The Mount Sinai School of Medicine is about to get a lesson in big data thanks to Cloudera Chief Scientist Jeff Hammerbacher. He’s partnering with the school’s clinical and academic faculty to develop new methods and systems for analyzing data in a variety of important areas. Read more »
Like it or not, sweeping software bugs are just part and parcel with operating the largest computing systems the world has ever seen. Although Amazon is already fixing the problems that caused its latest outage, this won’t be the last we see. Read more »
Twitter released its first-ever transparency report on Monday, which provides statistics on the number of times governments and individuals requested data on Twitter users or made takedown requests under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act during the first half of 2012. Read more »
VMware has acquired DynamicOps, a Burlington, Mass.-based cloud computing startup that spun out of banking giant Credit Suisse’s IT department in 2008. VMware is touting DynamicOps ability to manage resources running on Hyper-V- and Xen-based hypervisors, and Amazon EC2. Read more »
Cloud-based servers simple enough to be at the beck and call of every Joe Schmo are a compelling vision, but presently not a realistic one. At this point, in fact, one could argue that the holy grail of the consumer cloud has already been realized. Read more »
To say there are a lot of companies involved in the Hadoop ecosystem would be an understatement. To say partnership strategies are broad would be one, too. The folks at Datameer created this infographic to show just how expansive and interconnected the Hadoop ecosystem is. Read more »
A startup called ThroughPuter has a message for the world’s cloud computing providers: Come talk to us, we can make your cloud fly for serious applications. The company has built a hardware platform designed from ground up to run parallel-processing applications in a multitenant environment. Read more »
Google’s new infrastructure-as-a-service offering Compute Engine is a big, big deal in the world of cloud computing. Now that it’s a reality, here are five things I think Google Compute Engine means for the cloud industry. Read more »
Having learned a lesson from the backlash its peers in Congress endured recently, the White House is trying, presumably, to develop an anti-piracy strategy that’s actually sane. On Monday, it announced an open call for comments on a new IP strategy. Read more »
The results of a recently released survey from Hadoop-focused startup Karmasphere show that while Hadoop use is picking up among mainstream (read “non-web”) companies, it’s still far from the all-powerful and ubiquitous insight engine its supporters (myself included) believe it will become. Read more »
According to physicist Geoffrey West, the world’s cities have what one might call a growing problem. As they grow bigger, their problems grow worse, which means it takes an ever-faster pace of innovation to keep things in check. Big data techniques might provide the answer. Read more »
PoliticIt is a Logan, Utah-based startup that uses machine learning to gauge the popularity of political candidates by measuring their digital influence. Its system has proven remarkably accurate in predicting winners, but its real promise is in leveling the playing field between political haves and have-nots. Read more »
The thinking behind Keen.io is pretty simple: No one should have to build their own analytics infrastructure, especially not mobile developers. So Keen built an analytics infrastructure for them — well enough to win over the judges at GigaOM’s Structure Launchpad competition on Wednesday. Read more »
Big data has always had a place in the world of systems management, but it’s sweet spot might be in the cloud. Especially with a new model such as cloud computing, there could be a real value in learning from what your peers are doing. Read more »
If you haven’t heard IBM Fellow Jeff Jonas talk about how the right algorithm can help you figure out who’s who among a sea of data points, you’re missing out. The good news is Jonas’s vision is now a product. Read more »
Keas co-founder and former Google VP of product management Adam Bosworth knows a thing or two about building software-as-a-service applications, and he’s convinced that anyone not doing so atop a platform-as-a-service framework either will be doing so soon or will likely have an inferior product. Read more »
Forget the ideas of virtual desktops and desktop hypervisors to separate employees’ work lives from their personal lives. Bromium, the latest company from Xen creators Simon Crosby and Ian Pratt, creates isolated instances on computer processors that keep code from going where it’s not wanted. Read more »
In publishing, there’s a constant struggle to determine who’ll read what posts, what the ideal headline might is and when is the best time to publish. GigaOM is teaming with Splunk to find some answers via a Kaggle competition worth a total of $25,000 in prizes. Read more »
A startup called Bluebox has raised $9.5 million from Andreessen Horowitz and Andy Bechtolsheim, among others, although the world will have to wait a little longer to hear about the technology justifying all that money. What we do know if that Bluebox targets mobile security. Read more »
When you mix a researcher, a massive online encyclopedia and a supercomputer, the result is a collection of insights and visualizations into what Wikipedia looks like mapped across time and space. It looks a lot like how our history books might look merged and graphed. Read more »
