Startup WeatherBill has built a business around offering farmers financial protection against weather, but the underlying goal of the company has always been to help companies adapt to a changing climate, the company’s CEO and Co-Founder David Friedberg told me. Read more »
Travel-booking service Orbitz chose Kognitio’s Data Warehouse as a Service offering. The decision to move such a critical piece of the analytics stack to Kognitio’s cloud service highlights Orbitz’s commitment big data and is further proof that the cloud is an ideal place for it. Read more »
Cloudera and Hortonworks have been playing a game of oneupsmanship over the past few weeks in an attempt to prove whose contributions to the Apache Hadoop project matter most. Reputation matters to both companies, but maybe not as much as fending off encroachments to their turf. Read more »
Hadoop is becoming a popular choice for large organizations needing to store and process large volumes of unstructured data, but is it merely the flavor of the day? An eBay exec recently questioned his continued use of the platform if the pace of development doesn’t improve. Read more »
With its latest appliance, Oracle officially signaled its embrace of big data. Company execs said the appliance marries big data technologies with Oracle’s core 11G database and new Exalytics analytics appliance. The Big Data Appliance bundles Oracle NoSQL and an open-source Apache Hadoop distribution. Read more »
It looks like Oracle does indeed have a big data strategy in place, complete with plans for Hadoop, NoSQL and even an integration of the R statistical analysis software. Today, some of startups affected by Oracle’s impending moves weighed in with their takes on the situation. Read more »
Research from the University of Texas at Austin argues that companies are not leveraging the data to draw insights that could help improve their businesses. This infographic shows that a 10% improvement in data usability results in over $2 billion in gains for Fortune 1000 companies. Read more »
Oracle customers have lots of questions for the database giant. If you’re one of the 50,000 people Oracle expects to converge on the Moscone Center starting Sunday–or even if you’re not–here are some key things to look out for at the big Oracle OpenWorld 2011 Conference. Read more »
Karmasphere, a Cupertino, Calif.-based startup focusing on helping analysts write better big data applications, has raised $6 million in a Series B round. That brings the announced VC investment in Hadoop to more than $30 million in the last 30 days. Read more »
It looks as if Oracle’s official forays into Hadoop and NoSQL spaces will come at next week’s OpenWorld conference. The company appears to be working on an Oracle Loader for Hadoop and a NoSQL database as part of an all-encompassing big data platform. Read more »
Oracle’s cloud computing stance has evolved, to say the least, over the past few years. As the company preps for its annual Oracle OpenWorld mega-show in San Francisco next week, a huge question lingers: Does Oracle–and its CEO Larry Ellison–really “get” the cloud? Read more »
Much like everyone has some product or strategy to optimize on “the cloud,” momentum is already gathering around the next big technology trend to drive buzzzwords — big data. VMware is no exception, so I spoke with Steve Herrod, the company’s CTO to find out more. Read more »
Traditionally, scientists and researchers develop the latest and greatest techniques in computing, which trickle down corporate data centers where they’re relevant. But with big data — the process of analyzing voluminous quantities of data in new, unique ways — it’s industry that’s driving the innovation ship. Read more »
The United States alone faces a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills. We are starting to understand the value of being data-savvy and how different kinds of data can be used to influence behavior and improve organizational policies and practices. Read more »
Twitter has acquired Julpan, a New York City-based startup that analyzes real-time data collected from blogs, Tweets, status updates and news sources. It’s just the latest in a series of moves Twitter’s made to better analyze the huge amounts of data that flow through its service. Read more »
Hadoop is all the rage in analytics, but it still isn’t easy for mere mortals to utilize the big data framework. A handful of companies are trying to solve this problem, including Karmasphere with the latest version of its Analyst Big Data product. Read more »
Graph databases are a pretty specialized product — but as NoSQL keeps gaining mainstream acceptance, they seem to be catching on, and the latest evidence comes in the form of a $10.6 million funding found for Silicon Valley firm Neo Technology. Read more »
Storage giant EMC is adding more muscle to its Hadoop strategy with a 1,000-node cluster for testing new Apache Hadoop releases and a new analytics appliance combining EMC’s Hadoop distribution with the EMC Greenplum Database. Read more »
DataStax has created the first commercial distribution of the Apache Cassandra database and has just closed an $11 million Series B round. Neither piece of news should come as a shock because as NoSQL products have been maturing over the past year, money has always followed. Read more »
Building on his social media success in 2008, it looks like big data will be a driving force behind President Obama’s reelection campaign. To that end, his team is taking to the streets to find data scientists and engineers, including at an event Tuesday at Stanford. Read more »
