big

At CNET's SXSW 'big data' panel, sparks fly over privacy

AUSTIN, Texas--Representatives from opposite sides in the "big data" privacy debate tangled Sunday over whether a proposed White House "privacy bill of rights" is necessary to keep Americans safe online.

During a "big data" panel sponsored by CNET at South by Southwest, Berin Szoka, president of the non-partisan, non-profit, tech policy think tank TechFreedom, argued that states and the federal government might have better results providing privacy protections for Americans by enforcing existing laws than they would if they adopted new regulations.

"We have a difference of opinion of when government should get … Read more

LaCie 2big Thunderbolt series review: Just about right

LaCie has been known to give its tech products a touch of fashion, and the 2big Thunderbolt Series is no exception.

The device looks good and sturdy, resembling the rest of the 2big family, including the already reviewed 2big USB 3.0.

The biggest difference from the previous models is that it has two Thunderbolt ports on the back that take the place of any other connection types, so no USB, FireWire, or eSATA.… Read more

Data vs. models at the Strata Conference

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--That this week's O'Reilly Strata data conference was sold out says a lot about this corner of tech. It's hot. Like cloud computing, big data is all the rage, even if, like cloud computing, it's not so much a single thing but an intersection of technologies, market needs, and critical mass.

One of several themes that kept popping up this week was data vs. models.

In 2008, Wired's Chris Anderson wrote a provocative article titled "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete." His thesis was … Read more

In the world of Big Data, privacy invasion is the business model

Recent weeks have seen a lot of (overdue) talk about privacy and technology. There was the flap over Path and other mobile apps uploading your phone's address books to their servers without your permission. A follow-up story noted apps might be able to slurp up photos and their location data on iOS, too.

There was the discovery that Google overrode some cookie settings in Safari in order to track users for ad serving. And Congress is still figuring out a response to last fall's concerns over software on phones that could share your location or other data without … Read more

Who's topping the big data charts?

Thanks to the rise of open-source data analysis tool Hadoop, business intelligence and analytics have reached new levels of interest and hype as the market scrambles to keep up with the volume of data and the need to make sense of it immediately.

In the wake of Yahoo nurturing Hadoop, an ecosystem sprung up among other big Internet companies developing their own tools, in many cases variations of database management systems. Facebook eventually rolled out Cassandra, Google introduced BigTable, and from there variations began to appear among smaller companies and open source foundations.

The majority of these databases rely on … Read more

Little startup Infochimps has a platform for big data

Infochimps today announced a scalable platform for big data environments. The Infochimps latform is the first formal product for the company, which, to date, has served primarily as a big data marketplace.

The Austin-based Infochimps initially developed its data system behind the Infochimps Platform as the foundation for its big data marketplace. With the Infochimps Platform, customers will be able to leverage a proven big data system to construct big data projects for less money and optimize them more deftly.

A platform as a service (PaaS) model will heavily reduce costs by facilitating the creation of big data constructs while … Read more

Why 'big data' is a magnet for startups

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Armies of entrepreneurs are trying to make money sifting through mountains of data from the Web and other sources, but one of the biggest challenges is simply getting control of the data in the first place

Entrepreneurs at an event here this week said that the trend of "big data," or collecting and analyzing reams of information from varied sources, threatens incumbent technology providers and enables applications once considered impossible. Startups are harnessing massive amounts of data to generate personalized entertainment ideas, predict how media coverage will affect company stock prices, or analyze genomes in the … Read more

One year later, IBM Watson goes to work (and the cloud)

What started out as a research project at IBM has become not only an unbeatable "Jeopardy" champion but also a new line of business for Big Blue. And it's coming to the cloud.

IBM's Watson project proved a big hit when it appeared as a contestant on "Jeopardy" one year ago and proved that machines are indeed smarter than man (I for one welcome our robot overlords.)

And now, IBM is taking Watson to the next level, having created a commercial business unit working to offer Watson both on-premise and as a hosted cloud … Read more

Data as a business philosophy

If there is one thing that startups can learn from the rise of Facebook it's that making sense of data you collect is where the money is.

Lots of companies collect data and do nothing meaningful with it. But thanks to new tools and the realization that knowing more about what your users are doing is the way to monetize, there are plenty of opportunities to take advantage the information collected.

In case you've been living in a cave, Facebook has filed to go public at an enormous valuation, based largely on the fact that the company has … Read more