Big data could mean big savings in health care – but here’s what has to happen first
A new report from McKinsey estimates that big data could save the health care industry up to $450 billion, but it has to overcome a few obstacles first. Read more »
Seeking startup cred: SAP pushes HANA as a platform for data startups
photo: Flickr / kirinqueen
Two legacy powers — SAP and Kendall Square (in the guise of hack/reduce) pulled out the stops Friday to woo big data entrepreneurs. SAP wants them to use HANA. Hack/reduce just wants them to stick around. Read more »
On the quest to data ownership, lots of questions lie ahead
photo: Andreas Weigend
As companies rack up more data on consumers, it’s high time for talking about new standards for data sharing and what data ownership should look like. Read more »
You want to crunch top-secret data securely? CryptDB may be the app for that
photo: Thinkstock
A project at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab aims to make crunching of the most top-secret data possible without exposing that data. At all. Read more »
Anatomy of a security fix: Postgres launches massive update to address vulnerability
Any time a major security vulnerability is discovered in a popular software product, there’s hell to pay. Here’s how the Postgres community reacted to one such vulnerability. Read more »
Meet DSSD, Andy Bechtolsheim’s secret chip startup for big data
photo: Pinar Ozger (c) 2011 GigaOM
The solution for better and faster storage may lie in DSSD, a stealthy chip startup backed by Andreas von Bechtolsheim, that counts several members of the Sun ZFS team as founders. Read more »
IBM releases Hadoop box and database technology for quicker data insights
photo: Jordan Novet
IBM announced a new PureData appliance for Hadoop and technology for speeding up analytic databases. The announcements come at a good time, with data sets growing and enterprises hankering for easy and fast analysis capability. Read more »
A Tableau IPO could validate the big data visualization push — or not
Tableau Software is following rival QlikView in an IPO that may show whether or not data visualization as a hot technology category has legs. Read more »
Twitter plays its platform hand, and it is the one holding all the Cards
Twitter wants to get on the good side of third-party app developers with some new features for its expanded-tweet Cards, but the main focus of these new features is still to cement Twitter’s control over its ecosystem. Read more »
What is SignalFuse and why should we care?
photo: Flickr ryanmilani
Stealthy Silicon Valley startup is in the market for engineers who know distributed systems, data science and statistics. But it’s heritage — co-founders are Karthik Rau formerly of VMware and Phillip Liu out of Facebook — is what piques curiosity. Read more »
Triposo’s iOS travel guides gain “opinion mining” data and faster OpenStreetMap rendering
photo: Triposo
The algorithmically generated travel guides have received a major update on the iPhone and iPad, with the Android versions set to receive similar upgrades at some point down the line. Read more »
Cisco wades deeper into small cell waters with $310M Ubiquisys purchase
Another month, another big acquisition to bolster Cisco’s portfolio for mobile carriers. This time it’s Ubiquisys, the highly-rated purveyor of small cells, SON technology and other operator-focused treats. Read more »
On Kaggle, GE finds data science solutions for patients and pilots
photo: Jordan Novet
GE, an airline and a health system have crowdsourced data science questions using Kaggle and are now paying out $600,000 to winners of two competitions. Read more »
Ignition raises $150M fund, opens Silicon Valley office, to back enterprise IT
Enterprise IT is a segment that has been underserved, says Ignition Partners’ Frank Artale, so Ignition launched a new fund to attack that opportunity. Read more »
Applied Micro’s cloud chip is an ARM-based, switch-killing machine
photo: Stacey Higginbotham
Applied Micro, a chip company with a market cap of $500 million, is set to take on Intel and AMD with the first 64-bit, ARM-based server part that mimics an entire rack on a chip. Read more »
Forget in-memory — SiSense raises $10M for in-chip analytics
photo: Shutterstock / Iscatel
SiSense has been growing like mad with its analytic database and BI software that’s designed to maximize the disk, memory and CPU on even small computers in the name of low latency. Read more »
Deep Information Sciences scores $10M for its general-purpose database
A New Hampshire company has emerged from the shadows with its DeepDB general-purpose database for transactional and analytic work. Investors have put $10 million behind the company. Read more »
Sponsored post: The future of BI for Hadoop is here
Hadoop has become synonymous with big data, but the promise of the technology remains elusive. In order to achieve the results big data hype has promised, companies need a different approach that allows users to have unlimited access and control of all their data within Hadoop. Read more »
DataRPM scores $250K, introduces Google-like big data searching
photo: anaken2012 / Shutterstock
Natural-language processing powers the Instant Answers feature from business intelligence startup DataRPM, which could help more people easily get insights from their big sets of data. Read more »
Google faces wrath of European regulators over unified privacy policy
photo: Shutterstock / vlad_star
Remember when Google drew together all its privacy policies last March? That move has now prompted investigations from privacy regulators across Europe, who say the company has ignored their recommendations. Read more »
Is this the future of memory? A Hybrid Memory Cube spec makes its debut.
