Data-warehouse providers are quickly adding Hadoop distributions, or even their own versions of Hadoop, into their architecture, adding further cost advantages to collections of extremely large data sets. Finding the talent to manage this newly converged environment will not be easy, but it presents tremendous opportunity for companies willing to take some risk. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Netflix CEO thought he could do a better job at developing a recommendation algorithm than his engineers. He failed – and the episode shaped the way the company has looked at data ever since. Read more »
Hadoop startup Mortar Data is offering to build recommendation systems for 10 companies, with help from Hilary Mason, Drew Conway and Max Shron. It’s part of a bigger plan to democratize the science behind online recommendations. Read more »
Teradata is trying to steal some thunder in the in-memory analytics space with a new technology called Intelligent Memory that places hot data in RAM while dispersing the rest across solid-state drives and disk. Read more »
EMC CTO John Roese has a tough, but important job trying to keep EMC, VMware and Pivotal all moving in the same direction. While the three are separate companies, their fates are also very much aligned. Read more »
MetLife is building new products on new technologies thanks to a $300 million investment in new technology and new skills. One of the first products is a MongoDB-based app that puts all of customers’ information in one place. Read more »
IBM’s entrant in the SQL-on-Hadoop competition has been flying under the radar, but is available as a technology preview. Called Big SQL, it’s a big deal if IBM wants to be a major player in the Hadoop space. Read more »
MailChimp wasn’t always a big data company, but 12 years into its existence the company is using its mountains of email data to do everything from modeling spam to connecting subscribers. Read more »
True believers may be guilty of hype, but there’s no denying that big data presents opportunities for businesses of every stripe. That potential is vulnerable to pollution from data bias, and so calls for preventative processes. Read more »
The confluence of better location data and audio-recognition could mean big changes to seemingly static industries such as retail and radio as they learn more about what customers really want. Read more »
MapR on Wednesday released its commercial version of HBase called M7, the first such product on the market, that the company claims is bigger, faster and better than the open source version. Read more »
Analytics startup Precog is on a mission to make analytics on unstructured data as simple as possible with a new line of targeted appliances. Read more »
The growing pains of big data were apparent at the Data 2.0 Summit on Tuesday in San Francisco. Here is a selection of visualization tools that came up at the meeting. Read more »
Machine learning startup Skytree has raised $18 million for its software that makes short work of pattern recognition across massive datasets. Read more »
In the tsunami of experimentation, investment, and deployment of systems that analyze big data, vendors have seemingly been trying approaches at two extremes—either embracing the Hadoop ecosystem or building increasingly sophisticated query capabilities into database management system (DBMS) engines.For some use cases, there appears to be room for a third approach that lies between the extremes and borrows from the best of each. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Cloudera’s Impala engine for interactive SQL queries on Hadoop data is now generally available, and CEO Mike Olson gives his lay of the competitive landscape. Read more »
Artificial intelligence expert and Google Director of Research was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences last week. He’s well known for a 2009 paper titled “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data.” Read more »
The advent of big data is affecting Ford Motor Co. in some significant ways, from how it analyzes its supply chain to the features it puts into its cars. Read more »
Analytic database vendor ParAccel has been acquired by a relatively quiet database company called Actian. ParAccel targets big data with its scale-out architecture, and it counts Amazon as both an investor and user. Read more »
Hadoop experts Qubole have just closed a Series A funding round for their service, which lets users run Hive data warehouse jobs in Amazon’s cloud. Read more »
“Social customer service” refers to those services that provide customer support via social media channels. Providing such services is no longer merely a niche or specialty sideline. Challengers, or disruptors who were early with the new technology, are working to expand and integrate their offerings into enterprise systems and processes. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
When it comes to forming a bond with customers, one expert suggests using big data to help them form a bond with each other. Read more »
Gravity CTO Jim Benedetto knows his way around MySQL after managing a 600-instance cluster at MySpace, but he has found HBase religion as his real-time content-recommendation platform grew. And he’s not alone. Read more »
Guavus makes its living by helping telcos and mobile carriers make sense of what’s happening across their networks. To date it has raised $87 million and is looking to expand far and wide. Read more »
Less than year after hitting the 1 trillion object mark, Amazon S3 is now storing more than 2 trillion objects. That’s a lot any way you slice it and highlights AWS’s role as an underpinning of today’s web. Read more »
Hadoop not fast enough for you? Then you might want to get to know AMPLab, a University of California, Berkeley team developing faster versions of many core Hadoop components. Read more »
The FBI has amassed terabytes of data from sources near the terrorist attack that occured during the Boston Marathon. This raises a question about the role crowdsourcing could play in solving some crimes while protecting citizens’ privacy. Read more »
Data scientist might be the sexiest job of the 21st century, but it’s hardly an easy gig to land. Here is some advice from practitioners at Netflix, Orbitz and Hortonworks on how get hired and even do the hiring. Read more »
IDC is predicting a $6 billion big-data storage market by 2016, part of an overall big data market worth nearly $24 billion. Read more »
More than a decade ago, Gracenote received some cryptic advice from Apple to buy more servers. What followed — the launch of iTunes and iPod — blew up Gracenote’s database to epic proportions and laid the groundwork for a metadata empire. Read more »
Major League Baseball is using new data tools to create more detailed profiles of people who visit team and league websites. MLB plans to use the extra data to create profiles of affluent customers, and to let brands target those profiles on private ad exchanges. Read more at paidContent »
Is Facebook serious with its new partner categories advertising program? Somehow, using offline data to target ads seems like a stretch for a company already facing a privacy backlash and that has such rich data to mine from inside its own platform. Read more »
A team of Stanford researchers has developed a method for mining the text of doctors’ notes to identify adverse reactions from prescription drugs. The technique could spot problems years before the current FDA-reporting process can. Read more »
After hearing about the applications of big data for better ads, song recommendations and social media analysis, nothing makes me happier than hearing about technologists coming together with non-profits to use data to fight human trafficking. Read more »
Although there has been a focus on energy efficiency in commercial buildings for some years, the BEMS market can still be considered nascent. The landscape of new entrants, new technologies, and new methodologies is expanding rapidly, and even well-established market leaders are finding new ways to present and market their businesses. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Cloud computing is finally starting to add value to business, as those in charge of cloud within enterprises are moving from talking to doing. That much was very evident in the first quarter of 2013. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The SumAll Foundation, a non-profit effort by cloud analytics startup SumAll, is trying to change the world by showing non-profits how to get the most out of their data by thinking more like businesspeople do. Read more »
The new version aims to provide a simpler interface for wrangling hundreds of data points per site visit. Qubit has also released research about browser user value, with IE users coming out on top. Read more »
A data democracy built to last needs tools that empower everyone to work with data rather than relying on apps and data scientists. Tableau helped ignite the data revolution, and its IPO could help it keep going. Read more »
Almost every tech company claims to hate patent trolls, but they certainly don’t always back up their words with actions. Recent patent activity around the Hadoop big data platform might show how companies can effectively battle trolls — if they really want to. Read more »
