Hipmunk, the hot flight-finding service, has added in-flight Wi-Fi as a new metric for travelers. Sure, this is an indication of how deep the web has sunk its talons into us, but working on flights has become pretty much the standard in many offices. Read more »
Big data can sometimes mean big infrastructure to run everything on, or perhaps it can mean slower performance as the hardware struggles to read from or write to a database, which is why we picked Acunu as one of our Structure 2011 Launchpad companies. Learn more. Read more »
Hadoop is a very valuable tool, but it’s far from perfect. While Apache, Cloudera, EMC, MapR and Yahoo focus on core architectural issues, there is a group of vendors trying to make Hadoop a more-fulfilling experience by focusing on business-level concerns such as applications and utilization. Read more »
Ravel now offers an open-source graph database that looks to bring the benefit’s of Google’s Pregel project to the masses. Graph databases don’t get the attention of other big-data technologies such as Hadoop or NoSQL, but every Twitter user is familiar with what they can do. Read more »
Yahoo will be spinning off a separate company focused on the development and commercialization of Apache Hadoop, called HortonWorks. The official announcement likely will come tomorrow or Wednesday to coincide with Yahoo’s annual Hadoop Summit, but rumors have been circulating for months. Read more »
Being able to crunch terabytes of data is great, but having someone else do it for you is even better. HPCC Systems, which launched last week to challenge Hadoop’s big data dominance, is planning to do just that with a cloud service for big data processing. Read more »
The days of viewing everything in the cloud through an application lens is nearing its end. Instead, we are evolving into a world where quantity, processing speeds and distribution of data compel IT professional to see data as a platform in its own right. Read more »
One of the themes running through many of the projects that won this year’s $5-million Knight News Challenge for media startups is the idea that data — and the ability to filter and make sense of it — can be a powerful tool for digital journalism. Read more »
Michael Chertoff, the former head of the Department of Homeland Security, said that with the explosion of open data flowing from the Internet and social networks, the key to improved security is to capture that information and analyze it for signals that yield important insights. Read more »
Cloud storage startup SolidFire is giving cloud providers early access to its solid-state-disk-based systems for storing customers’ data. The Atlanta-based company is building SSD-based appliances that it says will help ease the migration of enterprise applications into the cloud by significantly boosting storage performance. Read more »
Big data tools are an incredibly important way to help better manage the world’s resources, like energy consumption, food production and fuel use. Here are 5 companies that are leveraging big data to help the planet: Read more »
Infobright today announced version 4.0 of its analytic database designed for machine-generated data, complete with a handful of innovations that should significantly the speed and accuracy of poring through piles of big data. Read more »
Online dating service eHarmony is using SeaMicro’s specialized Intel Atom-powered servers as the foundation of its Hadoop infrastructure, demonstrating that big data applications such as Hadoop might be a killer app for low-powered micro servers. Read more »
Is Hadoop our only hope for solving big data challenges? From scalability to fault tolerance, Hadoop does myriad things very well. Yet, Hadoop is not the solution to all big data problems and use cases. Several key issues remain, including investment, complexity and batch-only processing. Read more »
Groupon’s prospectus for an IPO started arguments over the company’s huge losses. Silicon Valley wants Groupon to look like a technology company, but right now it’s more or less in the Yellow Pages business. But by better applying big data analysis, Groupon could start seeing profits. Read more »
EcoFactor, a startup that uses big data tools to act as a new brain for connected thermostats, says on average its services can reduce a person’s home energy use by 17 percent compared to a programmable but non-optimized thermostat. Read more »
Like oil and vinegar, marketing and IT just don’t mix well. But as social media flourishes and marketers try to use it to their advantage, its time to bridge the gap. Big data, cheap processing and social media are changing the advertising and marketing landscape. Read more »
When Steve Jobs flashed inside images of Apple’s new cloud data center during his WWDC keynote on Monday, he ignited a mini firestorm of speculation about just kind hardware is filling its immense surface area. Everyone seems to agree that HP and Teradata were big winners. Read more »
IT analytics company Splunk has received a patent for its method of organizing and presenting big data to mirror the experience of browsing links on the web. Splunk wants users to think about big data like a web problem and not like an analytics problem. Read more »
WAN-optimization startup Infineta has raised $15 million for its product that speeds traffic flows between data centers. Unlike many WAN-optimization products that speed traffic between user sites and a data center, Infineta targets data moving between data centers at up to 10 GbE speeds. Read more »
