Google has opened its Knowledge Graph to the English-speaking world and has made intelligent voice search possible on mobile phones. Underneath it all, of course, are ever more-complex methods of analyzing data to make search smarter and easier than it has any business being. Read more »
A new app called Saga hit the App Store promising to be a personal assistant that knows what users are up to even if they don’t. It wants to tell users where they’ve been, where they’ll go next and how long it will take to get there. Read more »
There’s so much data available and such powerful tools for analyzing it that the world might be a lot better off if politicians listened to the data first, rather than their parties or constituents. Already, data is showing ways to limit everything from traffic to AIDS. Read more »
If you’re reading this in Los Angeles right now, there’s a decent chance you’re doing so while stuck in traffic on a packed freeway. Well, help might be on the way if efforts from companies such as Xerox to make sense of traffic flows work out. Read more »
In cloud and big data, the second quarter of 2012 featured several high-profile deals and product launches that could reshape the marketplace for everyone. Google and Microsoft launched Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings, software-defined networking took off, and all eyes stayed fixed on the continuing promise of data analytics. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Startup Prior Knowledge opened up its public beta to its database API on Monday, so it can solve the problems of developers who want to play with data, but who’d rather avoid all that pesky math. Prior Knowledge has raised $1.4 million to achieve its goals. Read more »
PoliticIt is a Logan, Utah-based startup that uses machine learning to gauge the popularity of political candidates by measuring their digital influence. Its system has proven remarkably accurate in predicting winners, but its real promise is in leveling the playing field between political haves and have-nots. Read more »
Google is teaching computers to recognize human faces without telling the algorithms which faces are human. It’s a machine-learning problem made for this era of unstructured data and access to large compute clusters. It’s also the next big opportunity in tech — enabling computers to “see.” 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 »
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 »
In a move to expand its utility beyond simply finding better answers to known statistical problems, hot data-science startup Kaggle is now letting its stable of expert data scientists compete to tell companies how they can improve their businesses using machine learning. Read more »
Solariat Founder and CEO Jeffrey Davitz has a message for anyone trying to leverage social network data to make money: “The fundamental problem with social is yes, it’s big data, but it’s mostly big, sucky data.” Targeting users means deciphering what they really want. Read more »
Even if you haven’t heard of LivePerson, chances are you’ve encountered one of its products while browsing online. It’s the company behind those pop-up windows offering real-time chat with a representative, and it uses big data to decide which visitors are worth what type of attention. Read more »
Who needs a Ph.D. in statistics when you have the cloud? Machine learning is high data science, and it’s fast becoming something that anyone leverage to sell more handbags, or solve a research problem, or build the next LinkedIn or Facebook. Read more »
Legal scholars are always searching for ways to improve the patent system, sometimes via sweeping changes, but big data — especially techniques such as machine learning and natural-language processing — could help provide a technological fix to a big part of the problem. Read more »
Everybody who has watched The Terminator knows about Skynet, the computing system that becomes self-aware and decides to destroy humanity. But I look at cloud computing and automated systems and I fear something much more depressing: the total leisure paradise of the movie Wall-E. Read more »
Big data startup Skytree emerged from stealth mode on Thursday with a product that is designed to democratize the science of machine learning while improving significantly on the speed and scale of existing options. Skytree has raised $1.5 million from Javelin Venture Partners. Read more »
If you are a data scientist, or have other “big data” chops, you can write your own ticket, headhunters say. A search of popular job posting sites shows huge demand for anyone who can demonstrate these skills even in this tough economy. Read more »
Companies are hot on social media for a number of reasons, but perhaps chief among them should be that social platforms can create focus groups at a scale never before possible. Given the right big data tools and techniques, the insights can be fantastic. Read more »
More news from the Google-data-scientists-conduct-the-coolest-research desk: YouTube has created an algorithm for determining what videos are funniest based on the intensity of viewer comments. It sounds fairly unimportant, but YouTube’s work actually speaks volumes about the potential of social-media sentiment analysis. Read more »
We’re entering the age of the smart personal assistant, as computers increasingly listen and understand what we’re saying and fulfill our requests in real time. Siri and Watson have gotten a lot of attention but we’ll see this type of service in a variety of areas. Read more »
If you like the idea of your analytics system’s getting more accurate with each piece of data it ingests, it looks like you are in for an exciting run, because machine learning appears to be catching fire across the ecosystem of big data vendors. Read more »
The great thing about big data is that there’s still plenty of room for new blood, especially for companies that want to leave infrastructure in the rearview mirror. At this point, the data-infrastructure space, including Hadoop, is well-funded and nearly saturated, but it also needs help. Read more »
Ad-targeting company 33Across is acquiring link-tracking specialist Tynt Multimedia, resulting in a combined user graph spanning 1.25 billion users. Both are storing and analyzing billions of transactions daily, and they will use that data to help publishers compete on ad sales against mega sites like Google. Read more »
IBM is showing off how its artificial intelligence system Watson can help retailers get smarter in dealing with consumers. IBM believes that Watson could be positioned as a phone customer service line, in-store kiosk or as a resource available through tablet-wielding store clerks. Read more »
Beepl opened its social Q&A site to the public, with the hopes of challenging Quora and others by finding specialists to answer user questions. It does that with technology that matches users with the queries that they are most interested in and most qualified to answer. Read more »
Google announced it has bought Clever Sense, maker of the smart local recommendations app Alfred. The deal arms Google with another tool to attack the local market, as it seeks to scoop up more ad dollars and be the go-to resource for all things local. Read more »
Connectivity changes everything. That’s the credo driving just about every corner of our day-to-day lives. As human beings, we are now connected to one another through not just our social networks but also our cars, the books we read, the albums we download and even our own health and wellness habits (to name just a few areas). With that in mind, GigaOM Pro has singled out certain areas in the technology industry where we see this shift to constant connectivity taking place most drastically. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Hopper wants to make searching for travel options a more complete experience using big data tools, and it has raised millions to do it. Hopper lets users enter keyword searches, but it provides results far beyond those typically found in a keyword search. Read more »
BankSimple, the next generation mobile bank start-up, has raised $10 million as it prepares to launch. The new financing is led by existing investor IA Ventures and also includes Shasta Ventures and should help the company scale up for a public debut later this year. Read more »
Affectiva, a Massachusetts start-up spun out of the MIT Media Lab, has nabbed $5.7 million in Series B funding to help it pursue technology which helps recognize and measure human emotions. The company sees big opportunities in helping companies understand and gauge how people are feeling. Read more »
Startup medical search company Apixio is trying to save lives by bringing machine-learning and natural-language-processing techniques to medical records, giving doctors a patient’s entire relevant medical history via a simple cloud-based search engine. The goal is to make information-sharing among medical providers far more intelligent. Read more »
Consumer electronics recommendation engine Retrevo launched a new feature this morning that challenges the Amazon Marketplace. However, for Retrevo to meet its lofty goals of dethroning Amazon even in this single category, it will have to rely on the accuracy of its machine-learning algorithms. Read more »
