Provo, Utah–based sales automation company InsideSales has always been interested in applying data analysis to mountains of sales data. After delivering on this mission last year, the company is now ramping up its efforts to predict who salespeople should call and when.
Alteryx has raised $60 million to help expand its fast-growing business, which straddles the middle ground between Excel and SPSS by trying to turn data blending and predictive modeling into self-service experiences.
A mixture of big data, improved algorithms, increasingly cheaper storage, and cloud-hosted options has fueled a surge in new data mining and machine learning products.
Google open sourced a new package for the R statistical computing software that’s designed to help users infer whether a particular action really did cause subsequent activity. Google has been using the tool, called CausalImpact, to measure AdWords campaigns but it has broader appeal.
Numenta, the machine learning company from Palm creator Jeff Hawkins, has narrowed its business model to focus solely on predicting anomalies in Amazon Web Services instances. It’s one of several big changes at the company in the past few years.
Dell has bought a statistical analysis vendor called StatSoft that makes software akin to that of SAS and IBM’s SPSS business. It seems like an uninspired buy for a company trying to forge a new direction since going private.
MailChimp Chief Data Scientist is at Disney World this weekend wearing his RFID-equipped MagicBand. Here’s how he thinks the practice of digitally tracking consumers in the physical world will reach everywhere from theme parks to our homes.
Intel is using big data to improve everything from manufacturing efficiency to sales, and is increasingly looking toward technologies such as Hadoop and machine learning to create new opportunities.
Dataminr, a startup dedicated to analyzing the Twitter firehose of real-time tweets, is using today’s BlackBerry news as proof of its value. The company claims it gave users a 3-minute advantage in which time to start selling BalckBerry shares.
FBI CISO Patrick Reidy gave Black Hat attendees some advice on detecting insider threats inside their agencies or companies. Essentially, he said, there’s no Edward Snowden profile that should set off alarms, so organizations must know their people very, very well.
There has been a lot of talk about data after the success of “Orange is the New Black” on Netflix, but as the content competition picks up in streaming TV, it might be the little things where big data has the biggest impact.
Kaggle has reached an impressive milestone of 100,000 data scientists competing on its online platform. This is due, in part, to Kaggle helping lower the bar for getting started with data science.
An effort called the Durkheim Project has brought together a collection of big data companies, universities and government agencies that want to predict suicide risks among veterans by analyzing their social media posts.
The choices are getting a lot better for businesses that want out-of-the-box functionality for machine learning, predictive analytics and general data science. Prepackaged software might not make your company into Google, but a step closer is a step in the right direction.
WalmartLabs has acquired a predictive analytics startup called Inkiru to bolster its ability to create better customer experiences through data. The division of Walmart was created in 2011 on a foundation of big data.
Sure, a lot of data scientists spend their days trying to optimize ads or movie recommendations, but a growing number are spending their free time tackling bigger causes.
Cascading creator Concurrent has developed a new open source tool called Pattern for running machine learning models on Hadoop clusters. When combined with its SQL tool called Lingual, users can move data from one stage to another easily.
The FBI has amassed terabytes of data from sources near the terrorist attack that occured during the Boston Marathon. This raises a question about the role crowdsourcing could play in solving some crimes while protecting citizens’ privacy.
Companies such as Inrix are making their money helping commuters and commercial drivers find the fastest routes through traffic, but their reach could go much further. Creative organizations can apply the data in entirely new areas, and crowdsourcing means seeing how the world moves.
An MIT researcher says he has created an algorithm that can identify Twitter trends hours before the service can itself. If the algorithm works as he says, it could help Twitter — and many more companies — make a lot of money.
A startup called Entelo is trying to make résumés a thing of the past by aggregating profiles of tech workers from their public data, and then feeding those results to recruiters. The secret sauce is an algorithm for spotting when someone might be looking for work.
Big data and data science have already proven their worth in the worlds of online advertising and marketing, and now they’re being turned to elections. Here are five sites to follow if you want to impress your peers with data-driven insights on who’ll win in November.
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.
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.
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.
If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if the top two teams in the Netflix Prize competition united and put their predictive analytics skills to work together, you’ll soon find out. On Tuesday, big data service provider Opera Solutions acquired Austrian predictive analytics specialist Commendo.
In September, I profiled six companies doing big data in the cloud, and here are nine more. One of the themes of Structure:Data is “putting big data to work,” and there’s no easier way to get started doing so than with a cloud service.
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.
Mu Sigma has closed a $108 million investment round to expand its analytics-outsourcing business. Mu Sigma takes customers’ data and it turns it into business insights, meaning customers don’t have to built their own in-house big data expertise. It’s an already-profitable business that’s only getting bigger.
Calling a company’s customer service department can be a frustrating experience. If only there was a way to make it a more rewarding experience for everyone involved and perhaps even save everyone some time. That might be coming, and big data might be leading the charge.
The United States alone faces a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills. We are starting to understand the value of being data-savvy and how different kinds of data can be used to influence behavior and improve organizational policies and practices.
Predictive analytics provider Opera Solutions has raised $84 million from equity investors in its first-ever funding round, but that amount shouldn’t be surprising for anyone familiar with the company. I’ve called Opera the big data expert you’ve never heard of, but that’s about to change.
Alpine Data Labs, a predictive analytics startup that incubated within Greenplum (now part of EMC), is expanding its support beyond the Greenplum Database and into Oracle’s Exadata appliance and the open-source Postgres database. Alpine tries to distinguish itself by running entirely within companies’ analytic databases.
Don’t feel bad if you haven’t heard of Opera Solutions. However, the analytics-as-a-service provider has been quietly building up its $100 million company since 2004 and, with big data on the tip of the IT world’s collective tongue, Opera is ready to start spreading the word.