On the sidelines of our Green:Net event last week, I did a series of video interviews with our 10 Big Ideas companies. First up is a startup marrying big data and connected cars: Virtual Vehicle Company. Read more »
Food is the next frontier for mobile, big data and web services to change our lives, but in order to make that happen we need open standards, or any kind of standards for identifying ingredients, importing recipes and tracking nutritional data. Read more »
Just like every vendor now has a cloud product and every company has a cloud strategy in place, big data efforts also will become ubiquitous over the next couple years, and the two very well might merge in the near future. Read more »
The most interesting part about yesterday’s announcement that Groupon is using the Cloudera Distribution of Hadoop wasn’t the actual use but, rather, the insight that Groupon is “building a world-class infrastructure” of which Hadoop will be a key part. But recruiting big-data-savvy talent is getting rather pricey. Read more »
Dave Girouard, president of Google Enterprise, in a conversation earlier this week, outlined Google’s cloud strategy and its long-term plans, and how it is different from other cloud providers including Amazon Web Services. He talks about Google’s two areas of focus – apps and big data. Read more »
Two markets stand out above all else when looking at the first quarter of 2011: infrastructure as a service (IaaS) — the epitome of cloud computing — and big data. Amazon Web Services continues to lead the IaaS space in terms of customers and innovation, while Rackspace, buoyed by momentum around OpenStack, will be its primary competitor for mainstream customers. In the big data space, there are so many players and terms floating about it’s difficult for outsiders to get a handle on who’s who and what’s what, though such activity validates the technologies. Other developments this quarter included HP’s impending presence in the cloud computing and big data spaces and the realization that Intel won’t be left to die if low-power servers based on x86 processors catch on like the buzz late last year suggests they will. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Microsoft, Cloudera, SeaMicro and Facebook. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Internet botnets wreak much of their havoc because of the sheer number of infected machines, and a startup security service called ipTrust is trying to fight fire with fire by using many terabytes worth of log files to combat these hordes of zombie PCs. Read more »
Cloudera released version 3.0 of its distribution of Apache Hadoop (CDH3) Tuesday. CDH3 is a big reason why, despite a recent spate of Hadoop-based big data products either on the market or about to be there, Cloudera says it isn’t sweating all the new competition. Read more »
Overlooked in the buzz following a Reuters report that acquisition talks between HP and enterprise software vendor Tibco have fizzled out is the possibility that the loss represents a setback in HP CEO Leo Apotheker’s grand cloud computing vision, as well as HP’s big data strategy. Read more »
Ever wondered how big data, smart grid and cloud computing will impact an average person? Now you can, thanks to Opower, which molds terabytes of data into delightful insights, shares them with many of us, hoping that we will do our bit as willing conservationists. Read more »
Despite an industry-wide push for better and more-complete big data strategies, it’s beginning to look like EMC and IBM will be the two technology vendors earning the most data-related dollars once the dust settles because they’ve embraced the new big data bundle while others have not. Read more »
Unstructured database provider MarkLogic has a new CEO with big-business experience and plans to take fast-growing company public. MarkLogic is nowhere near the size of CEO Ken Bado’s former employer, Autodesk, but it does have a healthy business that belies its relative youth and NoSQL ties. Read more »
Startup medical search company Apixio is trying to save lives by bringing machine-learning and natural-language-processing techniques to medical records, giving doctors a patient’s entire relevant medical history via a simple cloud-based search engine. The goal is to make information-sharing among medical providers far more intelligent. Read more »
A handful of new releases and partnerships this week — as well as a big award — illustrate just how versatile the data-processing tool Hadoop is and how widespread its use might become. Hadoop is becoming a more viable tool for everyone from business users to journalists. Read more »
Researchers at the University of Washington utilized the Cloudant NoSQL database as part of an experiment that determined radiation levels in Seattle as a result of the recent Fukushima nuclear disaster are “well below alarming limits” at that particular location. Read more »
Hardware rarely comes up in discussions about big data, save for those centered on data warehouse appliances. But the omission hardly means hardware is irrelevant. In fact, big gear might become a big deal as companies look to bolster the performance of their big data systems. Read more »
The NoSQL database space is little more crowded this morning, as Citrusleaf officially launched with its eponymous product, which promises users the best of both the relational and NoSQL worlds. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company also announced a reported $2 million initial round of funding. Read more »
Hadoop has been used by large web companies for applications such as search engines, but the reality is that the project is so much more. This report takes a closer look, examining what Hadoop is (and isn’t), who’s doing what to productize it and why we can expect to see the market pick up serious steam in 2011. We profile the growing number of companies — from startups like MapR to Cloudera, the arguable leader in the space — using Hadoop, the challenges still hindering widespread adoption and where potential users can expect the market to go as we move through 2011 and beyond. Companies mentioned in this report include Yahoo, Facebook, EMC, Teradata and Appistry. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
High-performance computing leader Platform Computing hopes to capitalize on the big data movement by spreading its wings beyond its flagship business of managing clusters and grids and into managing MapReduce environments, too. Platform has a solid foundation among leading businesses, especially in the financial services industry. Read more »
