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 »
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 »
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 »
A new report from McKinsey estimates that big data could save the health care industry up to $450 billion, but it has to overcome a few obstacles first. Read more »
Two legacy powers — SAP and Kendall Square (in the guise of hack/reduce) pulled out the stops Friday to woo big data entrepreneurs. SAP wants them to use HANA. Hack/reduce just wants them to stick around. Read more »
As companies rack up more data on consumers, it’s high time for talking about new standards for data sharing and what data ownership should look like. Read more »
A project at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab aims to make crunching of the most top-secret data possible without exposing that data. At all. Read more »
IBM announced a new PureData appliance for Hadoop and technology for speeding up analytic databases. The announcements come at a good time, with data sets growing and enterprises hankering for easy and fast analysis capability. Read more »
Tableau Software is following rival QlikView in an IPO that may show whether or not data visualization as a hot technology category has legs. Read more »
SiSense has been growing like mad with its analytic database and BI software that’s designed to maximize the disk, memory and CPU on even small computers in the name of low latency. Read more »
A New Hampshire company has emerged from the shadows with its DeepDB general-purpose database for transactional and analytic work. Investors have put $10 million behind the company. Read more »
Spurred by infrastructural innovations such as Hadoop and NoSQL, we’re seeing the beginning of a new analytic stack that’s all about deal with big data in an easier, more-transparent way than ever before. Read more »
A new research paper shows just how easy it is to identify individuals based on supposedly anonymous mobile-phone data, and this isn’t the first time supposedly anonymous data really wasn’t. But how do we balance the need for privacy with the value of these datasets? Read more »
Netflix computes information in different ways, depending on how soon the data needs to get served up to customers or evaluated internally. The nuanced approach extends to Facebook, LinkedIn and other webscale companies. Read more »
MapR is releasing open source code and partnering with Canonical on Ubuntu, while Netflix is releasing some data for for developers to play with. Sounds like a good day for openness. Read more »
Teradata has been around forever, and its customer base full of huge companies suggests it will probably for a while to come. Here’s how some of its customers use the company’s analytics software. Read more »
Medical researchers are using a mathematical process similar to Google PageRank in order to identify organs most likely to spread lung cancer throughout the human body. Read more »
As we move towards a quantified society, one shaped by data, we start to dismiss things that are unquantified. Empathy, emotion and storytelling — these are as much a part of business as they are of life. Here is why. Read more »
Platfora, the San Mateo, Calif.-based startup that helped spur a general rethinking of business intelligence for a big data world, is finally exiting its beta period and is generally available. It’s no wonder the company has garnered so much attention given its stated mission to make […] Read more »
A recent study found strong correlations between people’s Facebook likes and a number of personal characteristics such as sexual orientation and intelligence. But relying on correlations as proof of anything is a questionable practice. Read more »
The first week of the NCAA tournament is in, and the results would suggest that Nate Silver is yet again the man when it comes to predicting the things Americans care about. Read more »
People’s movements are highly predictable, researchers say, making it easy to identify most individuals from supposedly anonymized location datasets. As these datasets have valid uses, this is yet another reason why we need better regulation. Read more »
Call it whatever you want — big data, data science, data intelligence — but be prepared to have your mind blown. Imagination and technology are on a collision course that will change the world in profound ways. Read more »
GigaOM Pro analyst Adam Lesser’s latest report on the opportunities for big data and the smart grid. Read more »
In-memory, SQL, NoSQL and graph databases were on display in a fiesty discussion about databases that don’t involve Hadoop. The distinctions stand out amid growing interest in specialized databases in a big-data age. Read more »
Rather than store lots of data and then analyze to draw insights, Guavus puts rapid analysis first, yielding considerable return on investment for telecommunications companies, said CEO Anukool Lakhina. Read more »
All companies have data, all companies have people: the secret to big data analytics is incorporating people into the overall process, according to speakers at GigaOM’s Structure Data. Read more »
Natural language user interfaces show great promise for a variety of situations, but Nuance Communications CTO Vlad Sejnoha sees a need for standard formats if new entrants aren’t to be blocked as data sources. Read more »
A new report from Juniper Research predicts big uptake for in-car connectivity, which may in turn drive big-data-derived revenue for telematics companies and car manufacturers. Read more »
