Quantcast, an internet audience measurement and ad targeting service, processes over 20 petabytes of data per day using Apache Hadoop and its own custom file system called Quantcast File System (QFS). Today, it’s making that technology available to as open source under an Apache license. You can now find it on GitHub. → Read More
Analytics company Datameer raised $6 million today according documents filed with the SEC. The company’s PR manager Susan Puccinelli confirmed the funding and said the round came from Redpoint Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. → Read More
Have you ever tried to search the web for reviews of web hosting services? Search results typically fall into two categories: A) Spammers posting rankings and positive reviews to get a cut of the sign-up fees from services with affiliate programs and B) Anecdotal experiences. It’s hard to get an overall idea of what hosts actually have a good reputation. → Read More
BlockAvenue, which is launching today, has acquired and aggregated about 50 million data points from across the U.S. to assign a letter grade to virtually every neighborhood and city block in the country. According to the company’s founder and CEO Tony Longo, finding the right place to live in a city can be difficult, and in dense urban areas, quality of life is often determined more by which… → Read More
Last week The New York Times ran a story by John Markoff about robots replacing human workers. Andrew McAfee, co-author of the excellent Race Against The Machine followed up with a post of his own. The gist: technology and automation lead to more job creation than job displacement in the past, but that may be changing.
Writing is one of the few areas that McAfee and his co-author Erik… → Read More
I’m going to get a little political here, but bear with me, this is a tech post in the end.
I’m in the midst of a trip from my new home in Berkeley, through my old stomping grounds in New York City, to my hometown in Canada. Politically, almost everyone in all three places falls in one of two camps: either they view the US Republican Party as evil incarnate, or (like me) they’re fiscal… → Read More
Wall Street has been dealing with big data since before it was a thing. But the rise of algorithmic and high frequency trading is making big data even bigger and has led many firms to adopt the same free open source tools that tech startups and scientific researchers are using, according to Dharmesh Malam, CEO and co-founder of the Y Combinator alum BigCalc. → Read More
Google, as you might expect, has massive amounts of data and it’s built many tools to handle it. Stuff like MapReduce and GoogleFS, which spawned the open source Apache Hadoop, and BigTable, which spawned Apache HBase.
But Google didn’t stop with those projects. It’s continued to create new big data tools and continues to publish papers about them. Dremel (PDF) is designed to make querying the… → Read More
Hopper, a stealthy consumer-facing travel startup in development for nearly five years so far, has closed on a $12 million Series B round of funding to grow its team in Boston. Hootsuite, BuildDirect and Wave Accounting investor OMERS Ventures led the round, and Brightspark Ventures and Atlas Venture participated, bringing Hopper to a total raise of $22 million. What’s interesting about the… → Read More
Par Stream has raised $5.6 million for furher extending its big data search engine technology that uses in-memory and massive parallel processing to do real-time analysis.
The Series A financing was led by Khosla Ventures. Additional investors include Baker Capital, Crunch Fund, Data Collective, Tola Capital and private individuals. → Read More
Usually when we think of a pivot, we think of a company that has decided to drop its core offering and market a different product or service. Obvious Corporation put ODEO up for sale and focused on Twitter. BRBN shuttered its location check-in service and became Instagram. But Nodeable’s pivot isn’t that sort of pivot. → Read More
After investments in digital health doubled from 2009 to 2011, the torrid pace of growth has continued in the first half of 2012. Rock Health’s founder Halle Tecco stated why they released a report at this time. “The impetus of this report was the notable growth in venture funding of digital health–so much so that we are seeing 65% more investments than the same time last year. As we strive to… → Read More
Data visualization isn’t easy, especially if your data is coming from a wide variety of sources. Datahero, which is launching its private alpha today, wants to make it easier for individuals, small companies and even enterprises to visualize and understand their data without having to worry about data formats and SQL queries. The company plans to opens its web-based service up to the public later… → Read More
Massive Health, the San Francisco startup that aims to tackle major health care problems with tools such as mobile apps and big data technology, launched its first iPhone app “Eatery” back in November 2011.
For users, the Eatery app is almost deceptively simple: You use it take a photo of what you’re eating, grade it on a scale of “fit to fat,” and give your rating to others’ meals as well. But… → Read More
Vigilent, a company that provides intelligent energy management systems for data centers, telecommunications facilities and large buildings, has raised $6.7 million in investments led by Accel Partners. This investment is part of Accel’s new $100 million Big Data fund. Angel investors including Gaurav Garg and Peter Wagner also participated in this round.
The startup’s services help data… → Read More
There has been a bit of a landrush of late on enterprise companies focused on big data and how best to harness that in the cloud, and today sees the launch of a new fund that will fuel the growth of even more companies working in that space. OpenView Venture Partners is today announcing its third fund of $200 million, aimed at operational support for enterprises, including in areas like big-data… → Read More
Predictive analytics company Medio Systems is debuting a brand new product suite for businesses, called inGenius Suite. Basically, the inGenius processes massive amounts of big data to identify possible revenue opportunities in customer usage patterns on connected devices.
inGenius uses a set of predictive analytics algorithms to gather and analyze real-time information,
such as location… → Read More
How would you like to crunch your way through big data on your iPad? That’s one of the many promises of Lucky Sort, the stealthy new Portland, Oregon-based startup building a visualization and navigation engine called TopicWatch meant for discovering patterns in live data streams.
The company just raised a half-million seed round from Neu Venture Capital, Invite Investments (founders of Invite… → Read More
Quick, what’s the second most traded commodity in the world, after oil? Sorry, no: it’s not coffee. In fact, while hard data is scant, it may well be — of all things — carbon. No, really. According to the World Bank (PDF) , the global carbon market was worth a whopping 1.42 Facebooks US$142 billion in 2010.
Mind you, it’s not like container ships weighed down to the gills with graphite are… → Read More
Venture capital firm Battery Ventures this morning announced that it has made an investment in Continuuity, a stealth ‘big data’ startup founded by Battery entrepreneur-in-residence Todd Papaioannou (formerly VP and Chief Cloud Architect for Yahoo). → Read More
Earlier in the year, I wrote an opinion column on TechCrunch that big data “needs to think bigger.” At the time, I kept hearing the term “big data” over and over, and wondered how much of the emerging insights and techniques would be applied toward the Internet versus the larger problems society faces, such as detecting fraud in financial markets, finding new deposits of natural resources… → Read More
Editor’s note: Big Data has been around for a long time between credit card transactions, phone call records and financial markets. Companies like AT&T, Visa, Bank of America, Ebay, Google, Amazon and more have massive databases they mine for competitive advantage. But lately, Big Data is finding its way to the smallest startups. The Web and cloud computing brings Big Data everywhere. But… → Read More
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