One of the statements that struck me most from Structure: Big Data was CA CTO Donald Ferguson’s notion that big data represents a “very promising” opportunity for startups, particularly those targeting specific target use cases. I think he’s right, particularly with regard to the latter part. Read more »
Ravel wants to provide a supported open source version of Google’s Pregel software called Golden Orb to handle large-scale graph analytics. Ravel COO Zach Richardson told me in the following video interview that the startup would release the Golden Orb code on March 31st. Read more »
It’s pretty clear mobile payments and the idea of delivering payment capabilities as an app are finally hitting their stride, but amid the details of how we’ll pay for things online, what it will mean for our relationship to money and our relationships with retailers? Read more »
It turns out that “big data” isn’t just a buzzword, but a legitimate concern for companies across the board. Their interest in the tools to take advantage of the opportunity for data analysis has sparked a land grab among software vendors centered around Hadoop. Read more »
With so much data flowing over networks and with so much computing power needed to crunch that data, computing infrastructure needs to be as low power as possible to both make the era of “big data” economical and also more eco-friendly. Read more »
Underlying all the useful applications, like Hadoop, that have emerged out of the big data ecosystem, there’s a fundamental assumption: The data that companies want will be able to be accessed when companies want and need it, explained Michelle Munson, CEO and co-founder of Aspera. Read more »
At our Structure: Big Data conference, CA Technologies CTO Donald Ferguson suggested that big data might actually be a driving force behind the adoption of cloud computing because variable workloads are ideal for utility billing models. More of his thoughts here. Read more »
As organizations strive to analyze more data than ever and to do it faster than ever, the results they’re getting might actually be worse than those in the pre-big-data and real-time world — at least temporarily. Read more »
When it comes to social data, one of the biggest firehoses around is the one that comes from Twitter. Trying to make sense of 140 million tweets a day in something close to real-time is a significant challenge, says Tap11 chief technology officer Braxton Woodham. Read more »
Google may have more distributed data than any other company but it still takes user input to create smarter machines. Google’s Voice Search speech recognition, for example, began to improve when the service started to train itself and improve accuracy through the use of end-user data Read more »
During an afternoon panel entitled “The Many Faces of MapReduce — Hadoop and Beyond,” moderator Gary Orenstein compared the two primary Hadoop components — MapReduce and the Hadoop Distributed File System — to the meat and bread of a sandwich. Read more »
Mining terabytes of data isn’t just for service providers — media companies are also trying to make use of the oceans of information they have about their users to come up with better ways of recommending news to them, says Bloomberg Digital head Kevin Krim. Read more »
Dave Hitz — data storage pioneer and co-founder of NetApp — doesn’t like the term big data. But, if he must use the moniker, he acknowledges that big data and analytics are what are keeping the storage industry interesting and driving business right now. Read more »
NoSQL startup DataStax officially entered the pantheon of Hadoop providers today, introducing its own distribution called “Brisk.” Brisk utilizes the open source NoSQL database Cassandra as a replacement for Apache’s Hadoop Distributed File System, as well as Cassandra’s built-in MapReduce engine and Hive. Read more »
Data isn’t the solution to business problems. Pulling data into applications and using it to make decisions and improve the user experience is the way to solve business problems said Jim Baum, the CEO of Netezza, at Structure Big Data. Read more »
As the amount of captured data grows, how can businesses make more sense of it, use it for accurate predictions and better understand their customers? The answer may lie in the world of physics: the concept of space-time paired with data improves predictions through context. Read more »
Joyent Founder and Chief Scientist Jason Hoffman redefined the concept of big data in a panel on data science with bit.ly Chief Scientist Hilary Mason, Cloudscale Founder and CEO Bill McColl, Fluidinfo Founder and CEO Terry Jones, and nPario President and CEO Bassel Ojjeh. Read more »
Are you excited about NoSQL, Hadoop and big data analytics? Then you don’t want to miss GigaOM’s Structure Big Data conference, which is happening today in New York. Don’t have a ticket for the sold-out event? No worries, every session is streamed live online. Read more »
A Yale computer science project has turned into a company giving Hadoop the ability to perform analytics on both structured and unstructured data. Hadapt launched today with an undisclosed amount of funding and the goal of making Hadoop more broadly applicable for analytics. Read more »
Business and IT leaders now face significant opportunities and challenges with big data — that is data sets that are so large they are difficult to store, manage and analyze. This report explores the rapidly evolving big data business and technology ecosystem. It examines big data in the context of several different industries: financial services, health care, sports, travel and media. We explore the different big data technologies — from Hadoop and NoSQL derivatives to cloud-based collaboration tools — and their various benefits for enterprises. And we examine some of the existing challenges big data poses, and what enterprise IT leaders can do to overcome them. Companies mentioned in this report include Amazon Web Services, Google, Teradata, IBM and Cloudera. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Netflix is taking a bold step, licensing the first exclusive show to stream through its service before appearing on broadcast or cable TV. But is the move as risky as some might think? Thanks to a large amount of viewing data, Netflix doesn’t think so. Read more »
