analytics

Twitter's latest buy: Big data startup Lucky Sort

Twitter's shopping spree shows no signs of letting up. Today, the social-networking giant said that it has acquired big data startup Lucky Sort.

Lucky Sort CEO Noah Pepper said in a blog post that his company's "goal was to make huge document sets easier to analyze, summarize, and visualize by building elegant and user-friendly tools for text analysis."

Neither Twitter nor Lucky Sort said precisely how the startup will be integrated into Twitter's larger plans, but Pepper said in his post that several members of his team would be moving to San Francisco to become … Read more

PeopleBrowsr gains small court victory against Twitter

The social media analytics company PeopleBrowsr won a victory against Twitter in court today.

Federal District Court Judge Edward Chen ruled that the case was to remain in San Francisco Superior Court. While this doesn't seem like a big deal, it is actually quite significant because it means that PeopleBrowsr's service won't be shuttered during litigation.

The lawsuit between the two companies is complicated, but it basically boils down to Twitter restricting access to its tweets and data -- which PeopleBrowsr needs for its service.

According to PeopleBrowsr, it paid Twitter $1 million a year for the … Read more

Escaping the Iron Curtain for Silicon Valley

The one thing everyone wants to know about Christian Gheorghe's life is the one thing he won't talk about.

In Silicon Valley, where the top talent at the hottest companies -- the Zuckerbergs, the Brins, the Cooks, and so forth -- are household names and paparazzi bait, Gheorghe's name isn't in play. Though he is a Silicon Valley CEO, his company, Tidemark, makes enterprise-focused performance and financial management applications, certainly not the sexiest of products.

But to a category of people who matter a lot in Valley -- the VCs -- Gheorghe is a bona-fide hero, … Read more

Twitter acquires Crashlytics crash reporting service

Twitter has bought Crashlytics, a startup whose crash reporting tool has been incorporated into a wide variety of iOS apps including Vine, Yelp, Kayak, TaskRabbit, and Waze.

In a blog post today, Crashlytics co-founders Jeff Seibert and Wayne Chang announced that the company is "joining the flock," the term often used when people or companies are hired or acquired by Twitter:

We started Crashlytics a little over a year ago to address a huge hole in mobile app development. With hundreds of millions of devices in use around the world, it was impossible for developers to fully test … Read more

Twitter is loopy for Vine videos

Thursday's CNET Update is longer than six seconds:

Today's tech news roundup explains why Apple's latest earnings report of record revenue and sales has disappointed investors. Tim Cook also had little to say about an Apple television and fixes to the Maps app.

Netflix surprised analysts with reported profit and growth. Netflix will push out it's own TV series, "House of Cards," on Feb. 1, and new episodes of Arrested Development are arriving in May.

Hundreds of AT&T U-verse customers have had to live without TV, Internet or phone service for several days. … Read more

Ada Lovelace, early computer whiz, gets Doodle love

Today's Google Doodle honors the birth of a computer visionary who believed such machines could be more than just number crunchers.

Born December 10, 1815, Ada Lovelace is perhaps best known for her contributions toward Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, Designed but never actually built until 1991, the Analytical Engine is in many ways one of the ancestors of today's computer systems.

A mathematician and writer, Lovelace took on the task of first translating and then expanding upon an article describing the Analytical Engine. Her notes contains what some people think of as early computer progams or algorithms, … Read more

Mobile apps outpace the Web and neck-in-neck with TV

It looks like a four-year-old industry is hijacking one that has been around for six decades.

According to mobile analytics firm Flurry, the time people spend on mobile apps is now nearly neck-in-neck with time spent watching television.

"With new content released via thousands of new apps each day, we expect this trend to continue," Flurry CEO Simon Khalaf wrote in a blog post today. "In fact, we ultimately expect apps on tablets and smartphones to challenge broadcast television as the dominant channel for media consumption."

Flurry's numbers, which are based on data from more … Read more

How Square can help you sell more cupcakes

With the holiday season bearing down on the calendar, Jake Vance needs to know how many cupcakes he should make every day. Make too many, and the rats that frequent his dumpsters are happy. Don't make enough, and customers walk away without getting to enjoy their favorite treat.

Vance runs Sweet Avenue, a small bakery in Rutherford, N.J. So small, in fact, that it doesn't make sense to spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on point-of-sale software or professional cash registers that are routinely used by larger businesses to generate smart data on sales patterns.

Until even … Read more

Worldwide smartphone user base hits 1 billion

The smartphone industry has reached an important milestone.

During the third quarter, the total installed base for smartphones worldwide hit 1.04 billion, jumping from the 959 million smartphones in use during the second quarter, research firm Strategy Analytics announced today. Just a year ago, the total worldwide smartphone installed base was 708 million.

It took 16 years for smartphones to reach the 1 billion mark. The Nokia Communicator, a device that first launched in 1996, is widely viewed as the first smartphone to hit store shelves. Since then, a host of smartphone makers have jumped into the fray.

"… Read more