With 50TB of machine-generated data produced daily and the need to process 100PB of data all together, eBay's data challenge is truly astronomical. This deluge of data is helping eBay to emulate the know-how that customers used to get from a local shop owner; the only...
SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. It has become fashionable to bad-mouth big data. In recent weeks the New York Times, Financial Times, Wired and other outlets have all run pieces bashing this new technological...
Data-driven marketing has become incredibly powerful for businesses large and small. That's undeniable. Whether you're automatically sending marketing emails based on previous clicks, or you're using dynamic remarketing in PPC to follow your website visitors around...
A couple of months ago, on a trip to the US, I decided to replace my aging MacBook with a MacBook Air. I placed the order online, since I also wanted to soup up the memory and hard disk. While I was at it, I decided to order a “COVER” for the machine. Four days later,...
Let’s say you’re walking past a store and your eye catches a fancy gadget that you decide you must have, but you’re in a tearing hurry. So what do you do? You take a picture of the doodad with your smartphone, and hey presto, the store’s technology enables you to get...
For the past nine months, Janet Vertesi, assistant professor of sociology at Princeton University, tried to hide from the Internet the fact that she's pregnant — and it wasn't easy. Pregnant women are incredibly valuable to marketers. For example, if a woman decides...
Are you paying attention to your existing customers? If not, you may want to reconsider your priorities: According to a new report, more than half of the annual revenue for 61 percent of small business owners comes from repeat buyers. The report found that 80 percent...
Big Data will eradicate extreme world poverty by 2028, according to Bono, front man for the band U2. But it also allows unscrupulous marketers and financial institutions to prey on the poor. Big Data, collected from the neonatal monitors of premature babies, can...
Data scientists are hard to find and expensive to keep, but that doesn’t mean that big data insights are beyond your reach. And, no, we’re not suggesting that you outsource your most important work to a team of analysts in a distant land. After all, there’s a new...
Big data may be a big buzzword, but it's implications are bombarding the business world, offering new insights to old problems and connecting the dots where previously no dots were even seen. It's a changing space out there, where what you like on Facebook can tell a...
More than 70% of banking executives worldwide say customer centricity is important to them. However, achieving greater customer centricity requires a deeper understanding of customer needs. Research from Capgemini indicates that only 37% of customers believe that...
Big data. You know it’s out there. You know it’s accumulating in mind-boggling volumes and at breakneck speeds. And you know you need to do something about it to drive your retail content marketing efforts. If the words “big data” get your pulse racing, make you toss...
Every now and then, something comes along that promises to reboot the debate on a hot button issue. A new algorithm developed at the Chinese University of Hong Kong looks set to do just that, pitting privacy advocates against technologists in a fresh fight over facial...
People are a little touchy about data collection nowadays. They were most certainly touchy about inBloom, a non-profit that was offering to house and manage student data for public school districts across the US by extracting a dizzying array of information - we're...
In this article I'm going to show you how to backup SQL databases using the VMware Data Protection Advanced SQL agent. The first thing you need to do is download and install the SQL agent on your SQL server (If using SQL 2012 then please refer to this blog article)....
At Nokia’s Here connected car division in Chicago, researchers are pouring over crowdsourced vehicle data from all of the world, trying to figure out how our future autonomous vehicles should comport themselves on the road. By comparing high-definition mapping data...
At the Interop conference in Las Vegas a few weeks ago, I noticed some strong trends in the topics covered. As a matter of fact, most of the topics fit into a dozen or so categories. Here are 10 hot topics that are clearly on the minds of business and IT leaders. 1:...
For the past few years, NoSQL or Non-relational database tools have gained much popularity in terms of storing huge amount of data and scaling them easily. There are debates on whether non-relational databases will replace relational databases in the future. With the...
The Python conference PyCon2014 has held recently and the videos for the conference are online. I have been working my way through the interesting machine learning ones and will share a few on this over the coming weeks. A great talk, if you are starting out in data...
I recently got my hands on more than 1.3 million tweets, all mentioning bitcoin or creator Satoshi Nakamoto, spanning the entire month of February 2014. My goal was to get a sense of who’s actually interested in bitcoin (enough to tweet about it, at least) and to see...
This year will see the enforcement of the EU’s clampdown on bankers’ bonuses, which requires banks to restrict bonuses to 100% of salary. This has already had a major impact on the market with the likes of HSBC and Goldman Sachs finding ways to circumvent the cap...
Having moved on from a period when the focus for leading edge businesses was on experimenting with new capabilities such as Hadoop, 2014 looks set to be characterised as the year of action, not experimentation – running valuable analytics for tangible results. The...
This session assumes absolutely no knowledge of Apache Hadoop and will provide a complete introduction to all the major aspects of the Hadoop ecosystem of projects and tools. If you are looking to get up to speed on Hadoop, trying to work out what all the Big Data...
Albert Einstein was quoted as saying, “Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.” People describe the Internet as a hostile network — which is true — and that got me thinking about other hostile environments where a successful strategy...
When running on EC2, you often can't win when it comes to instance types. One of the more cost-effective types available is the c1.xlarge. It has enough CPU to handle compactions, a decent amount of disk, and high network I/O. However, we've found that the relatively...
