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 »
Digital recipes and cookbooks need to emulate the world of digital music. By creating a standard recipe format similar to the MP3, we could overcome the artificial barriers between cooking Websites, apps and our bookshelves. Only then could we be build truly comprehensive digital cooking libraries. Read more »
On New Year’s Day, Ginny Rometty took the reins at IBM. Big Blue is on a roll: its stock outperformed Google and Apple this year, and Warren Buffett is a fan. But the IT giant faces perils as well as opportunities going into 2012. Read more »
Mu Sigma has closed a $108 million investment round to expand its analytics-outsourcing business. Mu Sigma takes customers’ data and it turns it into business insights, meaning customers don’t have to built their own in-house big data expertise. It’s an already-profitable business that’s only getting bigger. Read more »
The outsize growth in online spending this holiday season suggests that e-commerce as a sector of the economy has passed some kind of tipping point and that factors beyond simply convenience and price — both long-standing hallmarks of online shopping — are propelling the e-commerce sector ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Google announced that it’s ending its Academic Cloud Computing Initiative, a joint program with IBM and the National Science Foundation that gave researchers access to a massive Hadoop cluster on which to run their data-intensive projects. The company says access to such resources is now common. Read more »
This year may have been the beginning of the big data onslaught, but big data will only get bigger in 2012. Watch for companies to check out specialized databases for different data types and to segment their data centers for old and new workloads. Read more »
Money has turned the Hadoop community, once united under the Apache banner and the cuddly stuffed-toy-elephant logo, into something resembling a frat house: Everyone’s under the same roof, but there’s plenty of machismo to go around. If it’s not good business; it is good theater. Read more »
The discovery of a new type of chemical bond by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign shows exactly how supercomputers and big data are combining to become the microscope of the future. Read more »
For those in a perpetual snit about personal data privacy, here’s bold proposal from Michael Driscoll: Donate your own medical data. And do it now — don’t wait till you’re dead. What better way to make big data truly relevant — and helpful — to real live people? Read more »
Application developers can now use one API to access data from Factual’s marketplace that contains data on more than 55 million places worldwide. It’s not data nirvana just yet, but Factual points to what our data-driven future might look like. Read more »
Beyond Hadoop, there’s a lot more to think about when it comes to big data, ranging from where companies will actually find workers to how they’ll deal with an impending privacy-policy onslaught. The answers won’t be easy to come by, but they could be critical. Read more »
It is becoming abundantly apparent that, while there is still focus on install rates of physical smart meters, what will matter in the future is how well the data from these smart meters can be secured by utilities and how well utilities can use that data ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform as a service (PaaS) now supports Node.js, the popular server-side JavaScript development framework. That could give Azure more traction beyond the Microsoft .NET faithful. Also new: a limited trial of Hadoop-based distribution for Azure. Read more »
Northwestern University is doing its bit to feed the need for analytics skills in this era of big data. NU’s McCormick School of Engineering launched a new Master of Science degree in analytics and is accepting applications for the inaugural class. Read more »
There has been a remarkable flowering of companies over the past year or two, all riding a wave of developer and investor enthusiasm for the loosely defined concept of “big data.” But given that the big data startup market is probably overvalued and headed for a ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
IBM plans to acquire retail data analytics company DemandTec in an all-cash deal valued at $440 million, continuing Big Blue’s buys in big data businesses. DemandTec has two especially compelling elements for IBM: It adds to its big data expertise, and it’s vertically focused. Read more »
LexisNexis is pressing MarkLogic’s technology into service for its just-launched Lexis Advance legal service. MarkLogic’s document storage, search and analytics technology replaces legacy home-built code as part of a platform modernization and big data push. Read more »
Greenplum has announced its Unified Analytics Platform, a packaging of the Greenplum Database and Hadoop distribution along with its long-awaited Chorus software. Chorus is really what ties everything together, providing a platform to explore both types of data and to share interesting data sets and findings. Read more »
Digital Reasoning, a somewhat shadowy specialist in big data analytics for the U.S. intelligence community, announced B Series funding and named industry vet John Brennan to its board. Funding came from CIA-backed In-Q-Tel, as well as some Silver Lake Sumeru partners and other unnamed investors. Read more »
