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 »
We’re entering the age of the smart personal assistant, as computers increasingly listen and understand what we’re saying and fulfill our requests in real time. Siri and Watson have gotten a lot of attention but we’ll see this type of service in a variety of areas. Read more »
Looks like Oracle has some competition when it comes to selling big iron for big data. On Wednesday, Cray, the Seattle-based company best known for building some of the world’s fastest supercomputers, announced it’s getting into the big data game. Read more »
WibiData, a Hadoop-based startup focused on making it easier to analyze user behavior, has raised $5 million from New Enterprise Associates. The company, formerly known as Odiago, launched in late 2011 already claiming Wikipedia and Atlassian among its early customers. Read more »
Data, I believe is like plastic. You can use it to make wonderful things. However, like plastic, it can be a great polluter and create havoc on the environment. Or as I like to say, data without context is dirt. Read more »
Twitter is fast becoming the focus group of the 21st century, a status solidified yet again during Sunday night’s Super Bowl. The platform saw 453 times the maximum tweets per second it saw during 2008′s game, and sentiment analysis of tweets might have predicted the upset. Read more »
Hadoop features front and center in the discussion of how to implement a big data strategy, one of the biggest trends in IT. There’s just one problem that keeps cropping up: many people don’t seem to know exactly what it means when somebody says “Hadoop.” Read more »
Romanian startup Skin Scan is selling an iPhone app that lets consumers take pictures of questionable moles and get back information on its threat level. However, the company has much grander goals than helping consumers figure out whether to see a doctor. Read more »
Facebook’s S-1 filing shows the company is all about infrastructure. The ad revenue and user experience it relies on to exist mean Facebook can’t afford to take it easy on IT, which means shareholders and users will both find plenty of reasons to get upset. Read more »
If you like the idea of your analytics system’s getting more accurate with each piece of data it ingests, it looks like you are in for an exciting run, because machine learning appears to be catching fire across the ecosystem of big data vendors. Read more »
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 »
If you’re like many of us, you’re already thinking over some New Year’s resolutions that will make you a better “you” in 2012. But how are the tech industries’ thought leaders approaching the new year? We asked 12 of them for their resolutions. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Pentaho is moving its business intelligence tools to the Apache license to make them more compatible with big data technologies that already operate under that license. Pentaho’s Kettle extract, transform, load (ETL) technology was previously available under the LGPL or lesser Gnu General Public License. Read more »
The great thing about big data is that there’s still plenty of room for new blood, especially for companies that want to leave infrastructure in the rearview mirror. At this point, the data-infrastructure space, including Hadoop, is well-funded and nearly saturated, but it also needs help. Read more »
With all the talk of big data, cynics think the whole notion has jumped the shark. Get ready, they say, for the next tech bubble to burst. EMC CMO Jeremy Burton is not among them. Granted, he’s a marketer, but what he says makes sense. Read more »
In the fight to determine who dictates web privacy, web users are like a a chew toy at risk of being torn asunder by two competing dogs — played this week by Google and the European Union. But the best option is empower consumers themselves. Read more »
Former Yahoo VP and chief cloud architect Todd Papaioannou is working on a stealth-mode startup called Continuuity, which aims to make it easier for developers to create data-focused cloud applications. The company has raised a $2.5 million seed round from Battery Ventures and Andreessen-Horowitz. Read more »
On Monday, the Supreme Court deemed it unconstitutional in most cases to use GPS to track suspects without a warrant — calling the attachment of a GPS device to a suspect’s property a trespass — but the Court declined to address some major privacy issues also at play. Read more »
IBM is working the reins of its Smarter Commerce initiative by rolling out a new Netezza analytics appliance designed to help retailers churn through potentially petabytes of consumer sales data in real time. It’s trying to capitalize on the increased importance of e-commerce to revenues. Read more »
Energy software company Opower says it will send its 25 millionth energy data report to a utility customer by the end of January and will likely hit the 75 million mark sometime in 2012. Read more »
The greater Boston area may not be the hub of the big data universe that some recent research suggests, but it got a leg up this week with news that tech giant Hewlett-Packard is moving some of its big data operations to Cambridge. Read more »
Now that human genomes will soon take only one day and $1,000 to sequence, life is about to get a lot easier for medical researchers, but a lot more difficult for companies trying to make a buck selling them tools to store and analyze genomic data. Read more »
Security-software company Sourcefire is trying to help large-enterprise IT teams leverage big data analytics in fighting malware. A new product, called FireAMP, utilizes a cloud-based analytics approach to let IT teams dig deep to find out the hows, wheres and whys of their malware problems. Read more »
