Big data could mean big savings in health care – but here’s what has to happen first
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 »
Seeking startup cred: SAP pushes HANA as a platform for data startups
photo: Flickr / kirinqueen
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 »
On the quest to data ownership, lots of questions lie ahead
photo: Andreas Weigend
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 »
You want to crunch top-secret data securely? CryptDB may be the app for that
photo: Thinkstock
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 releases Hadoop box and database technology for quicker data insights
photo: Jordan Novet
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 »
A Tableau IPO could validate the big data visualization push — or not
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 »
Forget in-memory — SiSense raises $10M for in-chip analytics
photo: Shutterstock / Iscatel
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 »
Deep Information Sciences scores $10M for its general-purpose database
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 »
The new analytic stack is all about management, transparency and users
photo: Shutterstock / ramcreations
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 »
If there’s no such thing as anonymous data, does privacy just mean security?
photo: Flickr / striatic
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 »
3 shades of latency: How Netflix built a data architecture around timeliness
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 »
Big, open data: MapR on Github and Yelp’s dataset challenge
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 »
Why Apple, eBay, and Walmart have some of the biggest data warehouses you’ve ever seen
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 »
How researchers are fighting lung cancer using PageRank
photo: PLOS One
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 »
Coffee & Empathy: Why data without a soul is meaningless
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 »
White-hot BI-on-Hadoop startup Platfora now GA
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 »
Liking curly fries might not mean you’re smart: When mere data isn’t enough
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 »
ESPN should just hire Nate Silver already
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 »
Why the collision of big data and privacy will require a new realpolitik
photo: Corbis / Stanley Eales
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 »
5 ways big data is going to blow your mind and change your world
photo: Shutterstock / GrandDuc
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 »
How energy data will impact the smart grid
GigaOM Pro analyst Adam Lesser’s latest report on the opportunities for big data and the smart grid. Read more »
No, not every database was created equal. Here’s how they stand out
photo: Albert Chau
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 »
Why Guavus analyzes lots of telecommunications data before storing it all
photo: Albert Chau
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 »
Big data analytics is great but it’s no silver bullet
photo: Albert Chau
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 »
Why Nuance sees the semantic web as a key to smarter natural language interfaces
photo: Albert Chau
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 fifth of cars in North America and Western Europe will be app-enabled by 2017, analysts predict
photo: Life360
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 »
Cloudera scores analytics-as-a-service deal with Germany’s T-Systems
The strategic partnership will see Cloudera’s enterprise Hadoop distribution, along with its Impala real-time query engine, running on top of T-Systems’ extensive cloud infrastructure in Europe and beyond. Read more »
How Aetna uses patient data to prevent diabetes and heart attacks
photo: Albert Chau
Speaking at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference on Wednesday, Aetna’s head of innovation, Michael Palmer, talked about the company’s efforts to use patient data to provide better care. Read more »
Concurrent gets $4M for higher-level Hadoop
photo: Concurrent CTO Chris Wensel
Cascading proprietor Concurrent has secured $4 million in venture capital in order to advance its efforts toward easing the development of big data applications. Read more »
Subscriber Content
Sector RoadMap: SQL-on-Hadoop platforms in 2013
Today’s most successful companies are the ones with the ability to capture and analyze all data available to them. Enter SQL-on-Hadoop solutions, which increase the accessibility of Hadoop and allow organizations to reuse their investment learning in SQL. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Drawn to Scale wants to make MongoDB scale like Hadoop
photo: Shutterstock / z0w
Database startup Drawn to Scale has extended its Spire distributed data platform from SQL to MongoDB. That means users can get high performance from the latter even across hundreds of terabytes. Read more »
Microsoft buys into multi-lingual social analytics with Netbreeze acquisition
photo: Flickr / ToddABishop
Netbreeze promises to bring multi-lingual access and analysis to Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube streams via Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Read more »
The world is ready for the consumer-grade enterprise
photo: Shutterstock / Oleksiy Mark
Former VMware CEO and current Pivotal Initiative leader Paul Maritz shares his thoughts on how the future of enterprise IT must mirror the practices of consumer web companies. Read more »
In battle for Hadoop, MapR raises $30M
Hadoop vendor is racking up customers and on Monday it announced a $30 million venture-capital investment that brings its total funding to $59 million since launching in 2011. Read more »
Statwing wants to make your data — and armchair quarterback — dreams come true
Many of us yell at the TV while watching our favorite sports teams. Many of us also want to get better at working with data. Statwing thinks it can help with both. Read more »
Google BigQuery is now even bigger
photo: Google
Google now allows joins within its BigQuery analytics service, as well as support for timestamped data and massive aggregations. Valuable stuff if you use BigQuery. Read more »
HG Data gets $2M to provide sales leads for enterprise tech with help from big data
photo: HG Data
To bring in more data on the IT products that enterprises use, HG Data is taking on $2 million in venture funding, pointing to the role big data can play in lead generation. Read more »
Microsoft’s vision of our future is big screens and big data
photo: Microsoft
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 »
Hadoop’s past, present, and future: A GigaOM special report
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’s next chapter: Putting Bing tech inside our homes and data centers
photo: Microsoft
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 »
