Data & All the Little Fishes That Swim in the Sea

Interesting article from +james m connolly about efforts by +Google Analytics, +SkyTruth  and Oceana who together form +Global Fishing Watch. I agree with him completely - it relies on everyone having an Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) in order to map their location but that is not likely so whilst those that have one know they are being watched anyone that does not have one has a carte blanche to go into areas the others can't in order to fish.  Great idea just issues with the execution.

Regression Analysis using R

While dealing with any prediction problem, the easiest, most widely used yet powerful technique is the Linear Regression. Regression analysis is used for modeling the relationship between a response variable and one or more input variables.

This blog from +suresh kumar Gorakala is great at talking through examples and providing R code which could help anyone still learning the basics.  It's actually good for the rest of us to remind us too.

So you wanna be a data scientist? A guide to 2015's hottest profession

Are you good at math? Like, really good at math? Do you also know Python and, oh yeah, have deep knowledge of a particular industry?

On the off chance that you possess this agglomeration of skills, you might have what it takes to be a data scientist. If so, these are good times. LinkedIn just voted "statistical analysis and data mining" the top skill that got people hired in 2014.

Continue to read this interesting article on +Mashable

Know More, Sell More With Data Science in 2015

Yes, 2014 was a big technology year for sales teams. We saw the launch of Salesforce’s Analytics Cloud, HubSpot’s entrance into CRM, and a flurry of new startups trying to change the way selling and forecasting gets done. Venture capitalists invested over a quarter of a billion into the industry in 2014 because they know technology that makes sales teams better means big value.

Continue to read here on +Information Management

The Future of Data Scientists

Since our days as cavemen, people and companies have been tasked with what seems like an impossible job: Take in massive amounts of data, process that data, and make decisions based on that data for our benefit and the benefit of others. And while the types of data have changed and the tools used to analyze data have grown exponentially more sophisticated, the process is as old as our species itself.

Continue to read here on +Information Management

Cheat Sheets for Data Science

Blog by Steve Miller on +Information Management with some links to cheat sheets/

I would also recommend looking at this article of cheat sheets by +Vincent Granville which I find more comprehesive.

Will Big Data Resolve Questions of Measurement in Social Research?

The big five personality traits are some of the most well researched concepts in the field of psychology. It is a framework used to understand human personality along five factors; openness, conscientious, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Each factor has its own spectrum and an individual may rank anywhere between the points of the two extremes. An individual’s personality will be an amalgam of these factors.

Continue reading on +SteamFeed 

Live Map Shows Thousands Of Cyber Attacks As They Happen

Sony got nuked, said one security expert. But it’s hardly the only attack aimed at a major corporation. Tens of thousands of cyber attacks are launched every second – a majority of which are directed at the United States – but few have the impact that can force a Hollywood studio to cancel a film.

Look at this article on +Forbes to see a real tie map of cyber attacks.  It is both fascinating and scary.

How does the typical data science project life-cycle look like?

This blog post looks at practical aspects of implementing data science projects. It also assumes a certain level of maturity in big data and data science management within the organisation.

By Maloy Manna

Finding Maturity in Your Metadata Strategy

Metadata has always been around. There used to be a theory that organizations needed to devise one and only one way of defining a concept, making it official, and then keeping it in one place for everyone to access and use. That goal was never achieved in most organizations, and thus the information lifecycle continues to evolve. We create reference data, master data, metadata, operational metadata, business metadata and process metadata, and I guess it is all really data. Or is it?

Continue reading here on +Information Management 

Why 2015 Will Be Year of Big Data: Oracle's Seven Predictions

Data is a new form of capital. Ultimately, information about people, places and things will truly differentiate enterprises.

Oracle has been handling big data-type workloads in its parallel databases since long before the term "big data"—and even the Internet—was born.

Continue reading here on +eWEEK.com

Hadoop Tutorial - How to visualise website Clickstream Data

This Hadoop tutorial is from the Hortonworks Sandbox – a single-node Hadoop cluster running in a virtual machine. Download to run this and other tutorials in the series. The tutorials presented here are for Sandbox v2.0

SLIDESHOW - 8 Hadoop Big Data Predictions for 2015

Where is Hadoop, the open source Big Data platform, heading in 2015? No doubt, a growing number of businesses will build smart applications atop Hadoop. But the effort will push beyond analytics, according to Forrester Research Inc. – which offers up these eight Hadoop predictions for 2015.

See the slideshow here on +Information Management

How Big Data Changed the World in 2014

Data accumulation has been so fast in the last two years that it is even bigger than all the data collected since the first record of human civilization. It got so big that it is now called “big data”. In fact, Google CEO Eric Schmidt in 2010 said that the amount of data collected since the dawn of humanity until 2003 was the equivalent to the volume we now produce every two days.

Continue to read here on +Infinit Datum

A Tale Of Two Cities: Why Europe Is Struggling To Compete In The Big Data Market

There’s a pervasive belief in the tech world that Europe is a year behind New York and two years behind Silicon Valley when it comes to technological innovation. While there is still an undeniable lag, European tech companies are seeking to bridge the gap.

Continue reading on +BusinessIntelligence.com

3 Hacks for Using Big Data to Increase Sales Revenue

In today’s market, data accuracy, quite simply, is the price of admission for doing business. But today’s sales teams are faced with a fundamental lack of knowledge about their customers and what those customers need.

Continue reading here on +Data Informed

5 Business Areas Poised for Big Data Opportunities in 2015

The term “big data” prompts a range of different responses and emotions. For some, it might evoke anticipation and excitement in the knowledge that, if analyzed properly and put to good use, the reams of collectible data available today can have a profound positive impact on business performance, quality of life, and society. For others, the term might be met with an “enough already” eye roll and frustration or a feeling of being overwhelmed by the notion of this nonstop machine of information.

Continue reading here on +Data Informed

We're all being mined for data – but who are the real winners?

A year on from the Snowden/NSA revelations, John Naughton examines whether big data – the masses of online information collected from all of us – is a force for good or bad?

Read in this article from +The Guardian

Getting to the Business of Big Data: Overcoming the Marketer's Dilemma

If you're a marketer and Big Data is keeping you up at night, take comfort in knowing you're not alone. According to a recent IBM survey, the percentage of CMO's who feel under prepared to deal with the "data explosion" increased from 71% to 82% between 2011 and 2014. Big Data is a source of unrelenting angst among marketers everywhere.

Continue reading here on Smart Data Collective

Why Open Source Storage May Not Be for You

Open source storage (OSS) software has been in the news a lot in 2014. This reflects the growing interest in open-source technology in general, which relies on software with a source code generally given to the public free of charge by a public collaboration project (often, some commercial vendors also offer a supported distribution of the software for a service fee).

Continue reading here on +Data Informed

5 Ways the Internet of Things Can Change Retail

For years, imagination and modelling propelled the very sci-fi idea of computers running our lives. Think of people in the late 1960s imagining our life now — as illustrated in this 1969 film from the Philco-Ford Corporation that reveals what life will be like for a family living in 1999.