A highly dense memory technology introduced in 2011 takes another step closer to reality with the launch of new interconnection specifications. At this rate, we’ll see the new tech in devices in 2014. Read more »
CloudSigma goes all-SSD to boost HPC performance in the public cloud
The IaaS provider, which is a supplier to Europe’s performance-hungry Helix Nebula science cloud, has abandoned magnetic disks for solid-state storage, and all without raising its prices. Read more »
Facebook builds a database benchmark for a graph-powered world
Facebook has built a new open source tool for benchmarking graph databases, called LinkBench. And although the chances are your infrastructure and workloads look nothing like Facebook’s, the good news is LinkBench was built with configurability in mind. Read more »
Politics and personalization have more in common than you think
New research suggests that a phenomenon called biased assimilation makes people view new, inconclusive evidence in ways that support existing biases, leading to increased polarization on topics such as politics or even what we read online. Read more »
HTML5 lovers rejoice: Famo.us to make its platform free for developers
Famo.us, a San Francisco-based HTML5 platform maker, is making its platform free for developers and has new technology that makes its HTML5 platform even more robust. Read more »
Intelligent Content: Soon your media will know you better than you know yourself
photo: Viorel Sima/Shutterstock
Though tablets and ebook readers are now mainstream, the revolution in the way they display content – and how that content will be generated dynamically – is yet to come. Read more at paidContent »
The new analytic stack is all about management, transparency and users
photo: Shutterstock / ramcreations
Spurred by infrastructural innovations such as Hadoop and NoSQL, we’re seeing the beginning of a new analytic stack that’s all about deal with big data in an easier, more-transparent way than ever before. Read more »
Welcome to the golden age of enterprise IT — and get used to it: It’ll be here for a while
photo: f9photos / Shutterstock
Venture capitalists have been putting more money behind enterprise startups than consumer-facing startups in recent years. VCs expect the trend to last for some time. Read more »
How to make your mark in professional basketball at 5′ 9″
Vasu Kulkarni isn’t an NBA star; he couldn’t even make an Ivy League basketball team. But Kulkarni’s startup Krossover is trying to change the nature of coaching, scouting and even fandom by testing people’s on-the-field sports intelligence. Read more »
If there’s no such thing as anonymous data, does privacy just mean security?
photo: Flickr / striatic
A new research paper shows just how easy it is to identify individuals based on supposedly anonymous mobile-phone data, and this isn’t the first time supposedly anonymous data really wasn’t. But how do we balance the need for privacy with the value of these datasets? Read more »
Content for cord cutters is going to get harder to find, industry executive predicts
photo: Shutterstock user Vlue
The TV industry knows that broadband changes its business, but it can’t adapt quickly. That’s why the CEO of Conviva expects cord cutters to suffer higher fees and less content in the short term. Read more »
3 shades of latency: How Netflix built a data architecture around timeliness
Netflix computes information in different ways, depending on how soon the data needs to get served up to customers or evaluated internally. The nuanced approach extends to Facebook, LinkedIn and other webscale companies. Read more »
Big, open data: MapR on Github and Yelp’s dataset challenge
MapR is releasing open source code and partnering with Canonical on Ubuntu, while Netflix is releasing some data for for developers to play with. Sounds like a good day for openness. Read more »
Liberty Global buys minority stake in Dutch ISP Ziggo for $810M
Liberty, the biggest ISP outside China, already owns the Netherlands’ second-largest cable provider outright. Now it’s bought a 12.65 percent stake in the largest. Read more »
After sorting out mobile carriers’ APIs, Apigee targets healthcare and the airlines
Ever wanted a single app that check you into any airline or an app that could aggregate healthcare data from multiple doctors and insurance companies? Apigee’s new API Exchange aims to make those apps possible. Read more »
Egyptian Navy arrests divers over major broadband cable cut
It looks like Wednesday’s internet slowdown in parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia may have been the result of sabotage, rather than the sort of accident that usually knocks out submarine cables. Read more »
Startup Chronon looks to replace logging and record apps instead
photo: Chronon screen shot
One startup pitching in the enterprise-focused Alchemist Accelerator’s second class envisions widespread adoption of an alternative to logging applications: recording and replaying them. Read more »
Why Apple, eBay, and Walmart have some of the biggest data warehouses you’ve ever seen
Teradata has been around forever, and its customer base full of huge companies suggests it will probably for a while to come. Here’s how some of its customers use the company’s analytics software. Read more »
Wal-Mart is arming itself for fierce retail battles with better search, social streams and more
photo: Jordan Novet
Wal-Mart has been rolling out improvements on its desktop and mobile sites and building a unified back end for subsidiaries to take advantage of all the new features. Read more »
Two ways the new Flipboard could disrupt media: Advertising and revenue sharing
Flipboard’s new curation tools for creating custom magazines may appeal to individual users, but they will likely also appeal to advertisers and other brands — and therein lies the potential for real media disruption. Read more at paidContent »
