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 »
Amazon has become the cloud king, with its AWS offerings providing cloud-based storage and processing that takes a lot of the cost out of deploying new products and applications. Netflix, DropBox and Yelp are all AWS clients, but the most important user might be Amazon itself. Read more »
Oracle has acquired Endeca, a Cambridge, Mass.-based big data vendor specializing in analyzing and providing business intelligence for unstructured data. For Oracle, Endeca, which has been around since 2001, represents an expansion of the big data focus it unveiled at its OpenWorld conference earlier this month. Read more »
BillGuard, a personal finance service that uses Big Data analysis and crowd sourcing to identify bogus charges, has been racking up accolades since it launched in May. And now it’s pulling in big money: $10 million from Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund and Innovation Endeavors. Read more »
SGI and Cloudera have entered into a reseller agreement, but the most interesting part of the deal is that it’s yet another example of a vendor pushing Hadoop products at mainstream customers while keeping the custom stuff targeted at HPC. Read more »
Data is playing a bigger role in how we do our work. According to a recent study by Factiva, there are at least six different personas that workers take on in their data work, illustrating the different ways we relate to this data. Read more »
Cloud-based DNA-sequencing specialist DNAnexus has closed a $15 million second round led by Google Ventures and TPG Biotech. Elsewhere, we learned Wednesday that agribusiness giant Monsanto has deployed Cloudant’s NoSQL database as the underpinning of the company’s genomics system. Read more »
IBM on Tuesday acquired Platform Computing, a company that made a name for itself in high-performance computing but recently made a splash in the cloud computing and big data spaces. It’s likely these areas that had IBM in a buying mood. Read more »
There’s a lot of talk about the democratization of data, but simply making data sets publicly available leaves open some key problems. Datafiniti wants to change that with a search engine it hopes will make finding structured data as easy as finding sites using Google. Read more »
Startup WeatherBill has built a business around offering farmers financial protection against weather, but the underlying goal of the company has always been to help companies adapt to a changing climate, the company’s CEO and Co-Founder David Friedberg told me. Read more »
Travel-booking service Orbitz chose Kognitio’s Data Warehouse as a Service offering. The decision to move such a critical piece of the analytics stack to Kognitio’s cloud service highlights Orbitz’s commitment big data and is further proof that the cloud is an ideal place for it. Read more »
Cloudera and Hortonworks have been playing a game of oneupsmanship over the past few weeks in an attempt to prove whose contributions to the Apache Hadoop project matter most. Reputation matters to both companies, but maybe not as much as fending off encroachments to their turf. Read more »
Sprint has begun taking pre-orders for the 8 GB iPhone 4 Apple announced at its press event on Tuesday. The iPhone 4 will retail for $99 on a two-year contract, and both it and the iPhone 4S will have unlimited talk and data plans available. Read more »
Hadoop is becoming a popular choice for large organizations needing to store and process large volumes of unstructured data, but is it merely the flavor of the day? An eBay exec recently questioned his continued use of the platform if the pace of development doesn’t improve. Read more »
To glimpse the future of the data stack, Oracle need look no further than its own backyard. Silicon Valley start-ups are embracing Hadoop, NoSQL data stores like MongoDB, and cloud platforms. Michael Driscoll of Metamarkets explains why Oracle should step up its game. Read more »