Continue reading on +Salesforce

Big Data: The Key Vocabulary Everyone Should Understand

The field of Big Data requires more clarity and I am a big fan of simple explanations. This is why I have attempted to provide simple explanations for some of the most important technologies and terms you will come across if you’re looking at getting into big data.

Guest blog post by +Bernard Marr on Data Science Central

10 data science predictions for 2015

These predictions were published by the International Institute for Analytics (IIA). They produced a nice infographics, featured below, and re-tweeted many times by various bloggers, using the hash tag #2015Analytics. Other interesting predictions include those by Tableau, those by Pivotal, as well as +Vincent Granville's  own predictions.

Continue to read here.

IBM, Apple Intro Big Data Enterprise Apps for iPhone, iPad

Five months after Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s partnership with International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) was announced, the companies are unveiling the initial fruits of the deal: 10 applications made for governments and businesses.

Read on +Information Management

Top ten hottest BI Analytics skills for 2015

Gartner’s recent CIO insights document shows that BI/analytics is the number one (and growing) priority for CIOs globally.

Additionally, respondents to the recent Computerworld Forecast survey who said they plan to add IT positions in the next 12 months, listed BI/analytics expertise as the skill set they expect to have the hardest time finding.

Continue to read article on +KDR Recruitment

Will Spark, Google Dataflow Steal Hadoop's Thunder?

Apache Spark and Google's Cloud Dataflow service won't kill Hadoop, but they're aimed at the high-value role in big data analysis.

Continue to read on Information Week

Big Data, IOT and Security - OH MY!

While we aren’t exactly “following the yellow brick road” these days, you may be feeling a bit like Dorothy from the “Wizard of Oz” when it comes to these topics. No my friend, you aren’t in Kansas anymore! As seem above from Topsy, these three subjects are extremely popular these days and for the last 30 days seem to follow a similar pattern (coincidence?).

Continue reading this blog from +Carla Gentry

Don’t Judge a Tweet by its 140 Characters: How One App is Using Machine-Learning to Tackle Credibility on Twitter

When you use Twitter, how do you know when you are being presented with something credible instead of something totally bogus? The answer is, unless you spend a lot of time researching each tweet, you probably don’t. However, one thing is for certain, we rely on what we read on Twitter to be true.

Continue to read this blog by +Renette Youssef

What is the future of Data visualization and Dashboard solutions?

This article by Nilesh Jethwa is not about any futuristic "Iron Man style dashboard/data visualization product" where you are combing through holographic cubic chunks from your ultra fast Big Data pipeline.

Interview: Daqing Zhao, Macys.com on Advanced Analytics for Marketing in the Big Data era

KD Nuggets discusses Analytics at Macys.com, comparison of advanced analytics with traditional BI, building data models for scalability, problem of data models becoming quickly obsolete and challenges in customer targeting.

11 Stats that Prove Big Data is a Big Deal

Analytics have transformed the way we think about business. Big decisions were once made using a combination of precedent and instinct. Now, ease of accessibility is making analytics a critical component of any organization’s growth. From measuring productivity of workers to ROI of business initiatives, many companies have come to rely on analytics to track a variety of metrics—particularly big data, which is defined by Webster’s as “an accumulation of data that is too large and complex for processing by traditional database management tools.”

Continue to read at +Thinking Phone Networks

What Retailers Need To Know About Big Data

The “big data” hype rages on, especially for retailers anticipating the holiday shopping season. If you are among those hoping to find a sudden, near-miraculous solution to your data concerns, I have good news and bad news:
The good news is that big data is not a magic cure for sales woes. The bad news is that big data is not a magic cure for sales woes.

Continue to read on +BusinessIntelligence.com

Why You Need to Care About the 'Data Lake'

Have people been telling you to go jump in the lake recently? This may not be a bad thing—if it’s a data lake.

A “data lake,” by definition, is the opposite of silos or the structure of a data warehouse. Instead of taking the time to massage data so that it fits into a warehouse, a data lake just takes all the data in an unstructured form.

Continue to read on +Laserfiche

Big Data Traffic Spikes Drive IaaS Cloud Market

The global infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) may grow as much as 42.91 percent annually over the next five years, as growth-oriented companies try to keep their burgeoning technology costs under control, protect themselves from the risk of datacenter disasters, and manage Big Data traffic spikes, according to Infiniti Research.

Continue to read on +Information Management

Data science without statistics is possible, even desirable

Interesting blog post by +Vincent Granville where he starts with a controversial statement: data science barely uses statistical science and techniques. The truth is actually more nuanced, as explained further in the post.

Read it here.

IBM Launches Watson Analytics Cloud Service Beta

IBM wants to bring Watson -- the company's artificial intelligence platform -- to the masses. First known as a supercomputer of sorts, Watson technology is now rolling out in a range of easier-to-consume ways, including a Watson Analytics cloud service.

Continue to read on +Information Management

The Internet of Things (IoT) Will Grow To 40 Billion Devices By 2020: Are You Ready ?

The Internet of Things (IoT) can be defined as a scenario where objects, animals or people are provided with unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human to human or human to internet interaction. In the internet of things, a thing can be a person with a heart rate monitor implant, a farm animal with a biochip transponder or an automobile that has built-in sensors to alert the driver when the tire pressure is low.

Continue to read on +Dazeinfo - Startling Insights Of Tech Industry !

5 basic rules of data organization

Here +Vincent Granville  compares the 5 rules published in 1999, with the new 2014 version. Data has changed so much that the opposite rules are now followed. Yet many statisticians and big businesses still stick to the outdated rules.

Continue reading here.

Good Data Can’t Save Bad Marketing

Recently, a Harvard Business Review article suggested that the downfall of Tesco, a U.K. based grocery giant, was in part due to an overreliance on data-driven marketing practices. To be blunt, this idea is just wrong. Research shows that businesses effectively using customer analytics enjoy 10.5% year-over-year increase in annual company revenue, increase customer satisfaction by 8.1% annually – all the while increasing the number of positive social media mentions by 14.6% annually. But beyond these statistics, how do you explain the success of data-driven marketing giants like Amazon, Nordstrom, Dollar Shave Club, and other companies who consistently outperform their competitors through data-driven marketing practices? What’s more, the position taken by the HBR article doesn’t fully articulate the whole situation, as +Chuck Chapek Principal of JAC CRM Consulting notes:

Continue reading on +NewsCred

Transform Your Culture To Realize Big Data’s Full Potential

We are living in the era of big data, and those unable to adopt these approaches will be rapidly left behind. So the question for businesses today isn’t whether or not to use data science, the question is whether businesses can be taught to shift their people, processes, and vision into alignment with driving data science into their value proposition so that it is relevant and competitive.

Continue reading at +Data Informed

HP Boosts Big Data Cloud Amid SaaS Challenges

Hewlett-Packard continues to bolster its Big Data and cloud offerings, but the latest milestones also include a stark reality: HP's SaaS revenues are flat at a time when rival cloud companies enjoy ongoing double-digit growth.

