Hey, mobile developers, have you ever wondered where users are when they interact with your apps — like down to the level of whether they’re in a Starbucks or the McDonald’s right across the street? A startup called Placed can tell you so you can act accordingly. Read more »
For better or worse, Hadoop has become synonymous with big data. In just a few years it has gone from a fringe technology to the de facto standard. But is the enterprise buying into a technology whose best day has already passed? Read more »
A major limitation of big data is that the technologies used to analyze it are not easy to learn. It doesn’t have to be that way, and technologies like data visualization and cloud-based tools target less-sophisticated users — from business users to receptionists to high school students. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The Mount Sinai School of Medicine is about to get a lesson in big data thanks to Cloudera Chief Scientist Jeff Hammerbacher. He’s partnering with the school’s clinical and academic faculty to develop new methods and systems for analyzing data in a variety of important areas. Read more »
It was a rough weekend for the internet. While Friday’s problems with Amazon Web Services and other sites could be chalked up to some wicked thunderstorms, several sites went down Saturday for periods of time thanks to problems with the “leap second.” Read more »
To say there are a lot of companies involved in the Hadoop ecosystem would be an understatement. To say partnership strategies are broad would be one, too. The folks at Datameer created this infographic to show just how expansive and interconnected the Hadoop ecosystem is. Read more »
The results of a recently released survey from Hadoop-focused startup Karmasphere show that while Hadoop use is picking up among mainstream (read “non-web”) companies, it’s still far from the all-powerful and ubiquitous insight engine its supporters (myself included) believe it will become. Read more »
Discussions about the cloud now involve more than just the IT department. New developments in hardware architectures, more-energy-efficient data centers, regulatory concerns and simplifying analytics are all discussions currently circling through the industry. Here’s what to consider when thinking about your business in the cloud. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
In late 2007, in a conversation with my colleagues I pointed out that over the next decade or so, the Internet’s infrastructure was going to be transformed in a very fundamental manner. It would start with the proliferation of Amazon Web Service-style core cloud computing and […] Read more »
Now six years old, the Apache Hadoop platform for storing and processing huge amounts of data, perhaps the catalyst of the current big data movement, appears ready for its closeup. According to the companies leading the Hadoop charge, they’re already beating away customers with a stick. Read more »
Netflix’s algorithms for recommending movies to customers might not be perfect, but it isn’t for lack of trying. The company is capturing and analyzing incredible amounts of data, even from the videos themselves, to try and figure out what you want to watch next. Read more »
It’s no secret that Facebook stores a lot of data in Hadoop, but how it keeps that data available whenever it needs it isn’t necessarily common knowledge. Today at the Hadoop Summit Facebook Engineer Andrew Ryan highlighted that solution, which Facebook calls AvatarNode. Read more »
Amazon Web Services already has a winner with its Elastic MapReduce Hadoop service, and now it’s turning up the heat by adding MapR’s Hadoop distribution as an option. Users can take advantage of MapR’s performance features while also having integration with AWS’s suite of cloud services. Read more »
VMware is launching a new open source project, called “Serengeti,” that aims to let the Hadoop data-processing platform run on the virtualization leader’s vSphere hypervisor. VMware apparently smells a lucrative opportunity in Hadoop and isn’t about to miss out on getting a piece of the pie. Read more »
Online genealogy service Ancestry.com is trying to become like the Amazon or Netflix of family trees. Much like those companies use customer data to recommend products or movies customers might like, Ancestry.com is using machine learning to make learning about ancestors a lot less work. Read more »
One year after launching into the Hadoop market with much anticipation, Yahoo spinoff Hortonworks finally has a product available. The company announced version 1.0 of its flagship Hortonworks Data Platform on Tuesday, as well as a High Availability version designed with new partner VMware. Read more »
Karmasphere CEO Gail Ennis told me recently she thinks “2013 is going to be the year when we see [Hadoop adoption] go a lot more mainstream and [turn] into a tornado.” I like the prediction, as much for its imagery as for its near-term certainty. Read more »
Two key members of the Facebook team that created the Hadoop query language Hive are launching their own big data startup called Qubole on Thursday. Qubole is a managed version of Hive that’s hosted on the Amazon Web Services cloud computing infrastructure. Read more »
If you just pay attention to largest Hadoop users, you might think the platform is just a way of powering search engines or analyzing customer behavior for ad-serving. Of course that’s not the case, but finding those broader use cases can still be kind of difficult. Read more »
If you’ve ever wondered what big data means at an individual level, this realization about sums it up: “I could either keep dying my hair or retire a year earlier.” It’s those types of realizations Intuit hopes its heavy big data use will help uncover. Read more »
