A year after it launched as a skunkworks project inside music data company The Echo Nest, trendy social music site This Is My Jam is “looking at options” for going independent — as well as getting ready to launch some fun new site exploration features. Read more »
There’s evidence to suggest that traffic congestion is a side effect of strong city economies, a claim furthered by recent traffic-data analysis from INRIX. However, a decreased reliance on cars might mean clearer roads are more the result of alternative transit than of slow economic growth. Read more »
Startups and enterprises alike face barriers when it comes to cloud adoption. This includes security, speed of access to cloud resources, and runaway network costs. However, multiple solutions for direct access are being provided to address this issue for companies big and small. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Placed Analytics has published a blog post showing which retailers had the most in-store visits during the holiday season. Placed can’t track sales, but its mobile-phone-derived location data can give a glimpse into who’s attracting the most physical shoppers, and when. Read more »
A New York newspaper has come under fire for publishing a map with the addresses of registered gun owners — data that is legally public, but not often published. The incident raises a number of thorny questions about what personal information should be made public and when. Read more »
Congress is supposed to write our laws, but it’s looking inadequate at doing so in the face of a rapidly evolving technology industry. The near-term passage of a bill allowing Netflix to share user data is too little, too late — and altogether too common. Read more »
Everyone’s talking about the greatness of big data, but we’re nowhere near the promised land of what’s possible when we turn data loose on our lives. Here are three things to watch that could affect how companies and everday people consume all that info. Read more »
When we think about data privacy, we normally think about a company giving or selling our info to a third party. But a single company can also circulate around our information among its various units in ways that raise similar privacy concerns Read more »
Big data can make lives better, but it can also ensure bigger profits. That’s the pitch that Guavus, a real-time data analysis platform is sharing with mobile operators. If they show Guavus the data, the software can help them optimize pricing and capacity spending. Read more »
A startup called BitDeli is trying to democratize analytics by letting developers create custom metrics and dashboards using Python scripts instead of having to try Hadoop. What frameworks like Rails were to web development, Co-founder and CEO Ville Tuulos says, BitDeli is to analytics. Read more »
A study of Black Friday cyber-shopping said that social media advertising was a big bust with few people buying things in response to an ad from Facebook. The story is very different if you use other metrics to define “responded.” Read more »
If your application’s infrastructure is based in the cloud, then monitoring that infrastructure requires a cloud-based product as well. But monitoring the performance of cloud-based apps and the clouds they are hosted on requires a lot of data. Terabytes of it. Read more »
Web publishers can buy tools that let them identify and segment their readers, and then combine that information with other customer data to offer fine-grained audience options to advertisers. As the ad market gets more demanding, the tools may become essential for some – but not all. Read more at paidContent »
In the fight about royalties from streaming media services like Pandora, Popular cellist Zoë Keating says she’s willing to give up the money in exchange for data. It’s an idea that’s gaining traction elsewhere, too, as more companies are paying consumers for their truly valuable data. Read more »
Using data to improve patient health or deliver better care is a huge goal of the medical industry, but with so many players it’s hard to know how to bring a wide-scale data pilot to the healthcare industry. Here’s what Aetna is doing. 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 »
A big brain computer tracks Twitter’s global heartbeat during the 2012 elections and Hurricane Sandy in a research project created by two Illinois academics proving that real-time analysis of unstructured data is possible if you only have enough cores, cache and networking I/O. Read more »
Obama for America CTO Harper Reed had helped build Threadless, a site for selling hip t-shirts, but he had never done anything like this. Here’s how he and his team built a tech platform that might forever change how presidential campaigns are built. Read more »
People love platforms as a service because they are easy so Heroku’s new Fork tool that allows you to copy your database with one click should be a nice feature for users who want to play with their data without making a costly mistake. Read more »
Designing a store that’s not about selling products, but is instead about delighting and engaging with the customer may be the future of retail if George Blankenship of Tesla Motors has his way. Blankenship shares his retail vision honed at Apple and at Tesla. Read more »
It’s one day before the presidential election, and the results from computer models and other data analyses are in, with most experts giving President Obama a higher probability of winning than challenger Mitt Romney. That’s no lock, however: while data doesn’t lie, models sometimes do. Read more »
What Sandy is teaching us about the relationship between the physical and digital worlds. Once again our digital expectations can’t keep up with the reality of physical fulfillment. Read more »
Gmail has been claiming the top spot for worldwide email providers since this summer. New outside data finally shows it’s true. Read more »
Even using a smartphone in fairly normal ways — checking your location with a web-based map, sending email or text messages, uploading photos and so on — can result in massive charges when it is done while roaming internationally, thanks to the market control that telecom carriers enjoy. Read more »
Damian Black, CEO of SQLstream, talks about why data flow computing is experiencing a rebirth and what it could mean for scaling in the cloud. Read more »
The number of free tools available to novice graphic designers has grown in recent years. GigaOM’s editorial producer Rani Molla tries out the latest, Infogr.am. Read more »
Data centers are like a virtual version of the traditional shipping industry, says Joyent founder and chief technology officer Jason Hoffman — they are becoming commoditized, but at the same time they are also disrupting digital businesses just as shipping disrupted traditional manufacturing. 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 »
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 »
Prismatic founder Bradford Cross doesn’t come from a traditional media background — he is a data scientist who specializes in machine learning — but what he is doing with content recommendations says a lot about how the media business is evolving and what the future might look like. Read more »
Building a robotic bee that acts like a real bee is a lot more complicated than programming a robot to fly around from flower to flower. A project called Green Brain aims to build an artificial intelligence system that can actually mimic a bee’s brain. Read more »
Social media analytics firm Dataminr announced that it has raised a $13 million Series B round of financing. The company accesses the Twitter firehose and provides an early warning network for finance and government clients. Read more »
Nokia Research Center has developed a new system for finding parking spots that rewards users for sharing information on primo spots. It’s a smart approach to a common problem, as users might be more willing to share if they know they’ll get privileged information in return. Read more »
The ability to distribute real-time information through social networks like Twitter is a powerful thing, but a new study points out that one of the downsides of this phenomenon is the fact that much of the content that gets linked to eventually disappears. Read more »
Targeting consumers with relevant ads on their mobile devices is still an inexact science, but new data sources should make the process much more accurate. Knowing precisely where users shop and whether ads influenced their purchases could help everyone get what they expect from mobile ads. Read more »
Photojournalist Rick Smolan has a new book coming out called The Human Face of Big Data. Far more than a book, it’s part of a project to show how much data each one of us generates, how it’s all connected and how it’s changing the world. Read more »
Blue River Technology is a startup that raised $3.1 million to take machine learning from Silicon Valley to the farming-focused Salinas Valley. It has built a robot that identifies and then kills weeds and hopes to reduce the use of pesticides in agriculture. Read more »
Locu, a Boston-based startup that came out of MIT, is releasing a local business information API for developers and publishers. The API will let them access deeper local data on not just menu items but all kinds of detailed information on product descriptions and customization options. Read more »
The effort to dig out the data in our genomes has led to a rash of discoveries announced Wednesday, but amid the scientific insights are cultural ones that speak to how companies will have to learn to collaborate around big data and manage it. Read more »
South Bend, Ind., is using a sensor network and IBM software to prevent its sewer system from dumping sewage into rivers or backing up into citizens’ home, but it’s just a microcosm of global trend toward solving urban maladies using big data. Read more »