We all know about the consumer Web innovations in the last ten years, created by crunching massive amounts of consumer data for personalization. But how are companies in other industries leveraging the big data that’s erupting from social media services? Read more »
Balancing an open-source community with commercial interests can be difficult, which is why HPCC Systems sought the help of Bruce Perens before open-sourcing its eponymous big-data-processing software. Essentially, the company either ensures the existence of a free version or pulls contributed code. Read more »
Predictive analytics provider Opera Solutions has raised $84 million from equity investors in its first-ever funding round, but that amount shouldn’t be surprising for anyone familiar with the company. I’ve called Opera the big data expert you’ve never heard of, but that’s about to change. Read more »
Xignite, which is offering financial data that’s hosted on Amazon’s cloud to its clients, has raised $10 million to become the big data repository for financial market information. The company, which was formed in 2004, is betting on the trends of mobile, cloud and big data. Read more »
Broadcom, a chipmaker known for wireless chips for cell phones and home networks, today said it will buy NetLogic, which provides silicon for networking gear. An emphasis on real-time data has pressured networking inside and outside the data center, and Broadcom wants to capitalize on that. Read more »
HPCC Systems has released the open source code of its data-processing software that it’s positioning as a better version of Hadoop. The code is available on Github, and it marks the commencement of HPCC Systems’ quest to build a community of developers underneath Hadoop’s expansive shadow. Read more »
Intel Capital announced $24 million in new investments, and cloud computing and big data companies were the big beneficiaries. They underscore Intel’s understanding that it has to prop up software partners to keep Intel dominant as computing evolves. Read more »
Dell-bashing is a fairly common pastime these days, but I actually think Dell has a golden opportunity to reposition itself as IT visionary if it treats hardware it as what it really is: a delivery mechanism for software and services. Read more »
Hadoop-based startup Platfora has raised $5.7 million from Andreessen Horowitz and military intelligence–focused strategic investor In-Q-Tel. Investors are excited because Platfora promises big things around making big data analytics obtainable by anyone needing to parse large volumes of unstructured data, not just data scientists. Read more »
Data is playing a bigger role in our work, requiring that organizations and individuals learn to work with Big Data to stay competitive. The role of data scientist is emerging in organizations wanting to take advantage of this data flow. Read more »
Cloud computing and big data are a match made in heaven. Although it’s still very early in the evolution of this combination — experts predict major investment in this area going forward — several companies have already melded the two into a variety of unique services. Read more »
To find out how these two services measure up in the real world, Craig Knighton of LiquidSpace and Zach Richardson of Ravel Data lay out the cases for their clouds of choice to see how the services compared in real-world use at living, breathing companies. Read more »
MapR Technologies, the San Jose, Calif.-based startup that sells it own Hadoop distribution for analyzing large volumes of unstructured data, has raised a $20 million Series B round, which will helps its positioning as a worthy alternative in a space that Cloudera has dominated since 2009. Read more »
USC Annenberg Innovation Lab launched a film forecaster last month that utilizes IBM’s BigSheets analytics tool. It showed that Big Data analysis is something that can be done by non-technical people and it underscores the promise of data analysis when it reaches the masses. Read more »
Databases aren’t sexy. Except for possibly a brief moment in 2010 and perhaps a bit of 2011 when every reader of Hacker News was sharing his or her experience and every coder on GitHub wanted to know more. The NoSQL Tapes captures this moment. Read more »
We are moving from the information age to the insight age. So the computer industry is building chip with more cores to keep up with influx of data and the need to process it faster. But more cores means new ways of programming. Read more »
Hopper wants to make searching for travel options a more complete experience using big data tools, and it has raised millions to do it. Hopper lets users enter keyword searches, but it provides results far beyond those typically found in a keyword search. Read more »
If HP does sell off its PC business, it might have to nail its foray into cloud computing to avoid becoming a punchline decades down the road. Without that PC revenue, and billions lighter in the wallet after buying Autonomy, something must pick up the slack. Read more »
Angry Birds creator Rovio is using predictive analytics software from Seattle-based startup Medio in an attempt to improve the gaming experience and keep users playing. Mobile and social games might appear to be cute diversions, but they’re generating lots of money. Read more »
In late June, Accenture CTO Don Rippert left the company after nearly 30 years to serve as CEO of NoSQL database startup Basho. Why would someone leave a top role at a Fortune 500 company for a 40-person startup in a niche market? Read more »
