We’re entering the age of the smart personal assistant, as computers increasingly listen and understand what we’re saying and fulfill our requests in real time. Siri and Watson have gotten a lot of attention but we’ll see this type of service in a variety of areas. Read more »
Looks like Oracle has some competition when it comes to selling big iron for big data. On Wednesday, Cray, the Seattle-based company best known for building some of the world’s fastest supercomputers, announced it’s getting into the big data game. Read more »
WibiData, a Hadoop-based startup focused on making it easier to analyze user behavior, has raised $5 million from New Enterprise Associates. The company, formerly known as Odiago, launched in late 2011 already claiming Wikipedia and Atlassian among its early customers. Read more »
Data, I believe is like plastic. You can use it to make wonderful things. However, like plastic, it can be a great polluter and create havoc on the environment. Or as I like to say, data without context is dirt. Read more »
Twitter is fast becoming the focus group of the 21st century, a status solidified yet again during Sunday night’s Super Bowl. The platform saw 453 times the maximum tweets per second it saw during 2008′s game, and sentiment analysis of tweets might have predicted the upset. Read more »
Hadoop features front and center in the discussion of how to implement a big data strategy, one of the biggest trends in IT. There’s just one problem that keeps cropping up: many people don’t seem to know exactly what it means when somebody says “Hadoop.” Read more »
Romanian startup Skin Scan is selling an iPhone app that lets consumers take pictures of questionable moles and get back information on its threat level. However, the company has much grander goals than helping consumers figure out whether to see a doctor. Read more »
Facebook’s S-1 filing shows the company is all about infrastructure. The ad revenue and user experience it relies on to exist mean Facebook can’t afford to take it easy on IT, which means shareholders and users will both find plenty of reasons to get upset. Read more »
If you like the idea of your analytics system’s getting more accurate with each piece of data it ingests, it looks like you are in for an exciting run, because machine learning appears to be catching fire across the ecosystem of big data vendors. Read more »
As utility industry trade show DistribuTECH wrapped up last Thursday, attendees got a peek at not only new product offerings — from smart thermostats to software platforms that manage smart meter data — but also the potential for what a utility of the future might look ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
For eBay, big data is serious business. Every day, the site stores and analyzes data from millions of users buying, selling and searching for hundreds of millions of products. It handles all this data with lots of Hadoop, although a good data warehouse doesn’t hurt either. Read more »
As promised, storage kingpin EMC has integrated its Isilon NAS product with Hadoop in a way that will bring Isilon’s OneFS file system to bear on data. EMC isn’t alone. Vendors from Amazon to Oracle are trying to tame this big data beast. Read more »
Was Bill Gates, chairman and co-founder of Microsoft, the power behind the proprietary Windows-and-Office juggernaut, really an open source champion? A new Wired article lays Microsoft’s wider embrace of open source technologies — including Node.js and Hadoop — squarely at Gates’ feet. Read more »
Pentaho is moving its business intelligence tools to the Apache license to make them more compatible with big data technologies that already operate under that license. Pentaho’s Kettle extract, transform, load (ETL) technology was previously available under the LGPL or lesser Gnu General Public License. Read more »
Analytics and big data tools will remake energy in 2012, from helping curb energy consumption, to reducing energy loss, to adding in more clean power to the grid. Here’s 10 ways this will happen: Read more »
The great thing about big data is that there’s still plenty of room for new blood, especially for companies that want to leave infrastructure in the rearview mirror. At this point, the data-infrastructure space, including Hadoop, is well-funded and nearly saturated, but it also needs help. Read more »
With all the talk of big data, cynics think the whole notion has jumped the shark. Get ready, they say, for the next tech bubble to burst. EMC CMO Jeremy Burton is not among them. Granted, he’s a marketer, but what he says makes sense. Read more »
In the fight to determine who dictates web privacy, web users are like a a chew toy at risk of being torn asunder by two competing dogs — played this week by Google and the European Union. But the best option is empower consumers themselves. Read more »
Big data has gotten very, very big if the elite talking heads at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, are talking about it. And they are talking about it. Sessions include “Decoding the data deluge” and “Personal data: the ‘new oil’ of the 21st century.” Read more »
Ad-targeting company 33Across is acquiring link-tracking specialist Tynt Multimedia, resulting in a combined user graph spanning 1.25 billion users. Both are storing and analyzing billions of transactions daily, and they will use that data to help publishers compete on ad sales against mega sites like Google. Read more »
