A few weeks back I attended venture firm Accel Partners' New Data Workshop event and learned quite a bit about the state of what we are now commonly referring to as "big data" and the challenges that await the vendors trying to target this new way of slicing and dicing vast amounts of information. Read more »

The R programming language could be coming to a workplace near you — if it hasn't arrived already. The big deal about R is that it can analyze Big Data, those exploding data sets that have traditionally defied analysis. R is the brainchild of Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman (known as "R" and "R"), academics at the Department of Statistics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Since Ihaka and Gentleman wrote the original R paper in 1993, R has become the lingua franca of analytic statistics among students, scientists, programmers and data managers. Read more »

One of the trends of the moment is "Big Data" and in many organizations it is a fair bet that some CEO is asking the CIO to come up with a briefing book on Big Data. That message will go down to the CTO, the Chief Architect and so on. Eventually someone will come back with a note to the effect that Big Data is the Next Big Thing. Read more »

Pentaho has been talking about a Hadoop-related strategy. Unfortunately, in support of its Hadoop efforts, Pentaho has been — quite insistently — saying things that don’t make a lot of sense to people who know anything about Hadoop.

That said, I think I found four sensible points in Pentaho’s Hadoop strategy, namely:

If you use an ETL tool like Pentaho’s to move things in and out of HDFS, you may be able to orchestrate two more steps in the ETL process than if you used Hadoop’s native orchestration tools. Read more »

Lyric Semiconductor, a Cambridge, Mass.-based startup that was spun out of MIT in 2006, today announced a revolutionary new approach to processing data called probability processing. It wants to make chips that are fit for a world drowning in information and dealing with data deluge. Read more »

IBM (NYSE: IBM) and North Carolina State University today announced a new project that matches university-invented technologies and scientific advancements with global business opportunities. The project is designed to encourage economic growth and get new inventions from NC State researchers into the marketplace quickly. Read more »

There's a boom in large-scale analytics. The subjects of this analysis may be categorized as:

• People
• Financial trades
• Electronic networks
• Everything else Read more »

When starting from scratch, something new such as MapReduce technology is a relatively easy option to consider. After all, you have no major investments in SQL and there’s not a lot of existing data that would need to be loaded in another database. Read more »

Two and a half years ago we described eight technology-enabled business trends that were profoundly reshaping strategy across a wide swath of industries. We showed how the combined effects of emerging Internet technologies, increased computing power and fast, pervasive digital communications were spawning new ways to manage talent and assets as well as new thinking about organizational structures. Read more »