Solar rooftops only work in specific environments — an area with enough sun, or a roof with the right tilt — and a company called Geostellar is using big data tools to help its solar installer customers deliver more solar in places where it actually makes economic sense. Read more »
Big data startup MapR is now an official corporate contributor to the Apache Hadoop project, a somewhat interesting turn of affairs given its corporate mission to lure users away from Apache’s Hadoop Distributed File System. However, other companies commercializing Hadoop shoud follow its lead. Read more »
Raptr, a social network for gamers, is showing some interesting ways in which it’s using what it knows about its members to create tailored experiences that cut through a lot of noise. And it’s showing how social networking can evolve to be even more personal. Read more »
San Jose, Calif.-based storage startup MapR, which provides a high-performance alternative for the Hadoop Distributed File System, will serve as the storage component for EMC’s forthcoming Greenplum HD Enterprise Edition Hadoop distribution. Cloudera announced an HDFS partnership of its own with compression expert RainStor. Read more »
Real estate website Trulia is set to roll out a new feature that will allow users to view crime statistics for 50 metro areas in the U.S. The new feature, launching in June, is a major exercise in real-time big data processing. Read more »
IBM showed how it will ride the growth of Big Data to continue its momentum into the future. IBM announced a $100 million investment for future data analytics along with new services and software aimed at helping improve data analysis and new services for IT professionals. Read more »
Randy Shoup, the architectural guru credited with scaling eBay, tweeted Monday evening that he has left the online auction giant to co-found a new consumer-focused e-commerce startup, Shopilly.com. He and another former eBay exec are keeping their plans under wraps for now. Read more »
What if you amassed petabytes of data and then realized you had nothing you wanted to do with it? It’s not enough to hoard data hoping for patterns; to create the true promise of a big data revolution the industry needs big apps. Read more »
As a recent McKinsey Global Institute report on big data points out, finding the appropriate balance between consumer privacy and business innovation will play a key role in ensuring that big data and the overall web advance at the pace required by both business and consumers. Read more »
We are moving from the Information Age to the Insight Age, and as part of that shift we need a compute architecture that will handle the storage and processing required all without requiring a power plant hooked up to every data center. What architecture will win? Read more »
EMC is throwing its weight behind Hadoop. Today, at the EMC World, the storage giant announced a slew of Hadoop-centric products, including a specialized appliance for Hadoop-based big data analytics and two separate Hadoop distributions. EMC’s entry is going to shake-up the Hadoop market. Read more »
The recent excitement around Hadoop has culminated in five new Hadoop products today from EMC, NetApp, Mellanox, SnapLogic and DataStax. What’s interesting now is that we’re seeing large technology vendors with hardware expertise pushing gear optimized for Hadoop. Read more »
Don’t feel bad if you haven’t heard of Opera Solutions. However, the analytics-as-a-service provider has been quietly building up its $100 million company since 2004 and, with big data on the tip of the IT world’s collective tongue, Opera is ready to start spreading the word. Read more »
Data-integration specialist Syncsort is releasing two new Hadoop tools that it says will give Hadoop users a better, faster experience than they can achieve using Apache Hadoop alone. Unlike some other recent announcements, however, Syncsort is looking to improve Hadoop rather than replace aspects of it. Read more »
A day after Twitter experienced its “CNN moment,” John Adams , the messaging service’s operations engineer, posted a nice slide show on how the company has scaled and the tools it uses. Entitled, “Talk Cloudy to Me” the slide show reviews old insights and offers new ones. Read more »
Red Hat is expanding its set of cloud capabilities by announcing the JBoss Enterprise Data Grid. The product gives customers an in-memory data grid that scales along with the server infrastructure and provides a high-performance cache to offload the demand on the primary database. Read more »
IBM today announced a new product dedicated to helping customers perform sentiment analysis of social media data, as well as a new program with the Yale School of Management’s Center for Customer Insight to train students in advanced data analysis skills. Read more »
If Yahoo plans to spin off its white-hot Hadoop business, it would make Yahoo the third vendor operating alongside Cloudera and IBM — fighting for what, right now, are only speculative customer dollars. Would Yahoo’s spinout have what it takes to compete? Read more »
ChoozOn, a start-up co-founded by a trio of former Yahoo executives, is launching a social network built around shopping and personalized deals that works hard to bring brands and consumers together. It will face tough odds going up against Groupon, Facebook, Google and others. Read more »
Hadoop is the talk of the town when it comes to big data, but it’s not without faults that have some users begging for an alternative. Like many open source projects, it’s relatively unpolished and often requires a great deal of learning and much strenuous customization […] Read more »
