Saturday, October 19, 2013

BigData Elite


The fund, called Big Data Elite, is backed by celebrity investors like Ron Conway, one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent angel investors, and Andreessen Horowitz, the $2.5 billion venture capitalist firm, as well as Social+Capital Partnership and Anand Rajaraman, whose social media start-up was bought by Wal-Mart Stores in 2011.

In an announcement on Thursday, Big Data Elite described itself as a venture lab and early stage fund that will offer a six-month program beginning January 2014. The fund will choose 10 start-ups or individuals from a list of 20. Those chosen will work a Big Data Elite’s offices in San Francisco and will have access to advisers who work at Facebook, Zynga, Netflix, LinkedIn, Riot Games and a handful of other companies that rely heavily on data analysis.

Companies like Netflix, Google and Amazon rely heavily on the data its customers provide through their Internet searches, and over recent years they have poured large sums of money into data teams of computer scientists who sift through search and transaction data to find patterns.

“Big Data is behind every sector,” Mr. Venios said. “By 2016, the budget spend for Big Data will be larger in corporate business development than information technology,” Mr. Venios added, citing data from McKinsey & Company.

The fund will invest $150,000 to $1 million in each participant, in exchange for equity — typically 6 percent initially — and convertible notes.

Sunday, October 13, 2013

QueryIO


QueryIO is a Hadoop-based SQL and Big Data Analytics solution, used to store, structure, analyze and visualize vast amounts of structured and unstructured Big Data. It is especially well suited to enable users to process unstructured Big Data, give it a structure and support querying and analysis of this Big Data using standard SQL syntax.

QueryIO enables you to leverage the vast and mature infrastructure built around SQL and relational databases and utilize it for your Big Data Analytics needs.

QueryIO builds on Apache Hadoop's scalability and reliability and enhances basic Hadoop by adding data integration services, cluster management and monitoring services as well as big data querying and analysis services. It makes it easy to query and analyze big data across hundreds of commodity Compute+Store cluster nodes and petabytes of data in an easy and logical manner.

Saturday, October 5, 2013

Highly funded startup


Riding the Big Data tidal wave, MongoDB has raised $150 million in financing to accelerate its global expansion. The round was led by an unnamed financial services company and attracted industry heavy hitters such as Salesforce and Intel.

Now the most valuable startup in New York, MongoDB offers a highly scalable document-oriented database for analytical and fast-changing operational workloads. The platform has been downloaded over 5 million times, and deployed by SAP, MTV Networks, Foursquare and other big name companies.

As part of its aggressive growth strategy, MongoDB will expand its partner ecosystem and target new markets. The company also plans to double its headcount to 600 over the next 12 months.

Originally known as 10gen, the SQL vendor rebranded in August to “get back into alignment” with its flagship product. Shortly afterwards, rival MemSQL updated its distributed in-memory database to support JSON, a popular syntax for processing semi-structured data.  It also improves index scan performance and expands support for SQL.