Continue reading on +Information Management

Sisense 2015 predictions for BI, Big Data

Mobile devices, text analytics, Google Glass, and data intelligence will be key to the evolution of business intelligence in 2015 according to Adi Azaria and Eldad Farkash of SiSense.

Read at Sisense 2015 predictions for BI, Big Data

Nine Steps to Unlock Big Data's Hidden Value

No matter where you look, the numbers on big data are staggering. Among estimates of its potential benefits are productivity-led savings: $300 billion a year for the US healthcare industry; €250 billion for the European public sector; a 60 percent potential increase in retailers’ operating margins; and $600 billion in economic surplus for services enabled by personal-location data. However, these are just the early calculations coming in from a few sectors; they could well go higher.

Continue reading the article from +Information Management

Customer Insights, Big Data Analytics Will Sprawl in 2015

Forrester recently published its 2015 Predictions for Asia Pacific. I wanted to highlight some specific trends around customer insights (CI) and big data, two very hot topics for many AP-based organizations.

Continue reading this blog on +Information Management

Hackers with Wall Street Savvy Found to Be Stealing M&A Data

Hackers with Wall Street expertise have stolen merger-and-acquisition information from more than 80 companies for more than a year, according to security consultants who shared their findings with law enforcement.

Read more on +Information Management

8 tips for data analytics success from Data Strategy Symposium

Brands and big data experts share their advice on how you can improve your organisation's use of data to inform business strategy and drive success.

Read more from CMO

Where are big data and analytics heading in 2015?

Big data and analytics in 2015 will be less about collecting everything and anything and more about focusing on the most relevant data for actionable insights. More organisations will also look at how machine generated data can add value to their business, not just data coming from customers or employees, according to analysts.

Continue to read on +CIO

The Surprising Industries Making Use Of Big Data Analytics

Anyone who stays current on tech trends knows that big data is changing the way many business leaders are running their organizations. The specific industries currently incorporating this emerging tool more than any other seem to be healthcare and retail, by a landslide. However, we are seeing more and more niche industries making use of big data and its ever-increasing benefits.

Continue reading on +BusinessIntelligence.com

Hacking the hackers with Big Data

When researchers uncovered cyber attacks on a range of US-based think-tanks earlier this year, they didn’t rely on typical detection techniques. If they had, they might have let the perpetrators slip away, as the attackers weren’t using typical hacker tools that traditional anti-virus protection would detect.

Article here from +Raconteur

6 Tips for Landing a Job in the Big Data Industry

The information explosion is driving demand for qualified individuals in the booming Big Data industry. According to a recent study by the UK-based business analytics company SAS Institute, the number of employees that organizations will need to carry out Big Data tasks is expected to grow by more than 240 percent by 2017. What does that number mean for the U.S.? As more and more companies turn to Big Data analytics platforms such as cloud-based Hadoop to collect, manage and mine mountains of rich data for competitive advantage, the demand for Big Data employees will dramatically outpace supply. According to a 2011 report published by McKinsey & Co., by 2018 the U.S. could “face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills, as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts with the know-how to use the analysis of Big Data to make effective decisions.” This huge talent gap represents a tremendous opportunity for those looking to pursue a career in the booming Big Data industry, provided they have the right qualifications. Based on a review of credible online sources that outline the qualifications Big Data employers are looking for in new hires, here are 6 tips for landing a job in the Big Data industry.

Continue reading at +Datafloq

How Big Will The Internet of Things Be?

2014 was the year of Big Data, 2015 will be the year of the Internet of Things. More and more every day items are being connected to the Internet ranging from smart thermostats to smart toothbrushes. In the coming years, the amount of smart devices in our household could grow drastically as Gartner predicts that a typical home could contain more than 500 smart devices by 2022. The falling costs of sensors and the upcoming domotica platforms such as Apple’s Homekit will contribute to this growth. However, this is just the beginning. IDC expects the market for the Internet of Things to grow to $ 3 trillion by 2020, Garnter even predicts a $ 14 trillion market in 2022. So how big will the Internet of Things actually be?

Continue reading at +Datafloq

Data analytics for HR: how to make effective recruitment.

In his book Drive, management author Daniel Pink talks about the disconnect between “what science is telling us and what businesses do”. He refers to employee motivation and how organisations use various incentives, especially monetarist, to motivate people. Conversely, there is a body of research that shows that such ‘extrinsic motivators’ actually have an adverse effect on employee motivation.

Read more of this blog from +PromptCloud

HP Big Data, Cloud Sales Don't Completely Fill Revenue Void

Hewlett-Packard continues to invest in Big Data and cloud computing, but sales apparently haven't grown fast enough to offset weaknesses across HP's services, printing and enterprise businesses. HP CEO Meg Whitman and several other executive team members described the state of HP during the company's Q4 earnings call earlier this week.

Read more at +Information Management

Integrated Big Data Analytics approach to Sustained Economic Value Creation for CSPs

A telecom operator is a ‘natural’ Big Data factory. Huge volume of data is generated each second as part of its business-as-usual processes and what is more – all this data is generated, captured and available in real-time and digital form by default. This is unlike any other industry – healthcare, retail or public sector – where data has to be purposefully captured and then converted to digital form. Increasing connectivity, faster networks, and growth of connected devices and subscribers, all continue to multiply the volume and variety of data.

Read more at +Flytxt

High versus low-level data science

Here I describe a case study: a solution based on high-level data science. By high level, I mean data science not done by statisticians, but by decision makers accessing, digging into, and understanding summary (dashboard) data to quickly make a business decision with immediate financial impact. There is also a section on smart imputation techniques, with patentable, open intellectual property that we created after investigating this problem.

Continue reading well thought out blog by +Vincent Granville

How IT Will Change Healthcare Patient Engagement

As the healthcare industry depends increasingly on software to drive the change to value-based care from transaction-based compensation, the future of global healthcare is increasingly bound to the technology that will deliver.

Read blog from +Information Management

Bringing Silicon Valley to the ICU: My Vision of Data for Good By Rob Seaman

Any parent can relate to the anxiety of being encharged with a newborn completely dependent on you yet unable to communicate its needs. This worry is amplified when your baby is born prematurely and spends its first few weeks of life in the Intensive Care Nursery hooked up to cardiorespiratory monitors.

Here’s the thing about cardiorespiratory monitors. These devices track a newborn’s heart rate, breathing rate and oxygenation so that nurses can attend to health problems like apnea and bradycardia and parents can rest assured that their kid is okay.

Continue reading article at +WibiData

Meet IBM Watson's Potential Rival

+Sentient Technologies , a potential IBM Watson rival focused on artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data, has raised $103.5 million in Series C funding.

Key financial backers include Access Industries, Tata Communications (Hong Kong), Horizons Ventures, and a group of private investors. ""Making sense of massive amounts of data is critical for consumer-facing digital businesses,” said Jörg Mohaupt from Access Industries, in a prepared statement.

Article from +Information Management

Big Data Top Trends in 2015

Big Data has seen a huge leap forward in 2014 regarding how it has been represented and used across companies. The adoption rates have grown and the importance of Big Data as a business function has increased, but what are we going to see in 2015?

