In just a few years, big data has turned from a buzzword and concept best left for large web companies into a force that drives much of our digital lives. Here are five technological trends that will change how data is processed and consumed going forward. Read more »
App analytics and advertising firm is raising $25 million from Crosslink Capital as it builds out internationally and looks at a possible IPO by the second half of 2013. The company is riding the boom in mobile as more consumers turn to smartphones and tablets. Read more »
A new research paper from Google highlights the importance of big data in creating consumer-friendly services such as voice search on smartphones. More data helps train smarter models, which can then better predict what someone say next — letting you keep your eyes on the road. Read more »
Forget what comes after infinity, we at GigaOm were worried about a smaller problem, namely what comes after a yottabyte. Well now we know the answer to that problem — a 1 followed by 27 zeros (a yottabyte only has 24 zeros), otherwise known as a brontobyte. Read more »
EMC is beefing up its RSA security division with the planned acquisition of big-data-focused startup Silver Tail Systems. The company’s software detects malicious activity by monitoring and analyzing site visitors’ behavior in order to determine whether it’s harmless or potentially harmful. The company claims multiple large […] Read more »
Sandy is certainly living up to its promise as a destructive force, but it’s also serving as a teaching tool for companies whose business is big data. They’re releasing new dashboards, products and case studies demonstrating how data analysis before can save lives and money later. Read more »
Rackspace is busy building a Hadoop service, giving the company one more avenue to compete with cloud kingpin Amazon Web Services. However, the two services — along with several others on the market — highlight just how different seemingly similar cloud services can be. Read more »
Tictrac, a U.K.-based startup, integrates with data from a range of third-party apps and tools — from those that monitor health and activity to those that track social activity and fundraising — to help users make the most of their personal data. Read more »
Dell is donating an ARM-based server to the Apache Software Foundation so contributors can test their projects on new, energy-efficient hardware architectures. Big data projects such as Hadoop and Cassandra are low-hanging fruit, but many webscale applications likely could use them to save power. Read more »
Cloudera has joined the fray of Hadoop companies trying to turn the big data platform into an engine for exploring data interactively using standard SQL. As the biggest company in the space, its new technology called Impala could go a long way toward changing Hadoop’s image. Read more »
Former Yahoo cloud VP Todd Papaioannou and Facebook engineer Jonathan Gray are trying to big data for programmers with a new platform service called Continuuity. It’s a development environment and runtime layer that sits atop a company’s Hadoop infrastructure and abstracts the complexity of writing apps. Read more »
EMC’s Greenplum division hopes to encourage users of its Chorus big data application to reach out to the Kaggle community of data scientists to do real-world work. The company also inked partnerships with Gnip and Tableau and open-sourced a version of Chorus. Read more »
Analytics startup Platfora is finally showing off its next-generation business intelligence software to the world, combining Hadoop, in-memory processing and HTML5 into an impressive product. It’s entering a competitive market full of large incumbents and other innovative startups all trying to change how we do BI. Read more »
BloomReach, which offers a big data parsing service that etailers can use to juice their web sites, netted $25 million in new funding which it will use to boost both sales and marketing and research and development efforts. Read more »
Analytics is not a new field, but its evolution into ‘big data’ shows how much of a growth industry it is. That means facing up to issues such as the need for talent and good models. Read more »
The cloud is a great thing when it comes to storing large quantities of data, but getting it into and out of cloud-storage services can be difficult. Technologies that speed that process up can allow for new uses of that data, says Aspera CEO Michelle Munson. Read more »
Hadoop is getting closer to business intelligence thanks to a slew of new products ranging from a SQL database built atop Hadoop to an appliance packaging the two alongside a full complement of servers. On Wednesday, Birst, Teradata and Splice Machine got into the act. Read more »
Datasift, the UK company that has access to the Twitter firehose analyzes petabytes of tweets and ships terabytes of insights around the world. And the infrastructure needs to keep up. That and dark social were topics of interest today at Structure:Europe. Read more »
Although older generations might still view cloud computing as an emerging trend, their children take it for granted, largely forgoing physical devices for cloud services. We might as well come get on board and maybe change the world in the process. Read more »
A new study shows that the BBC and the New York Times have the most reach and influence on Twitter among news organizations. The findings are just a taste of what we can expect as researchers apply data-based network analysis to patterns of news consumption. Read more at paidContent »
