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 »
IBM on Friday announced its plan to acquire big data analytics company Star Analytics. The IT vendor has already spent more than $16 billion on big data and analytics acquisitions since 2005. Read more »
Gravity, a startup that personalizes reader content for web publishers, is opening up its recommendation engine to anyone that wants to use it. Considering the increasing importance of personalization online, this could be a good deal. Read more »
Not everyone is drowning in big data or has the know-how to deal with it if they were. Here are six free web services that help mere mortals analyze and visualize their own data. Read more »
Vendors from tiny startups to giants like RSA, IBM and Cisco are rushing to incorporate big data expertise to beef up IT security. Read more »
Max Levchin, who in his past life started PayPal and Slide is back at it again. He has started a new hybrid R& D Lab/Incubator (HVF) and his focusing on opportunities created by the digitization of our physical world and explosion of data. Read more »
IBM is giving Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York its own Watson system similar to the one that crushed its human competitors on Jeopardy!. The goal is to give Watson new skills and push it into new industries. Read more »
In order to recommend new events for its members, online event-management company Eventbrite must build what it calls “implicit social graphs.” It’s just one of many approaches to figuring out what content users want to see. Read more »
Numenta, the latest startup from Palm creator Jeff Hawkins, aims to help us make sense of fast-flowing machine-to-machine data by recognizing patterns and building models. Its latest customer is smart-grid efficiency expert EnerNOC. Read more »
Gary Read, the CEO of Boundary, reports more than 5 terabytes of data coming into its servers for processing. At the same time, the company has grown revenues and employees. Read more »
Is there there really a model for predicting the success of Kickstarter campaigns? A new interactive model from machine learning service BigML offers a fun way to try, although the dearth of public data from Kickstarter might affect its accuracy. Read more »
Cloud provider Joyent has a new Hadoop offering that the company claims can outperform most others on the market. However, the company says Hadoop is just its foray into big data and is promising bigger, better things to come. Read more »
Amazon Web Services has introduced its latest instance — an 88-core, 240 GB SSD, 244 GB RAM and 10 GbE behemoth designed for real-time analytics with software like SAP HANA, as well as demanding scientific workloads. Read more »
The last quarter of 2012 saw the rise of cloud-based databases, the cloud awakening of software giants such as HP, and many cloud outages that have left question marks. Enterprises found more IT dollars, and they will focus on the cloud for much of that spending. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Facebook is looking at almost all options to address the storage needs of its myriad applications that all have different requirements around performance, scalability and efficiency. Flash can be too fast and hard drives to slow, but Facebook wants something just right. Read more »
GigaOM Research analysts Jo Maitland and George Gilbert discuss the cloud in 2013: what to know, who to watch, and crazy predictions for the coming months. Read more »
SevOne has raised $150 million for its line of appliances that help companies capture and analyze their streams of operational infrastructure data. Its financial success, even for a relatively quiet company founded in 2005, illustrate how important it is to know your systems data well. Read more »
Netflix is at it again, this time showing off its homemade architecture for running Hadoop workloads in the Amazon Web Services cloud. It’s all about the flexibility of being able to run, manage and access multiple clusters while eliminating as many barriers as possible. Read more »
Streaming-data specialist Guavus has raised $30 million to help its business of helping telcos make more sense of their streams of network data. By analyzing that data on the fly, they can see in real time who how their networks are being used, and by whom. Read more »
Tableau’s new European VP James Eiloart reckons that Europe’s current belt-tightening phase should provide ample opportunities for his company’s analytics products, in spite of established local rivals. Read more »
There’s evidence to suggest that traffic congestion is a side effect of strong city economies, a claim furthered by recent traffic-data analysis from INRIX. However, a decreased reliance on cars might mean clearer roads are more the result of alternative transit than of slow economic growth. Read more »
While some are hoping for better software to reduce the need for data scientists, WibiData’s Omer Trajman thinks we need more of them. Better software, he argues, is actually just a tool to make it easier for data scientists to do world-changing work. Read more »
Despite the idea that a server is a server, the needs of different computing customers differ widely. For those thinking about selling infrastructure, software or even services understanding the difference in computing and IT styles will help you hone your pitch and find your buyer. Read more »
A group of researchers from an Israeli university used data from Waze to determine the country’s most-accident-prone areas and how they correlate, or not, with a notable police presence. It’s just one of many efforts using ballooning data from drivers and devices to try and make sense of city traffic. Read more »
I recently spent 11 days in Beijing meeting lots of companies trying to make it in cloud computing and big data. Here are seven with which I had a chance to sit down and learn about their businesses and how to sell cloud computing in China. Read more »
Big data technologies are like manufacturing robots: they let people do what they’re already trying to do, only faster than before and at a much greater scale. But as with any other product, that analyzed data is nothing without humans to do something with it. Read more »
Big data might not be able to predict when a mass murderer is about to strike, but perhaps it can shed some light on why certain countries have such high murder rates. Are there factors not related to gun control that inspire a willingness to kill? Read more »
Show me — that’s the common thread in the top 10 most-trafficked GigaOM cleantech stories of 2012. Exclusive photos and videos of emerging clean power and electric car technologies lead the year. (OK, we’re not so surprised by that.) Read more »
Besides the skyrocketing growth of data itself, there are several key technology trends we will be watching in 2013. That list includes a renaissance in the database market, next-generation SaaS-based BI and visualization tools, and data warehousing as a service. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Sure, more data scientists would be great. But Scott Brave, of Baynote, says the better solution is to create analytics products that are so easy to use that you don’t even need a data scientist. Read more »
A lot happened in the world of data analysis this year. Here’s a list of the most-popular and generally most-interesting things I’ve had the fortune to cover in 2012 — from Hadoop to the Supreme Court to Bollywood stars. Read more »
Amazon’s Data Pipeline, which promises easy, automated consolidation of data from many sources, is now available — or at least you can sign up for it. Amazon also unveiled a new instance type for data-intensive applications. Read more »
Whether they’re building big data applications or just trying to gather some insights from their mobile apps, developers have more need than ever for analytics tools. It’s a good thing so many companies are building tools designed with developers’ needs and skills in mind. Read more »
Everyone’s talking about the greatness of big data, but we’re nowhere near the promised land of what’s possible when we turn data loose on our lives. Here are three things to watch that could affect how companies and everday people consume all that info. Read more »
The way the industry will use cloud-computing technology in 2013 will require following the existing adoption patterns and trends into the New Year. Those trends include the rise of standards, big data’s role in the cloud, industry-specific clouds, security, and more. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
In the latest case of researchers using the cloud for good, Google is highlighting the six projects to which it awarded grants via its Exacycle for Visiting Faculty program. Ranging from genomic research to astronomy, the researchers received 100 million computing hours apiece. Read more »
With DataRaker buy Oracle says it can expand its reach into the water and energy verticals and offer deeper analytical “Big Data” services. It also buys new customers and a better maintenance and support revenue stream. Read more »
Opportunities for big data and data-analytics firms in health care are likely to expand dramatically in the coming years. Driving this are trends such as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the use of data to address inefficient processes, and the rapid growth of mobile health. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Despite high joblessness in the country, many companies have job openings but lack qualified applicants. Steve Goodman, of Bright, says big data and data science can help fix that problem. Read more »
Cloudera netted big bucks to accelerate its Hadoop push into enterprises and around the world. The Palo Alto, Calif. company says its framework is the most widely deployed of several available Hadoop distributions. Read more »
