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 »
Foursquare said Thursday it has raised $41 million to expand its location-based service, but the financing is convertible debt rather than equity, which increases the pressure on the company to prove it has a real business. Read more »
GigaOM Research and Infochimps delve into a discussion on understanding the ecosystem of big data cloud services and big data managed services. Join us for a free analyst webinar on Thursday, April 18, 2013, at 10 a.m. PT. Read more »
The financial technology firm will use the funding to push on into Europe, which – by happy coincidence – has just decided to adopt governmental open data policies across the board. Read more »
A team of Stanford researchers has developed a method for mining the text of doctors’ notes to identify adverse reactions from prescription drugs. The technique could spot problems years before the current FDA-reporting process can. Read more »
After hearing about the applications of big data for better ads, song recommendations and social media analysis, nothing makes me happier than hearing about technologists coming together with non-profits to use data to fight human trafficking. Read more »
The IT industry is undergoing a cataclysm of innovation that is disrupting big businesses, offering opportunities for entrepreneurs and redefining the role of IT in the corporation. GigaOM’s Structure event helps you understand what’s next. Read more »
Enevo’s services, which involve putting sensors into trash bins to optimize collection times and routes, provide a useful reminder of the potential of the internet of things. Read more »
Key stakeholders across your organization need a big data technology that can give them answers as fast as they think of questions. Take advantage of every step in the big data life cycle. Learn how you can use Splunk to harness your machine-generated big data. Read more »
MarkLogic has raised $25 million in new venture funding to add more customers for its NoSQL database. It wants to go after companies that have looked to longtime software vendors for relational solutions. Read more »
Good news for startups hoping to draw on public road traffic and weather data, among other types: changes agreed on Wednesday should allow the use of such data for free or at very low cost. Read more »
A startup called Blab has developed software for predicting conversations on social-media sties and news outlets. It’s another example of applications offering insights using unstructured data that previously was difficult to work with. Read more »
Mendeley, an open collaboration platform for scientific research, has promised that it won’t become less open after being acquired by journal publisher Elsevier, but some prominent users aren’t waiting around. Read more at paidContent »
A startup called ParElastic thinks it can change the cloud database game by helping companies scale their MySQL environments without resorting to sharding or deploying an entirely new database. Read more »
MongoDB creator 10gen is growing again, this time with the addition of Sydney Carey as the company’s first CFO. She’ll help lay the infrastructure for plans to more than double in size in two years as it eyes an eventual IPO. Read more »
The rumored takeover is now reality, at a reported price of $69 million. But, given Elsevier’s reputation and Mendeley’s open access ethos, will this deal turn out to be a harmonious success? Read more at paidContent »
The SumAll Foundation, a non-profit effort by cloud analytics startup SumAll, is trying to change the world by showing non-profits how to get the most out of their data by thinking more like businesspeople do. Read more »
IBM Fellows get access to all of IBM’s toys (maybe even Watson!) and, perhaps more importantly, a hotline to Ginni Rometty. That’s why analysis and risk whiz Neil Bartlett is so happy to join the club. Read more »
A second generation of wearable computing is emerging that focuses on design and a so-called glanceable UI. Valley startup Misfit Wearables is leading the charge, and trying to create a new type of user experience. Read more »
The new version aims to provide a simpler interface for wrangling hundreds of data points per site visit. Qubit has also released research about browser user value, with IE users coming out on top. Read more »
A data democracy built to last needs tools that empower everyone to work with data rather than relying on apps and data scientists. Tableau helped ignite the data revolution, and its IPO could help it keep going. Read more »
An early blogger and startup founder who had recently launched a new business focused on health and fitness, Allen Stern passed away last week and was remembered by his friends and blogging colleagues. Read more »
Almost every tech company claims to hate patent trolls, but they certainly don’t always back up their words with actions. Recent patent activity around the Hadoop big data platform might show how companies can effectively battle trolls — if they really want to. Read more »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 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 »
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 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 »
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 »
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 »
