Graphiq targets publishers with new data visualization tools
FindTheBest rebrands
Google isn’t the only company with a new name. Research startup FindTheBest announced today that it’s rebranding as Graphiq, and releasing a new…
The industry leader in emerging technology research Subscribe
Google isn’t the only company with a new name. Research startup FindTheBest announced today that it’s rebranding as Graphiq, and releasing a new…
With the year nearly at an end, it seemed like a good time to take a look at which Gigaom posts generated the most traffic…
Google has responded to criticisms over its Flu Trends tool and has reworked its predictive model to also account for data from the Centers for for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s still not a replacement for actual scientific research, but should be more accurate.
StackIQ, a startup that specializes in automating and managing big data clusters, has taken in a $6 million series B funding round.…
If a smartwatch comes with a cellular connection, it will probably need a data plan. The Timex Ironman One, one of the first smartwatches with a built-in 3G modem, will require a $40 annual subscription after the first year.
Syapse, a startup trying to build something akin to Google’s Knowledge Graph for medical data, has raised a $10 million series B…
The Data Retention and Investigation Powers (DRIP) Act will reinstate powers taken away from the government in a ruling by Europe’s top court. However, it would also expand those powers in terms of territory and scope — despite what the government is saying.
Facebook recently conducted a short study to see whether or not mail providers are actively using STARTTLS to deliver messages via an encrypted network. The company urges email providers to support the capability.
Twitter is offering up access to its entire corpus of tweets to a select group of researchers through a new data grant program. But the program raises a simmering question over whether such valuable data shouldn’t be more open in the first place.
Report: Microsoft’s decision to beef up security around data transmission is more evidence that NSA revelations are hurting U.S. tech companies’ ability to compete.
A laser-based technology allows transfer speeds of up to 40 gigabits per second. The researchers hope the development will solve some of the bottlenecks facing the computing industry.
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/09/change-org/all/ This article from Klint Finley at Wired Enterprise raises some good questions about the ideal integration of big data into nonprofits.…
Dallas-based enterprise-search company PureDiscovery has closed a $10 million series C funding round that should help it brings its BrainSpace platform to the masses. The idea is one to build knowledge about the content of documents rather than just an index of what’s where.
Rapidus is reporting that Apple has acquired AlgoTrim, a Swedish data compression startup. This could potentially help it reduce iOS data usage and improve camera quality.
It appears investors are buying into the adage that CMOs are the new CIOs. On Friday, a Portland-based startup called Lytics announced…
Researchers have simulated 1 second of real brain activity, on a network equivalent to 1 percent of an actual brain’s neural network, using the world’s fourth-fastest supercomputer. The results aren’t revolutionary just yet, but they do hint at what will be possible as computing power increases.
Immersion is a program that utilizes gMail meta-data to show off your personal connections.
SpaceCurve has raised another $10 million for its database technology designed to make sense of massive amounts of data from sensors, social media, mobile devices and other streaming sources.
The needle-and-haystack analogy of finding important insights inside big data certainly applies to tweets, and Dataminr, one service that find the needles in the Twitter firehose, just got more venture funding.
Hedonometer.org draws on tweets and other sources of textual sentiment to gauge population-level happiness.
Major League Baseball is using new data tools to create more detailed profiles of people who visit team and league websites. MLB plans to use the extra data to create profiles of affluent customers, and to let brands target those profiles on private ad exchanges.
As companies rack up more data on consumers, it’s high time for talking about new standards for data sharing and what data ownership should look like.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is offering a $100,000 grant to a group that can solve the problem of “data interoperability,” or segregated sites storing data on nonprofits and startups.
Google could add huge data sets of satellite images to the Google Maps Engine, which businesses would be able to use for rapid analysis of changes over time. Now only researchers can access the data.
Venture capitalists made more big data investments than ever before in 2012, and a few more deals have already closed in 2013. Entrepreneurs from several venture-backed data startups will speak at Structure:Data next month.
If your doctor asks you to touch his or her iPhone at your next phyiscal, don’t be alarmed. It’s likely they have an AliveCor iPhone case; the device measures pulse through two fingers and can provide a detailed electro-cardiogram when held to your chest.
