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 »
Google has been on the receiving end of some particularly egregious privacy complaints lately, stemming from its revised privacy policy. However, most of these efforts to call out Google seem like little more than attempts to make a quick payday in the court or with voters. Read more »
Plans by the British government to give intelligence agencies access to details of every phone call, email, text and website visit made in the country have drawn plenty of anger from across the spectrum. Here’s what people are saying about the controversy. Read more »
An effort to build a telescope that can see back 13 billion years to the creation of the universe is prompting a five year €32 million ($42.7 million) effort to create a low-power supercomputer and networks to handle the data the new telescope will generate. Read more »
Violin Memory is a force to be reckoned with in the storage world. It’s not just the industry shift toward solid-state drives replacing slower, less-efficient hard disk drives that’s driving Violin’s value through the roof, though, it’s also the company’s very strategic set of investors. Read more »
By pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into big data research and development, the Obama administration thinks it can push the current state of the art well beyond what’s possible today, and into entirely new research areas. It’s a noble goal, but also a necessary one. Read more »
Last summer, Yahoo’s investments in big data brought us Hadoop startup Hortonworks, and now those same investments brought us predictive-marketing startup InsightsOne. The company, founded by the team responsible for building Yahoo’s consumer analytics platform, launched on Thursday with $4.3 million in Series A funding. Read more »
The White House released the details of its $200 million-plus annual big data strategy, which includes lots of access to funding and data for researchers.The administration is banking on big data having revolutionary effects on par with the Internet, which federal dollars financed decades ago. Read more »
Big data must really be big to get its own White House-sanctioned research and development initiative. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will host a live webcast Thursday to outline how the government can “help big data” efforts. Read more »
If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if the top two teams in the Netflix Prize competition united and put their predictive analytics skills to work together, you’ll soon find out. On Tuesday, big data service provider Opera Solutions acquired Austrian predictive analytics specialist Commendo. Read more »
In the latest dispatch from the too-much-information bureau, on-demand ride service Uber has calculated the prevalence of one-night stands among its customer base. It’s another example of what companies can find out if they’re just able to think of the right questions. Read more »
The technological hurdles to embracing big data are well-known at this point, but strong anti-data corporate culture might be an even bigger obstacle. The changes required to listen to the data and, possibly, to transform a company’s business model take a lot of work. Read more »
Information from Facebook on user “interests” is nothing compared to the affinity data that could be mined from Pinterest. The potential to aggregate, analyze, and deploy the site’s data is huge. Baynote CTO Scott Brave examines the types of affinity data that Pinterest could monetize. Read more »
The problem for many companies is that user information is spread across hundreds or even thousands of different fields in various databases, and it’s difficult to compile it in real time. But doing that successfully is becoming increasingly important, says WiBiData at Structure:Data. Read more »
“Anticipation denotes intelligence.” Zubin Dowlaty, VP and head of innovation and development of analytics-outsourcing firm Mu Sigma, said at Structure:Data that’s what companies need to be striving for and in this era of big data, the barriers to achieving that have fallen away. Read more »
Two star hires and a well-reviewed phone-and-tablet operating system do not necessarily remake a company, but they do ease the perception — prevalent in recent years — that Microsoft is on its last legs. Could the once-dominant software giant be on the comeback trail? Read more »
Hadoop may be the current leader of the pack when it comes to handling big data, but LexisNexis says at Structure:Data the system it developed for its own internal data use — and recently open-sourced — is a viable alternative and in some cases is superior. Read more »
Your corporation is watching you, and it might be using Cataphora’s software, which mines employees emails, IMs and other electronic communications to determine how big of a risk a corporation might face from one bad apple. Read more »
Machine-generated data, the non-intelligible zeros and ones that are generated by sensors and other devices, is no longer just for geeks. While it looks like gibberish forward-thinking consumers are already pressing that “gibberish” data into service, according to speakers at Structure: Data 2012. Read more »
Next-generation online banking service ZestCash uses data to help qualify people for short term loans. The company explains at Structure:Data it has been giving $300 to $800 loans to users based on thousands of variables, which are boiled down to 10 models. Read more »
How do you or your business get the most value out of all the data you’ve accessed about your customers? At Structure:Data, Nick Weir, CEO of ChoozOn, gave some basic tips on the most important things to consider when mining your data. Read more »
Companies are grappling with how to make use of all their data, facing the challenge of teasing out insights quickly and with flexibility. Moving to the cloud opens up security and privacy questions. But the effort can be worth it, says Google’s Ju-kay Kwek at Structure:Data. Read more »
Cloud technologies still lag behind on-premise tools in some key ways, but are unbeatable in enabling “one single guy” to complete large BI projects, We Are Cloud’s Rachel Delacour said at Structure:Data today. Read more »
Businesses understand now that big data can help them wring revenue out of once-unproductive assets. But that just fuels an exploding demand for bigger, faster, and more precise big data applications, experts speaking at Structure:Data say. Read more »
EMC’s acquisition of Pivotal Labs proves the company really understands the big data market. Namely, that big data won’t go anywhere without great applications, and EMC isn’t the company to help customers figure out how to build theirs. Read more »
With many utilities facing the task of storing petabytes of smart meter data for as long as seven years in order to satisfy regulatory requirements, the ability to house and leverage the massive load of data accumulating from the smart grid is a significant IT challenge. Read more »
Raghu Ramakrishnan, who was the top scientist for several of Yahoo’s key technology efforts, is now a technical fellow with Microsoft’s server and tools unit. This is the latest sign that Yahoo is struggling to retain key technologists. Read more »
Holding onto millions of pieces of archived content it still wanted to monetize, the Associated Press turned to MarkLogic’s NoSQL non-relational database designed for XML files. As publishers try to leverage their years worth of archived, often not tagged content, they’ll need new tools. Read more »
Web companies like Google and Facebook invest incredible resources in making sure they know everything about their infrastructures and how server-level issues are affecting the applications that comprise their lifeblood. The rest of the business world is now catching on. Read more »
Businesses can now leverage big data for the benefit of driving marketing insights. According to Ajay Agarwal of Bain Capital Ventures, this fundamental shift will create several multi-billion dollar winners, and new technology companies will emerge as the marketing equivalents of Salesforce and SAP. Read more »
EMC Corp., the Hopkinton, Mass.-based storage and cloud hardware company has bought Pivotal Labs, a San Francisco-based consulting firms well known for its tool Pivotal Tracker and also for its pioneering work on agile development methodology. I had first reported earlier this week. Read more »
In September, I profiled six companies doing big data in the cloud, and here are nine more. One of the themes of Structure:Data is “putting big data to work,” and there’s no easier way to get started doing so than with a cloud service. Read more »
