Even before Governor Patrick announced the Massachusetts Big Data Initiative in May, the state had already established itself as the big data capital of the world. We have 12,000 people employed in the sector in more than 100 companies.
Computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University have devised a framework for running large-scale computations for tasks such as social network or Web search analysis efficiently on a single personal computer.
EROSKI da un nuevo paso en su empoderamiento tecnológico al implantar en España una innovadora plataforma colaborativa con proveedores, que persigue dar un salto cualitativo en la mejora de la competitividad de su oferta comercial, a fin de desarrollar nuevas soluciones al cliente a partir de información sobre sus patrones de consumo.
“The consumption of data by humans has increased maybe millions of times compared to what we used to use,” Ajeet Singh says. “This is possible because of search.”
By that, serial entrepreneur Singh means search engines like Google and Microsoft’s Bing, which instantly scour websites to find us a restaurant, an audiobook, or the name of an actor that eludes us. But Singh (pictured) is also one of the innovators who have been extending the territories of data that can be interrogated by new machines seeking quick answers, patterns, or simply unexpected caches of compelling information.
Biomedical research generates an obscene amount of data. Many of the sensors, robots and other technologies IEEE Spectrum regularly profiles spew out terabytes to petabytes of data—and that’s only a sliver of the volume of health information stored in databases around the world.
When a state representative named Thom Tillis ran for U.S. Senate in North Carolina in 2014, his campaign followed the now-standard practice of sending voters online and direct-mail advertisements referring to particular issues. Which issues mattered to which people, from ISIS to the Affordable Care Act, could be gleaned from the voters’ memberships and donations or inferred from demographic information and databases of everything from their purchases to their Web history.
There is a race on to develop analytics software that can turn the vast amounts of data generated these days into something useful for businesses—and it will likely get harder to keep up.
Not only is there more data to deal with, new sources of information continue to emerge, further complicating the matter, says Amir Orad, CEO of Sisense in New York and Tel Aviv. “All around we’re deploying sensors,” he says. “You have sensors for the speed of the delivery guy on a motorcycle and the heat of the pizza as it gets to the customer.”
Attivio, a Newton, Massachusetts-based startup that promises to “accelerate data discovery,” announced today that it closed a $31 million financing round.
The investment, the startup said, will help the company to meet investors’ expectation of turning profitable “later this year.”
The best-selling book Moneyball by Michael Lewis changed the way people thought about sport, particularly for those owners, managers, and players with the biggest vested interests. Lewis’s book helped bring about a revolution in which player performance was measured and assessed using an evidence-based approach rather than a tradition dominated by anecdote and intuition.
Looker, a startup selling data analytics software, is announcing today a $48 million funding round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Looker can visualize data from many sources, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) Redshift, Cloudera Impala, HP Vertica, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Snowflake. It’s available as on-premises software or as a cloud service.
