Big Data–Over Hyped Buzzword or Enterprise Focus?
Of all the myriad of terms that the tech industry throws around at the moment, none is as often subverted for marketing spin as “big data”. So much so that few people can actually agree on what big data is. For me, I’ll revert to Wikipediaand it’s definition which states; big data is a collection [...]
Data Scientists Should Be Design Thinkers
World Airline RoutesEvery company is looking for that cool data scientist who will come equipped with all the knowledge of data, domain expertise, and algorithms to turn around their business. The inconvenient truth is there are no such data scientists…
GigaOM Pro report on Hadoop and cluster management
My latest piece of work for GigaOM Pro just went live. Scaling Hadoop clusters: the role of cluster management is available to GigaOM Pro subscribers, and was underwritten by StackIQ. Thanks to everyone who took the time to speak with me during the preparation of this report. As the blurb describes, From Facebook to Johns [...]
The Americans are Coming
This October, two great US events are making their first forays into Europe. O’Reilly‘s big data conference, Strata, reaches London on 1-2 October. Then GigaOM‘s cloud computing event, Structure, hits Amsterdam on 16-17 October. I’ve attended both in the States (see disclaimer), and look forward to seeing how each sets about fusing the best elements [...]
Crunching the numbers in search of a greener cloud
Although sometimes portrayed as a big computer in the sky, the reality of cloud computing is far more mundane. Clouds run on physical hardware, located in data centres, connected to one another and to their customers via high speed networks. All of that hardware must be powered and cooled, and all of those offices must [...]
Survey: How open is your data?
Back in 2006 as we rolled out the first public draft of the Talis Community Licence, the world of data licensing seemed a simple place. Today, the Open Knowledge Foundation‘s Data Hub contains 3,888 data sets, many of which are explicitly licensed with respect to the Open Definition. But many are still not explicitly licensed. Over at [...]
Silicon Angle Interview–What’s New and News in the Cloud
While I was in Las Vegas a few weeks ago I took the opportunity to sit down with Alex Williams, Cloud editor of Silicon Angle, and Stu Miniman from Wikibon, to film a video interview. The interview cam at an interesting time – in the space of 24 hours we’d seen some large Cloud-related announcements [...]
Thinking about Data Gravity
Dave McCrory introduced his idea of Data Gravity with a blog post back in 2010. The core idea was — and is — interesting, and got some traction from sites like ReadWriteWeb, ZDNet and GigaOM. More recently, Data Gravity featured in this year’s EMC World keynote. But beyond the observation that large or valuable agglomerations of data [...]
Proxies Are As Useful As Real Data
Last year I ran a highly unscientific experiment. I would regularly put a DVD in an open mail bin in my office to mail it back to Netflix, every late Monday afternoon. I would also count the total number of Netflix DVDs put inside that bin by other people. Over a period of time I [...]
Intelligent Platforms – PaaS For The Internet Of Things
Recently, I travelled to India to give a talk at Cloud Connect conference in Bangalore. The talk is based on the Intelligent Platforms model I have been advocating in this space. It is similar to what I spoke at the Pitney Bowes Data Day event with little modifications. I have embedded the slides below. Intelligent [...]
Data Is More Important Than Algorithms
Netflix Similarity Map In 2006 Netflix offered to pay a million dollar, popularly known as the Netflix Prize, to whoever could help Netflix improve their recommendation system by at least 10%. A year later Korbel team won the Progress Prize by improving Netflix’s recommendation system by 8.43%. They also gave the source code to Netflix [...]
Zyrion Launches Predictive Analytics for IT Monitoring
Seemingly every day another vendor launches a service that promises to revolutionize the way they monitor their IT infrastructure. Generally these launches comply with all the buzzword – cloud, big data, predictive analytics etc. While I’ve no doubt that IT infrastructure monitoring is vitally important, it seems that vendors, in
Does Your Organization Face Data Obesity Problem?
Recently, I wrote a report for GigaOm Pro (behind Paywall) commemorating their Structure:Big Data conference and introduced a term which is going to hurt many organizations in a big way in the near future. I thought I will write about it here and get the thoughts of practitioners and vendors on the problem. In the world [...]
4 Big Data Myths – Part II
This is the second and the last part of this two-post series blog post on Big Data myths. If you haven’t read the first part, check it out here. Myth # 2: Big Data is an old wine in new bottle I hear people say, “Oh, that Big Data, we used to call it BI.” One [...]
Presentation: Big Data And Intelligent Platforms
Last week, I gave a talk at the Pitney Bowes Data Day conference on “Big Data and Intelligent Platforms”. It is based on the Intelligent Platform idea I have been promoting in this blog. It is my argument that today PaaS solution are not well prepared for the data driven world and we need intelligent [...]
