EBay is putting down roots in New York and has bought up a 35,000 square foot space. The retailer is announcing that it has purchased an entire floor in the Flat Iron district where it will house 200 people in a new technology center of excellence. Read more »
Known for integration and embeddable databases, Pervasive has all kinds of exciting technology plans for cloud and big data on its roadmap. ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
When your business is to insure farmers against the effects of bad weather, you’d better have some seriously accurate data on your side. Mother Nature, after all, can be somewhat unpredictable. The Climate Corporation thinks the answer is lots of data and lots computing power. Read more »
Data warehouse veteran Teradata announced on Wednesday it is buying German software company eCircle in an attempt to gain a stronger presence in fast-growing world of marketing data. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but this is the second marketing-specific acquisition Teradata has made in […] Read more »
Birst, a San Francisco-based business intelligence company with its roots in the cloud, has raised $26 million from Sequoia Capital, Hummer Winblad and DAG Ventures. The new money comes as Birst tries to become a BI heavyweight by pushing its way into the software world, too. Read more »
Own a Galaxy Nexus, iPhone or other GSM handset? If so and you’re tired of the cost and long-term contract, Straight Talk’s SIM card may be an option. The no-contract deal is $45 for unlimited voice minutes, messages and HSPA+ data on either AT&T or T-Mobile. Read more »
While there has been much outrage about Google “snooping” user data over Wi-Fi, even the FCC says this behavior wasn’t illegal, since the networks in question were public. Is this a sign that the laws around privacy are broken, or is the Streetview furor an overreaction? Read more »
Bina Technologies emerged from stealth mode last week and is bringing an Apple-like business model to genomics. The company relies on its Bina Box to make genome analysis faster than ever before possible without the benefit of having a supercomputer and a research network on hand. Read more »
The moods of men can be captured by a web app, which can then recommend the appropriate spiciness of chicken wings they should eat, and even suggest appropriate mood music thanks to Spotify. Welcome to the data-driven future. Adjust your personal privacy setting accordingly. Read more »
Greylock Partners, seeking more operational experience in the enterprise and cloud computing sector, named Dev Ittyhceria, an operations guy who made his name in enterprise software, as its newest partner. Ittycheria founded Bladelogic and sold it to BMC seven years later for $900 million. Read more »
A new Portable Consent Form could make it easier — and more palatable — for individuals to donate their anonymized genetic data to science at large. The goal of the Consent to Research project is nothing less than the open-sourcing of the genetic data pool. Read more »
Facebook wasn’t satisfied with how its legacy tools measured what was working and what wasn’t across the site’s many-thousand servers, so it created a distributed in-memory data store called Scuba to help. Here’s how it works and what other companies can take away from the project. Read more »
If you don’t think venture capitalists and other investors love all things big data, think again. In the past three days alone, companies claiming some connection to big data — either analyzing and/or storing large volumes of data — have announced at least $56 million in new funding. Read more »
IBM’s big data platform will support the Cloudera Hadoop distribution, a surprising decision given the reservations the two companies had expressed about each other before. That gives IBM and rival Oracle at least one thing in common: Oracle’s Big Data Appliance runs Cloudera too. Read more »
It’s beginning to look like there will be no free-standing analytics companies left. IBM is buying Vivisimo for the “discovery and navigation” expertise that companies use to access and analyze (what else?) big data. The news come a week after IBM bought Varicent, another analytics company. Read more »
VMware has acquired Cetas, a startup that provides analytics atop the Hadoop platform. Terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed, but Cetas is an 18-month-old company with tens of paying customers that didn’t need to rush into an acquisition. So, why did VMware buy it? Read more »
DataPop, a startup using big data to deliver custom online ads, has raised a $7 million Series B round. The company’s technology uses big data techniques such as natural-language processing and semantic association to automatically generate online ads based on what a web user has searched for. Read more »
Big data and the marketing world go together like peanut butter and jelly. Marketers want to present their brands in the most-effective manner possible and always put the right ad in front of the right person. Big data makes that possible at a whole new level. Read more »
Cheap computing and the ability to store a lot of data fairly cheaply have made the concept of big data a buig business. But amid the frenzy to gather such information, especially unstructured information, are companies pushing the boundaries of polite (or ethical) behavior? Read more »
Big data meets the quantitative self with a project to collect every heartbeat for science. Dr. Leslie Saxon wants everyone to send in their heartbeat data to a website to create a database to track heart health. Such a database could help predict heart health. Read more »