Hadoop startup Hadapt has made its unified Hadoop-and-SQL analytic architecture even easier by adding native advanced analytic functions and integrating tightly with Tableau’s powerful BI software. It’s a sign of things to come as Hadoop and traditional SQL-based BI become cozy across the board. Read more »
According to Equinix CTO Lane Patterson, CIOs are still learning what can and what can’t be done in the cloud. Ultimately, it’s a matter of trust. Read more »
Europe’s Helix Nebula project is addressing the technical, legal, and procedural issues that today make it difficult to seamlessly move jobs from one cloud to another at scale. Lessons learned from it could provide a window through which we can see Europe’s cloud provision taking shape. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The usual suspects Amazon and VMware made significant announcements in cloud in the third quarter, while Hadoop remained the talk of the town in big data. Emerging trends in software-defined networking and flash storage stirred up lots of M&A and venture investment in the quarter. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The big data revolution is in its early innings, and it is about to get even more exciting. Ravi Mhatre, managing director at Lightspeed Venture Partners, discusses the disruptive innovations that are helping make data fast, intuitive and easy to analyze. Read more »
In the new app economy, organizations no longer own all the data they need to make accurate business decisions. This loss of control requires data marketplaces and data syndication models that few enterprises are currently prepared for. Apigee’s Anant Jhingran looks at three important steps that companies need to take to succeed in the app economy. Read more »
Social data pulled from online health forums and the comments section of blogs is helping patients learn about side effects to various drugs and could ultimately help them figure out the medications that suit them best. Read more »
A team of University of Notre Dame researchers has developed an algorithm for solving Sudoku puzzles that doesn’t require it to guess at all. Rather, it’s able to discern patterns even with sparse available information and automatically determine which numbers go where. Read more »
Rent prices are higher than ever, but a growing number of startups are working to analyze our homes’ energy use so we can save money by using less power. Their approaches might differ, but data and analytics are the ties that binds them all. Read more »
A handful of leaders in health data suggest that data-driven personalized health approaches could achieve mainstream adoption in five years, with some saying valuable but intermittent work could happen even sooner. Read more »
If you’re a big data hacker in the greater Boston area, hack/reduce wants you to join its effort to make the area a big data hub, according to Abbey Fichtner. Read more »
IBM and Cisco have both launched specialized hardware designed to securely and efficiently handle big data, but is there a large market for specialized big data gear? If there is such a market, are these the boxes that will fill it? Read more »
Campaigns have been profiling potential voters for decades, but the glut of data available online changed the game in terms of how much they collect and how it’s used. Now, thanks to complex models and real-time ad platforms, poltiical advertising is becoming a personal affair. Read more »
In photojournalist Rick Smolan’s latest book, The Human Face of Big Data, he shares more than 100 stories revealing the concrete, mind-blowingly powerful ways big data is changing how we consume energy, receive healthcare, monitor the environment and more. Take a look at five examples. Read more »
A new startup called Trifacta, founded by UC-Berkeley professor Joe Hellerstein and Stanford professor Jeffrey Heer, wants to eliminate much of the hassle of making messy data usable. The company combines machine learning and human-computer interaction, and has raised $4.3 million from Accel Partners. Read more »
Big data company RainStor has raised $12 million is Series C funding for its database that’s designed to shrink data footprints by at least 95 percent. It also plays nice with Hadoop, meaning a system can handle ad hoc SQL queries as well as MapReduce jobs. Read more »
NASA and a couple other government agencies have kicked off a series of TopCoder challenges designed to find innovative solutions to the government’s big data problems. The first contest is all about making disparate, incompatible data sets usable and actually valuable across agencies. Read more »
A startup called Entelo is trying to make résumés a thing of the past by aggregating profiles of tech workers from their public data, and then feeding those results to recruiters. The secret sauce is an algorithm for spotting when someone might be looking for work. Read more »
Although Twitter is pushing itself as a platform to gauge public opinion around popular events — including the upcoming presidential election — not everyone is buying the hype. Stats about sentiment and tweet velocity are certainly interesting, but man cannot live on tweet data alone. Read more »
Interest graph specialist Gravity has raised $10.6 million to expand its business of personalizing the web for consumers. Thanks to a semantic engine that associates the content site visitors read with related topics, Gravity says it can show readers just what they want to see. Read more »
