Many have predicted a “big data tsunami” that will transform the energy sector and open an entirely new market for smart-grid data analytics. Stepping into the fray is the next generation of smart-grid companies poised to use data to change energy consumption. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
For most people, the only data they’ll ever really see about themselves are the pretty charts generated by applications like Mint or Jawbone. Some people take their personal data a little more seriously, tracking their lives for years, then showing the world what that looks like. Read more »
Social media are a great source of information on consumer sentiment, but the next wave of analytics in social media will be influence. It’s easy to ridicule your friends and co-workers who are actually concerned with their Klout scores, but this stuff matters. Read more »
We live in a big data world, full of complex algorithms among any type of information one can imagine. Gaining the skills to work with it requires a lot work, however — and the first step in changing that might be realizing that data can be fun. Read more »
March Madness is officially upon us, and this year I have a plan to dominate my betting pool by using big data. I hope. I’m going to balance my gut feelings and my heart’s desires with statistics and . . . I’m going to hope everyone else doesn’t do the same. Read more »
The emergence of the big data phenomenon is fundamentally changing everything from the way companies operate to the way people interact to how the world deals with outbreaks of infectious diseases. Here we highlight 10 case studies illustrating how big data is changing the world. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The massive amount of data that is emerging from connected, digital systems, is fundamentally changing everything, from Internet search to entertainment, to disease management, to energy consumption. Here’s 10 case studies that highlight the power of big data. Read more »
Legal scholars are always searching for ways to improve the patent system, sometimes via sweeping changes, but big data — especially techniques such as machine learning and natural-language processing — could help provide a technological fix to a big part of the problem. Read more »
The files J. Edgar Hoover kept are nothing compared to the data collected by the Republican and Democratic campaigns in the coming 2012 elections. Thanks to tools such as Hadoop and Hive, campaigns can now predict how to target their campaigns. What’s next? Read more »
Seemingly overnight, big data became the behemoth to conquer. But the truth is, tried and true technologies have been tackling the problem for years. Versant’s Robert Greene gives respect to three unsung heroes of big data. Read more »
There’s a reason Larry Ellison called cloud computing “nonsense” and why he still won’t permit Amazon-style metered pricing for Oracle’s mainstream database and middleware. George Gilbert lets us in on the company’s expensive secret. Read more »
It all seems so easy: You log into Facebook, update your status, tell everyone where you are and — voila! — your Timeline is geospatial. Only, while it’s just one extra step for you to add location, building that capability was a tad more complicated for Facebook. Read more »
Banks and their customers are under constant threat from cybercriminals trying to get at their money, but at least one bank is using Hadoop to help ensure those attacks aren’t successful. And it has changed the face of its analytics efforts. Read more »
Drawn to Scale, a two-year-old startup focused on making SQL ready for the world of big data by combining it with Hadoop, has raised an initial funding round of $925,000. Its product, Spire, utilizes Hadoop to increase scalability and reduce latency across large data sets. Read more »
Enterprises realize their big data is a strategic asset, and they have budget to spend against it. But without the usual yardsticks and metrics for measuring the success, these projects will fall flat. ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Twitter has been on a tear lately when it comes to open sourcing big-data tools. The latest two are Cassie, a client for managing Cassandra clusters, and Scalding, a MapReduce framework for simplifying the creation of Hadoop jobs. Big data won’t be black magic forever. Read more »
IBM’s Jeopardy-playing supercomputer Watson is now getting a gig in the retail banking sector as part of an IBM partnership with Citi. The many careers of Watson illustrate a very big technological and business opportunity — the rendering of big data into human scale. Read more »
Look under the covers of almost any data-focused web application — including Klout — and you’ll find Hadoop. It helps Klout accurately measure and score its users’ social media influence. But Klout also has another important, and very not-open-source, weapon in its arsenal — Microsoft SQL Server. Read more »
On Super Tuesday, when 10 states hold their presidential primaries and 419 delegates are up for grabs, the election trackers at Yahoo and Fizziology have Mitt Romney as the favorite to win the day. The day might not go as well for Rick Santorum. Read more »
Zynga is in a tricky position technologically thanks to its new frenemy status with Facebook. Zynga claims 240 million active users, and it wants a lot more, but scaling to those heights might require one heck of a computing infrastructure. Read more »