Former Facebook engineers Eric Frenkiel and Nikita Shamgunov launched a startup called MemSQL that seeks to speed relational databases by taking a page out of the Facebook playbook. MemSQL boosts performance by keeping data in memory and converting SQL code into faster C++. Read more »
Now six years old, the Apache Hadoop platform for storing and processing huge amounts of data, perhaps the catalyst of the current big data movement, appears ready for its closeup. According to the companies leading the Hadoop charge, they’re already beating away customers with a stick. Read more »
Netflix’s algorithms for recommending movies to customers might not be perfect, but it isn’t for lack of trying. The company is capturing and analyzing incredible amounts of data, even from the videos themselves, to try and figure out what you want to watch next. Read more »
It’s no secret that Facebook stores a lot of data in Hadoop, but how it keeps that data available whenever it needs it isn’t necessarily common knowledge. Today at the Hadoop Summit Facebook Engineer Andrew Ryan highlighted that solution, which Facebook calls AvatarNode. Read more »
Amazon Web Services already has a winner with its Elastic MapReduce Hadoop service, and now it’s turning up the heat by adding MapR’s Hadoop distribution as an option. Users can take advantage of MapR’s performance features while also having integration with AWS’s suite of cloud services. Read more »
VMware is launching a new open source project, called “Serengeti,” that aims to let the Hadoop data-processing platform run on the virtualization leader’s vSphere hypervisor. VMware apparently smells a lucrative opportunity in Hadoop and isn’t about to miss out on getting a piece of the pie. Read more »
Online genealogy service Ancestry.com is trying to become like the Amazon or Netflix of family trees. Much like those companies use customer data to recommend products or movies customers might like, Ancestry.com is using machine learning to make learning about ancestors a lot less work. Read more »
According to a new survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit (commissioned by IT consulting giant Capgemini), corporate executives are starting to figure out that big data matters and how to leverage it, even if they haven’t fully come around on the concept. Read more »
Amazon S3 now hosts more than a trillion objects for its cloud computing customers, proving once again that AWS is the king of the cloud. That’s 142 objects for every person on Planet Earth or 3.3 objects for every star in the galaxy. Read more »
One year after launching into the Hadoop market with much anticipation, Yahoo spinoff Hortonworks finally has a product available. The company announced version 1.0 of its flagship Hortonworks Data Platform on Tuesday, as well as a High Availability version designed with new partner VMware. Read more »
Karmasphere CEO Gail Ennis told me recently she thinks “2013 is going to be the year when we see [Hadoop adoption] go a lot more mainstream and [turn] into a tornado.” I like the prediction, as much for its imagery as for its near-term certainty. Read more »
It’s 2023, and here you are, 13 years old and finally ready for your own Facebook page! I’m sorry if my decision not to digitally document your life up to this point makes it tougher for you to be successful. But I hope you’ll thank me. Read more »
Two key members of the Facebook team that created the Hadoop query language Hive are launching their own big data startup called Qubole on Thursday. Qubole is a managed version of Hive that’s hosted on the Amazon Web Services cloud computing infrastructure. Read more »
Lest storage vendors thought they were immune to disruption that open source hardware is having on the server industry, Netflix’s new Open Connect content-delivery network might make them think again. It’s inspired by open source storage designs first released by Backblaze almost three years ago. Read more »
In a move to expand its utility beyond simply finding better answers to known statistical problems, hot data-science startup Kaggle is now letting its stable of expert data scientists compete to tell companies how they can improve their businesses using machine learning. Read more »
If you just pay attention to largest Hadoop users, you might think the platform is just a way of powering search engines or analyzing customer behavior for ad-serving. Of course that’s not the case, but finding those broader use cases can still be kind of difficult. Read more »
According to new research by Twitter’s data science team, Twitter search is used often as a tool for finding breaking news in real time, which makes it difficult for Twitter to assign relevance to any given tweet or topic in the long run. Read more »
For renowned computer hacker turned security consultant Kevin Mitnick, his online life is like one big playground game. “It’s like I’m the king of the mountain,” Mitnick says, “and everybody wants to take me down.” He has found a knight, though, in cloud provider FireHost. Read more »
Google has filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission against Microsoft and Nokia and is also tattling on the companies with U.S. regulators, accusing them patent-troll-like behavior. The good thing about filing a complaint with the EC is Google doesn’t have to do the legwork. Read more »
A startup called Datahero launched on Thursday with a new cloud service that makes visualizing data as simple as a few mouse clicks, and $1 million in seed funding. The company’s ultimate goal is to make big data something you or I could do. Read more »
