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 »
ClearStory Data has raised $9 million from from KPCB, Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures in an attempt to plant its stake in the world next-generation analytics platforms. Big data is presenting a big challenge for business users, and they need help making sense of it. Read more »
Many factors have driven the recent high demand for IT products and services. However, relentless global economic weakness and uncertainty have resulted in a deterioration of worldwide IT spending through the third quarter and will continue to be an anchor in the fourth quarter. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
In his latest book, The Human Face of Big Data, photojournalist Rick Smolan depicts the many ways big data is transforming the world. On Tuesday, he and his team released an iPad app that puts an interactive twist on many of the book’s examples. Read more »
Everywhere you look, there’s another option for sharing your medical data in the name of the greater good. These efforts are not for nothing: Because of there scale and geographic reach, crowdsourced data banks have the potential to revolutionze how medical research is conducted. Read more »
If your doctor asks you to touch his or her iPhone at your next phyiscal, don’t be alarmed. It’s likely they have an AliveCor iPhone case; the device measures pulse through two fingers and can provide a detailed electro-cardiogram when held to your chest. Read more »
According to Amazon Web Services Chief Data Scientist Matt Wood, big data and cloud computing are nearly a match made in heaven. Limitless, on-demand and inexpensive resources open up new worlds of possibility, and a central platform makes it easy for communities to share huge datasets. Read more »
A startup called BitDeli is trying to democratize analytics by letting developers create custom metrics and dashboards using Python scripts instead of having to try Hadoop. What frameworks like Rails were to web development, Co-founder and CEO Ville Tuulos says, BitDeli is to analytics. Read more »
Writing Hadoop queries doesn’t have to be hard and neither does sharing data according to Mortar Data, which just released an open source framework for Hadoop applications. The idea is that groups of people can more easily collaborate on building apps around giant data sets. Read more »
There’s no shortage of great minds using big data techniques to improve the quality of our medical treatments, but sometimes they can’t get access to the data they need most. Improving access to genetic data, for example, might just help cure cancer. Read more »
A group of British researchers recently analyzed 2.5 million newspaper articles in order to prove that new data analysis techniques, such as machine learning and natural-language processing, can accurately classify media content. They hope their approach can save academicians untold hours of manual labor. Read more »
According to the New York Times, National Football League teams are often years behind their peers in other professional sports when it comes to data analysis. Machine learning could help teams make more sense of the myriad variables that currently keep them relying on human intuition. Read more »
Online dating startup Zoosk uses big data techniques and technologies for a lot more than just computing which members might make the best mates. Data from its young audience well versed in social media lets the company design a user experience that matches their expectations. Read more »
Competitive advantage used to come from using pricey enterprise applications to create operational efficiencies. Ross Mason of MuleSoft says SaaS and APIs have killed that model, and the future belongs to companies that integrate applications to discover new business models. Read more »
In the fight about royalties from streaming media services like Pandora, Popular cellist Zoë Keating says she’s willing to give up the money in exchange for data. It’s an idea that’s gaining traction elsewhere, too, as more companies are paying consumers for their truly valuable data. Read more »
Eight years after forming, a startup called BeyondCore is finally launching publicly with a product it claims can revolutionize analytics. Rather than making analysts search for the needle in the haystack, BeyondCore says it remove the human element and deliver that needle on a silver platter. Read more »
Big data tools such as Cassandra and Hadoop are transforming how data is stored and exploited at scale. But without similarly capable search technologies, enterprise adopters face challenges when it comes to gaining insights from that data. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
New York-based data analytics startup SumAll announced that it has raised $6 million in a Series A round led by Battery Ventures and including Wellington Partners. Launched last year, SumAll helps smaller businesses analyze and visualize a comprehensive set of their data. Read more »
A report by Europe’s cybersecurity agency points out several flaws with the proposed ‘right to be forgotten’. A big one has to do with the challenges presented by the increasing use of aggregated data. Read more »
Even if you don’t agree with ZestFinance’s business, it’s hard to argue with its grasp of big data and applied mathematics. Now, the company has added a human touch to machine learning in order to make its models for assessing repayment risk even more accurate. Read more »
Prague-based social media analytics startup Socialbakers on Monday announced that it had raised $6 million in funding from Index Ventures and Earlybird Venture Capital. The startup says that more than a fifth of all Fortune 500 companies are its clients. Read more »
Mortar Data has raised $1.8 million for its cloud-based service that wraps Hadoop in a custom — and supposedly developer-friendly — blend of Pig and Python, meaning even novice Hadoop programmers can be writing jobs in about an hour. Read more »
Companies such as Inrix are making their money helping commuters and commercial drivers find the fastest routes through traffic, but their reach could go much further. Creative organizations can apply the data in entirely new areas, and crowdsourcing means seeing how the world moves. Read more »
By accessing and combining publicly-available datasets, health innovators are letting patients and others view connections between physicians. The so-called “DocGraph,” as one hacktivist calls it, could give patients a valuable window into who their doctors trust. Read more »
What’s true in the rest of the world is true for security software, as well: more data means more intelligence. Thanks to the emergence of new techniques for storing, collecting and analyzing data, there’s a new wave of security companies looking smarter than ever. Read more »
Project Glass, Google’s augmented reality smart glasses, is the ultimate expression of the wearable tech trend. Paul Armstrong of @TheMediaIsDying says that whether you like it or not, the technology is coming–and the changes are going to be profound for the media business. Read more »
HBase is a great option for developing big data applications, but it’s not necessarily easy to use. WibiData is addressing this by open sourcing a portion of its predictive analytics infrastructure that adds structure to data, followed eventually by a whole HBase development framework called Kiji. Read more »
Hadoop is nothing without applications, and Continuuity aims to deliver those apps by making Hadoop something developers can work and innovate with. Its efforts haven’t gone unnoticed — the company just closed a $10 million Series A round from a who’s who of big data VCs. Read more »
Zoomdata has a plan for business intelligence that involves tacking the difficult problem of streaming data, and doing so with a mobile-device-first mindset. The result is pretty and compelling in theory, but it’s technologically challenging and will face tough competition from new and old vendors alike. Read more »
Less than a month after unveiling its Hadoop analytics engine to great fanfare, Platfora has raised $20 million to realize its mission of displacing the business intelligence and data warehouse incumbents. It’ll need every dime: although the competition is old, it’s also rich, entrenched and determined. Read more »
The largest players in the Hadoop market are already raising money and sky-high valuations, employing hundreds of people and, in some cases, looking at nine-figure revenues. If you’re trying to get a sense of whether Hadoop is for real, these details might help. Read more »
