A number of new data markets have emerged in the past few years that provide access to data for decision making. It’s early days, however, with plenty of kinks to work out on both the technology side and with business models. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Continuing a yearlong trend, the fourth quarter in big IT was all about big data, and Hadoop in particular. Still, many are beginning to recognize the software framework’s shortcomings, which is why this quarter also saw more attention for startups claiming easy analytics and real-time processing. Elsewhere in infrastructure, SaaS startups made out well and valuations for these companies are getting higher, and naturally there was news from the AWS camp. This quarterly wrap-up examines these events and more, including the quarter’s dark spot, the hike in prices in the hard-drive manufacturing space due to the floods in Thailand. Companies mentioned in this report include Calxeda, Heroku, Rackspace, Salesforce.com and Tier3. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
How does the cloud market for the next year look? There will be no silver linings or lemonade. This research note, part of GigaOM Pro’s outlook for 2012, examines startups’ chances to challenge traditional enterprise IT practices, cloud pricing models, the true state of federated clouds, and how IT jobs will change in the coming months. Expect plenty of defensive M&A, cloud lock-in, phantom data discovery, outages, availability headaches, pricing confusion and job displacement over the next 12 months. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Application developers can now use one API to access data from Factual’s marketplace that contains data on more than 55 million places worldwide. It’s not data nirvana just yet, but Factual points to what our data-driven future might look like. Read more »
Alistair Croll’s post on O’Reilly Radar this week may have been titled “There’s no such thing as big data,” but Croll believes the exact opposite. Rather than just collecting data, he argues, you have to ask the right questions of it. Coincidentally, DJ Patil joined Greylock ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
A new way of thinking about data and data scientists illustrates the broader shift that is slowly under way in the economy, a shift from simply collecting big data toward gathering and using data in order to make businesses better informed. Read more »
Bundle uses the billions of Citi customer transactions to draw correlations between spending habits and what other people might enjoy or buy. CTO Phil Kim explains that wrangling even highly structured data takes a lot of organizing, a lot of computing and a lot of time. Read more »
Factual, an open data start-up built by Applied Semantics co-founder Gil Elbaz, has raised $25 million in first-round funding to expand its data API service. The company is trying to build a platform for open data that developers can tap to power their applications. Read more »
Web data API provider Factual is making a play for the hot geo-local space today. Today it came out a huge new dataset for geo-coded information like addresses and phone numbers tied to latitude and longitude for 14 million local U.S. businesses and points of interest. Read more »
[qi:gigaom_icon_web-apps] First there was open source. And now, here comes open data. Or that’s what Gil Elbaz thinks. He’s returning to the startup arena with a new Los Angeles-based company called Factual, which is building its business around the concept of open data. It wants to […] Read more »
