Rand Paul took to the podium at a Heritage Foundation event last week to talk about tech policy. However, individual rights and less government regulation certainly are important to the future of the internet, there are necessary limits to that freedom. Read more »
These suggestions might seem like common sense, but the more we use cloud services, the more we put ourselves at risk of identity theft and other negative effects of cybercrime. Here are six ways to at least make it more difficult to steal your data. Read more »
The hard truth for consumers is that using cloud services means they’re often at the mercy of their cloud providers’ security practices, perhaps even their HR practices. However, unless they’re willing to abstain from the cloud altogether, trusting their providers is often all consumers can do. Read more »
With millions of viewers expected to watch history Sunday night, NASA couldn’t afford to let the live stream of its Mars rover Curiosity landing go untested. Here’s how NASA put its Amazon Web Services-based infrastructure through its paces to ensure it keeps up with demand. Read more »
A group of researchers has developed a machine learning model that can detect tweets relating to bullying, and even identify bullies, victims and witnesses. Next, it wants to add sentiment analysis to determine individuals’ emotional states. But if they see trouble, how do they intervene? Read more »
Venture capital firm Accel Partners is following up on its $100 million Big Data Fund with two new members to help it thrive. New principal Jake Flomenberg comes from Splunk (and Cloudera before that), while new EIR Nick Mehta was previously CEO of LiveOffice. Read more »
Big data and data science have already proven their worth in the worlds of online advertising and marketing, and now they’re being turned to elections. Here are five sites to follow if you want to impress your peers with data-driven insights on who’ll win in November. Read more »
The Rackspace Cloud is now based fully on the open source OpenStack platform. I recently spoke with CEO Lanham Napier, who discussed how his company doesn’t necessarily see Amazon Web Services as a direct competitor, and how OpenStack is changing his company’s entire business. Read more »
