Twitter is said to be looking at acquiring Bluefin Labs, which would fit the trajectory that the real-time information network has been on for some time. But is cozying up to traditional TV the only future for Twitter? Read more »
As part of its new big-data-focused XDATA initiative, DARPA has invested $3 million in a startup called Continuum Analytics. The company’s aim is to extend Python’s prowess in scientific computing into the world of big data and analytics. Read more »
IBM on Friday announced its plan to acquire big data analytics company Star Analytics. The IT vendor has already spent more than $16 billion on big data and analytics acquisitions since 2005. Read more »
Not everyone is drowning in big data or has the know-how to deal with it if they were. Here are six free web services that help mere mortals analyze and visualize their own data. Read more »
In order to recommend new events for its members, online event-management company Eventbrite must build what it calls “implicit social graphs.” It’s just one of many approaches to figuring out what content users want to see. Read more »
Twitter added nine new companies to its Certified Products Program on Thursday, highlighting companies in the areas of marketing and analytics as companies it looks to partner with. Read more »
SevOne has raised $150 million for its line of appliances that help companies capture and analyze their streams of operational infrastructure data. Its financial success, even for a relatively quiet company founded in 2005, illustrate how important it is to know your systems data well. Read more »
Tableau’s new European VP James Eiloart reckons that Europe’s current belt-tightening phase should provide ample opportunities for his company’s analytics products, in spite of established local rivals. Read more »
While some are hoping for better software to reduce the need for data scientists, WibiData’s Omer Trajman thinks we need more of them. Better software, he argues, is actually just a tool to make it easier for data scientists to do world-changing work. Read more »
Placed Analytics has published a blog post showing which retailers had the most in-store visits during the holiday season. Placed can’t track sales, but its mobile-phone-derived location data can give a glimpse into who’s attracting the most physical shoppers, and when. Read more »
Whether they’re building big data applications or just trying to gather some insights from their mobile apps, developers have more need than ever for analytics tools. It’s a good thing so many companies are building tools designed with developers’ needs and skills in mind. Read more »
In an acknowledgement of the growing importance of the “second screen” for TV watchers, Nielsen is unveiling a new set of ratings that will measure a given show’s popularity on Twitter. Read more »
Opportunities for big data and data-analytics firms in health care are likely to expand dramatically in the coming years. Driving this are trends such as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the use of data to address inefficient processes, and the rapid growth of mobile health. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
ClearStory Data has raised $9 million from from KPCB, Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures in an attempt to plant its stake in the world next-generation analytics platforms. Big data is presenting a big challenge for business users, and they need help making sense of it. Read more »
Everywhere you look, there’s another option for sharing your medical data in the name of the greater good. These efforts are not for nothing: Because of there scale and geographic reach, crowdsourced data banks have the potential to revolutionze how medical research is conducted. Read more »
A startup called BitDeli is trying to democratize analytics by letting developers create custom metrics and dashboards using Python scripts instead of having to try Hadoop. What frameworks like Rails were to web development, Co-founder and CEO Ville Tuulos says, BitDeli is to analytics. Read more »
Millions of people now consume content on mobile devices but the analytics tools used to measure websites has failed to account for them. Now, a system has come along that measures these mobile users — and shakes up some of the traditional rankings. Read more at paidContent »
According to the New York Times, National Football League teams are often years behind their peers in other professional sports when it comes to data analysis. Machine learning could help teams make more sense of the myriad variables that currently keep them relying on human intuition. Read more »
In the fight about royalties from streaming media services like Pandora, Popular cellist Zoë Keating says she’s willing to give up the money in exchange for data. It’s an idea that’s gaining traction elsewhere, too, as more companies are paying consumers for their truly valuable data. Read more »
Eight years after forming, a startup called BeyondCore is finally launching publicly with a product it claims can revolutionize analytics. Rather than making analysts search for the needle in the haystack, BeyondCore says it remove the human element and deliver that needle on a silver platter. Read more »
According to a new report from Startup Genome, a company that provides benchmarking tools to startups and investors, New York ranked fifth on a list of the world’s top startup ecosystems. Silicon Valley led the pack, followed by Tel Aviv, Los Angeles and Seattle. Read more »