It’s neither easy nor glamorous — data scientists get all the love — but making sure your Hadoop cluster is properly configured and applications are running optimally is necessary, especially as applications move into production. Here are five tools to help you do it. Read more »
Facebook’s hyperinflated valuation heading into its IPO has everything to do with its promise, and very little to do with its actual profits. Here are some numbers we know about Facebook’s infrastructure that speak to its promise perhaps as much as its 900 million users. Read more »
There’s nothing quite like a hypothetical about someone setting a whole block on fire after cutting off the fire department’s electric supply in order to slow its response. Is it comforting to know that smart people and smart analytics could help stop it from happening? Read more »
Yahoo is looking to leverage its big data prowess with a new tool for marketers called Genome. It looks like an acknowledgement that while Yahoo might not rule the the web anymore, it knows a heck of a lot about analytics. Read more »
As the world once again starts analyzing Yahoo’s myriad woes after Sunday morning’s ouster of embattled CEO Scott Thompson, I’m left wondering if its investment in Hadoop didn’t aid in the company’s demise, even if it’s a way down the long list of Yahoo’s mistakes. Read more »
The IT hype machine has everyone jumping on the big data bandwagon. But before we start saving every scrap of data in the enterprise for fear that we will miss a nugget of insight, shouldn’t we focus on what we already have? Read more »
Paul Doscher, CEO of Lucid Imagination wants you to know that when it come to enterprise-class search, open-source Lucene is a contender. And a strong contender that can face off against Google, Amazon and Microsoft in the big data search arena. Read more »
Finally the worlds of big data geeks and clean energy nerds have collided. Researchers have proposed building a “GreenHadoop,” that is a version of the MapReduce programming framework that could manage a data center’s computing workload to optimize clean energy from a solar system. Read more »
A cadre of DevOps experts will gather later this week at an undisclosed location in Northern California. The goal: To hash out issues they see in their own shops, to compare notes on problems and talk in a way that they cannot in vendor-driven conferences. Read more »
Market research firm IDC released the first legitimate market forecast for Hadoop on Monday, claiming the ecosystem around the de facto big data platform will sell almost $813 million worth of software by 2016. But Hadoop’s actual economic impact is likely much, much larger. Read more »
Ask a VC about big data and she will probably tell you about visualization of the user interface. We’re talking about intuitive UIs that let users visually work with data using charts and tools, not algorithms. It’s hard to do right, but the payoff could be huge. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Known for integration and embeddable databases, Pervasive has all kinds of exciting technology plans for cloud and big data on its roadmap. ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
When your business is to insure farmers against the effects of bad weather, you’d better have some seriously accurate data on your side. Mother Nature, after all, can be somewhat unpredictable. The Climate Corporation thinks the answer is lots of data and lots computing power. Read more »
Cloud computing and big data are in the enterprise to stay, but making the most of them presents challenges for IT decision makers. The future belongs to those companies who can work through legacy tools, ongoing security issues and the data scientist shortage. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
There are now more than half a dozen commercial Hadoop distributions in the market, and almost every enterprise with big data challenges is tinkering with the Apache Foundation-licensed software. A new report examines the key disruptive trends shaping the Hadoop platform market. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
IBM’s big data platform will support the Cloudera Hadoop distribution, a surprising decision given the reservations the two companies had expressed about each other before. That gives IBM and rival Oracle at least one thing in common: Oracle’s Big Data Appliance runs Cloudera too. Read more »
It’s beginning to look like there will be no free-standing analytics companies left. IBM is buying Vivisimo for the “discovery and navigation” expertise that companies use to access and analyze (what else?) big data. The news come a week after IBM bought Varicent, another analytics company. Read more »
VMware has acquired Cetas, a startup that provides analytics atop the Hadoop platform. Terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed, but Cetas is an 18-month-old company with tens of paying customers that didn’t need to rush into an acquisition. So, why did VMware buy it? Read more »
Big data and the marketing world go together like peanut butter and jelly. Marketers want to present their brands in the most-effective manner possible and always put the right ad in front of the right person. Big data makes that possible at a whole new level. Read more »
This quarter saw Amazon Web Services finally relaxing its public-cloud-only stance and launching services to support hybrid-cloud deployments. Meanwhile, Hadoop players moved to make their platforms more accessible to mainstream BI analysts and database administrators. A new quarterly report analyzes these trends and provides a near-term outlook. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
