A startup called Datahero launched on Thursday with a new cloud service that makes visualizing data as simple as a few mouse clicks, and $1 million in seed funding. The company’s ultimate goal is to make big data something you or I could do. Read more »
Ask a VC about big data and she will probably tell you about visualization of the user interface. We’re talking about intuitive UIs that let users visually work with data using charts and tools, not algorithms. It’s hard to do right, but the payoff could be huge. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
For eBay, big data is serious business. Every day, the site stores and analyzes data from millions of users buying, selling and searching for hundreds of millions of products. It handles all this data with lots of Hadoop, although a good data warehouse doesn’t hurt either. Read more »
Big data and Platform-as-a-Service offerings highlighted the second quarter, suggesting that we can expect to see a shift in enterprise IT practices around application development and analytics very soon. On the PaaS front, we saw new projects like DotCloud and Cloud Foundry gain incredible momentum in just a few short months. The big-data activity ranged from major new Hadoop vendors to heavy investment in flash storage that will speed the serving of data to processing engines. In other areas, we saw an uptick in cloud-computing plans from large vendors, OpenStack continued to mature and pick up both contributors and users, and Facebook caught our eye by launching an open-source project around the designs for its specialized servers and data centers. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Salesforce.com, IBM, Heroku and Calxeda. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Two markets stand out above all else when looking at the first quarter of 2011: infrastructure as a service (IaaS) — the epitome of cloud computing — and big data. Amazon Web Services continues to lead the IaaS space in terms of customers and innovation, while Rackspace, buoyed by momentum around OpenStack, will be its primary competitor for mainstream customers. In the big data space, there are so many players and terms floating about it’s difficult for outsiders to get a handle on who’s who and what’s what, though such activity validates the technologies. Other developments this quarter included HP’s impending presence in the cloud computing and big data spaces and the realization that Intel won’t be left to die if low-power servers based on x86 processors catch on like the buzz late last year suggests they will. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Microsoft, Cloudera, SeaMicro and Facebook. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Hadoop has been used by large web companies for applications such as search engines, but the reality is that the project is so much more. This report takes a closer look, examining what Hadoop is (and isn’t), who’s doing what to productize it and why we can expect to see the market pick up serious steam in 2011. We profile the growing number of companies — from startups like MapR to Cloudera, the arguable leader in the space — using Hadoop, the challenges still hindering widespread adoption and where potential users can expect the market to go as we move through 2011 and beyond. Companies mentioned in this report include Yahoo, Facebook, EMC, Teradata and Appistry. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Business and IT leaders now face significant opportunities and challenges with big data — that is data sets that are so large they are difficult to store, manage and analyze. This report explores the rapidly evolving big data business and technology ecosystem. It examines big data in the context of several different industries: financial services, health care, sports, travel and media. We explore the different big data technologies — from Hadoop and NoSQL derivatives to cloud-based collaboration tools — and their various benefits for enterprises. And we examine some of the existing challenges big data poses, and what enterprise IT leaders can do to overcome them. Companies mentioned in this report include Amazon Web Services, Google, Teradata, IBM and Cloudera. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Michael Dell is talking this week talking about having acquisition plans in “software, data centers, cloud computing, storage and virtualization,” which raises questions about who it might be eying up. There are five vendors, in particular, that could give high value for a relatively low price. Read more »
The action in the data warehouse/analytic database space has been hot and heavy over the past couple weeks, with new funding, acquisitions and partnerships announced seemingly every day. It likely won’t slow down anytime soon, and here are a few acquisitions that may be coming down ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Boxee CEO Avner Ronen stopped by our NewTeeVee Live conference last week to officially announce the first Boxee-branded hardware, a set-top box that will be available sometime next year. I interviewed Ronen after his keynote, and he gave me a few more details about both the […] Read more »