Article from +Innovation Enterprise 

Why technology and content are inseparable at Netflix

Neil Hunt is the chief product officer at Netflix, and his job entails a lot more than it might sound like. The end product at Netflix is the video streaming through our iPads or smart televisions, but what we’re watching and we’re seeing it is result of a lot of work.

Article from +gigaom

How Can Big Data Drive Growth Of Business Enterprises?

The world is a huge storehouse of structured and unstructured data that extends well into the range of petabytes and zetabytes. Business enterprises usually have such large repositories of data related to their business processes, customer information, evolving market trends along with data coming in from an enterprise's social media streams. In such a scenario, business enterprises can utilize predictive and big data analytics to make informed decisions to facilitate the creation of multi-dimensional customer services and to enhance their productivity.

Read more on +hostReview

Google demos how to get the most out of analytics

Google has launched a new website to help developers gain more insight into their applications. Google Analytics Demos & Tools aims to give experienced developers the ability to be more productive and improve their business through Google Analytics and advanced measurements.

Article on +SD Times

Industry Watch: Four areas to watch for Big Data innovation

The industry has reached an inflection point in our thinking about data. It’s no longer about slicing and dicing data sets; it’s now about creating insights.

Article from +SD Times

Popular Software Skills in Data Science Job postings

This exercise was done to understand the software skills that are in high demand for Data Science. Analysis was done by extracting the job postings from popular online websites. The findings are interesting. R continues to be the most popular skill, found in 70% of the postings. Python follows as a close second. Surprisingly, in spite all the talk about "Big Data Science", SQL comes up third. This shows that traditional RDBMS still continue to be the base for machine learning work today

Article from Kumaran Ponnambalam.

Bank CEOs Fear Data-Driven Decisions

 Do bank CEOs fear analytics?

A recent study found that analytics are underused at banks and that senior executives are cold to the technology: a scant 20% said that if it were up to them their organization would be highly data driven.

Article from +Information Management

Teradata, MapR Unite Hadoop and Data Warehouses

Big Data technologies like Hadoop and NoSQL could be coming to a data warehouse near you -- thanks to Teradata and MapR. The two companies have inked a partnership to ensure MapR's Hadoop and NoSQL capabilities integrate with Teradata's data warehousing portfolio.

Article from +Information Management

How Artificial Intelligence Will Solve IoT's Big Data Challenges

If IoT is going to deliver on its transformational promise, it will have to provide greater value and importance than a single internet enabled sensor such as a wearable device

Read more at this blog by +Isaac Sacolick

How We Can Grow Analytics Intelligently in the Year Ahead

As analytics continues to capture the attention of the business world, we contemplate a distinct field that uses newly available data to make better decisions. In the coming year, we must pay attention to our university analytics degrees, our continuing education, certifying competent practitioners, and organization-wide evaluations to make sure that our field grows and we bring greater benefit to those who seek our insights.

Article from +Data Informed

Internet of Things: 25B IoT Devices By 2020 Says Gartner

Some 4.9 billion connected “things” will be in use in 2015, up 30% from 2014, and will reach 25 billion by 2020, according to recent research from Gartner Inc. The Internet of Things (IoT) has become a powerful force for business transformation, the firm says, and its disruptive impact will be felt across all industries and all areas of society.

Article from +Information Management

Time for Data-Driven Intuition

The book The House Advantage: Playing the Odds to Win Big In Business (Jeffrey Ma) should be required reading for anyone working in the data management and business intelligence fields where we often oversimplify the business decision-making process by saying it’s either data-driven or intuition-driven—and strongly emphasizing that using data is always better than using intuition. Although Ma is definitely an advocate for data-driven decision making, toward the end of his book he also acknowledges that there are times when somewhat of a middle ground between data and intuition is called for.

Article from +Information Management

Data science: 'Machines do analytics. Humans do analysis'

Summary: Two leaders of +Booz Allen's data science team talk talent, building a data science team and the machine-human link in analytics.

Article from +ZDNet

Nine Steps to Unlock Big Data's Hidden Value

No matter where you look, the numbers on big data are staggering. Among estimates of its potential benefits are productivity-led savings: $300 billion a year for the US healthcare industry; €250 billion for the European public sector; a 60 percent potential increase in retailers’ operating margins; and $600 billion in economic surplus for services enabled by personal-location data. However, these are just the early calculations coming in from a few sectors; they could well go higher.

Article from +Information Management

HP Unveils Vertica for SQL on Hadoop

Hewlett-Packard is building a bridge between traditional SQL database analytics and Big Data on Hadoop systems. The result is HP Vertica for SQL on Hadoop.

HP officially unveiled the new offering today -- though reports about the offering (previously code-named Dragline) surfaced in May 2014.

Article from +Information Management

Moneyball For Music: Why Streaming Services Are Betting On Analytics

Amid a bitter feud between music artists and streaming services over royalties for online music, Pandora appears to be extending the olive branch.

In an attempt to lure musicians back to the site, the streaming radio service recently announced its new Artist Marketing Platform, which provides listener data to music artists who are being played on Pandora.

Article from +BusinessIntelligence.com

Four Ways Big Data Will Make You Happy

We are at the beginning of a data revolution, where every data source will be connected with each other and as such provide valuable insights. These insights can be used by organisations to reduce costs or increase their revenue, but it can also help in making consumers happier. Connecting data sources is called the semantic web and it is often quoted as the next phase of the Internet. The semantic web will allow us to easily share and re-use data across applications, communities and enterprise boundaries. The next phase will be the smart web, when techniques such as machine learning will apply smart algorithms to the semantic web. The result will be insights that can help us and make us happy.

Article from Big Data Startups

SQL SERVER – What are Hypothetical Indexes?

If you ever thought this is some sort of trick to bring you to the blog, well you are wrong. This infact is something worth a look and interesting thing to know. Before I start to explain you the finer details, let me tell you that this is NOT a new feature for performance improvement of the SQL Server Engine.

Blog from +Pinal Dave

Welcome to the Big Data Economy

So much of the American identity is tied up in the iconic image: the ability to move freely,
to experience a wider array of goods than when they were regionally locked by limited infrastructure, and the opportunity to pursue wildly different dreams than what were possible before these paths to prosperity were laid.

Article from Radhika Subramanian on Smart Data Collective

Big Data Can Guess Who You Are Based on Your Zip Code

In the era of Big Data, your zip code is a window into what you can afford to buy, but it also reveals how you spend time—and, in essence, who you are.

That's according to software company Esri, which mapped zip codes across the United States and linked them to one of 67 profiles of American market segments.

Article from +The Atlantic

Volkswagen: Big Data Doesn’t Have to Mean Big Brother

Given the vast amounts of data that will be collected by the cars of the future, strict protections are needed to prevent government intrusion, the chairman of Volkswagen Group said on Sunday.

Article from +Re/code

Data Governance and MDM – The 80/20 Rule

I attended once a session with a Gartner analyst, who declared that the closest thing to the work he was doing when helping customers with data governance was “Family Counseling”. This statement expressed perfectly the complexity of the topic, and highlighted the strong focus on people and processes that apply to the Data Governance field.

