Reader (456) Big data startups weigh in on competing with Oracle — Cloud Computing News. Big Data: Sorting Reality From the Hype. The quest to find decision-making insights in the modern data flood is certainly an appealing notion. After all, there is so much of data, from the traditional stuff inside corporate databases to e-mail, Web-browsing patterns, social-network messages and sensor data. Information drives decisions, so more of it ought to open the door to better decisions. The World Economic Forum has declared that data is a new asset class.
All that is the intellectual and marketing tailwind behind the concept known as big data. A Forrester Research report, published Friday, provides some leavening perspective on the big data phenomenon. The takeaway points, from reading the report and an interview with a co-author, include: big data is an applied science project in most companies, and a major potential constraint is not the cost of the computing technology but the skilled people needed to carry out these projects — the data scientists. The report concludes that big data is a real and significant trend. Hadoop app specialist Karmasphere scores $6M — Cloud Computing News. Revolution speeds stats on Hadoop clusters. High performance access to file storage Revolution Analytics, the company that is extending R, the open source statistical programming language, with proprietary extensions, is making available a free set of extensions that allow its R engine to run atop Hadoop clusters. Now statisticians that are familiar with R can do analysis on unstructured data stored in the Hadoop Distributed File System, the data store used for the MapReduce method of chewing on unstructured data pioneered by Google for its search engine and mimicked and open sourced by rival Yahoo!
As the Apache Hadoop project. R can now also run against the HBase non-relational, column-oriented distributed data store, which mimics Google's BigTable and which is essentially a database for Hadoop for holding structured data. Like Hadoop, HBase in an open source project distributed by the Apache Software Foundation. You can download the R connector for Hadoop from GitHub. EMC throws lots of hardware at Hadoop — Cloud Computing News. Six Provocations for Big Data by Danah Boyd, Kate Crawford. The era of Big Data has begun. Computer scientists, physicists, economists, mathematicians, political scientists, bio-informaticists, sociologists, and many others are clamoring for access to the massive quantities of information produced by and about people, things, and their interactions.
Diverse groups argue about the potential benefits and costs of analyzing information from Twitter, Google, Verizon, 23andMe, Facebook, Wikipedia, and every space where large groups of people leave digital traces and deposit data. Significant questions emerge. Will large-scale analysis of DNA help cure diseases? Or will it usher in a new wave of medical inequality? Will data analytics help make people’s access to information more efficient and effective? Or will it be used to track protesters in the streets of major cities? This essay offers six provocations that we hope can spark conversations about the issues of Big Data. Company - Report - Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity - May 2011.
The amount of data in our world has been exploding, and analyzing large data sets—so-called big data—will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus, according to research by MGI and McKinsey's Business Technology Office. Leaders in every sector will have to grapple with the implications of big data, not just a few data-oriented managers. The increasing volume and detail of information captured by enterprises, the rise of multimedia, social media, and the Internet of Things will fuel exponential growth in data for the foreseeable future. MGI studied big data in five domains—healthcare in the United States, the public sector in Europe, retail in the United States, and manufacturing and personal-location data globally.
Big data can generate value in each. 1. 2. Podcast Distilling value and driving productivity from mountains of data 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Hadoop data-management provider Platfora raises $5.7M months after launch. How can big data and smart analytics tools ignite growth for your company? Find out at DataBeat, May 19-20 in San Francisco, from top data scientists, analysts, investors, and entrepreneurs. Register now and save $200! Platfora, a data management software provider based on Hadoop, announced on Thursday it has raised $5.7 million from Andreessen-Horowitz just a few months after the company was founded. Hadoop is an open-source data-management software framework. It’s useful for companies that store enormous amounts of data and have to regularly index it.
“GoodData (and other big data companies) have a very cool system, but they are focused on a different scale of data,” Platfora chief executive Ben Werther told VentureBeat. Platfora takes all that information pulled in from Hadoop’s data management software and delivers it through dashboards and other easy-to-digest user interface elements. Yahoo, Google and Facebook all also use Hadoop to power some of their services.