DALLAS, Aug. 21, 2014 /PRNewswire-iReach/ -- Amid the proliferation of real time data from sources such as mobile devices, web, social media, sensors, log files and transactional applications, Big Data has found a host of vertical market applications, ranging from fraud detection to R&D.; Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140821/138541 "Big Data Market: 2014 – 2020 – Opportunities, Challenges, Strategies, Industry Verticals & Forecasts" Key Findings: In 2014 Big Data vendors will pocket nearly $30 Billion from hardware, software and professional services revenues Big Data investments are further expected to grow at a CAGR of nearly 17% over the next 6 years, eventually accounting for $76 Billion by the end of 2020 The market is ripe for acquisitions of pure-play Big Data startups, as competition heats up between IT incumbents Nearly every large scale IT ven... (more)

"We Need to Expand the Way We Think About Search," Declares comScore SVP

"This is an excellent example of comScore innovating to respond to the challenges of a fast moving marketplace," said Dr. Magid Abraham (pictured), CEO and co-founder of comScore, as the company today announced the launch of comScore qSearch 2.0, calling it "the second generation of search measurement." "With the continued evolution of the search market, it has become clear there is a need to expand the way we think about search," said James Lamberti, comScore senior vice president of search solutions. "qSearch 2.0 gives the most comprehensive and accurate view of the entire search market by including all forms of search that are being monetized currently or could be monetized in the future." The comScore qSearch 2.0 service will now provide clients with the ability to discern whether the search originates from a text box on a search engine portal, an auto-search t... (more)

Internet Winter Hits Mahalo; Cuts 10% Of Staff

In a post on his blog, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis has announced that his human powered search engine has laid off 10% of its staff. Along with the layoffs Calacanis writes that the company will be doing some “smart things” to help cut costs - it will be outsourcing much of its editorial to freelancers instead of in-house staff. Calacanis pegs the number of full-time staff cut at around 5 or 6, but that number could change depending on how well the freelancers work out for the company. From his blog post: While I anticipated and prepared for the ‘internet winter’ we’re now facing (you’ve read my posts and e-mails about the startup depression I’m sure), I failed to realize how bad the situation would get. It’s much worse than I thought it would be, and ignoring market conditions today would only mean deeper cuts down the road. It’s my responsibility to make this har... (more)

Elevator Pitch Saturday: Search Socially With Scour

It’s Elevator Pitch Friday Saturday, which means another startup has created a video that’s worth showing you. This week’s presentation comes from Scour.com, a meta social search engine. Scour searches and displays results from Google, Yahoo and Live Search all at once and enables each of its members to vote each listing up or down based on its relevance to their keyword as well as comment on their experiences with the site. In addition to the combined results Scour offers a kind of get-paid-to-search scheme based on points in a way similar to Microsoft SearchPerks. Users earn a point for each search, vote or comment they make and can claim a $25 Visa card when they’ve reached 6,500 points. Founded in 2007, Scour was originally named Aftervote.com. Almost exactly 1 year later, Aftervote was acquired by Internext media, owner and operator of the ABCSearch Network and... (more)

Web Spider ramps up its Flex/ AIR development team… again

Web Spiders continues to scale up its Flex/ AIR development team and provide leadership both in scale and thought process for Rich Internet Applications. As a result, recently another group of 25 designers and programmers went through training by Adobe Certified Trainers to join our existing RIA development teams. Web Spiders is a specialist RIA development company [...] ... (more)

[berkman] Berkman lunch: Andrew McAfee on Enterprise 2.0

Andrew McAfee, the Enterprise 2.0 guy, is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk. He begins by defining the term as “the use of emergent social software platforms by organizations in pursuit of their goals.” This technology tends to be emergent, bottom up, etc. [NOTE: I'm live blogging, making mistakes, missing stuff, creating typos, etc. Reader beware.] He contrasts this with ERP systems that are top-down, highly specific, etc. “The huge shift” is that the 2.0 tools “make an effort to get out of the way of the users at the front” but then allow structure to emerge. “The Net is the world’s largest library. The problem is that all the books are on the floor,” he says, citing an old saw. Companies are interested in what’s going on because they’ve used Wikipedia or their kids are on Facebook. But companies want to know what the tools are and how they’re different. Also, the... (more)

Why Businesses Need SEO? Answering WHYs of SEO

Although there is so much buzz on the Internet and marketing world about SEO but from a common mans perspective and from an eye of a business owner the Benefits and Purposes of SEO are still not clear. Most of us know HOW TO DO SEO? but very few ask WHY DO SEO? and even the handful of SEO gurus(so-called ) can answer this WHY ! In this blog post I will try to present a concise and to-the-point answer to WHY BUSINESSES NEED TO FOCUS ON SEO ? Some Facts: 1-Over 98% of the consumers use a search engine when they step out into cyber space looking for information. [Note the importance of Internet in lives of people, and what is important to your customer is important for you!] 2-The majority of this 98% choose to use Google.[That is why SEO efforts should be more focused towards Google but not to neglect Yahoo and MSN.] Point to Ponder ! With proper planning and focus yo... (more)

Alacra Pulse Sifts Through The Chatter For Business Intelligence

There is so much chatter on the Web about companies that it is difficult to filter it down to the essential data that you need. Today, Alacra, a company that aggregates business information from proprietary databases for business customers, launched a new information filter on the Web. It is called Alacra Pulse. Alacra is applying some of the same semantic filtering technologies it developed for its corporate product to 2,500 public feeds on the open Web. These range from news organizations and research firms to hand-selected blogs. You can search by company, analyst, or firm (i.e. the research source), and Alacra Pulse generates a feed of the latest news about that company. It compares the company names or tickers to its database of 500,000 public and private companies to categorize each article, and it throws some event-detection algorithms to surface only the l... (more)

[berkman] Pippa Norris on cultural convergence

Pippa Norris of the Harvard Kennedy School is giving a lunchtime Berkman talk titled “Cultural Convergence: The Impact on National Identities and Trust in Outsiders.” [Note: I'm live-blogging, hence making mistakes, missing stuff, misunderstanding other stuff, typing badly. This is an inaccurate, incomplete record of her talk.] What might be the impact of cosmopolitan communications, she asks? Her thesis is that there are many firewalls that block global information flows. She will argue that the news media has an impact through cosmopolitan communications, and will look at the implications for public policies. It makes people slightly less nationalistic. [Note: She talks fast. Bad for live bloggers, but good for listeners.] (This is from her book, available free on her Web site.) Globalization is the starting part. It’s about more than trade; it’s also social a... (more)

Local Business Listings Are Not About Getting Listed

The number of service providers that are attempting to help the local business and the small business to get listed are on the rise as the Internet becomes more valuable to the local businesses. What is strange is that in most of these cases the business is already listed! If you have a phone number for your business you are already listed with the major search engines and the major websites that focus their attention on the local market. The local listing websites can be broken down into four major categories that include with some examples: * Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask) * Local Listing Communities (Yelp, Judy’s Book) * 411 Websites (Yellow Pages, Yellow Book, Super Pages) * GPS (Magellan) Any one of these websites receives their original data from the phone companies and other public sources. After all, local listings have been on the web for a number o... (more)

Google Code University - Introduction to Parallel Programming and MapReduce

This tutorial from the Google Code University covers the basics of parallel programming and the MapReduce programming model. The pre-requisites are significant programming experience with a language such as C++ or Java, and data structures & algorithms. ... (more)