When people ask me what is the relation between MDM and Data Governance, I oversimplify and say: “Governance is about making decisions, and MDM is about making them real”.

Blog from +Semarchy

SLIDESHOW: 10 Big Data Career Killers

Data scientists are in high demand. The Big Data market will grow anywhere from 20 percent to 40 percent annually through 2017, depending on the market forecast you trust most. But even an industry boom doesn't guarantee job security. Here are 10 missteps that can stop your Big Data career in its tracks.

Slideshow from +Information Management

Is It Time to End Screen Scraping?

As the industry works to improve the way online banking information is shared with personal financial management apps, a debate is brewing over whether to end the decades-old practice of screen scraping.

Article from +Information Management

Customer Service & Social Media: Tools, Analytical Wealth and Brand Perception Decoded

Social media customer service is fast moving into mainstream enterprise strategies owing to the hype created amongst brands. Customer relationship management had been an age old concept for brands wherein the brand resolved customer issues and complaints after a product or service was bought. Social Customer Relationship Management (SCRM) on the other hand is creating a balance in the social media ecosystem, between marketing and other departments of a business, while also solving customer issues.

Article from +B2C

Cost, integration issues halting big data projects

25 per cent of organisations with more than 20 staff are using big data apps and services

Big data projects are being held back by the high cost of setting up infrastructure to support the capturing of potentially hundreds of millions of data points each day.

Article from +CIO

Big Data ROI: Does the Payoff match the Potential?

How do you accurately measure return on investment (ROI) of big data? This question is continually asked by marketers and big data experts alike, yet the answer seems to constantly elude them all. It reminds me of when everyone asked the same question about social media. In that case, I am not sure marketers ever really gave a satisfactory answer, but it’s possible to find one for big data.

Article from +Data Informed

Where Do Big Data, Internet of Things Intersect?

What if two of the biggest technology trends -- Big Data and the Internet of Things (IoT) -- actually converged or intersected? Actually, they are -- spanning everything from kitchen appliances to smart buildings. Not by coincidence, technology giants and  startups are seeking to help data chiefs, CIOs and CFOs make sense of the convergence.

Article from +Information Management

The Three Pillars Of Insurance Analytics

The insurance industry is all about assessing risk and managing the same successfully. Life insurance industry operates intrinsically by balancing risk assessment and risk management. Compiled with a large volume of data the insurance industry operates with, arriving at meaningful information can be a challenging task. Also, the insurance industry is growing competitive with each passing year and numbers of insurance service providers are constantly on the rise. In such a scenario only those companies that can increase their top and bottom growth line can stay competitive and profitable in the long run. Blog from +Aureus Analytics

The next frontier in IT leadership: 'Actionizing' real-time big data

Companies need to start thinking about how analysts or business managers will be tasked with "actionizing" real-time data in ways that affect real-time decisions.

Article from +TechRepublic

22 tips for better data science

These tips are provided by +Vincent Granville  in his blog, who brings 20 years of varied data-intensive experience working with successful start-ups, small companies across various industries, and eBay, Visa, Microsoft, GE and Wells Fargo.

Red Pill or Blue Pill? Choosing Between SQL & NoSQL

Pain is often the stimulus behind innovations. This is particularly true in software development, in what we endearingly call Pain Driven Development (PDD). Starting from the 1980s, we have all known how to handle relational data – simply put it in a Relational DataBase Management System (RDBMS) and use SQL to work with the data. For the past few years however, our industry has seen an increasing trend towards the usage of NoSQL databases, where data just isn’t stored like in relational databases.

Article from +Telerik

5 Strategies for Recruiting and Training Decision Science Talent

A career in decision sciences/analytics continues to be one of the sexiest jobs of the 21st century, but the supply of analytics talent threatens to limit the promise of decision sciences. A report by McKinsey and Company estimates a shortfall of 140,000 to 190,000 data scientists and 1.5 million managers who have the skills needed to use the insights to drive decisions. And Gartner predicts that by 2015, big data will create 4.4 million jobs globally. Data scientists are in short supply, but the dearth of decision scientists – the rare breed that combines the interdisciplinary prowess of math, business, technology, behavioral sciences, and design thinking – is even more alarming. For this reason, there needs to be an increased emphasis on recruiting and training as opposed to relying on acquisition,

Article from +Data Informed

Amazon Conference Attracts Big Data Cloud Companies

When Amazon's AWS re:invent 2014 conference kicks off Nov. 11 in Las Vegas, numerous Big Data cloud companies will be in the house. Among the businesses to watch: Blacklight Solutions, Intel, MediaMath, Numenta and Yellowfin (among others). Here's why.

Article from +Information Management

4 Big Data Trends Emerging in 2015 to Keep You Ahead of the Game

We are now in the last quarter of 2014. As we look ahead to 2015, you probably wonder what will be the future of Big Data for the coming year.

Blog from +Infinit Datum

Big Data in No Time: Getting Started with Big Data Quickly (Video)

Summary: Tony Baer, IT Analyst at Ovum, and Ashish Thusoo, co-creator of Apache Hive and CEO of Qubole, discuss common hurdles to Hadoop and big data and how mainstream enterprises can get started with Hadoop quickly via the cloud.

Video from +Qubole- Big Data in the Cloud

Gartner's top 10 technology trends for 2015: All about the cloud

Gartner analysts suggest you keep a close eye on the items listed in its latest trend report. Michael Kassner examines the technologies on the list and finds a common thread: cloud.

Article on +TechRepublic

Big Data and Quantified Self-Awareness

Big data raises, and rightfully so, data privacy concerns. We fear big data will expose our secrets to the world. But even if big data remained private, it could still expose our secrets to ourselves. In addition to its impact on our privacy, we should be concerned about how big data will impact our self-awareness.

Article from +Information Management 

Four tips for putting business users in touch with Hadoop

The Global Hadoop market was valued at $1.5 billion in 2012 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 58.2 percent, to reach $50.2 billion by 2020, according to a Hadoop Market Analysis report prepared by Allied Market Research.

Blog from +sas voice

Google Flu Trends: Underlying issues of big data

A Google software engineer took to an official company blog last Friday to announce that the tech firm was changing its Flu Trends tool for the 2014-15 flu season. That's potentially good news for healthcare for at least two reasons. First, it presumably means that the healthcare community will be getting more accurate data about flu incidence. Second, it provides a good opportunity to think about some of the challenges posed by the use of so-called big data, massive data bases combed through by computer power rather than human brain power, for healthcare's future.

Article from +Big Data Made Simple

Beyond Big Data: Understanding Social MDM Reference Architecture free book chapter

Reference architectures encapsulate architectural best practices harvested and harnessed from a series of implementations. In this chapter from Beyond Big Data: Using Social MDM to Drive Deep Customer Insight, the authors introduce the Social MDM Reference Architecture regarding its key capabilities based on the capability framework.

