Data Collective is a new venture capital firm focusing on seed-round investments in big data startups, from the infraastructure level up to analytics and applications. Among its collection of portfolio companies are Kaggle, MemSQL, Continuuity, Parse, Keen.io, Meteor, MongoHQ, Citus Data and Piston Cloud. Read more »
Google has opened its Knowledge Graph to the English-speaking world and has made intelligent voice search possible on mobile phones. Underneath it all, of course, are ever more-complex methods of analyzing data to make search smarter and easier than it has any business being. Read more »
NuoDB, the Cambridge, Mass.-based database startup, is drawing lots of interest and blue-chip investors with a ton of database cred. Now it also has a patent that gives credence to its claims that its elastic database is truly innovative. Read more »
Nimbula and MapR say that combining the former company’s scalable private cloud infrastructure with the latter’s Hadoop distribution will enable companies to run and manage big data applications much more easily. The idea is that a cloud infrastructure will make Hadoop much more flexible and available. Read more »
Infochimps has released version 1.1. of its platform that the company has described as Heroku for Hadoop. The new version takes things a step further, though, turning the platform into an engine for easily creating streaming workflows that don’t require using Hadoop at all. Read more »
London startup Mendeley is already beloved by researchers around the planet for helping them manage their work. Now it’s unveiled a new product that it hopes can help universities get a better handle on what’s happening right now. Goodbye slow, stuffy academia. Read more »
A group of researchers has developed a machine learning model that can detect tweets relating to bullying, and even identify bullies, victims and witnesses. Next, it wants to add sentiment analysis to determine individuals’ emotional states. But if they see trouble, how do they intervene? Read more »
Venture capital firm Accel Partners is following up on its $100 million Big Data Fund with two new members to help it thrive. New principal Jake Flomenberg comes from Splunk (and Cloudera before that), while new EIR Nick Mehta was previously CEO of LiveOffice. Read more »
Big data and data science have already proven their worth in the worlds of online advertising and marketing, and now they’re being turned to elections. Here are five sites to follow if you want to impress your peers with data-driven insights on who’ll win in November. Read more »
Analytics startup Birst thinks it can make data warehouses more useful by letting business users inside of them. Its new Distributed Business Analytics product puts departmental sandboxes right inside the warehouse, letting users interact with all the data they need from a central location. Read more »
A new app called Saga hit the App Store promising to be a personal assistant that knows what users are up to even if they don’t. It wants to tell users where they’ve been, where they’ll go next and how long it will take to get there. Read more »
The National Security Agency director Keith Alexander denied that the intelligence agency keeps massive dossiers on all U.S. citizens, a contention made recently by three former NSA hands and his denial sparked yet another spat in this ongoing controversy. Read more »
There’s so much data available and such powerful tools for analyzing it that the world might be a lot better off if politicians listened to the data first, rather than their parties or constituents. Already, data is showing ways to limit everything from traffic to AIDS. Read more »
Sure, you can trust a site is delivering you the best search results, but sometimes it might be nice to dig down, see a little of what the system sees and find that needle in the haystack. A new semantic search interface might let that happen. Read more »
Organizations are coping with the challenge of processing unprecedented volumes of data. However, the processes involved with using a large cluster to run applications like Hadoop are error-prone. So IT managers are turning to cluster-management solutions to automate tasks associated with cluster creation, management and maintenance. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
If you’re reading this in Los Angeles right now, there’s a decent chance you’re doing so while stuck in traffic on a packed freeway. Well, help might be on the way if efforts from companies such as Xerox to make sense of traffic flows work out. Read more »
Big data, properly applied, can help save energy, cure diseases, better predict trends. But there’s also worry that abuse of big data will benefit big government and corporations to the detriment of citizens, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center. Read more »
The Silicon Strip is coming along nicely, and although they’re mostly young and relatively unknown, Las Vegas’s startups aren’t hurting for good ideas. Some are even growing beyond their wildest dreams. Here are five of the city’s most-promising. Read more »
New York-based 33Across, an ad tech startup that uses vast amounts of social data to target audiences, has raised an additional $13.1 million from Pelion Ventures, Flybridge Capital, Greycroft Partners, First Round Capital and others. Read more »
My gut instinct is to call Senator Al Franken a well-meaning fool when it comes to his latest outcry — this time against the advent of facial-recognition software — but he actually has a point. Facial-recognition software opens up a whole new class of privacy concerns. Read more »
