Retroficiency, a startup out of MIT that uses software and big data to create energy retrofits for buildings, has raised a round of $3.2 million from Point Judith Capital and has acquired the energy efficiency division of Nexamp, called Clean Energy Solutions. Read more »
So the big data backlash begins. The Hadoop framework does a lot, but some experts — including those who push non-Hadoop options — say it’s not enough for many specialized apps where a build-your-own Hadoop implementation costs too much to be a real contender. Read more »
With its new Idol 10 software, Hewlett-Packard brings together key Vertica and Autonomy technologies acquired over the last year for an assault on knotty big data problems. HP says the software can collect and analyze unstructured data including video, audio and social net feeds. Read more »
Today, I read a press release from Sourcefire touting its “big data” approach to security and the fact that its Immunet anti-malware-for-PCs product is now monitoring 2 million endpoints. I reached out to find out what’s under Immunet’s covers and, no surprise, found Hadoop. Read more »
Hadoop gets plenty of attention from investors and the IT press, but it’s very possible we haven’t seen anything yet. All the action of the last year has just been setting the stage for what should be a big year. Read more »
Retailers already parse a ton of data — from ERP systems, from registers, from Twitter and Facebook. That pool of addressable data will only get bigger as more retailers revisit using RFID to prevent losses, says Steve Stone, former CIO of Lowe’s Home Improvement stores. Read more »
It appears as if Apple users’ willingness to shell out a little more cash for a premium experience doesn’t stop at computers. Orbitz’s data-crunching has found that Mac users also spend about $20 more a night on hotels than do Windows users. Read more »
Want to give Christmas a bit of a technological twist? Forget buying gadgets and doodads as gifts: why not dangle a 3D printed, data-crafted bauble from your tree instead? Read more »
Twitter may be an ever-flowing stream of information, but as it becomes a more mainstream source of news and commentary it also becomes a huge reservoir of data that can be analyzed, and that’s what startups like ThinkUp and DataSift and Gnip are trying to do Read more »
DataSift, the British company that built its business filtering and sorting through reams of Twitter data in real time, has brought its act to the U.S., opening a San Francisco office. Businesses use DataSift to glean information about user impressions of their products and services. Read more »
In the past decade supercomputers were dressed-up versions of Intel’s x86 machines, but increasingly supercomputers are borrowing innovations (and silicon in the form of ARM-based chips or DSPs) from the mobile and big data realms to add speed without guzzling too much power. Read more »
What happens when you place the equivalent of 1024 neurons in parallel on a chip? Well, you get a new form of computing for cloud computing and sensor networks as well as toys that can recognize cue cards, better artificial intelligence and pattern recognition. Read more »
A new startup called CrowdControl is launching today, and it aims to bring order to the world of crowdsourcing by using artificial intelligence to judge workers’ accuracy. Think Amazon Mechanical Turk, only with a quality control mechanism in place to help ensure jobs get done right. Read more »
Blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick is leaving his job at Read/Write Web to start a company called Plexus Engine, which he says will offer data-filtering tools he has used as a tech journalist. Kirkpatrick joins a growing group of bloggers who have left to join the startup world. Read more »
The Supreme Court of the United States heard oral arguments in a case that could decide how connected the concept of big data is to constitutional expectations of privacy. How much data is too much before allowable surveillance crosses the line into an invasion of privacy? Read more »
It’s no secret now that Apple is working hard on getting a fix for iOS 5 battery issues out the door. But battery life isn’t the only problem new iPhone 4S owners are having with their devices. Here are three other common complaints. Read more »
Johns Hopkins is building a 100 gigabit per second network to shuttle data from the campus to other large computing centers. The network would be capable of transferring the amount of data equivalent to 80 million file cabinets filled with text each day. Read more »
Luxtera has developed an optical chip for the data center market that can achieve speeds of more than 100 gigabits per second. That’s the same speed delivered by long-haul networks under the sea, but now harnessed to move big data and deliver cloud computing. Read more »
Splunk has integrated its product with Apache Hadoop to enable large-scale batch analytics on top of the product’s existing capabilities around real-time search, analysis and visualization of machine-generated data. Users can bring Hadoop data back into Splunk for visualization or run MapReduce jobs from Splunk. Read more »
Accel Partners is trying to capitalize on the popularity of big data with a $100 million Big Data Fund. The VC firm’s office across the globe will invest in applications that help form an ecosystem around existing big data building blocks such as Hadoop and NoSQL. Read more »
Hadoop isn’t the only thing going in big data, but it’s driving the bus at this point and it seems to have a reverse Midas touch: everything that touches it turns to gold. The latest to experience this is Cloudera, which has raised another $40 million. Read more »