Prague-based social media analytics startup Socialbakers on Monday announced that it had raised $6 million in funding from Index Ventures and Earlybird Venture Capital. The startup says that more than a fifth of all Fortune 500 companies are its clients. Read more »
DataSift raised another $15 million in venture capital, bringing its total investment to nearly $30 million. In this video from Structure: Europe, DataSift Founder and CTO Nick Halstead describes how the company handles the firehose of social media data it receives. Read more »
Zoomdata has a plan for business intelligence that involves tacking the difficult problem of streaming data, and doing so with a mobile-device-first mindset. The result is pretty and compelling in theory, but it’s technologically challenging and will face tough competition from new and old vendors alike. Read more »
Less than a month after unveiling its Hadoop analytics engine to great fanfare, Platfora has raised $20 million to realize its mission of displacing the business intelligence and data warehouse incumbents. It’ll need every dime: although the competition is old, it’s also rich, entrenched and determined. Read more »
Cloudera has joined the fray of Hadoop companies trying to turn the big data platform into an engine for exploring data interactively using standard SQL. As the biggest company in the space, its new technology called Impala could go a long way toward changing Hadoop’s image. Read more »
Analytics startup Platfora is finally showing off its next-generation business intelligence software to the world, combining Hadoop, in-memory processing and HTML5 into an impressive product. It’s entering a competitive market full of large incumbents and other innovative startups all trying to change how we do BI. Read more »
Hadoop is getting closer to business intelligence thanks to a slew of new products ranging from a SQL database built atop Hadoop to an appliance packaging the two alongside a full complement of servers. On Wednesday, Birst, Teradata and Splice Machine got into the act. Read more »
Hadoop startup Hadapt has made its unified Hadoop-and-SQL analytic architecture even easier by adding native advanced analytic functions and integrating tightly with Tableau’s powerful BI software. It’s a sign of things to come as Hadoop and traditional SQL-based BI become cozy across the board. Read more »
According to Equinix CTO Lane Patterson, CIOs are still learning what can and what can’t be done in the cloud. Ultimately, it’s a matter of trust. Read more »
In the new app economy, organizations no longer own all the data they need to make accurate business decisions. This loss of control requires data marketplaces and data syndication models that few enterprises are currently prepared for. Apigee’s Anant Jhingran looks at three important steps that companies need to take to succeed in the app economy. Read more »
A team of University of Notre Dame researchers has developed an algorithm for solving Sudoku puzzles that doesn’t require it to guess at all. Rather, it’s able to discern patterns even with sparse available information and automatically determine which numbers go where. Read more »
Media companies and publishers of all kinds spend a lot of time measuring their online traffic patterns using analytics that track where readers come from — but Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic argues that they are overlooking a huge contributing factor that he calls “Dark Social” traffic. Read more »
Rent prices are higher than ever, but a growing number of startups are working to analyze our homes’ energy use so we can save money by using less power. Their approaches might differ, but data and analytics are the ties that binds them all. Read more »
Campaigns have been profiling potential voters for decades, but the glut of data available online changed the game in terms of how much they collect and how it’s used. Now, thanks to complex models and real-time ad platforms, poltiical advertising is becoming a personal affair. Read more »
To take full advantage of big data, businesses must think about how to use those mountains of data as they come into the network, not store it and hope to gather insights weeks or even months later. To do this, we need new tools. Read more »
Micro-blogging startup Tumblr announced Thursday that it’s partnered with Union Metrics to offer brands and advertisers a full-fidelity analytics platform. Read more »
A new startup called Trifacta, founded by UC-Berkeley professor Joe Hellerstein and Stanford professor Jeffrey Heer, wants to eliminate much of the hassle of making messy data usable. The company combines machine learning and human-computer interaction, and has raised $4.3 million from Accel Partners. Read more »
A startup called Entelo is trying to make résumés a thing of the past by aggregating profiles of tech workers from their public data, and then feeding those results to recruiters. The secret sauce is an algorithm for spotting when someone might be looking for work. Read more »
Although Twitter is pushing itself as a platform to gauge public opinion around popular events — including the upcoming presidential election — not everyone is buying the hype. Stats about sentiment and tweet velocity are certainly interesting, but man cannot live on tweet data alone. Read more »