There’s no shortage of great minds using big data techniques to improve the quality of our medical treatments, but sometimes they can’t get access to the data they need most. Improving access to genetic data, for example, might just help cure cancer.
Forget what comes after infinity, we at GigaOm were worried about a smaller problem, namely what comes after a yottabyte. Well now we know the answer to that problem — a 1 followed by 27 zeros (a yottabyte only has 24 zeros), otherwise known as a brontobyte.
Yes, 4G and LTE networks are huge improvements over previous-generation mobile networks, but they’re not about to cure mobile-data woes without some…
Are you a startup working on big data/high performance computing; gaming; consumer or business applications? Do you want $50,000? If so, Amazon has a challenge for you.
SpaceCurve has raised another $3.5 million for its technology that should allow users to analyze mountains of geospatial data. Although the company has yet to deliver product code, it already has Fortune 50 customers waiting in the wings to test it on some difficult problems.
Sure, you can trust a site is delivering you the best search results, but sometimes it might be nice to dig down, see a little of what the system sees and find that needle in the haystack. A new semantic search interface might let that happen.
Rice University researchers have built a web-based calculator that predicts the risks associated with hurricanes for an address. The tool uses historial and meteorological data to generate a risk profile for residents of Houston. This is what big data tools should do — offer users actionable intelligence.
Online bra retailer, True&Co, which launched last week to help women find the perfect bra, is having trouble delivering its products. As the Internet crosses over into the real world, not only websites must prepare for a launch, but the entire supply chain.
The U.S. government is investing billions of dollars in big data technologies and research, and now it has a team of industry executives from IBM, Amazon and elsewhere ready and willing to share their views on how it can best transition into a data-driven institution.
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.
Mortar Data and Bison Alternatives represented big data startups at Boston TechStars Demo Day on Thursday. While they were outnumbered by consumer-focused startups, they nonetheless show the appeal of harnessing big volumes and velocities of data for productivity and profit.
Big data meets the quantitative self with a project to collect every heartbeat for science. Dr. Leslie Saxon wants everyone to send in their heartbeat data to a website to create a database to track heart health. Such a database could help predict heart health.
I loved this talk by Jer Thorp, currently the data-artist-in-residence at the New York Times. His work has appeared in my publications but it is the first time I have seem him speak about humanizing data. This talk for Tedx Vancouver is highly recommended.
An effort to build a telescope that can see back 13 billion years to the creation of the universe is prompting a five year €32 million ($42.7 million) effort to create a low-power supercomputer and networks to handle the data the new telescope will generate.
You know how our social graphs are creeping into every aspect of our web lives, from search results to coupons? Well, get ready for something a lot more personal, a lot more targeted and, perhaps, a lot more creepy.
If you want proof of a skills gap in big data, check out these charts. In the past 12 months, demand for “big data” specialists, including the relatively new data scientist category, have exploded, according to Indeed.com listings.
Twitter has acquired Julpan, a New York City-based startup that analyzes real-time data collected from blogs, Tweets, status updates and news sources. It’s just the latest in a series of moves Twitter’s made to better analyze the huge amounts of data that flow through its service.
Thank the humble, cheap sensor, the standard wireless radio and basic data bases for the future of planetary assistance. A massive sensor and data network called the National Ecological Observatory Network, or NEON, could go under construction as soon as this summer.
Underneath Twitter’s fun and trendy public image, the data streamed through the microblogging service is apparently worth some big bucks. DataSift, one of only two companies authorized to re-syndicate Twitter’s content using its “firehose,” on Monday announced a $6 million venture capital funding round.
I met with a cool startup called DueDil, which is trying to provide a Lexis-Nexis-meets-Google service that aggregates public data on public and private companies from a variety of databases and uses that to create new financial metrics to determine success.
Infochimps is attempting to build a data market, and in doing so, the company is wading into some of the messiest and most unstructured data around, attempting to clean it up and put it up for sale. I talk to co-founder Flip Kromer about the challenges.
Big Data software company Acunu said it has closed £2.2 million ($3.6 million) in Series A financing. The startups software helps bridge the gap between expensive in-memory storage and cheap-but-slow hard drives, by offering a rewrite of the storage stack optimized for solid state drives.
