Since launching less than a year ago, LearnSprout, an API platform for education, has helped 150 schools and 15 developers bring new software into the classroom. With a suite of new products, it plans to do even more to open and clean up student data. Read more »
Etsy, Airbnb and the Climate Corporation are all using a combination of Cascading and Amazon Elastic MapReduce to make creating Hadoop jobs as simple as possible. But they’re not the only options for doing so — simplifying Hadoop usage is big business in the IT world. Read more »
Hopper’s multiyear mission to use big data tools to bring structure to the web’s travel-related information continues with a fresh infusion of cash. CEO Frederic Lalonde talked about how his company is taking advantage of acquisition-happy Google’s interest in travel information. Read more »
Although it’s still a work in progress, 0xdata thinks it has the answer to the problem of doing advanced statistical analysis at scale: Build on HDFS for scale, use the widely known R programming language and hide it all under a simple interface. Read more »
In yet another move to simplify the process of patent search, Google is now tackling the particularly tough problem of prior with a new feature. But all this innovation begs the question of whether Google, not the USPTO, should become the de facto patent search engine. Read more »
German startup ParStream raised a $5.6 million Series A round for its analytic database that goes head to head with larger vendors such as HP Vertica, EMC Greenplum and ParAccel. It’s a highly competitive database market right now, so we’ll see if ParStream has legs. Read more »
SpaceCurve has raised another $3.5 million for its technology that should allow users to analyze mountains of geospatial data. Although the company has yet to deliver product code, it already has Fortune 50 customers waiting in the wings to test it on some difficult problems. Read more »
In the era of cloud computing and big data, chief marketing officers can either sink or swim depending on their ability to recognize the importance of the consumer information available to them and are able to capture and put it to use. Read more »
A team of Swiss researchers thinks it has created an algorithm capable of tracking almost anything — from computer viruses to terrorist attacks to epidemics — back to the source using a minimal amount of data. The trick is focusing on time to figure out who “infected” whom. Read more »
There’s been something of a perfect storm in the data world over the past several years. Companies are sitting on more data than ever before, yet it’s never been easier or cheaper to analyze all that information to solve problems and create new business opportunities. Read more »
Satyamev Jayate, one of India’s highest-rated television shows, is using data as a means to effect meaningful change. The show’s producers are aggregating and analyzing the millions of messages they receive on controversial issues to do everything from planning future episodes to pushing for political change. Read more »
A group of researchers have created a computing system capable of identifying the unique features that help create a city’s look and feel, beyond just its famous landmarks. Their project is just the beginning, however, as the researchers note numerous artistic and commerical applications. Read more »
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 »
