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 »
The face of high-performance computing is changing. That means new technologies and new names, but also familiar names in new places. Anyone that doesn’t have a cloud computing story to tell, possibly a big data one too, might starting looking really old really quickly. Read more »
The open-source, data-processing tool Hadoop is already popular for a variety of use cases that can benefit from clusters of machines churning through unstructured data — such as search engines and social-media analysis — and now it’s turning its attention to security data. Read more »
Appistry, a St. Louis–based software company, has closed a $12 million Series D round for its family of distributed computing products. The company also appears to have changed its corporate messaging — from that of a cloud-computing vendor to that of a big-data vendor. Read more »
Nimbus Data Systems today rolled out its second-generation platform and announced online auction giant eBay as a major customer. In fact, eBay has deployed a non-trivial 100TB of Nimbus gear. Have we finally reached the inflection point for primary flash storage? Read more »
All iOS 5 and Mac OS X Lion users can get 5 GB of storage in iCloud for free, but those who need more storage can pay $20 per year for 15 GB, $40 per year for 25 GB, or $100 per year for 55 GB. Read more »
Already incredibly useful for helping us get directions, find the nearest grocery store and find out our state capitol, Google Maps is now becoming the hot way to display enterprise or organizational data that’s tagged with location data. The timing of this trend isn’t surprising. Read more »
Web companies like Google and Facebook gain business advantage by analyzing large volumes of rapidly changing data about their users, but they are far from alone. A recent infographic from Get Satisfaction charts the volume of data stored in 17 key industry sectors, illustrating that most ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Big data has the potential to cut operating costs by nearly 50% across all sectors of manufacturing. Get Satisfaction makes several interesting claims about opportunities for big data in an infographic released this month. Market segments such as manufacturing are generating far more data (966 petabytes […] Read more »
For anyone who didn’t know, Facebook is a huge Hadoop user, and it does some very cool things to stretch the open source big data platform to meet Facebook’s unique needs. Today, it detailed how it migrated its 30-petabyte cluster from one data center to another. Read more »
Concurrent, the company providing the Cascading data workflow API, has raised a $900,000 seed round to capitalize on the newfound excitement around Hadoop. Cascading is an open-source API for creating and running data workflows atop Hadoop clusters. Read more »
OpenFlow may be one of the hotter buzzwords these days, but getting past the exuberance and down to brass tacks can be difficult because the technology can be applied many places. It also sprouts up in new contexts as the ecosystem around the technology expands. Read more »
Gojee, a recipe search site that knows what I have in my pantry and uses that knowledge to deliver fresh ideas for dinner, has reached 50,000 users. But it may be most useful as a lesson on bringing big data to applications and the masses. Read more »
All the speculation about how Yahoo’s Hadoop spinoff company, Hortonworks, will affect Cloudera and other companies providing Hadoop-based products might have been overblown. The company is still figuring out its strategy around offering a Hadoop distribution, which could be good news for competitors such as Cloudera. Read more »
The FinTech Innovation Lab, an accelerator program for financial tech startups, graduated its first class on Friday. This first batch of companies is bringing some impressive ideas to bear on data, analytics and payments and showing there’s room for new approaches in the financial sector. Read more »
Monster.com is getting into the cloud-computing mix with a new “semantic search and analytics platform” service called SeeMore. Merging two hot capabilities — cloud-based delivery and analytics — makes a lot of sense for Monster, which no doubt supplies many companies with a lot of data. Read more »
ZestCash, a next generation loan-service for the underbanked led by former Google CIO Douglas Merrill, has raised $19 million to expand its data-driven approach to offering short-term loans. The company uses online data to help determine the credit worthiness of customers. Read more »
What’s Watched uses data from social media and mobile applications to provide media companies with a view into what shows are being watched and who’s watching them. That data is then used to target specific groups of users to increase ratings and grow TV audiences. Read more »
Yesterday, Google announced a new feature that alerts web surfers when their PCs might be infected with malware, but it’s hardly the only company using big data to fight cybercrime. We’ve covered a handful of them of over the past couple years. Read more »
Alpine Data Labs, a predictive analytics startup that incubated within Greenplum (now part of EMC), is expanding its support beyond the Greenplum Database and into Oracle’s Exadata appliance and the open-source Postgres database. Alpine tries to distinguish itself by running entirely within companies’ analytic databases. Read more »
Something I thought about a lot while writing about OpenStack yesterday is how much it democratized access to cloud computing in just a year. But OpenStack is just one example of how information technology, overall, is undergoing a period of arguably unprecedented democratization. Read more »
IBM shares were trading up Tuesday morning after it reported strong second-quarter results yesterday. While Big Blue got a profit boost from recently released mainframe products, it also gave us some indications for the future growth of the cloud and big data. Read more »
Talk about big data: The California Independent System Operator Corporation has installed an 80-foot by 6.5-foot screen in its control room to display real-time power-grid data from thousands of endpoints. Its system is powered by Space-Time Insight, whose software melds real-time geospatial data with unique visualizations. Read more »
A startup offering Groupon-style group discounts for solar panel roof installations is now looking to connect with potential solar customers nationwide. Read more »
Thanks to the rating systems in place on such popular websites as Yelp, Amazon and eBay, many people are comfortable evaluating things in absolute terms: a two-star restaurant, a B movie and so on. But new MIT research says this approach is fundamentally flawed. Read more »
The ability to analyze enormous amounts of data and use that to better target an ad, make a new drug or any number of other lofty goals is talked about constantly, but what about harnessing Hadoop for the rest of us? Read more »
Underneath Twitter’s fun and trendy public image, the data streamed through the microblogging service is apparently worth some big bucks. DataSift, one of only two companies authorized to re-syndicate Twitter’s content using its “firehose,” on Monday announced a $6 million venture capital funding round. Read more »
Big processors or little processors, scale-up or scale-out, on-premise or in the cloud: the answers might not be as easy as one would think. Web-style, scale-out architectures, low-power server processors and cloud computing are getting more attention by the day, but they have their limits. Read more »
IDC’s latest snapshot of the digital universe suggests that data volumes continue to grow at a dramatic pace that shows little signs of slowing down. The sheer scale of the problem suggests that simply adding more storage is not a sustainable strategy. What is the solution? Read more »
According to database pioneer Michael Stonebraker, Facebook is operating a huge, complex MySQL implementation equivalent to “a fate worse than death.” It’s actually a predicament all too common among web startups, for which the solution might be a class of databases referred to as NewSQL. Read more »