Akiban, the hot Boston-based NewSQL database startup, is making two offerings Akiban Server and Persistit available as downloads this week. To date beta testers have run Akiban Enterprise as an add-on to existing SQL databases. Akiban Server goes it alone. Read more »
Nodeable is now offering a cloud service for processing and analyzing streams of data in real time. Its new flagship service, called StreamReduce, is built atop Twitter’s open source Storm framework and acts as Hadoop’s faster, nimbler front-end partner that delivers users insights as they happen. Read more »
EMC might be smarter than we thought it was. If it handles the rumored spin-out and the Maritz-Gelsinger transition well, the companies under its banner could do great things. Of course, there are a lot of moving parts here and the transition won’t be easy. Read more »
In cloud and big data, the second quarter of 2012 featured several high-profile deals and product launches that could reshape the marketplace for everyone. Google and Microsoft launched Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings, software-defined networking took off, and all eyes stayed fixed on the continuing promise of data analytics. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Slowly but surely, health care is becoming a killer app for big data. Whether it’s Hadoop, machine learning or natural-language processing, folks in the worlds of medicine and hospital administration understand that data is the key to helping them take their fields to the next level. Read more »
Big data has become the latest front for the patent troll epidemic as a shell company is suing firms for using a common software framework known as the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). Read more »
Hadoop is on its way to becomig the de facto platform for the next-generation of data-based applications, but it’s not without some flaws. Ironically, one of Hadoop’s biggest shortcomings right now is also one of its biggest strengths going forward — the Hadoop Distributed File System. Read more »
The market for business analytics software grew 14 percent in 2011 and will hit $50.7 billion in revenue by 2016, according to IDC. The category will grow at a 9.8-percent-a-year rate until then, driven in part by the hype around big data. Read more »
Flash-based storage pioneer Fusion-io says it has developed a method for extending a system’s memory from DRAM into Fusion-io’s NAND-based storage tier, enabling the possibility of bigger, cheaper in-memory applications than are currently possible. Read more »
Hey, mobile developers, have you ever wondered where users are when they interact with your apps — like down to the level of whether they’re in a Starbucks or the McDonald’s right across the street? A startup called Placed can tell you so you can act accordingly. Read more »
Between its CEO search and patent war with Facebook, the past few months have been especially rocky for long-beleaguered Yahoo. But, on schedule, the company today announced that it is rolling out its big data ad tool Genome. Read more »
NuoDB has $10 million in Series B funding led by Morgenthaler Ventures and adds database pioneer Gary Morgenthaler to its board. The company will use the funding to widen the beta of its webscale database and get it out broadly this fall. Read more »
For better or worse, Hadoop has become synonymous with big data. In just a few years it has gone from a fringe technology to the de facto standard. But is the enterprise buying into a technology whose best day has already passed? Read more »
By becoming an underwriter for some of the world’s largest banks and credit card companies, ZestFinance might actually be able to achieve its goal of using big data to supply the underbanked with needed credit. It’s not altruism by any means, but here’s how it works. Read more »
ZestCash, the startup co-founded by former Google CIO and VP of Engineering Douglas Merrill to provide short-term loans to the underserved, has changed its name to ZestFinance and its business model, as well. Now essentially an underwriting service for lenders, can ZestFinance remain ethical? Read more »
A major limitation of big data is that the technologies used to analyze it are not easy to learn. It doesn’t have to be that way, and technologies like data visualization and cloud-based tools target less-sophisticated users — from business users to receptionists to high school students. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The Mount Sinai School of Medicine is about to get a lesson in big data thanks to Cloudera Chief Scientist Jeff Hammerbacher. He’s partnering with the school’s clinical and academic faculty to develop new methods and systems for analyzing data in a variety of important areas. Read more »
To say there are a lot of companies involved in the Hadoop ecosystem would be an understatement. To say partnership strategies are broad would be one, too. The folks at Datameer created this infographic to show just how expansive and interconnected the Hadoop ecosystem is. Read more »
Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other e-reader companies are collecting data about your e-book reading habits, but they’re keeping their most interesting findings close to the vest. Read more at paidContent »
The results of a recently released survey from Hadoop-focused startup Karmasphere show that while Hadoop use is picking up among mainstream (read “non-web”) companies, it’s still far from the all-powerful and ubiquitous insight engine its supporters (myself included) believe it will become. Read more »