Former Yahoo VP and chief cloud architect Todd Papaioannou is working on a stealth-mode startup called Continuuity, which aims to make it easier for developers to create data-focused cloud applications. The company has raised a $2.5 million seed round from Battery Ventures and Andreessen-Horowitz. Read more »
Joe Coyle, CTO of global integrator Capgemini, sees a lot of cloud pitches from all the major technology vendors — and God knows they all have a cloud strategy. Here’s what he thinks of the current state of the market. Read more »
On Monday, the Supreme Court deemed it unconstitutional in most cases to use GPS to track suspects without a warrant — calling the attachment of a GPS device to a suspect’s property a trespass — but the Court declined to address some major privacy issues also at play. Read more »
IBM is working the reins of its Smarter Commerce initiative by rolling out a new Netezza analytics appliance designed to help retailers churn through potentially petabytes of consumer sales data in real time. It’s trying to capitalize on the increased importance of e-commerce to revenues. Read more »
Energy software company Opower says it will send its 25 millionth energy data report to a utility customer by the end of January and will likely hit the 75 million mark sometime in 2012. Read more »
The greater Boston area may not be the hub of the big data universe that some recent research suggests, but it got a leg up this week with news that tech giant Hewlett-Packard is moving some of its big data operations to Cambridge. Read more »
Now that human genomes will soon take only one day and $1,000 to sequence, life is about to get a lot easier for medical researchers, but a lot more difficult for companies trying to make a buck selling them tools to store and analyze genomic data. Read more »
Security-software company Sourcefire is trying to help large-enterprise IT teams leverage big data analytics in fighting malware. A new product, called FireAMP, utilizes a cloud-based analytics approach to let IT teams dig deep to find out the hows, wheres and whys of their malware problems. Read more »
It’s not surprising that Box CEO Aaron Levie says CIOs are ready to approve big corporate cloud storage deals. But it is somewhat surprising that outside experts with no dog in this fight agree that cloud storage is coming to the enterprise. Read more »
Although the first couple years of commercial Hadoop attention have been characterized by an attitude of “Hadoop is great, but …”, the tone is changing as Hadoop vendors increase the platform’s palatableness with each new iteration. No longer is Hadoop necessarily an epic undertaking rife with pitfalls. Read more »
For anyone thinking the big data trend is a flash in the pan, there’s some new evidence to the contrary. A hefty 75 percent of IT pros and developers responding to a new Linux Foundation survey have their eyes firmly on this big data phenomenon. Read more »
Splunk’s IPO has been much anticipated with good reason. Splunk’s machine data search, analytics and visualization technologies address the gap between the reams of big data generated by the second and the ability to parse and display that data in a meaningful way. Read more »
Metamarkets is readying its cloud-based big data platform for significant business growth by making key personnel changes and spreading its wings into new industries. Co-founder Mike Driscoll is stepping up to CEO, and the company is moving into the gaming and social media spaces. Read more »
In a meeting of analytics minds, Birst and ParAccel are putting Birst’s graphical reporting gloss atop ParAccel’s analytics database.
Deals like this are the latest proof that big data is important but the ability to put that data into a useable format is also key. Read more »
Netflix dominates the business of streaming movies and television into consumers’ homes, but a new business model developed by big data firm Opera Solutions could help give cable companies the inside track. The model is combination of peer-to-peer networking via set-top boxes and big data algortihms. Read more »
Oracle’s Big Data Appliance is now for sale, featuring Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution and management tools. Regardless of what anybody thinks about Oracle’s strategy, the deal is a coup for Cloudera as it tries to fend off competition from fellow Hadoop startups Hortonworks and MapR. Read more »
I spent some time playing with Google Insights to find out what parts of the country are most interested in technology and when that interest hit its peak. It wasn’t surprising to see Silicon Valley rank highly, but did you know Utah was into next-generation programming? Read more »
Big data is often talked about as a phenomenon that lets organizations create narratives from their volumes of data. That is an apt characterization when we are talking about connecting the dots among disparate and possibly disconnected data sets. However, when we are talking about anything ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
1010data says it now hosts more than 5 trillion records for its customers. If 1010data’s growth is a microcosm of the greater market, it’s no wonder there’s so much excitement around scalable data stores such as Hadoop, NoSQL databases and massively parallel analytic databases. Read more »
In the world of science, cloud computing provides an ideal platform for crowdsourcing scientific problems across the whole world of researchers, giving them access to data sets and the computing resources to analyze them. If big data is any indicator, scientific crowdsourcing should catch on. Read more »
