IBM Verse

Over 100 billion work e-mails are exchanged each day, but research suggests that only around a quarter of those are actually essential. IBM hopes to lighten with new online e-mail service called Verse, which uses algorithms to work out which messages and people are most important to you

IBM’s new messaging software uses algorithms to learn how to organize your e-mail better. Few interesting scorecard on Industry work mail usage.

IT industry analysts estimate that 108 billion work emails are sent daily, requiring employees to check their inboxes an average of 36 times an hour. It is also estimated that only 14 percent of those emails are of critical importance.




IBM's Verse Highlights:

• Verse combines an e-mail client, a digital calendar, internal collaboration tools, video chat, and content from social networks including Twitter and Facebook into one interface.
• It analyzes your communication patterns to try to understand which people matter to you most.
• It then highlights important e-mails accordingly.
• A toolbar provides one-click access to the latest messages from the people judged to be your most crucial contacts.

According to IDC, email remains the single most widely used collaboration tool, with worldwide revenue for enterprise email expected to reach USD 4.7 billion in 2017

Top 5 Funded Startup

Industry has 5 stages of Startup Funding. They are:
1) Angel Investor Funding 2) Seed Capital
3) Venture Capital Financing
4) Mezzanine Financing Bridge Loans
5) IPO (Initital Public Offering)

Big Data is the fuel driving transformation across virtually every business. It creates not only new industries, but it revolutionizes existing ones.

As per Forbes.com, Top-5 most-funded startups in the big data space as on Jan-2015, are listed as:

Company Name	Startup $	Core Service
Cloudera	1040 Million	Hadoop-based software, services and training
Palantir Technologies	950 Million	Analytics applications
MongoDB	311 Million	Document-oriented database
Domo	250 Million	Cloud-based Business intelligence
Mu Sigma	195 Million	Data-Science-as-a-Service

Ref: http://www.forbes.com/sites/gilpress/2015/01/31/top-ten-most-funded-big-data-startups-january-2015/

Databricks Cloud

Databricks (founded 2013 by Spark creators; recent VC $47million) aims to become the platform for Big Data by leveraging Apache Spark. The idea is to simplify big data processing and free users to focus on turning data into value

Databricks provides a cloud hosted platform based on Spark which allows companies  to implement their entire  big data pipeline — from data ingestion, data transformation,  interactive processing, to data products — in one environment.  It  offers interactive visualization, using machine learning, graph processing, and building and running data products.

Spark is a parallel execution engine that is better than Hadoop MapReduce in three dimensions:

1. optimized to work efficiently with data stored both in memory and on disk.
2. provides a more powerful and flexible API than MapReduce, which makes it much easier for developers to write sophisticated applications.
3. unifies a variety of computation models including streaming, interactive queries, machine learning, and graph processing. 

Databricks Cloud is a Big Data cloud computing solution with three main parts:

1. Databricks Platform
2. Spark
3. Databricks workspace.

Although Databricks Cloud would initially be designed to run on Amazon Web Services, the company said they would eventually make it compatible with the Google Compute Engine and Microsoft Azure.