Tech — GigaOM

Tech

PayPal’s years of experience in online payments is one of its biggest assets as it chases mobile and in-store transactions. But the by product of all that experience — mounds of data — could be an even bigger weapon. PayPal’s chief scientist Mok Oh explains the … Read More »

Riding a new wave of growth, analytics startup Mixpanel today announced that it had raised $10 million in new funding from Andreesen Horowitz and other investors. Read More »

 
 

While the latest business trend is in tapping the power of big data, Personal.com is helping people find the potential in wielding what it calls small data, the private information they have about themselves. The company announced a new iPhone app Monday to further its plans. … Read More »

While there has been much outrage about Google “snooping” user data over Wi-Fi, even the FCC says this behavior wasn’t illegal, since the networks in question were public. Is this a sign that the laws around privacy are broken, or is the Streetview furor an overreaction? Read More »

Plans by the British government to give intelligence agencies access to details of every phone call, email, text and website visit made in the country have drawn plenty of anger from across the spectrum. Here’s what people are saying about the controversy. Read More »

(c) 2012 Pinar Ozger. pinar@pinarozger.com

How do you or your business get the most value out of all the data you’ve accessed about your customers? At Structure:Data, Nick Weir, CEO of ChoozOn, gave some basic tips on the most important things to consider when mining your data. Read More »

Aneesh Chopra

To improve medicine, we need a big heaping dose of data. That’s the takeaway from a conversation with Aneesh Chopra, the former U.S. CTO, at SXSW in Austin on Friday. He discussed where startups interested in this space should focus on as well as privacy. Read More »

There has been a lot of outrage — bordering on hysteria — about Google’s new privacy policy, with some critics advising users to delete their search histories. But is there that much to fear from Google’s tracking? Not really. In fact, in many ways it is … Read More »

With the launch of Google’s new privacy policy — which gives it the ability to share personal data across all of its services — European regulators are questioning its legality. Here’s what the web is saying about the spat. Read More »

European politicians have just voted up proposals to slash roaming charges for mobile users who stray across the continent’s borders. But it’s drawn a violent response from Vodafone boss Vittorio Colao who thinks it could create “hell” for operators. Read More »

Meet Frstee, the snowman built from Twitter

Want to give Christmas a bit of a technological twist? Forget buying gadgets and doodads as gifts: why not dangle a 3D printed, data-crafted bauble from your tree instead? Read More »

Twitter may be an ever-flowing stream of information, but as it becomes a more mainstream source of news and commentary it also becomes a huge reservoir of data that can be analyzed, and that’s what startups like ThinkUp and DataSift and Gnip are trying to do … Read More »

More Must Reads

Blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick is leaving his job at Read/Write Web to start a company called Plexus Engine, which he says will offer data-filtering tools he has used as a tech journalist. Kirkpatrick joins a growing group of bloggers who have left to join the startup world. Read More »

Researchers are busy trying to use Twitter to predict everything from disease outbreaks and financial markets to elections and even revolutions. New research from Topsy Labs shows that Twitter can provide a window into events like the Arab Spring. But can it predict what will happen? Read More »

What drove Walmart to acquire OneRiot and make it part of Walmart Labs is the same thing plenty of other companies — particularly media entities — should be interested in: namely, making sense of all the data that is coming in from users on social networks. Read More »

USC Annenberg Innovation Lab launched a film forecaster last month that utilizes IBM’s BigSheets analytics tool. It showed that Big Data analysis is something that can be done by non-technical people and it underscores the promise of data analysis when it reaches the masses. Read More »

Facebook has shut down a service from Open-Xchange that allowed users to export the email addresses of their contacts, which makes the Germany company the latest to run afoul of the social network’s ongoing attempts to maintain control over the information of its users. Read More »

A lot of the attention on Google+ has focused on whether it’s a “Facebook killer,” but it’s actually more likely to become a competitor for Twitter than Facebook. Is the Google network just benefitting from “shiny new object” syndrome, or could it pose a real threat? Read More »

Facebook’s blocking of a Chrome extension that allowed users to export their friends’ email addresses has reignited a debate over who should control that kind of data — should you have the right to export it, or is Facebook right to prevent you from doing so? Read More »

Israeli startup Personyze is linking with one of the web’s most controversial data collection companies, Rapleaf, to provide new tools for website owners. Can its attempt to help ordinary website owners turn information into actions really solve the big data puzzle? Read More »

