Paul Miller
Top Level Domain for data answers the wrong question
Image of Stephen Wolfram via Wikipedia British-born computer scientist Stephen Wolfram sees ongoing efforts to extend the Internet’s top-level domains (TLDs) beyond the familiar .com, .org, .uk etc as an opportunity to raise the profile of machine-readable data. In a blog post published yesterday, he argues that a new .data domain would increase “exposure of data on [...]
Nurturing the market for Data Markets
From Microsoft’s Azure Data Marketplace to the eponymous DataMarket, or InfoChimps, Factual, and Kasabi, there’s resurgent interest in the venerable business of collecting, curating, and commercialising data created by others. But despite investment and innovation, there isn’t yet the matching evidence for much use or — even — interest amongst prospective customers. In principle, at least, these data markets [...]
The myth of a data free trade policy
The border between the USA and Canada, in Washington State In my last post I looked at the USA PATRIOT Act, and at some of the ways in which it exemplifies differences in attitude and approach on either side of the Atlantic. In our increasingly connected world, these differences begin to pose quite serious challenges [...]
Microsoft, the USA PATRIOT Act, and European cloud computing
Microsoft announced last month that its Software as a Service (SaaS) offering, Office 365, will better comply with European guidelines to ensure that customer data is adequately protected. This move is certainly welcome, but the long-armed spectre of the USA PATRIOT Act continues to hang over Microsoft and other US companies, regardless of customers’ nationality [...]
Of Kindles and Business Models and Stuff
Over at TechCrunch, MG Siegler’s 2 September post on Amazon’s new Kindle has generated quite a storm. All across the web, media, bloggers, pundits, analysts and the rest are pointing to MG’s post, getting terribly excited about a new tablet that might actually challenge the iPad; something that so many others have patently failed to [...]
June is San Francisco month
For real-world applications of Linked Data and the Semantic Web, the long-running Semantic Technology Conference is hard to beat. For getting a real handle on the Cloud Computing landscape, GigaOM‘s Structure Conference is also a leading light. Working across both areas as I do, these events tend to figure prominently in my calendar for the [...]
Lessening the Pain of Data Roaming With Onavo
I am in the Belgian city of Brussels at the moment, which means that my mobile phone is ‘roaming;’ off my UK network and being charged a scary amount of money to access data. Travelling to Europe is less scary than going elsewhere in the world, as I’m ‘only’ charged about £3 per Mb here. [...]
The Appliance of Backup Science
With apologies to Zanussi for the corny title, I had an interesting conversation with Axcient CEO Justin Moore and HP’s VP for Channel Strategy & SMB Meaghan Kelly about the issues of helping small and medium businesses cope with backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity. Yesterday’s conversation was taking place in the context of today’s [...]
February’s Semantic Link Podcast Discusses Marketing the Semantic Web
February’s episode of the Semantic Link podcast is now online at SemanticWeb.com. During the show, regulars Christine Connors, Eric Franzon, Ivan Herman, Eric Hoffer, Bernadette Hyland and Andraz Tori are joined by two special guests with some experience in both marketing and semantic technologies. Krista Thomas was responsible for marketing at Thomson Reuters‘ semantic technology [...]
Strata Conference 2010: Real World Applications in the Enterprise and Industry
Notes from a panel session, Real World Applications Panel: Enterprise and Industry, featuring Kenneth Cukier from The Economist, Adam Hurwitz from BIA, Jinesh Varia from Amazon Web Services, and Mario Veiga Pereira from PSR. Cukier – Strata so far been focussed on the tools and toolmakers. Real-world applications will actually lead to biggest changes, but [...]
Strata Conference 2010: Building and Pricing the Data Marketplace
Pete Soderling of Stratus Security and Pete Forde of BuzzData led a session on Building and Pricing the Data Marketplace. Rough notes follow. What’s the Data supply business now? What’s a Data Marketplace? How do we get from here to there? Today, data is a $100Bn global market. But what is data, and why should [...]
Strata Conference 2011, Day 2 Keynotes
Day 2, and after yesterday’s tutorials the conference is really getting going. Here’s a stream of consciousness from the morning’s keynotes at this sold-out event. Conference chair Edd Dumbill is introducing things, talking about William Smith‘s nineteenth century map of geological strata in the British Isles, the rise of industrialisation, and the move to towns. [...]
Executive Summit kicks of O’Reilly Strata Conference 2010
I’m in Santa Clara this week, attending O’Reilly‘s inaugural Strata Conference. Today, I’m spending the day in the event’s Executive Summit, where I hope to hear some of the ways in which ‘normal’ businesses are approaching the opportunity of making their data work harder. The notes that follow are a rather raw summary of some [...]
Kaggle CEO Anthony Goldbloom reckons competitions ‘an amazing way to do data science’
Image via CrunchBase I had coffee this morning with Anthony Goldbloom, Australian CEO of Kaggle. The company describes itself as “a platform for data prediction competitions,” and seeks to solve big problems by hosting competitions that match data owners with a problem to (professional and amateur) data scientists with the time, creativity and skills to [...]
A little bit of Cray, over on SemanticWeb.com
Image via Wikipedia The second of my monthly columns just went up on semanticweb.com. This month, I take a quick look at an intriguing partnership between supercomputer titan Cray and a group of established semantic technology companies. To what extent do (very) big machines with loads of RAM figure in the continuing roll-out of enterprise-grade [...]