Already a heavy user of Apache Software Foundation projects, Twitter is now giving back to the organization financially as a sponsor. It’s difficult to think of a situation where Apache sponsorship wouldn’t be the right move and, it’s definitely the right thing for Twitter to do. Read more »
The highly anticipated Splunk IPO has not disappointed, with shares up 90 percent from their opening price at one point. Intense trading tripped NYSE circuit breakers. Surging interest in Splunk reflects a belief that the era of big data is just beginning. Read more »
Ravel Data, a promising big data startup best known for its open source graph database called GoldenOrb, has sold its assets to marketing-and-communications firm W2O Group. According to sources, the company had been winding down for about a month after expanding faster than business actually demanded. Read more »
Skybox Imaging, a startup that wants to capture and analyze high-resolution photos and videos of the Earth, has raised $70 million in Series C funding. The money will help Skybox its lineup of software engineers and data scientists that might be its secret sauce. Read more »
PureDiscovery, a Dallas-based big data startup, thinks it has the has the answer to outdated enterprise search technology, and it’s called BrainSpace. Its goal is to let users find information that matters without having to search for it, to bring data to users. Read more »
If you’re an amateur poet and love big data, high-performance system vendor AMAX has a deal for you. The company is conducting a contest to find the best haiku on big data. But I’m sharing my poems right here. Read more »
TempoDB, a startup out of Chicago, has build a database as a service offering specifically for time-series data thrown off by thermostats, servers, automotive telematics. Does the world (or the Internet of Things) need a specialty time series database hosted in the cloud? Read more »
The desire for more and increasingly specific analytics continues with IBM’s acquisition of Varicent Software. Banks, insurance companies, and retailers use Varicent software to look at data across finance, sales, human resources and IT departments to determine how to boost sales, according to IBM. Read more »
The Atlantic recently published an article on what politicans know about voters, complete with market research data that breaks down consumer preferences by poltical party and likely turnout on voting day. There are some strong associations that lack political explanations. I want to know why. Read more »
The headline might sound like buzzword stew, but it couldn’t be any truer. For companies willing to make the leap to cloud services, there will be a lot of companies willing to make big data as easy as paying your bill every month. Read more »
After years of beating around the bush, SAP declares that it is a database company and will take on the biggest kid on the block. It’s about time. It’s funding startups to build applications for Hana and Sybase. But beating Oracle won’t be easy. Read more »
For years, Oracle has wowed Wall Street with fat software margins: Large companies depending on Oracle relational databases pay what it takes to keep them up and running. It’s unclear whether Oracle can carry that dominance over into the Big Data era, however. Read more »
Amazon Web Services Storage Gateway is the company’s first foray into the on-premises cloud-storage space. But a number of vendors are attacking the on-premises cloud-storage gateway market too. Do these offerings signal the death of the cloud gateway as an appliance or simply validation of the market? Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Dataminr, a New York-based start-up that has been quietly building a global sensor network powered by Twitter, is now introducing its technology to the public today, showing how its real-time engine can act as an early warning system for enterprise and government customers. Read more »
In a webscale data center, peak efficiency feels like a blast furnace. I stepped into the hot aisle of Dell Modular Data Center and 1,920 servers blasted 115-degree air right in my face. If eBay’s Dean Nelson has his way, that was just the beginning. Read more »
Social and mobile analytics startup Kontagent has expanded its business to include a data-mining service powered by Hive, the SQL-like interface for querying data stored within Hadoop. It’s a smart move by the company, and one that other cloud-based analytics providers would be wise to replicate. Read more »
The federal government talked a lot about grand scientific visions when it unveiled its big data agenda last week, but the government has consumers on its mind, too. Specifically, it doesn’t want to unduly hinder innovation, and it might even be willing to provide data. Read more »
If you have a lot of unstructured data, don’t have (or want) a Hadoop cluster and can write Python jobs, Mortar Data has got the service for you. The New York-based startup is jumping into the fray with possibly the most lightweight Hadoop service yet. Read more »
I loved this talk by Jer Thorp, currently the data-artist-in-residence at the New York Times. His work has appeared in my publications but it is the first time I have seem him speak about humanizing data. This talk for Tedx Vancouver is highly recommended. Read more »
Managed hosting provider Sungard is getting into the big data space with a new Hadoop service that gives users on-demand access to the popular data-storage and processing platform. Called Unified Analytics Service, Sungard’s new offering joins the growing ranks of cloud-based Hadoop offerings. Read more »
