If the big data era is really going to revolutionize our world, visualizations that let more people make sense of data will be critical. Here are six startups trying to change how we interact with and look at our data. Read more »
Platfora, the San Mateo, Calif.-based startup that helped spur a general rethinking of business intelligence for a big data world, is finally exiting its beta period and is generally available. It’s no wonder the company has garnered so much attention given its stated mission to make […] Read more »
There’s no doubt that Hadoop is the data tool of the present and future, but more can be done to make it really shine for business intelligence. Read more »
Less than a month after unveiling its Hadoop analytics engine to great fanfare, Platfora has raised $20 million to realize its mission of displacing the business intelligence and data warehouse incumbents. It’ll need every dime: although the competition is old, it’s also rich, entrenched and determined. Read more »
Cloudera has joined the fray of Hadoop companies trying to turn the big data platform into an engine for exploring data interactively using standard SQL. As the biggest company in the space, its new technology called Impala could go a long way toward changing Hadoop’s image. Read more »
Analytics startup Platfora is finally showing off its next-generation business intelligence software to the world, combining Hadoop, in-memory processing and HTML5 into an impressive product. It’s entering a competitive market full of large incumbents and other innovative startups all trying to change how we do BI. Read more »
Although it’s still a work in progress, 0xdata thinks it has the answer to the problem of doing advanced statistical analysis at scale: Build on HDFS for scale, use the widely known R programming language and hide it all under a simple interface. Read more »
If we want to big data revolution to scale, then we need to make it as easy as Netscape made the web surfing experience. Here are 7 startups making that happen. Read more »
There’s a principle of application design that beautiful means usable, but a new study out of Google suggests that while beauty doesn’t necessarily affect perceived usability, poor usability can negatively affect perceived beauty. Nobody wants a reputation as selling a product that’s both unusable and ugly. 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 »
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 »
One solution to the big data skills shortage has been consulting firms that specialize in deploying big data systems companies need to make sense of their information. These companies will continue to play a vital role in helping us make sense of the the data deluge. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Big data now touches everything from enterprises to smart-meter startups, while Hadoop is fast becoming the leading tool to analyze that data, and debates around privacy abound. GigaOM Pro analysts offer insights on what to consider when it comes to big data decisions for your business. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Hadoop features front and center in the discussion of how to implement a big data strategy, one of the biggest trends in IT. There’s just one problem that keeps cropping up: many people don’t seem to know exactly what it means when somebody says “Hadoop.” 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 »
If big data does indeed write the screenplay for the movie about the next generation of business, the climax will be that mathematicians take the prom queen home. If students want high-paying jobs with the coolest companies around, they’d better heed that prediction. Read more »
Hadoop gets plenty of attention from investors and the IT press, but it’s very possible we haven’t seen anything yet. All the action of the last year has just been setting the stage for what should be a big year. Read more »
Last quarter we highlighted the fast maturation of the Platform-as-a-Service and big data spaces. Those two trends only picked up speed during the third quarter of 2011. Joining them on the cusp of IT greatness, though, are the OpenStack project and flash storage. The former gathered serious validation from big-name companies, while the latter saw less funding than last quarter but a significant number of product launches. Of course, the third quarter wasn’t all lollipops and rose petals. We saw new computing technologies and delivery models such as tablets wreak havoc on both HP and Cisco, and there are concerns (aren’t there always?) about how the Internet will handle our increased use of streaming video and cloud computing. Unfortunately for HP and Cisco, the latter problem might be an easier fix than the strategic woes facing them. Additional companies mentioned in this report include CloudBees, Rackspace, Engine Yard and Joyent. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Hadoop is all the rage in analytics, but it still isn’t easy for mere mortals to utilize the big data framework. A handful of companies are trying to solve this problem, including Karmasphere with the latest version of its Analyst Big Data product. Read more »
Hadoop-based startup Platfora has raised $5.7 million from Andreessen Horowitz and military intelligence–focused strategic investor In-Q-Tel. Investors are excited because Platfora promises big things around making big data analytics obtainable by anyone needing to parse large volumes of unstructured data, not just data scientists. Read more »
Big data and Platform-as-a-Service offerings highlighted the second quarter, suggesting that we can expect to see a shift in enterprise IT practices around application development and analytics very soon. On the PaaS front, we saw new projects like DotCloud and Cloud Foundry gain incredible momentum in just a few short months. The big-data activity ranged from major new Hadoop vendors to heavy investment in flash storage that will speed the serving of data to processing engines. In other areas, we saw an uptick in cloud-computing plans from large vendors, OpenStack continued to mature and pick up both contributors and users, and Facebook caught our eye by launching an open-source project around the designs for its specialized servers and data centers. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Salesforce.com, IBM, Heroku and Calxeda. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
For anyone concerned about the difficulty of doing advanced analytics tasks with Hadoop, the future might be just around the corner. A stealth-mode Palo Alto, Calif.–based startup called Platfora is working to make Hadoop usable even for the non-data scientists among us. Read more »
