Above the Trend Line: machine learning industry rumor central, is a recurring feature of insideBIGDATA. In this column, we present a variety of short time-critical news items such as people movements, funding news, financial results, industry alignments, rumors and general scuttlebutt floating around the big data, data science and machine learning industries including behind-the-scenes anecdotes and curious buzz. Our intent is to provide our readers a one-stop source of late-breaking news to help keep you abreast of this fast-paced ecosystem. We’re working hard on your behalf with our extensive vendor network to give you all the latest happenings. Heard of something yourself? Tell us! Just e-mail me at: daniel
An array of Earth observation satellites, including the Sentinels involved in Europe’s Copernicus programme, collect untold amounts of data as they circle our planet. This high-resolution imagery and further information on climates and environments present tremendous potential in overcoming some of the biggest challenges of our time. Thanks to new developments in big data, cloud computing, and other areas, commercial products – and mobile apps in particular – are growing more and more proficient at handling huge quantities of information. This is where the European Space Agency’s Space App Camp comes in: For the fifth time, this event is inviting programmers to develop creative and innovative apps that make Earth observation data accessible to a wide audience. Professional app developers from all over Europe are welcome to apply until 22 July 2016 at www.app-camp.eu. Based on the applications received, 20 of them will then be invited to participate in the free Space App Camp at ESA’s ESRIN facility in Frascati (near Rome), Italy, from 12 to 19 September 2016 … In product launch news we heard about TradeState, a unique e-commerce focused analytics platform that provides essential views of trading KPI status and trends to key stakeholders via a unique dashboard in what could be called – Analytics-as-a-Service. This hosted service enables e-commerce retailers to dynamically monitor multiple aspects of their website traffic, customer experience, site performance, sales analysis (by traffic source, device type and product), detailed user journey monitoring, page conversion rates and abandoned baskets, with the primary intent to drive action by the retailers to continually improve trading performance … With the increasing demand for real-time decisioning and streaming analytics, and taking advantage of Celebrus real-time data, three new Celebrus Connectors have been launched as part of Celebrus Version 8 Update 16. These new Connectors, additions to the suite which already feeds data into Hadoop, MongoDB, Teradata, Oracle, MySQL and SQL, stream real-time data into a variety of industry-leading third party applications to power decisioning, marketing automation, fraud identification, streaming analytics and content personalization … In funding news that’s starting to compete with pre-bubble 2000 days, we have Instana Inc., founded in April 2015 with business headquarters in San Mateo, California, and engineering headquarters in Solingen, Germany, raising a $6 million investment led by venture capital firm Target Partners with participation of Codecentric, a leading German IT consulting firm. Instana is tackling the problem of monitoring and managing the increasingly complex big data and microservices architectures; humans can no longer monitor these systems by simply collecting data and building “dashboards.” Through auto-discovering the application’s technologies and topology, Instana is able to deliver unprecedented clarity into the health and performance of these modern architectures. The startup pairs its own ever increasing knowledge base with a machine learning approach to predict future performance degradation or downtime … Armorway, Venice, Calif. based provider of advanced data analytics solutions, announced the completion of a $2.5 million seed round of financing for its patented Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform that delivers descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive analytics with cognitive intelligence and deep machine learning to dynamically understand and respond to all types of security threats … Amplitude, developer of a powerful user behavior analytics platform for mobile and web that helps companies achieve sustainable growth and retention, announced that it has raised a $15 million Series B investment led by Battery Ventures with participation from existing investors Benchmark, Data Collective, Merus Capital and Quest Venture Partners. With funding from this round, Amplitude will hire key talent, fuel product development of its analytics platform, and expand sales and marketing to meet growing demand for mobile and web customer insights. Neeraj Agrawal, General Partner at Battery Ventures, will join the Amplitude board of directors … Heard on the street about a new industry alignment: Captricity, Inc., a leading Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) provider, revealed a technology partnership with Pegasystems Inc., (NASDAQ: PEGA), the software company empowering leading enterprises with strategic business applications, that will integrate Captricity’s cloud-native solution within Pegasystems’ suite of customer relationship management (CRM) applications and the Pega 7 platform … Another alignment has The Industry Data Exchange Association, Inc. (IDEA) announcing its strategic alliance with Stibo Systems, a leader of multi-domain Master Data Management (MDM) solutions. IDEA