Microsoft had a handful of journalists at its new Envisioning Center last week to show off its latest and greatest technology. Here’s what it demonstrated. Read more »
Check out our special retrospective on the history of Hadoop, one of the most powerful open-source data tools ever developed, in this post. Read more »
Microsoft is no joke when it comes to building web infrastructure and developing techniques such as machine learning. The company thinks its heavy investment in these areas will pay off big-time in the years to come. Read more »
A group of European researchers has created a cloud platform designed to serve as a central processing and data-access brains for robots located throughout the world. Read more »
IBM’s always on the look out for new challenges for Watson to tackle. Two dozen teams of USC students recently had 48 hours to create their own business plans for the technology. Read more »
We talk a lot about big data, but only analyze 1 percent of what’s available. In order to take advantage of the other 99 percent, we need to reconsider how we do big data. Read more »
Companies are running experiments that show employees are happier and more productive when eat in cheerful cafeterias with other people. The catch is that workers may have to hand over some privacy in exchange. Read more »
Not a huge surprise: Amazon Web Services cut prices on its DynamoDB NoSQL database service just over a year after its launch. Read more »
We were there very early on for the birth of Hadoop and its maturation into a vital data analysis tool. Here’s a look back at some of our best stories. Read more »
In Part III of our look at all things Hadoop, we examine the trends driving Hadoop’s future. At the end of the day, everything is pushing Hadoop toward being just generally faster and easier to consume. Read more »
Upworthy is attracting attention for its headlines and its viral videos about gay marriage, women’s rights and other social causes. But the site’s real value may be its potential to help the Democrats maintain their lead in social media and big data. Read more at paidContent »
It is fashionable these days to either like big data or just malign big data. Regardless of what your personal feelings are, the question has always been and will always be – what is data good for. Here are three stories to illustrate those questions. Read more »
Putting the right brains on the right problems is the goal of Kaggle Connect. Read more »
How big an impact has Hadoop had on the technology world? Check out our infographic on the reach of the most important big data tool of our time. Read more »
In the first of our four-part multi-media series on Hadoop, the people who helped build Hadoop talk about its birth, its promise and the challenges in moving it from webscale to just large-scale. Read more »
Five years ago, LinkedIn was a shell of the technology company it is today. Here’s an inside look at where it came from, what it’s become and where it’s going. Read more »
Google could add huge data sets of satellite images to the Google Maps Engine, which businesses would be able to use for rapid analysis of changes over time. Now only researchers can access the data. Read more »
Just when you thought spam was under control, a new breed of spammers is taking up new methods to infiltrate our inboxes, search results and social media feeds. Data science could make them very effective. Read more »
Use cases at the Strata conference show that information gleaned from Hadoop and other big data technologies can bring companies new revenue streams and cut expenditures. Read more »
There has been a lot of data news already this week — some big, some interesting, and some both. Here’s a collection of the stuff you shouldn’t, or don’t want to, miss. Read more »
EMC Greenplum rolled out a new Hadoop distribution that fuses the popular big data platform with its flagship MPP database technology. Co-founder Scott Yara thinks the company’s huge investment puts it in the catbird seat among Hadoop vendors. Read more »
Venture capitalists made more big data investments than ever before in 2012, and a few more deals have already closed in 2013. Entrepreneurs from several venture-backed data startups will speak at Structure:Data next month. Read more »
More and more companies and open source projects are trying to let users run SQL queries from inside Hadoop itself. Here’s a list of what’s available and, on a high level, how they work. Read more »
The fact that Amazon Web Services is targeting enterprise accounts is nothing new. The company’s just getting more blatant about it. Read more »
Red Hat is the latest company offering an alternative to the Hadoop Distributed File System, only this one is open source and ties into Red Hat’s bigger vision of hybrid cloud computing. Read more »
Citus Data has expanded its high-speed, analytic database called CitusDB beyond Postgres and into Hadoop. Up next, MongoDB and just about anything else you can think of. Read more »
Facebook Director of Engineering Lars Rasmussen held an Ask Me Anything session of Reddit on Thursday to talk about Graph Search. Here’s what he had to say about the infrastructure underlying it. Read more »
Google Flu Trends significantly overestimated the number of Americans afflicted with flu-like symptoms during the season’s peak a couple months ago, but assuring accuracy is a big part of the puzzle any time we’re talking about web data. Read more »
HStreaming has raised $1 million and is ready to take its message of real-time processing on Hadoop mainstream. In a world tired of batch processing only, that message should be well received. Read more »
The concept of bringing social media sentiment closer to business intelligence is a sensible move that can help companies create more value from social media. Read more »
Two Indiana University researchers have developed a computer model they say can identify significantly better and less-expensive treatments than can doctors acting alone. It’s just the latest evidence that big data will have a profound impact on our health care system. Read more »
It’s no secret that mobile, big data and cloud computing are transforming IT. Sanjay Poonen, president of SAP’s mobile division, says companies need a single unified strategy to tackle them, not three separate ones. Read more »
IBM is turning Watson loose on lung cancer, offering up a cloud-based service designed to let doctors from around the country find the best-possible treatments for their patients. Read more »
Not all data analysis is created equal, and understanding the difference is critical as our society places a greater value on listening to the data. Using big data to cure disease is one thing, using statistics to ruin my sports-watching is quite another. Read more »
Causata is really good at helping companies identify consumers and, thanks to new machine learning features, helping them predict behavior many steps down the line. Does all this personal data create a privacy concern? Depends who you ask. Read more »
Free from the scrutiny of public markets, Dell should let its freak flag fly and take some real risks to distinguish itself from the server-vendor pack. I think that means doubling down on next-generation software and server design. Read more »
Microsoft vet and data platform VP Ted Kummert is joining Madrona Venture Group as a venture partner. As VCs aim to boost their enterprise investments, they’re snatching up talent from big IT. Read more »
As part of its new big-data-focused XDATA initiative, DARPA has invested $3 million in a startup called Continuum Analytics. The company’s aim is to extend Python’s prowess in scientific computing into the world of big data and analytics. Read more »
For small business lender Capital Access Network, finding worthy borrowers is about a lot more than their credit scores. It’s taking real-world data into account in order to distinguish financial fools from savvy entrepreneurs. Read more »
Is the world of big data one in which information about us allows us to personalize services and benefit from that personalization, or is it one in which our data is used against us by companies and governments? Read more »