Every attendee of SXSW Interactive is used to the yoga, the HTML5, the gaming, and the death of journalism panels, but for 2011, the conference has fastened onto two new trends: data as a double-edged sword and a lack of women in technology and startups.
Aaccording to one machine-learning expert, one key takeaway from Watson’s “Jeopardy!” victory is simple: humans are very smart. That a system such as Watson can understand natural language is a huge step forward, but it’s still only as good as its data and algorithms.
The interesting story behind OkCupid, the online dating site recently acquired by Match.com, is OkTrends, its blog that analyzes the site’s wealth of data to shed light on our love lives. But the interesting story behind OkTrends is its use of R to power those analytics.
New start-up BillGuard is looking to build a crowd-sourced anti-virus billing protection system that digests a consumer’s transactional history and pulls in alerts from banks, existing members and the web. The system uses big data analysis and machine learning to help users spot fraud and errors.
Norman Nie helped create SPSS, one of the first companies to take advantage of the data computers enabled researchers and businesses to track. He spoke with me about why we need to speak to our data and how that conversation can change the way we innovate.
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.
MyCityWay reached 1 million in downloads by combining familiar information like local dining, nightlife, deals and movie showtimes with government data that creates a very sticky resource with users. It’s a great example of how companies can mine overlooked data sets and turn them into businesses.
As part of its ongoing battle with Facebook over data portability as it applies to users’ contact information, Google has added a new warning message when you try to export your contacts to the social network: a message entitled “Trap my contacts now.”
Swivel.com, a SF-based startup funded by C/Net Founder Halsey Minor quietly shut down. Quite a shame considering big data visualization is so hot. The groundbreaking data visualization company had thousands of users (I was one of them). Less than ten paid for it.
As data volumes skyrocket, startups looking to take advantage of the opportunity in Big Data need to focus on the art of statistical-learning algorithms, says the founder of Dataspora. Modeling and analysis through algorithms is what will determine the winners and losers in Big Data.
Facebook launched a new approach to understanding groups of friends today. CEO Mark Zuckerberg called groups “a fundamental building block” and “the biggest problem in social networking,” and said Facebook has determined the best solution is a social one: to enable users to tag each other.
Aster Data, a big data analytics software company is saying that it has received $30 million in new funds from existing investors and a new undisclosed strategic investor. David Cheriton who backed Google and VMWare as an angel investor is also investing in the company.
IBM says it will acquire Marlborough, Mass.,-based Netezza Corporation, a maker of data warehousing analytics for a whopping $1.7 billion in cash. IBM is offering $27 a share for the Neteeza and hopes that the smaller company would help IBM with its growing business analytics practice.
Xeround, a Bellevue, WA-based start-up has come out of stealth and has launched the beta version of MySQL in the cloud and is offering relational database as an on-demand service. Xeround is available either as Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) or as a virtual appliance.
The online personal finance assistant Mint often mines user data for trends and interesting charts to feature on its popular corporate blog. Now the Intuit-owned company is preparing to release the data it’s collected on behalf of its 3 million users.
Sometimes, the cellular data network just doesn’t want to play ball with your iPhone. It may not be immediately apparent, but you’ll find out when you try to load a page in Safari, for instance, and the progress bar will get stuck in one place.
In some ways, the fact that Hadoop is mature enough to inspire commercial products — Cloudera and Karmasphere, e.g. — means it’s yesterday’s news. Which open-source, big-data-inspired product will be the next to launch a wave of startups and drive tens of millions in VC spending?
[qi:gigaom_icon_cloud-computing] Collectively, Yahoo (s yhoo), Facebook, Amazon (s amzn) and Google (s goog) are rewriting the handbook for big data. Startups intending…
Since posting Psion’s response to the Intel/ Dell trademark scuffle I’ve been asked to post the Psion NetBook Pro promotional flyer. Here…
Despite decades of effort, troubleshooting applications is still hard. ExtraHop, which comes out of stealth today with the launch of its Application…
Facebook has been pilloried for not caring enough about our privacy. But now they face a call to offer data portability, something…