has selected Stibo Systems’ MDM solution STEP Trailblazer to power the next-generation Industry Data Warehouse (IDW). The platform will be used to standardize and manage manufacturer product data, and will be implemented and managed by IDEA … Boston Consulting Group (BCG), one of the “Big Three” management consulting firms, and Mu Sigma, a decision sciences and big data analytics provider, unveiled a new partnership that enables clients to leverage cutting-edge data and analytics solutions to transform the way they do business. The partnership delivers a unique set of capabilities for Global Fortune 500s that will enable end-to-end data-driven transformation, from strategy using BCG’s strategy and change management capabilities, to sustainable execution using Mu Sigma’s Art of Problem Solving approach and innovative decision sciences platforms … Lexalytics, a leader in cloud and on-prem text analytics solutions, unveiled a partnership with Brandtix, the real-time athlete brand value index platform. The Brandtix Sports Index, which leads the market in Live Athlete Brand Statistics (L.A.B.S.) indexing for European football clubs and players, chose Lexalytics text analytics because of its unique combination of advanced machine learning (ML) techniques and natural language processing (NLP), allowing for contextual processing to accurately determine sports-specific sentiment analysis, including named entity recognition … Cloudera and Microsoft announced a new open source Apache licensed REST based Spark service, called Apache Livy, that reduces the burden on application developers and data scientists leveraging Spark, enabling new use cases and architectures. By leading the development of Livy, Cloudera is enabling data scientists and developers to streamline architectures to push data science models directly into production in a fast and easy way. With Livy, still in early alpha development, users can easily consume Spark without worrying about deployment, configuration or monitoring of Spark jobs, making it easier for data scientists to interact with Spark, creating an improved developer experience … In customer wins news, Digital Realty Trust, Inc. (NYSE: DLR), a leading global provider of data center, colocation and interconnection solutions, will deploy the Denodo Data Virtualization Platform to speed time-to-value and improve data sharing among systems. Specifically, data virtualization will enable Digital Realty to replace ETL code with more efficient and agile integrations of data across its business systems, and create a data services fabric for internal and externally facing applications … Our friends over at Qubole, gave us some interesting Spark growth numbers. Qubole provides Spark-as-a-Service for customers. The growth statistics below show Spark adoption over the past six months (November 2015-April 2016):
- Spark Qubole Compute usage hours (QCUH): 36% increase
- Spark commands issued on QDS: ~300% increase
- Spark paying customers: 50% increase
- Spark commands usage: ~300% increase
- Number of unique Spark clusters started: 49% increase
Recognition can be sweet as Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (Nasdaq: CRAY) announced that Forrester Research has named Cray a “strong performer” in The Forrester Wave™: Big Data Hadoop Optimized Systems, Q2 2016 report. The independent research firm used a 26-point criteria evaluation system that covered current offering, strategy, and market presence in the evaluation of seven leading vendors in the report … And over in the Salesforce world there’s never a dull moment with Alteryx, Inc., a leader in self-service data analytics, unveiling it has expanded self-service analytics capabilities for analysts using Salesforce Wave Analytics and the entire Salesforce Customer Success Platform. With Alteryx, Salesforce users can prepare, blend and analyze data from any source, delivering it directly into Salesforce Wave Analytics to quickly and easily identify actionable insights and get smarter about their business … In people movement news we found out that Argyle Data, a leader in big data/machine learning analytics for mobile providers, announced that Mohan Gyani, former president and CEO of AT&T Wireless Mobility Services and one of the wireless industry’s foremost experts, has joined its Board of Directors … At the start of Summer, we’re hot on the conference circuit where we heard about some new product announcements such as SIOS Technology Corp., a leading provider of software products that help IT optimize and protect business critical application environments, announcing the newest release of SIOS iQ machine learning analytics software for VM environments. The new release integrates SIOS iQ with SQL Sentry Performance Advisor, bridging a critical gap between IT infrastructure administrators and SQL Server administrators. For the first time, IT staff can instantaneously identify and resolve the root causes of performance issues based on a comprehensive analysis of both the VMware infrastructure and the SQL Server application environment … Also, Helical IT Solutions Pvt Ltd announced the launch of the much anticipated Helical Insight, a new open source Business Intelligence Framework that is set to revolutionize the way businesses visualize, analyze and use data as a valuable and strategic resource. Helical Insight not only provides out-of- the-mill features such as email scheduling, multi-tenant environment, variety in visualization, etc. but it also empowers end users to add functionalities on the go using their in-house resources.
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