Accel has launched its Big Data Fund 2, a followup on the equally large fund the venture capital firm started in November 2011. Rather than seeking products that target data scientists, it wants those targeting business users. Read more »
GE Healthcare is pushing a system called Corvix for doing agent-based simulations on complex problems. In India, the technology simulated a population of 80 million people in order to determine the best places to build medical facilities. Read more »
Former CIA staffer Edward Snowden talked about a lot of things during a live Q&A on Monday hosted by the Guardian newspaper — but there were also some important questions that he neglected to answer. Read more »
New research shows that it’s possible to train Google-style neural networks with GPUs and Infiniband at low cost. The work could help drive further GPU adoption. Read more »
Startup Human API wants to help developers turn all the different datasets related to your health into valuable consumer-first applications. Read more »
Some cloud executives believe PRISM threatens the growth of the public cloud, and proposed legislation could tamper with the privacy of private clouds. Read more »
Spain’s StackOps released one of the first OpenStack distributions, and now it’s come out with a suite of tools to help small service providers and enterprises jump aboard the speeding OpenStack train. Read more »
Infrastructure nerds, it’s time to meet the accountants. At this year’s Structure conference this Wednesday and Thursday we’re focusing on the economics of cloud computing, not just for vendors, but for practitioners. Read more »
The NSA (and who knows who else) has made a habit of perusing our collective emails, we now know. Which makes it a perfect time to brush up on electronic security. Read more »
This week, both Facebook and Yahoo detailed new efforts to manage real-time data flows within their myriad systems. Yahoo’s work is an open source implementation of Storm designed to run on the same cluster as Hadoop and even share resources. Read more »
A Bloomberg report suggests widespread cooperation between U.S. tech firms and the nation’s intelligence agencies that could help those spies hack into foreign computers. Read more »
Raymie Stata spent seven years working on the guts of Hadoop as a VP, chief architect and CTO at Yahoo. His new Hadoop startup, called Altiscale, has raised a $12 million from some prominent investors. Read more »
The Financial Times is quoting three senior EU officials as saying an “anti-FISA” clause was taken out of the EU’s proposed data protection legislation, after senior U.S. figures lobbied against it. Read more »
Google Image Search just got a whole lot better, and the company’s purpose-built machine learning system infrastructure is a big reason why. No surprise, Jeff Dean helped build it. Read more »
The needle-and-haystack analogy of finding important insights inside big data certainly applies to tweets, and Dataminr, one service that find the needles in the Twitter firehose, just got more venture funding. Read more »
The data center in Luleå, Sweden, is highly energy-efficient as it uses hydroelectric power. It may also prove handy in keeping Facebook on the right side of European data protection legislation. Read more »
Want to correlate data from a NoSQL database with data from Salesforce, Stripe or Mailchimp? MetricaDB, a finalist in our Structure 2013 LaunchPad competition, wants to make that easy for you. Read more »
Silverback Learning, a startup hatched out of a school district in Idaho, has raised $2.5 million as it plans to expand to school districts nationwide. Read more »
Facebook, Google and Microsoft want to show users just how much the federal government requests access to data. The actions are attempts to save face on the privacy front following reports of the PRISM program. Read more »
We know the NSA is collecting our call records, but there are far bigger fonts of information carriers hold. The mobile network is highly managed, tracking our internet habits from the websites we visit to the apps we use. Read more »
A lot of Americans might say they support NSA surveillance of their online activities, but many other people — including folks overseas — aren’t so thrilled. Can these laws withstand pressure from a tech lobby concerned about lost profits from fleeing users? Read more »
After a wave of initial shock at the revelations about NSA surveillance, there seems to be a pervasive feeling of resignation about our data being collected by the government. Have we grown too used to being spied on? Read more »
Google wants more marketshare in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service market, so it’s cutting prices on the BigQuery data-analysis service and adding features to boost the appeal of the larger Cloud Platform. Read more »
After months of rumors that speculated the company was the target of an acquisition by either Facebook or Google, social-mapping provider Waze is set to be snapped up by Google and added to the web giant’s map service. Read more »
A storage startup called SageCloud is looking to deliver low-cost backup storage to the masses who want Facebook-like cold storage without resorting to tape, cloud services or building their own gear. Read more »
Startup InternMatch has raised $4 million in a Series A round meant to help the company build out its engineering team. Read more »
VMware sees an opportunity to help customers get a hold on unstructured data to understand what’s going on with their infrastructure. Its new Log Insight software will let companies do that. Read more »
Updated: A narrow majority of Americans surveyed are okay with the government gathering data (or metadata) on our online activities, according to new Pew Research. Read more »
In a brief debate on Tuesday, all major groups in the Parliament expressed either concern or outright anger at the PRISM program and the way it treats EU citizens’ data. Read more »
Artificial-intelligence startup Anki got plenty of attention Monday during a demonstration of its Anki Drive car game for iOS devices. It pointed to the company’s intention to bring AI into daily life. Read more »
WalmartLabs has acquired a predictive analytics startup called Inkiru to bolster its ability to create better customer experiences through data. The division of Walmart was created in 2011 on a foundation of big data. Read more »
No matter what form it takes, all data is equal when it comes to security and compliance; it represents the lifeblood of an organization. Most organizations have a handle on structured data, but it’s the digital landfill of unstructured data that is posing issues. Read more »
Hardware sales, Fusion adoption (or lack thereof) are two key factors to explore when Oracle goes through its fourth quarter earnings next week. Read more »
Decision time looms. And as painful as it seems, right now it feels like the only responsible response to the PRISM scandal would be to stop using American web services for any private communications. Read more »
A startup called Spinnakr is launching to simplify the process of monitoring traffic, brainstorming actions to take and tweaking websites to give visitors what they’re looking for. Read more »
If a piece of information has been collected but has never actually been seen by the human eye, is it considered surveillance? Read more »
The European Commission knew about PRISM. And, while it may want to firm up data protection rules, it’s up to individual EU governments to decide whether they’re OK with the U.S. spying on their citizens. Read more »
Updated: The deal U.S. citizens struck after 9/11 exchanging privacy for security should be up for renewal or at least subject to debate, says former Microsoft top tech guru Ray Ozzie. Read more »
The man who leaked top-secret documents from the NSA — about a digital surveillance program called PRISM that collected data from Google, Yahoo, Facebook and others — has come forward to speak about why he did it. Read more »
A handful of companies are putting the final touches on products that bring big data to sports. The hard part is not the development of the technology but the lack of good business models. Read more »
