Apple Acunu

On 25 Mar, Apple had acquired NoSQL database startup FoundationDB in what's thought to be a move to bolster the company's own cloud-based services.

Just a day after Apple acquired database company FoundationDB, Apple revealed the previously acquired U.K.-based data analytics company Acunu.

Acunu creates technology that provides analytics on databases, and its technology can be used in conjunction with other tools, improving their performance. Bloomberg notes the company's tools work well with free Cassandra databases, which Apple runs on several thousand computers.

It's likely that the Acunu acquisition will be used for iCloud and its various services, like iTunes Radio, the upcoming reimagined Beats Music streaming service and Apple's over-the-air TV service.

Both acquisition indicates that Apple is placing more emphasis on the development of solid data infrastructure to help provide services to its legions of global consumers beyond iPhones and iPads.

Letz watch this interesting tech wars !!!

Teradata Aster AppCenter

Teradata recently launched big data Apps powered by the Teradata Aster AppCenter. It allows a user to pre-package SQL, SQL-Map Reduce and SQL-Graph code into a one-click App which can then be shared with business users. When Apps are run they produce a report which can comprise tables, visualizations or a combination of both. The most basic type of App has its data source and input columns hard-coded in and will produce the report off whatever data is in the source table. Portable Apps allow the user to specify table and input columns – thereby running the App on different data sources.

Labour intensive tasks such as importing CSV data, moving data from other databases or from Hadoop, parsing semi-structured data such as weblogs, XML or json, and executing path, text and graph analyses can all be pre-packaged into a user-friendly one click app.  There is a RESTful APi to facilitate the integration of AppCenter output into web applications and make them available on mobile devices.

AppCenter is part BI tool like Tableau or Cognos, part code repository like Git or Subversion, and part collaboration and sharing space like Confluence – but it is not going to replace any of these. It is a way of making analytic repeatable and sharable.

Microsoft 40th Anniversary

Today 4 Apr 2015 is a special day for Microsoft; guess what?  Forty years ago, the world's largest maker of software was nothing more than a startup, founded by two college dropouts named Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Attached 1978 Portrait show case them.

Now, Microsoft has more than 125,000 employees, a sprawling 8-million-square-foot campus outside Seattle and its principal products running on nearly 90 percent of the world's computers. It's the third-most valuable company in the world, behind only oil giant Exxon Mobil and longtime competitor Apple.

Microsoft celebrates its 40th anniversary and Gates, who served as chief executive officer for 25 years before stepping down in 2000. He reiterated his commitment to the vision he laid out four decades ago that software could empower the world.

Bill Gates 40th anniversary mail, is tweeted by Amit Roy at https://twitter.com/roychoudhary/status/584044739000868865.

BigData Traffic Prediction

Microsoft has partnered with the Federal University of Minas Gerais, one of Brazil’s largest universities, to undertake research that could help predict traffic jams up to an hour in advance.

The Traffic Prediction Project is setting out to crunch all traffic data, including historical numbers where available, from transport departments, road cameras, Microsoft’s Bing traffic maps, and even drivers’ social networks, to see if established patterns can help foresee traffic jams from 15-60 minutes before they happen.

In 2014, it’s estimated that 54 percent of the planet’s people lived in cities, up from 34 percent in 1960. This is expected to grow at almost 1.84 percent a year until 2020, then 1.63 percent until 2025. The growing urbanization of the world’s population means that whoever cracks the traffic jam-prediction nut will be onto something lucrative, with drivers able to take alternative routes, use public transport, or simply stay at home.

While there are a growing number of tools and online services that can show drivers congestion hotspots in real time, including Google Maps, it’s often too late given that a driver may well be approaching the bottleneck already.

Microsoft will be putting its Azure cloud-computing platform to the test for the project, which will be necessary for the immense processing power needed to crunch multiple terabytes of data. The computing giant says that it has tested its model in London, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, and claims to have achieved a prediction accuracy of 80 percent.

Microsoft Research Video at http://msrvideo.vo.msecnd.net/rmcvideos/241812/241812.mp4

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.