With its acquisition of Lucky Sort, Twitter seems to be acknowledging that it’s a data company after all. The plan appears to be building a services that would do for Twitter equivalent to services such as Google Trends and Google Analytics. Read more »
Hedonometer.org draws on tweets and other sources of textual sentiment to gauge population-level happiness. Read more »
Is Facebook serious with its new partner categories advertising program? Somehow, using offline data to target ads seems like a stretch for a company already facing a privacy backlash and that has such rich data to mine from inside its own platform. Read more »
For a company like Eventbrite, which manages ticket sales and audiences for events across the world, keeping up with the constant flow of data and information is a challenge. 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 »
The US presidential election was further proof that 2012 has been a good year to be a quant — and being a data scientist has never been sexier. But data is nothing without trust, says former Last.fm executive Matthew Hawn. Read more »
Big data doesn’t always have to be complicated or even be the core of a business. As Alliance Health Networks is discovering, applying a few machine learning models taught using public data to healthcare discussions online can help patients and build a business. Read more »
Data is a hot topic among the startup community, which is why stealthy startup RelateIQ has a bunch of people excited about its product and plans. The startup has some big data street cred with executives from Palantir and LinkedIn’s former data scientist DJ Patil involved. 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 »
Social TV is any application, website or software that allows viewers to interact with television programming and share that interaction with others. Startups in this space hope to combine ubiquitous second-screen technology with well-established audience behavior to drive new value around shows. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
When you mix a researcher, a massive online encyclopedia and a supercomputer, the result is a collection of insights and visualizations into what Wikipedia looks like mapped across time and space. It looks a lot like how our history books might look merged and graphed. Read more »
One of the world’s leading credit agencies is courting controversy with an experimental program that will use data from Facebook and other social networks to inform its ratings decisions. And the biggest surprise? It’s happening in privacy-mad Germany. Read more »
In Oren Etzioni’s world, telling you where to buy a product is so 20 years ago. Today, Etzioni wants to tell you when to buy. Tomorrow, well, maybe he can let you know when you’re in the vicinity of a great deal. Read more »
Information from Facebook on user “interests” is nothing compared to the affinity data that could be mined from Pinterest. The potential to aggregate, analyze, and deploy the site’s data is huge. Baynote CTO Scott Brave examines the types of affinity data that Pinterest could monetize. Read more »
Businesses can now leverage big data for the benefit of driving marketing insights. According to Ajay Agarwal of Bain Capital Ventures, this fundamental shift will create several multi-billion dollar winners, and new technology companies will emerge as the marketing equivalents of Salesforce and SAP. Read more »
Enterprises realize their big data is a strategic asset, and they have budget to spend against it. But without the usual yardsticks and metrics for measuring the success, these projects will fall flat. ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Mobile deals combine location-aware discounts with mobile marketing campaigns. What are the largest pitfalls in this promising space, though? Privacy and security issues must be addressed to assure consumers their purchases are secure and their location is being closely guarded. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
This report outlines the myriad issues at play in Facebook’s move, from examining how CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to rewire the world to understanding the company’s infrastructure dependency. But from every angle, it’s clear the effects will ripple throughout the startup and tech communities. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The fourth quarter may have lacked a dominating big-event product announcement like Q3’s Facebook platform extension or Q2’s unveiling of Google+, but the NewNet world continued to buzz along. In the battle for mind share, everyone wanted to be a platform. Meanwhile, consumer and social technologies continued to gain momentum, and new vehicles for content and service discovery presented both challenges and opportunities for NewNet companies. And it is hard to ignore the overcrowded but growing world of daily deals. This quarterly report analyzes these trends and others, and it also provides a near-term outlook of trends, technologies and companies to watch in 2012. Companies mentioned in the report include Amazon, Facebook and Socialcast. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Big data is often talked about as a phenomenon that lets organizations create narratives from their volumes of data. That is an apt characterization when we are talking about connecting the dots among disparate and possibly disconnected data sets. However, when we are talking about anything ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The outsize growth in online spending this holiday season suggests that e-commerce as a sector of the economy has passed some kind of tipping point and that factors beyond simply convenience and price — both long-standing hallmarks of online shopping — are propelling the e-commerce sector ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Much of last week’s buzz surrounding the launch of Color was justifiably skeptical. Does the world really need another mobile photo-sharing app? But parts of the startup’s vision extend far beyond photo-sharing, and make the company worth watching as a potential indicator of social media trends. Read more »
One of the keys to monetizing NewNet technologies like real-time feeds and social media will be harnessing the massive amounts of data they create. In recent weeks, there have been a handful of announcements illustrating creative ways of using this data. But most of them have ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