New York City’s new Chief Digital Officer Rachel Sterne said New York City is trying to turn the city’s government into a platform that enables developers and individuals to take data about life in the metropolis and use it to create apps, services and other resources. Read More »

When it comes to social data, one of the biggest firehoses around is the one that comes from Twitter. Trying to make sense of 140 million tweets a day in something close to real-time is a significant challenge, says Tap11 chief technology officer Braxton Woodham. Read More »

When you have almost 600 million users and a “social graph” of the connections between them, you can do a lot with that data — so a Facebook intern plotted the connections between millions of users and came up with a map of the socially connected … Read More »

U.S. teenagers have quadrupled their mobile data usage, according to Nielsen, a sign that the traditional power texters are now ready to become serious mobile Internet users. Teens used 62 megabytes in the second quarter of this year, compared to just 14 MB last year. Read More »

Most website users prefer logging in with a Google sign-in, but Facebook is a close second, according to new data from Janrain. Close to 40 percent of users preferred to sign in with a Google ID, while 24 percent chose to login with their Facebook profile. Read More »

We managed to create 800,000 petabytes of digital information last year, according to a study released today by IDC and EMC. The creation of digital data will increase to 1.2 million petabytes by the end of this year, which means we need fatter pipes. Read More »

The World Bank, which tracks everything from mortality rates to livestock production in hundreds of countries around the globe, said today it is opening up its data, including removing all of the pay walls around data that used to require a subscription fee to download. Read More »

The Icelandic government is expected to put forward legislation that could turn the northern nation into an international freedom-of-information haven, thanks in part to the efforts of Wikileaks and the country’s recent experiences with corporate and government inaction and secrecy during its banking crisis. Read More »

BlueKai, which aggregates and sells data on 200 million online shoppers to advertisers and publishers, today announced a $21 million third round of funding led by GGV Capital and including former investors Redpoint Ventures and Battery Ventures, bringing its total funding to $34.7 million. Read More »

Most cloud providers house services in only a few geographically distributed data centers, and national or continental data storage regulations can limit how -– and if -– organizations move their operations to the cloud. Can legislation can be passed that takes into account such realities? Read More »

In 1964, Justice Potter Stewart, who was having difficulty explaining what exactly he meant by “hard-core” pornography, famously said, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced…but I know it when I see it.” When … Read More »

For the longest time, I have had an unshaken belief in the Internet’s core truth: It is a vast repository of data that can be tapped to build interesting, and perhaps exciting, experiences. In other words, it is not just the data, but what you … Read More »

Gear6 today released Web Cache in an effort to commercialize the Internet’s predominant (de facto, for Linux) distributed caching protocol, memcached. Every Top 20 web site not owned by Microsoft uses memcached (Facebook has almost 1,000 servers dedicated to its memcached tier) … Read More »

Database virtualization proprietor Xeround said yesterday that it received a Billing & OSS World 2009 Excellence Award for “Best Operational Support System” based on its deployment at T-Mobile. Both companies have been mum on the details of the deployment (trust me, I … Read More »

Command of the issues, cool confidence and disarming smile aside, Barack Obama might just owe his campaign’s success to his team’s ability to harness the technology at their fingertips. Social networking, broadband and data management all played huge roles in making the Obama campaign the most … Read More »

AMD isn’t going after the mobile Internet device market that Intel and other chip vendors are eying. AMD’s senior VP and chief marketing officer, Nigel Dessau, told eWeek, “What we are saying is that we are a smaller company and we have to … Read More »

The National Association of Venture Capitals released a demographic study today that was pretty anticlimactic. They discovered that venture capitalists in charge of investing money were white (88 percent) and male (86 percent.) But the trade organization was encouraged by the fact that 81 percent … Read More »

Eucalyptus, an open-source infrastructure for cloud computing on clusters that duplicates the functionality of Amazon’s EC2, directly using the Amazon command-line tools, was released today. For the full story, and a way to download Eucalyptus, head over to OStatic . Read More »

Editor’s Note: our readers are familiar now with contributor Ben Yoskovitz’s work. (His company, Standout Jobs was just named one of Canada’s hottest startups. Congratulations, Ben!) This week, on his Instigator Blog, Ben offers a great treatise on how founders can leverage … Read More »

While working a full time job, I have devoted my nights and weekends to developing a community-powered marketplace, which I feel will be incredibly successful. I have bounced the idea off many people, and they seem to be excited about the site and the movement it … Read More »

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