Book chapter from +InformIT

Monetizing Big Data: A Q&A with Wells Fargo's Data Chief

A. Charles Thomas is a rare bird in banking circles.

Nine months ago Wells Fargo made him its first chief data officer, and one of only a handful of such jobholders at banks nationwide. Thomas, who previously held a similar role at USAA, has a doctorate in behavioral science and manages a $100 million budget and a "small team" of 600 people.

Article from +Information Management

Hadoop 'No Longer Optional,' Says Forrester

Forrester says economics will make Hadoop "mandatory," predicts new roles, new software sources, and an end to skills shortage by 2015.

"Hadooponomics" will make Apache's open-source big data platform a "must have for large enterprises."

Article from +InformationWeek

What you need to know about keeping your cloud data safe

The first reaction many corporate users – even those who are quite technically aware – have when considering a migration to cloud computing is to worry about data security.

It is a fairly natural emotional response of course; you are effectively surrendering a kind of ownership of your data over to a third party.

Article from +The Register

Surveys: Big Data Is Mainstream, But ROI Varies Greatly

Big Data has gone mainstream. But is it succeeding? Results from two recent surveys (conducted by NewVantage Partners and Wikibon, respectively) show some key ROI (return on investment) challenges facing Big Data projects.

Article from +Information Management

Update on CA ERwin Data Modeling Business

NEW YORK, November 3, 2014 – CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) today announced that the agreement to sell its CA ERwin® data modeling business to Embarcadero, announced on March 13, 2014, has been terminated. It is anticipated that the transaction would not receive required regulatory approvals in a timely fashion, and therefore would not meet certain closing conditions.

CA is highly focused on supporting and driving value for CA ERwin customers, partners and employees.  The company will continue to invest in and execute on product development, marketing and sales plans.  Mark Lukianchuk, a 17-year CA veteran, has been appointed to lead the CA ERwin business. Key members of the leadership team will remain in place.

The award-winning CA ERwin is the most-used data modeling tool among data professionals, and is sold almost exclusively through more than 500 partners in over 70 countries. In August 2014, CA ERwin was named “Best Modeling Solution” in the inaugural Database Trends and Applications (DBTA) magazine Readers’ Choice Awards.

For financial accounting purposes, CA Technologies will continue to recognize the CA ERwin business as discontinued operations.

Announcement from here.

Cloudera Labs Incubates Big Data Analytics Tools

Cloudera, the fast-growing Big Data and analytics company, is now striving to incubate an industry around itself. The company, focused on Apache Hadoop, has launched Cloudera Labs -- which aims to "fast track" promising open source initiatives.

Article from +Information Management

Look at what Google and Amazon are doing with databases: That's your future

It may seem unlikely that ordinary firms will ever be able to emulate the resource-rich web giants when it comes to data architectures. But that possibility may be closer than you think, says +Neo Technology Services, LLC  CEO +Emil Eifrém

Article from +ZDNet

Big Data Meets the Ballot Box

Just as industries like retail and health care are harnessing the power of big data to more effectively reach consumers, so too are political advertisers.

Campaigns and outside groups made use of mountains of data about voters as they spent more than $1 billion on televised political advertisements this midterm cycle, according to an estimate from the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political TV advertising. Campaigns love the ability to target narrower groups of voters, but some argue the practice could feed into the polarized political climate in the U.S.

Article in +US News & World Report

NewVantage Big Data Executive Survey 2014: Corporate Big Data Investment Surges Forward

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--NewVantage Partners, advisors and consultants to Fortune 1000 business and technology executives improving business insights with data and analytics, has released the results of its Big Data Executive Survey 2014: An Update on the State of Big Data in the Large Corporate World.

“Big Data was a new topic just a few years ago, with many companies grappling with its role in their organization”

Survey respondents are Fortune 1000 senior business and technology executives who have a vested interest in the success of an organization’s data and analytics, and Big Data initiatives. This third annual survey by NewVantage Partners takes an in-depth look at the forces driving business investment in Big Data.

Article from +Business Wire

Google’s Big Data to Help Auction.com Predict Homebuying Trends

Auction.com LLC, which got a $50 million investment from Google Inc. in March, said it will use the Internet-search company’s big-data capabilities to try to predict U.S. home sales and other trends ahead of competitors.

The new product, known as Auction.com Real Estate Nowcast, based on Google Trends information and other data, predicts that existing homes will sell at an annual pace of 5.18 million in October, according to a statement today. That estimate is ready about four weeks before the National Association of Realtors reports its seasonally adjusted annual sales rate, which was 5.17 million last month and 5.13 million in October 2013.

Article from +Information Management

Defining Data Scientists & Their Tools

My thoughts of the day involve reactions to two blog entries. The first is titled, “Data Scientists Must Also Be Research Methodology Scientists." The second is "SAS vs. R (vs. Python) – which tool should I learn?" Here's Steve Miller's take on it on +Information Management

How To Become A Data-Driven Information-Centric Company

In the fast moving world of today, data is being created at lightning speed. Data comes from an infinite variety of sources and all this data can be used to discover valuable business insights. Combining internal and external data can enable organisations to beat the competition, as the analysis will provide valuable insights. The more business users that work with such insights, the better your organisation will become. Organisations should therefore strive for a data-driven, information-centric culture, where every business user makes decisions based on data.  Article from Big Data Startups

5 Big Mistakes You’re Doing with Big Data

Much has been written about Big Data. Companies nowadays are already aware that it is crucial to collect data to facilitate better decision-making. Better decisions, of course, can result to more efficient operations, reduction of costs, greater customer satisfaction and higher profits. The question is: do these companies know how to make the most out of their data in order to enjoy these benefits? Blog from +Infinit Datum

Exploring 5 big data training programs

With big data expertise in high demand, both universities and private companies are ramping up their education programs and big data training. Gartner expects that the BDA market will have 4.4 million jobs available by 2015, but only about one-third of them will be filled.  Article from +RCR Wireless News

Everything You Need To Know About The Internet Of Things

A few months ago I wrote a post called, A Simple Explanation Of The Internet Of Things where I tried to provide some clarity around what this new connected world means for all of us. In the article I mentioned some of the driving forces behind this.  Article from +Forbes

Plugging in to Hadoop

Even if it’s not where they end up, Hadoop can be a great starting platform for a data-driven software company. That’s what San Francisco- and Taipei-based Fliptop found in 2009 when they launched a social media identity matching engine, ultimately employed by such companies as MailChimp, Dell, Toyota, Oracle and Nordstrom. Article from +SD Times

IBM Bolsters Big Data, Cognos Cloud Offerings

IBM is preparing to add multiple analytics applications to the IBM Cloud Marketplace -- an online mall featuring on-demand software from Big Blue and its partners. The new cloud additions will include Cognos Business Intelligence, SPSS predictive analytics platforms and the recently announced Watson Analytics offering. Article from +Information Management

The Ultimate Guide to Using Big Data in the Healthcare Industry [E-Book]

In the United States, Big Data is now seen as an essential tool in delivering treatment and predicting health trends. While in the UK, studies show that data analytics can improve efficiency of its healthcare sector by 60% and save millions. There’s no doubt that Big Data in Healthcare is now a major consideration for improvement and healthcare transformation, especially in providing high-quality services to everyone. Downloadable e-book from +Infinit Healthcare

Big Data Taking Industries by Storm

No one cares about technology for technology’s sake. Well, probably some deep-drive gearheads do, but no CIO is going to get a board to finance a huge technology purchase without some clear use case.