Targeting customers demanding more-reliable and efficient Hadoop clusters to power their big data efforts, NetApp has partnered with Cloudera to deliver a Hadoop storage system called the NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop. It combines Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution and management software with a NetApp-built RAID architecture. Read more »
Google, IBM, Citi and a handful of other large U.S. technology and banking companies are pushing the U.S. government to take the lead on establishing global treaties that would assure the free flow of information across international borders. If the government is smart, it will listen. Read more »
Big data technology is attracting some big bucks. Kaggle, a startup that helps companies outsource large business analytics projects by turning them into large-scale competitions for scientists around the world, will announce Thursday it has secured $11 million in venture capital funding. Read more »
Cloudera founder Christophe Bisciglia launched a new company today called Odiago, whose WibiData product utilizes Hadoop and HBase to let businesses make the most of online user data. Big-name investors aside, under the covers WibiData shows the future of how Hadoop-based products will look. Read more »
E-commerce site Etsy has grown to 25 million unique visitors and 1.1 billion page views per month, and it’s generating the data volumes to match. Using tools such as Hadoop and Splunk, Etsy is turning terabytes of data per day into a better product. Read more »
Save for Hortonworks’ foray into the product space, none of today’s myriad Hadoop announcements are particularly earth-shaking, but they’re very meaningful when taken as a whole. They’re part of a larger trend in which anyone with a data-driven business has a Hadoop story to tell customers. Read more »
Hortonworks is getting into software after all with today’s release of the open-source Hortonworks Data Platform. This is a smart move by Hortonworks, which will need more than name recognition to displace Hadoop elder statesman Cloudera as well as mega-vendors EMC, Oracle and IBM. Read more »
Calling a company’s customer service department can be a frustrating experience. If only there was a way to make it a more rewarding experience for everyone involved and perhaps even save everyone some time. That might be coming, and big data might be leading the charge. Read more »
We often laud big data when it’s capturing and storing all sorts of new data types, but would the positive tone change if we we’re talking about monitoring your every digital interaction while at work to discover questionable behavior? Cataphora CEO Elizabeth Charnock doesn’t really care. Read more »
Monday, I sat down with Steve Mills, IBM’s SVP of Software & Systems, to discuss what IBM has in the works around big data, and he didn’t mince words in asserting IBM’s ambitious revenue plans and slamming rivals such as Oracle. Read more »
IBM joined the big-data-in-the-cloud fray, announcing Monday that its Hadoop-based InfoSphere BigInsights product will be available as a service on the IBM SmartCloud platform. Big Blue’s timing is good, as Hadoop will likely have a far greater presence across public clouds within the next year. Read more »
Siri may be the hottest personal assistant since I Dream of Jeannie, but Apple’s artificial intelligence is only the tip of the iceberg as we combine ubiquitous connectivity, sensor networks, big data, new AI and programming into a truly connected network. Read more »
The federal government has been gung ho over cloud computing in the past few years, but is it ready to do big data in the cloud? Federal contractor GCE Federal is offering a cloud service based on Hadoop and designed for federal agencies to outsource analytics. Read more »
Cambridge, Mass.-based startup Hadapt closed a Series A funding round of $9.5 million for its Hadoop-based software that handles structured and unstructured data in a single system. Norwest Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners led the round, which comes about seven months after Hadapt’s launch. Read more »
HP took a lot of flack when it decided to buy Autonomy for $10 billion, but if big data is a worthwhile investment, perhaps HP’s alleged overpayment really will pay off. Autonomy’s Nicole Egan explained to me why she thinks HP is in a good position. Read more »
EMC, having spent billions on acquisitions over the last few years, ain’t done yet. At the top of the shopping list is more security, more management and more data analytics know-how, EMC’s Pat Gelsinger told reporters today at an event at Gillette Stadium. Read more »
EMC CEO Joe Tucci gave a lecture at the University of Washington last night in which he said EMC spent $10.5 billion on research and development and $14 billion on acquisitions between 2003 and 2010, numbers that should only rise over the next eight years. Read more »
IBM detailed early results of a new sentiment-analysis experience to determine how Twitter users feel about the World Series. The findings won’t tell you who’ll win, but perhaps they’ll set the stage for a new way of thinking about who to sign, trade and cut. Read more »
Researchers are busy trying to use Twitter to predict everything from disease outbreaks and financial markets to elections and even revolutions. New research from Topsy Labs shows that Twitter can provide a window into events like the Arab Spring. But can it predict what will happen? Read more »
