A startup called Infer has taken on $10 million in venture funding to help more companies get a better idea of which leads to focus on in their sales and marketing lead lists. Read more »
When it comes to forming a bond with customers, one expert suggests using big data to help them form a bond with each other. Read more »
While Nest is widely known as a consumer-focused smart thermostat maker, the startup has quietly been developing services it can offer in conjunction with utilities, which can curb customers’ energy use while also lowering their energy bills. Read more »
Gravity CTO Jim Benedetto knows his way around MySQL after managing a 600-instance cluster at MySpace, but he has found HBase religion as his real-time content-recommendation platform grew. And he’s not alone. Read more »
Instead of trying to approximate the prospects of Bitcoin, the online-audience analysts from Quantcast have come up with some data on the common demographics of Bitcoin users. Read more »
The fine relates to Google’s accidental scraping of personal data, using the company’s Street View cars, from people’s open Wi-Fi access points back in 2010. Read more »
To bolster its data-visualization offerings, business-analytics vendor Pentaho has acquired Webdetails, a design firm that has previously done consulting work for Pentaho. Read more »
Thousands of enterprise customers use Splunk to help solve challenging big data problems across their infrastructure and beyond. Read this analyst report and discover how Cars.com, a leading website for vehicle shopping, used Splunk to find new revenue and cost containment opportunities within its machine-generated data. Read more »
Americans spend more than any other country on healthcare, and yet experience the worst medical outcomes of any developed nation. Investment and innovation in healthcare is an incredible opportunity for entrepreneurs that will benefit everyone. Read more »
Feedly has faced two outages since adding millions of users in the wake of the announcement that Google will retire its Google Reader service. Now Feedly is accelerating its monetization plans. Read more »
IBM is reportedly in talks to sell it’s server business to Lenovo. As it ditches commodity hardware again, where is IBM’s fortune going to be made? Mobility and data. Read more »
One of the biggest drivers for LinkedIn’s business isn’t the consumer-facing side that you see — it’s the set of tools the company provides professional recruiters to match people with jobs. And the company is using data and technology to improve those tools. Read more »
Platform companies from Apple to OpenTable take a commission from developers or merchants. But figuring out how much to take has huge repercussions on the business explains Benchmark’s Bill Gurley. Read more »
Guavus makes its living by helping telcos and mobile carriers make sense of what’s happening across their networks. To date it has raised $87 million and is looking to expand far and wide. Read more »
Following on previous quarterly disclosures on energy and water efficiency, Facebook is unveiling dashboards showing its data centers’ near-real-time performance. Read more »
Promising young startup Enlighted is powering up with new funds and new customers for its sensor, big data and lighting control tech that can reduce the lighting energy in buildings by 50 to 70 percent. Read more »
OpenSignal is expanding its mobile networking crowdsourcing project from Android to the iPhone. Though OpenSignal uses that crowdsourced data to generate its own detailed metrics, there’s plenty in the app for consumers as well. Read more »
Less than year after hitting the 1 trillion object mark, Amazon S3 is now storing more than 2 trillion objects. That’s a lot any way you slice it and highlights AWS’s role as an underpinning of today’s web. Read more »
Hadoop not fast enough for you? Then you might want to get to know AMPLab, a University of California, Berkeley team developing faster versions of many core Hadoop components. Read more »
The FBI has amassed terabytes of data from sources near the terrorist attack that occured during the Boston Marathon. This raises a question about the role crowdsourcing could play in solving some crimes while protecting citizens’ privacy. Read more »
How are book publishers learning more about our evolving reading habits? Not surprisingly, ebook publishers are turning the industry toward thinking more about making data-driven decisions. Read more at paidContent »
The “digital exhaust” from your mobile phones and other devices could give doctors a valuable window into your wellbeing. Read more »
Power grid operators and utilities are increasingly turning to big data analytics and tools. This week European power giant E.ON said it plans to work with Ericsson for a smart meter data project in Sweden. Read more »
Sherpa is trying to build a more flexible virtual assistant technology that can easily adapted for new tasks. To that end it has developed its own conceptual meta-language which it uses to process all voice commands. Read more »
Thiel Foundation subsidiary Breakout Labs has funded two new startups called SkyPhrase and Stealth Biosciences that, respectively, are trying to reinvent natural language processing and improve our ability to interact with individual cells. Read more »
Data scientist might be the sexiest job of the 21st century, but it’s hardly an easy gig to land. Here is some advice from practitioners at Netflix, Orbitz and Hortonworks on how get hired and even do the hiring. Read more »
IDC is predicting a $6 billion big-data storage market by 2016, part of an overall big data market worth nearly $24 billion. Read more »
A San Francisco company has raised $1.4 million in seed funding to bring to market a tool for processing text in any language in the world. Read more »
In a provocative live webinar, Hortonworks Founder & CTO Eric Baldeschwieler (aka “E14”) and Teradata CTO Stephen Brobst apply real-world Silicon Valley customer cases on big data applications to show you when to use Hadoop, and when to use an MPP relational data warehouse. Read more »
Mercedes-Benz, Bosch and the industrial insurance firm HDI have partnered up with European accelerator network Startupbootcamp. With names like that on the roster, it’s a fair bet that connected car technology will be a focus. Read more »
More than a decade ago, Gracenote received some cryptic advice from Apple to buy more servers. What followed — the launch of iTunes and iPod — blew up Gracenote’s database to epic proportions and laid the groundwork for a metadata empire. Read more »
Utilities are increasingly embracing the tools needed to manage big data, and on Monday data warehouse software firm Teradata said it’s teamed up with power grid giant Siemens for a better way to manage the massive data flowing off the smart grid. Read more »
Teradata introduces a new high-speed data-warehouse appliance and announces the ability to use insights from Hadoop as part of analysis in a data-warehouse appliance. Read more »
Asking companies to share their data with consumers could take a while, and hiding data could mean less personalization. As more online personalization becomes more popular, better solutions could emerge. Read more »
It’s easy to be sniffy about the concept of sending odors through the internet, but researchers are nonetheless hard at work on folding the sense of smell into the digital repertoire. Read more »
To serve up data quickly inside its Neighborhoods feature, Airbnb engineers cycled through a few database choices before choosing Memcached. Read more »
Microsoft has rolled out a new visualization feature for Excel called GeoFlow. It’s definitely pretty, and if you’re using Windows and trying to track activity over space and time, it might be useful, too. Read more »
IBM announced Thursday a $1 billion bet on flash storage, following on similar moves in the past. Flash has been hot as of late, and this bet could pay off nicely. Read more »
Is Facebook serious with its new partner categories advertising program? Somehow, using offline data to target ads seems like a stretch for a company already facing a privacy backlash and that has such rich data to mine from inside its own platform. Read more »
A conversation with a payments processing company that offers small businesses a side of data, got me thinking about how data may change your customer service experience and maybe distort markets. Read more »