Article from +Forbes

Data Driven Strategy Execution

Data driven strategy execution is the key to building value for all stakeholders in a business over time.  Measurable key performance indicators (KPIs) are essential to value creation.  Value creation for capital providers is the ultimate mission of every business. Blog from +Gabriel Lowy

Introduction to HBase, the NoSQL Database for Hadoop

HBase is called the Hadoop database because it is a NoSQL database that runs on top of Hadoop. It combines the scalability of Hadoop by running on the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), with real-time data access as a key/value store and deep analytic capabilities of Map Reduce. This article from +InformIT  introduces HBase and describes how it organizes and manages data and then demonstrates how to set up a local HBase environment and interact with data using the HBase shell.

The Big Data Industry in Detail: Biggest Players, Biggest Revenues and More [Infographic]

In the big data game, there are hundreds of players. From startups including Umbel and Hortonworks to legacy brands including IBM and Oracle, the race to reach the monetization of big data for clients first is on. Whether these companies build out platforms for retail, healthcare, sports, publishing, finance or all the above, all big data companies have one goal in common: help these industries realize big data's big potential. Blog from +Umbel

How to Keep Your Data Scientists (And Keep Them Happy)

Big Data and Analytics are all the rage. And, as we all depend upon analytics to drive business – and stay competitive – hiring, developing, and retaining analytical and big data talent is becoming more critical. Over the past year, much of this conversation has spotlighted on the data scientist, that sexy elusive fantastical beast of legend. But, we’ve spent so much time trying to figure out who the data scientist is, that we haven’t yet asked the next logical question: Once we find him or her, how to we keep him or her? Article from +Information Management

Find all triggers in a SQL Server Database

Do you know what triggers lurk in your database?

Triggers can be implemented to enforce business rules or referential data integrity in database applications.

There are even triggers that allow data modifications to multiple base tables of a view. I have actually used this in the past when working with 3rd party encryption tools prior to SQL 2005’s native encryption options.

Interesting blog from +SQLServerCentral

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Internals: Special Storage

This sample chapter from Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Internals looks at how SQL Server stores data that doesn't use the typical FixedVar record format and data that doesn't fit into the usual 8 KB data page.

Hadoop: 5 Undeniable Truths

Yes, you still need a traditional data warehouse after beginning work with Hadoop. Here are four more fundamental points to know about the big data platform from +InformationWeek.

Data Experts Discuss Their Dream Analytics Projects

Data analytics is an ever-evolving space, decades old but new at the same time. Data scientists, faced with an expanding universe of data and a steady stream of new tools, bring an artful combination of hard mathematics skills, creativity, and intuition to the search for solutions hiding in data.

The art of data science and analytics, unfortunately, isn’t limited only by the imaginations of its practitioners. Business considerations such as time, competing priorities, and, of course, money, have a hand in determining which ideas become working projects and which remain wishful thinking.

+Data Informed  asked several data practitioners what projects they would  work on if time, money, and staff were unlimited. The answers reveal the passions and, in some cases, the frustrations of experts who see problems up close every day and know they have access to the tools that could help solve them, if only resources would allow.

ClearStory CEO: How Apache Spark is helping bring analytics to the average Joe

With a new analytics cloud service unveiled earlier this month, CEO Sharmila Mulligan explains how +ClearStory Data's engine is shifting data insights to ordinary users.  Article in +ZDNet .

8 big trends in big data analytics

Big data technologies and practices are moving quickly. Here's what you need to know to stay ahead of the game from +Computerworld

Salesforce.com Enters the BI Market with Wave, the Salesforce Analytics Cloud

Blog from +Information Management discussing the annoucement.

Big Data Integration and Your Customer Genome

One of business’ Big Data challenges is the integration of different data silos. The integration of these disparate customer data helps your analytics team to identify the interrelationships among the different pieces of customer information, including their values, interests, attitudes about your brand, interactions with your brand and more. Integrating information/facts about your customers allows you to gain an understanding about how all the diverse variables work together (i.e., are related to each other), driving deeper customer insight.  Article from +Bob Hayes

Google acquires Firebase to bolster its Cloud Platform apps

Today (21 October 2014) Google announced that Firebase, a cloud service used for building Web and mobile apps, has been added to its Cloud Platform toster.  Apps built with Firebase let devs sync data automatically between mobile and web versions, and can be used to build apps that work offline too. The platform currently has over 110,000 users.  Article from +The Next Web

Big Data's Big Mistake; Quantity over Quality

Back in the “Golden Age” of advertising, instinct, creativity, and understanding of human nature drove the industry. Talented writers and artists paced in gleaming skyscraper offices, brainstorming ideas that would shape the nation’s perception of brands and products. This era has attracted a lot of attention over the past couple of years, thanks largely to the popularity of the television drama “Mad Men.” The show reminds us that 50 years ago, no real boundaries existed between advertising and marketing, and creativity directed the process.

Unfortunately, that era is over. Quantitative data has taken the place of qualitative data, and today marketing is considered more of a science than an art. But marketers who focus only on quantitative data risk missing the full view of customers.

Article from +Data Informed

Best practices for moving workloads to the cloud

The rapid diffusion for the cloud computing paradigm and promised benefits for the adoption of cloud infrastructure are attracting a growing number of businesses and organizations.

Of course, it is essential for organizations to maximize the benefits of migration to cloud architecture by reducing costs and minimizing risks.

Article from +CSO

84% Of Enterprises See Big Data Analytics Changing Their Industries' Competitive Landscapes In The Next Year

87% of enterprises believe Big Data analytics will redefine the competitive landscape of their industries within the next three years. 89% believe that companies that do not adopt a Big Data analytics strategy in the next year risk losing market share and momentum.

Article from +Forbes

Chief Data Officers Battle Complexity, Complacency: Wells' Thomas

Even with a newly created position, a $100 million budget and a team of 600, Wells Fargo's chief data officer, Charles Thomas, says he's fighting the forces of corporate inertia.

"It's hard to get a successful company to change until something hurts," Thomas said Thursday.

Article from +Information Management

The Duality of Big Data: The Angel and the Demon

Over the last few years, we underwent a change in perspectives on the U.S. government — and more specifically, the NSA. It all started when whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked details of secret NSA data collection programs.

Since then, the media and security analysts have debated back and forth concerning the usage of these collection programs and the subsequent analysis, which can all be rolled into one proverbial buzzword: big data.