Hadoop is going to be big, but today, its adoption is still small. According to Gartner, there are only 1,000 Hadoop systems in production, with most companies not moving Hadoop beyond the proof of concept phase. Partly, this is a matter of difficulty: Hadoop isn't...
A new cloud service from Swan Island Networks allows cities to tie information together from multiple "big data" sources to improve the response to natural disasters and man-made catastrophes. "Trusted Information Exchange Service [TIES] promises to allow city...
Here is a complete list of most active Linkedin groups for Analytics, Big Data, Data Mining and Data Science. Advanced Business Analytics, Data Mining and Predictive Modeling Big Data / Analytics / Strategy / FP&A / S&OP / Strategic Planning / Predictive & Business...
Imagine a nice Friday afternoon walking around your local mall. You walk into your favorite browsing for a new outfit to wear to your friend's party later in the evening. Although you usually shop in-store, sometimes you shop online, as many people all over the world...
Data mining, data analysis, these are the two terms that very often make the impressions of being very hard to understand – complex – and that you’re required to have the highest grade education in order to understand them. I can only disagree, and as with anything in...
In this post, we have seen some of the Big data technologies that are used to store and analyse data. For the past few years NoSQL or Non-relational database tools have gained much popular in terms of storing huge amount of data and scaling them easily. There are...
John F. Kennedy famously said "It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low," and with April 15 right around the corner, chances are your tax returns leave you hoping that everyone else is planning on paying their fair share...
On Wednesday came the government release, finally, of Big Data on Medicare payments to medical practitioners for 2012. The beginning, one hopes, of release of many more years of data in aid of trend-spotting. Also, surely, some reining in of the grossest of these...
According to a survey by Silicon Valley Bank, 90 percent of startups believe finding talent is their biggest challenge. Yet, a solution to this problem could lie with Big Data -- massive amounts of structured and unstructured data that's difficult to process using...
Big data isn't necessarily big and can be as much about the complexities of processing information as about volumes or data types. Personal genetic-profiling services such as 23andMe, which charges $99 to sequence an individual's genome, illustrate the point,...
Many organizations investing millions in big data, analytics, and hiring quants appear frustrated. They undeniably have more and even better data. Their analysts and analytics are first-rate, too. But managers still seem to be having the same kinds of business...
Who's No.1? How do you assess and define success? Who are the most popular artists and recordings at any given time? Ever since there has been a music industry, these questions have obsessed record company executives and artists alike. And to answer these questions,...
We don't like to throw around the term "smart data." It seems to so many like a lofty idea, perhaps a dream product for digital media companies and their audiences alike. And we agree -- it is all those things. So, we nabbed our in-house data scientists, convinced...
The rise of big data and big science have provided universities with an opportunity to work together on ways to technologically manage worldwide research projects. Misfolding proteins that cause Alzheimer's disease and the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy are...
Lean, mean MySQL and hulking Hadoop clusters may seem like an odd couple, but tying them together is now priority #1 for many MySQL users. This keynote talk on 1st day of this year's Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo 2014 explores the data management trends...
Investors looking for a hot sector of IT spending should look no further than data analytics. IT companies like IBM (NYSE: IBM ) and Oracle (NYSE: ORCL ) managed to generate growth with their analytics solutions. In addition, there is also a burgeoning opportunity for...
In 2001, I wrote a book called Making It Personal that predicted a growing tension between privacy and personalization. To illustrate potential developments, I included a number of fictionalized but plausible scenarios, including this one. Here's my question: could...
Holliday’s body language speaks clearly, and his reaction is understandable. The pitch was wide, even wider than the first two pitches, both of which the umpire miscalled as strikes. Here’s the data: The PITCHf/x technology that makes this graphic possible, whatever...
Code submitted this week for inclusion in the Hadoop stack will help speed the spread of the distributed big-data platform, according to Hortonworks co-founder Arun Murthy. The submission of the Slider framework to the Apache Software Foundation Incubator will result...
Excerpts from the report… Take the case of I Vijaya Kumar, a long timer with Wipro, where, as CTO, he was popularly known as IVK. Eventually IVK decided to move on and pursue his own calling. “I have always been interested in new technologies and innovation...
Almost half of Americans are increasingly cautious about their use of the internet following the NSA surveillance leaks, according to a Harris poll commissioned by security outfit ESET. This is pretty much what I and many others predicted when the agency’s data...
Big data and predictive technologies – sometimes called artificial intelligence (AI) – are changing the world. Everyone from Google to your supermarket and hospital are leveraging the power of data to transform the way they operate fundamentally. While the traditional...
Yesterday, a $100 million startup lost its last customer. According to a Politico article, the state of New York, inBloom‘s last remaining client, will delete all student data on the repository due to privacy concerns. InBloom’s company spokesperson told Politico the...
Whether it’s big government or big corporations you fear may be encroaching on our right to privacy, you should have no trouble these days finding news to fuel your suspicions. If, on the other hand, you happen to run a business, you probably find clear-eyed...
In this brave new world of big data, a database technology called "Bigtable" would seem to be worth considering -- particularly if that technology is the creation of engineers at Google, a company that should know a thing or two about managing large quantities of...