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 »
Bloomberg is reporting that HP plans to announce a $10 billion deal to buy Autonomy, a U.K. based software company that has bought up a variety of assets over the years to create an unstructured data storage and analyzing powerhouse. Read more »
After a century of making tabulation machines IBM has come up with a new chip that marries our brain’s architecture with silicon guts. The goal is to create a new style of computing aimed at making sense of big data without consuming a lot of power. Read more »
Last week’s outages at Microsoft and Amazon Web Services reiterated a very important lesson in cloud computing: Even the best-laid plans won’t stand up to an act of god or faulty electrical infrastructure. That’s why the burgeoning field of cloud insurance looks even better than ever. Read more »
The market for smart grid data analytics — software and services that can mine data and provide intelligence for smart grid vendors, utilities and consumers — could reach a cumulative $11.3 billion between 2011 to 2015, according to Pike Research. Read more »
Alistair Croll’s post on O’Reilly Radar this week may have been titled “There’s no such thing as big data,” but Croll believes the exact opposite. Rather than just collecting data, he argues, you have to ask the right questions of it. Coincidentally, DJ Patil joined Greylock ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
A new way of thinking about data and data scientists illustrates the broader shift that is slowly under way in the economy, a shift from simply collecting big data toward gathering and using data in order to make businesses better informed. Read more »
BankSimple, the next generation mobile bank start-up, has raised $10 million as it prepares to launch. The new financing is led by existing investor IA Ventures and also includes Shasta Ventures and should help the company scale up for a public debut later this year. Read more »
Thank the humble, cheap sensor, the standard wireless radio and basic data bases for the future of planetary assistance. A massive sensor and data network called the National Ecological Observatory Network, or NEON, could go under construction as soon as this summer. Read more »
Greylock Partners, the VC firm backing companies such as Cloudera, Airbnb and ZipCar hired DJ Patil, formerly the chief product officer at Color, as a data scientist in residence. Greylock’s trying to help its companies monetize the rich vein of user data on the web. Read more »
As businesses rely more and more on analytics and data to make strategic decisions, they continue to struggle with some thorny issues, such as incorporating data into company culture and allowing employees to access the data they need, according to a recent study. Read more »
Forget the division between structured and unstructured data. For the benefits of the big data era to reach businesses bottom lines or to change behaviors, companies will have to figure out how to bring the results of Hadoop analytics to HR and middle managers. Read more »
Todd Papaioannou, VP and chief cloud architect at Yahoo, has left the company for a role as entrepreneur in residence at Battery Ventures. At Yahoo, he drove the strategic directions for both the cloud computing and Hadoop teams and helped define the company’s overall IT strategy. Read more »
Attention webscale aficionados, Twitter plans to open source its Hadoop-like real-time data processing tool known as Storm. The social service nabbed the code through its acquisition last month of BackType, and says it’s a better tool for processing streams of data. Read more »
The great things about open source software stacks is that they’re free and they work. The not-so-great thing is that — like many open source projects — they can be difficult to configure and manage. Luckily, hardware vendors are stepping in to fill the void. Read more »