Will the good coming from big data outweigh the bad (think: big brother, privacy…)?  Interesting article from +WIRED

5 Small Businesses That Successfully Made Use of Big Data

It seems like common knowledge amongst business organizations that Big Data is exclusively for big businesses with big budgets. Whoever believes this idea doesn’t know that it is in fact one big misconception. Interesting blog from +Infinit Datum

9 Google Analytics Views that you must always use

Different people analyse and interpret the same data differently. It all depends upon the context in which they analyse and interpret the data.  Interesting article from +Himanshu Sharma

Collaborations and correlations in the common cause

What makes the world a better place? If any of us feels that we have the last word on that topic, we're either some great religious figure or insufferably self-important.  Interesting blog from +James Kobielus at +IBM Big Data & Analytics

Big Data Top Priority, Not the Case for Predictive Analytics

Less than one-third of companies have predictive analytics capabilities although big data analytics is a top priority for 88 percent of executives, according to a new study from GE and Accenture. Interesting article from +Information Management

Qantas Red Planet chief: We don't have a data strategy

Executive manager of the new audience marketing services business says standalone data strategies run the risk of analytics work being siloed across organisations.  Article from +Nadia Cameron from CMO.

5 Best Practices to Collect Data for your Small Business

Want Growth? Collect Data for your Small Business.  Blog from +Infinit Datum containing 5 best practices.

Hive Function Cheat Sheet

Working on a project in Hive? This Hive Function Cheat Sheet may come in handy from +Qubole- Big Data in the Cloud

An astrophysicist schools us on where to find data scientists

It’s hard to find qualified data scientists. Where are they hiding? Interesting article from +HP discussing the ways to find and hire data scientists with +Jessica Kirkpatrick

Most EHRs Unprepared To Integrate With Big Data, Other Technologies

While providers plan to use big data, cloud computing, mobile health and social media to optimize their electronic health record systems, 96% say their health IT infrastructure is not yet prepared to integrate such technologies,  Article from iHealthBeat.

12 things I hate about Hadoop

Hadoop is a wonderful creation, but it's evolving quickly and it can exhibit flaws. Here are my dozen downers - article by Andrew C Oliver on +InfoWorld

The Limits Of Big Data Marketing

Insight used to be considered a personal quality and one that was essential to be a successful marketer.  While other corporate functions, such as finance and logistics, were driven by cold, rational calculation, marketers were supposed to thrive at the human side of business.  Read more about it here from +Forbes

How To Identify Fake Big Data Products

One aspect of this year’s Strata and Hadoop World conference is to note is the rise of “fake Big Data” products, that is products that have added the adjective Big Data in the hope that the world will take more interest.  Read more here from +Forbes

Big Data and Quantified Self-Awareness

Big data raises, and rightfully so, data privacy concerns. We fear big data will expose our secrets to the world. But even if big data remained private, it could still expose our secrets to ourselves. In addition to its impact on our privacy, we should be concerned about how big data will impact our self-awareness.  Interesting blog from +Information Management

The Future Of Marketing Combines Big Data With Human Intuition

Great marketers have great guts.  Leo Burnett didn't need a legion of focus groups to come up with the Marlboro Man.  Steve Jobs, arguably the greatest marketing mind ever, famously eschewed market research because he didn't think customers knew what they wanted until he showed it to them. Read this interesting article from +Forbes on the future of marketing using big data and human intuition.

Westpac taps into new big data streams for customer delivery

Australian banking group deploys Teradata data analytics platforms to drive better insights around customer service delivery and fraud.  Read about this here from CMO.COM.AU

How Big Data Helps Bar Owners Sell More Beer

Like any industry, the FMCG industry can leverage the enormous potential of Big Data analytics. With each product, massive amounts of data are generated ranging from data in the production process to consumer generated data. One of those products is beer. Read more about this story here on  the Big Data-Startups website.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee speaks out on data ownership

The inventor of the web says data must be owned by its subject, rather than corporations, advertisers, and analysts.  Interesting article from +The Guardian

Databricks demolishes bigdata benchmark to prove Spark is fast on disk, too

Apache Spark is taking the big data world by storm, but the folks at Databricks wanted to disprove a misconception that its only performance advantages over Hadoop MapReduce come in-memory. Read all about it here from +gigaom

Questions about Primary and Foreign Keys You Were Too Shy to Ask

It is strange that one can ask simple questions about extended events or Hekaton at professional events and conferences without feeling embarrassed, yet nobody likes to ask vital questions about  SQL Server primary keys and foreign keys. Once more, Rob Sheldon is 'drawn to one side' to answer those questions about keys that one is too shy to ask on Simple Talk from +Red Gate Software
 .

Oracle Unveils Hadoop Data Exploration Tool

Oracle Big Data Discovery is a visual, business user-friendly alternative to Hadoop tools like Tableau Software, says Oracle.  Read more about it in this article from +InformationWeek and this blog from +Oracle

Disruption Coming For MDM - The Hub of Context

Spending time at the MDM/DG Summit in NYC this week demonstrated the wide spectrum of MDM implementations and stories out in the market. It certainly coincides with +Information Management's upcoming MDM inquiry analysis.

Big data burn-out looms as data scientists hit by work-related stress

Data scientists are over-stressed and risking burn-out because they're being forced into roles that don't suit their personalities.  Interesting article from +ZDNet

Big data and analytics third quarter 2014: analysis and outlook

Hadoop projects dominated the third-quarter big data market.

Report from +gigaom

8 Principles for Adopting Casework for Data Governance

Today, data governance units are staffed with dedicated professionals who work in a range of specialized activities. With such dedicated personnel, the rest of the enterprise recognizes it has a resource to help it with its data-related needs and has begun to request services from data governance. If data governance simply reacts in an ad hoc manner to the services requested of it, then it is likely to be limited in its effect and will have difficulty demonstrating how it is making a positive difference.

Slideshow is on +Information Management

Can Cloud-Based Solutions Reduce Costs for Electronic Payment Systems?

The complexity and prohibitively high cost of most new electronic payment systems have delayed massive deployments and generated negative perceptions among customers, according to a new report from Frost & Sullivan. As a result of this, vendors in the market are looking to cloud-based solutions to reduce the costs associated with communication, hosting and access to the service or software, the firm says. Article from +Information Management

LinkedIn's 'answer' to big data problems: Pinot

Already being rolled out for internal product management teams, LinkedIn is also planning to eventually open source Pinot to the public.  Article from +ZDNet

Top-K Optimisation

Blog about Top-K optimisation from +Qubole- Big Data in the Cloud

Wearable Tech: The Next Big in Big Data

In this two part blog from +PromptCloud they look at wearable tech which can be described as the integration of digital tools in lifestyles to improve health. Collecting this personal data is the next frontier of data science. This data has tremendous impact on not just individuals but workplace, communities and culture at large.  You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.

Movie animation firm's big data challenges present lessons to learn

The IT staff at a computer graphics animation firm have come up with smart ways to address archiving and backup challenges with its 3D data model files as described in this article on +Tech Republic

How big data could help stop the Ebola outbreak

Big data’s potential use by humanitarian workers to stop outbreaks such as Ebola is huge, says David Richards, CEO of big data firm +WANdisco  in this article on +CNBC

How big data is fueling a new age in space exploration

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will generate 700 terabytes of data every second, equivalent to roughly 35 times the data stored in the Library of Congress so by all definitions will creata big data problem.  This is described in an article from +VentureBeat