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 »
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 »
