Articles about Big Data

Along with Big Data, the Internet of Things (IoT) has been one of the most heavily hyped broad technology trends because it will touch just about every sector of society and commerce. As it happens, these two great trends will overlap and reinforce each other, while sharing some of the same constraints and concerns as they develop their full potential over the coming five to ten years.

Analyst group Gartner has identified a clear life cycle for such major technology trends, beginning with a discovery that triggers early innovation, which then generates hype followed by an inevitable period of disillusionment when the initial over-stoked expectations are not met. Some technologies die in this trough, but others emerge at the other side into Gartner’s "slope of enlightenment", where they gain adoption before reaching a plateau of maturity occupied now by the ICT sector as a whole.

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We hear a lot about big data, but collecting lots of information is of no use unless you’re able to get some practical benefit from it.

Business intelligence platform Looker is expanding its support for big data with new products supporting SQL query engines Presto and Spark as well as updates elsewhere.

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Who lives in a pineapple under the sea? SpongeBob SquarePants! Depending on your age, you might absolutely adore that character or possibly not be familiar at all. Me? I fall into the former. While it is a kids show, I find it to be quite entertaining.

You know who else might be a fan of Mr. SquarePants? Microsoft. Yes, believe it or not, the company has built an underwater data center, located in California, named 'Project Natick' for the ocean. In other words, like SpongeBob, the data center will live under the sea. While it is only in a testing phase, it is still cool nonetheless. Hopefully it operates quietly, however, as if it is noisy, it might bother Squidward's clarinet playing.

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More than three out of four IT decision makers are interested in running stateful applications like databases within containers, according to a recent survey.

Silicon Valley-based containerized data platform specialist Robin Systems conducted the survey in December 2015 with more than 200 respondents from industries including retail, banking and finance, manufacturing, and Internet infrastructure.

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It seems today that Big Data analytics is everywhere -- from Starbucks, which uses location-based services to (yes, purposely) place its coffee shops just blocks away from each other; to Free People, which uses customer analytics to design the following season’s collection; to Orange Telecom, which uses network statistics to improve overall customer experience.

And, these are just a few of the thousands and thousands of major corporations and small businesses that are harnessing Big Data, meaning in this day and age, we are amassing and storing more data than ever before. But what is dark data?

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According to new research from data intelligence specialist Blazent there's a major disconnect between executive attitudes to data quality and the effect that bad data can have on the business.

Based on a study by 451 Research of 200 C-level and senior IT leaders, the report reveals that fewer than half (40 percent) of C-level executives and data scientists are 'very confident' in their organization's data quality. Yet a majority (94 percent) recognize the impact poor data quality has on business outcomes.

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The Alibaba Group is launching a "big data" cloud platform which it plans will make data asset technology widely available throughout China.

Alibaba Cloud Computing (AliCloud), said on Thursday that the cloud "Big Data Platform" would offer an initial 20 products or solutions and services, which would cover all aspects of the so-called data development chain. This includes data services and visualization products that assist with data processing and analysis, but also provide a compute engine with capabilities for machine learning.

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Big Data, and its infrastructure is expected to grow significantly in the next four years, a new study by the International Data Corporation (IDC) shows.

IDC has done an in-depth market sizing of the Big Data infrastructure in Europe, Middle East and Africa, including servers and storage, as well as cloud resources, and here are the results:

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Tonight is President Barack Obama's final State of the Union address. Regardless of your opinion of the man, or his policies, it is certainly monumental. After all, his being elected broke racial barriers; inspiring countless people of various backgrounds. More importantly, however, he has done many arguably positive things. While he has many more months in office, it is still a farewell of sorts.

Hopefully you will tune in for the historic broadcast, and if you do, you might consider choosing CNN or MSNBC. If you are Spanish-speaking, you should consider NBC Universo, and Telemundo too. Am I endorsing specific networks? Not really. I only suggest them because they will be leveraging Microsoft Pulse; something BetaNews readers should appreciate and enjoy.

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If you've voted in a US election at some point in the last 15 years, there's a high chance that your personal details are now out in the wild. Security researcher Chris Vickery found a misconfigured database that exposes the details of no less than 191 million US voters.

The discovery was made a little over a week ago, and includes the names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, state voter IDs, and party affiliations of people registered to vote since the year 2000. The amount of detail contained in the database gives real cause for concern, and Vickery was shocked to find his own details were easily accessible due to a database misconfiguration.

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According to the results of a new survey, 84 percent of CIOs believe their organization can analyze data in real-time, however, only 42 percent of developers agree with that statement.

This difference of opinion is one of the findings of the study by in-memory data platform specialist VoltDB. Where 91 percent of CIOs, IT managers and developers do agree is that real-time streaming data analysis can have a positive impact on their company's bottom line.

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Extracting useful information from business data used to mean waiting for the IT department to run reports. Increasingly though there's demand for users to be able to extract information themselves.

The latest company to join this trend is Israel-based Anodot which is aiming to disrupt the static nature of today's BI using patented machine learning algorithms for big data.

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Enterprises have lots of data that could be used to improve their operations and profitability, but it can often prove hard to access. By contrast, users are accustomed to being able to instantly find information on search engines like Google with minimal effort.

Business intelligence company ThoughtSpot aims to bridge this gap with the launch of ThoughtSpot 3, a major update to its search-driven analytics platform.

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The growth of the Internet of Things is providing businesses with ever larger volumes of data, that in turn places ever greater demands on the technology needed to process it.

Big data specialist MapR is launching its MapR Streams solution which connects data producers and data consumers across shared topics of information and across the globe.

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Businesses are increasingly keen to unlock the insights contained within their data. But the tools to do this are often expensive and complex, putting them beyond the reach of smaller organizations.

Analytics specialist BeyondCore has announced a collaboration with Microsoft to make its data discovery solution available to Office users for free.

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