The metro Boston area has good database DNA dating back to Digital’s Rdb. Those good genes are resurfacing in a fresh crop of database startups clustered in the area. Here are five hot database startups to watch in the Boston-Cambridge-Waltham nexus.. Read more »
RSA says the way to handle security threats is by harnessing big data, but the tools aren’t out there yet for mainstream business ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Mark Phillip wants to save cable television, kind of. He really wants to make life easier for sports fanatics like himself, but in doing so has created something he thinks could save cable and satellite from the cord-cutting craze. The secret to his possible success: data. Read more »
Cisco and EMC have come up with a reference architecture featuring Cisco UCS server gear that’s designed to run the EMC Greenplum MR software, the company’s “enterprise-class” Hadoop distribution that features technology it OEMs from Hadoop startup MapR. Read more »
When Microsoft and VMware latch onto a technology, you know it’s for real. VMware is now pushing a project called Spring Hadoop that lets developers use the popular Spring Java framework to write big data applications atop Apache Hadoop. Read more »
Microsoft, which looked as if it might be the odd man out on Hadoop, might actually play a big role in taking the platform into the mainstream. On Tuesday, it exposed its plans to make Hadoop data analyzable via both a JavaScript framework and Microsoft Excel. Read more »
According to business intelligence provider Jaspersoft, MongoDB and Hadoop dominate the big data landscape among its users. The company today announced a new service, called the Big Data Index, which is a monthly measure of downloads of Jaspersoft’s “big data” connectors to its flagship BI product. Read more »
Rob Bearden, CEO of Hortonworks, the Hadoop startup that spun out of Yahoo in June 2011, knows a thing or two about making open source software profitable. And he thinks Hadoop has an opportunity to be bigger than the markets for JBoss, SpringSource and MySQL combined. Read more »
Big data startup Skytree emerged from stealth mode on Thursday with a product that is designed to democratize the science of machine learning while improving significantly on the speed and scale of existing options. Skytree has raised $1.5 million from Javelin Venture Partners. Read more »
Infochimps, a startup best known for its data marketplace, is now offering a cloud-based service that takes the pain out of managing Hadoop and scale-out database environments. The company hopes its new cloud-based service can do for big data applications what PaaS did for web applications. Read more »
BloomReach emerged from stealth mode a message about how it will help ensure companies get their web pages heard above the noise online. Using a potent brew of big data techniques, BloomReach says it can significantly improve traffic by making pages more relevant to consumers. Read more »
Data-warehouse veteran Teradata has tightened its embrace of the Hadoop big data platform via a partnership with Hortonworks. The goal is to give customers big data environments that integrate everything from the Teradata Database for advanced SQL analytics and the Hortonworks Data Platform Hadoop distribution. Read more »
If you want proof of a skills gap in big data, check out these charts. In the past 12 months, demand for “big data” specialists, including the relatively new data scientist category, have exploded, according to Indeed.com listings. Read more »
If you are a data scientist, or have other “big data” chops, you can write your own ticket, headhunters say. A search of popular job posting sites shows huge demand for anyone who can demonstrate these skills even in this tough economy. Read more »
There has been a series of significant, but unannounced management changes at Hortonworks, the Hadoop startup that Yahoo spun off in June. Former COO Rob Bearden is taking over the top executive role, with some thinking his task will be whipping the company into shape. Read more »
SpaceCurve, a startup pushing a database designed for location data, has raised $2.7 million on the promise it can help developers better leverage the Internet of things. SpaceCurve is designed for apps that need to analyze lots of complex location data in a hurry. Read more »
Companies are hot on social media for a number of reasons, but perhaps chief among them should be that social platforms can create focus groups at a scale never before possible. Given the right big data tools and techniques, the insights can be fantastic. Read more »
It’s no secret that Yahoo analyzes a lot user data, but today it’s giving the world a striking peek into how all that data is used. A new tool lets visitors work their way through demographic data to see which news stories are the most popular. Read more »
More news from the Google-data-scientists-conduct-the-coolest-research desk: YouTube has created an algorithm for determining what videos are funniest based on the intensity of viewer comments. It sounds fairly unimportant, but YouTube’s work actually speaks volumes about the potential of social-media sentiment analysis. Read more »
Who needs an awards show to tell us which movies and actors fans prefer when we have Twitter? IBM is turning its skills in social-media sentiment analysis to Hollywood awards so the world can see which movies and stars are generating the most buzz on Twitter. Read more »
