TechStars, the popular startup accelerator with locations in Boston, Boulder, New York, Seattle, London, and more, has today announced an expansion to Austin, Texas – a city TechStars founder and CEO David Cohen refers to as the “natural next stop for us” in this morning’s announcement about the new location.
In 2011, Charles Boicey looked at Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo and other major Web entities and said to himself, “Why do those guys get to have all the fun?” Boicey, an informatics solutions architect at the UC Irvine Medical Center, said he could very much see that the underlying big data technologies driving the big Web companies could help [...]
Infochimps is a cloud services company that thinks big data shouldn’t be so hard. Enterprises looking to leverage big data analytics to solve specific business problems should not have to get all wrapped up in implementing and managing a big data infrastructure stack.
If Infochimps’ new CEO delivers half as well as he sells, then Fortune 500 companies will be lining up to move their data — Big Data, streaming and still — on to the company’s Infochimps Enterprise Cloud.
SXSWi (South-by-Southwest Interactive) starts this week. Thousands of digerati from all over the world will gather to discuss tons of topics including the current state of social media, digital marketing, and even two or three sessions on big data. My best guess is that the term “data-driven marketing” will be mentioned often, as this is the “new” new trend that brands and their agencies are counting on to bring desired sales and transactions results.
Experts who specialize in computer-driven analysis of large streams of information say too many companies throw themselves into big-data projects, only to fall into common traps and end up with nothing to show for their efforts. Some 44% of information-technology professionals surveyed by business-software firm Infochimps Inc., for example, said they had worked on big-data initiatives that got scrapped.
Everyone can relate to having a boss whose expectations do not jibe with the experience of workers in the trenches. That disconnect is happening today between CIOs and IT departments struggling with Big Data.
Enterprise is sometimes pretty quick on the uptake, as illustrated by the fact that the vast majority of organizations have given Big Data projects a very high priority in recent months. Businesses and their CIOs understand that gaining insights from Big Data will be crucial to their performance over the next few years, and that if they fail to do so they’ll almost certainly be left in the dust by their rivals.
What business problem are you trying to solve? If you could tell your IT employees what it is, they’d have a much better crack at big data success. At least that’s the perspective of IT staffers as reported in a recent survey by big data cloud-services provider Infochimps.
In December 2012 Infochimps launched an enterprise cloud for big data analytics. Jim Kaskade, the company’s CEO, says it’s significant because it addresses two critical big data issues. The first is the fact that big data is too large to move to a cloud service, and the second inhibitor is caused by the need for tough and stringent data security. So in his view these challenges often prevent large organisations from using the cloud to analyse big data.
5. Infochimps
Although Infochimps is trying hard to make itself an enterprise IT company (hey, that’s where the money is), the company’s eponymous platform also provides a real value for developers. Sitting atop its technologies for configuring and managing big data environments is Wukong, a framework for creating Hadoop jobs or streaming data flows using Ruby scripts. Infochimps also maintains a data marketplace full of API-accessible or downloadable datasets.
Infochimps Debuts Enterprise Play with Zero Migration PaaS for Data Analytics
Dec 19, 2012 — Maria Deutscher
Infochimps is touting a new offering that allows enterprises to move to the cloud without investing too much in data migration. The service is targeting large organizations that face the challenge of moving massive amounts of information to and from their legacy infrastructure.
Infochimps is one of a growing ecosystem of companies that are programming the knowledge of data scientists, statisticians and programmers into applications that businesspeople can use.
Unlike people, not all data is created equal.
That’s one reason why Yahoo! engineers created Hadoop and Yahoo! built it out in 2008 as the world’s largest Hadoop production application. At the time, Yahoo!’s search webmap ran on “10,000 core Linux clusters.”
This year, Facebook, which is a contributor to the open source development community of Apache Hadoop, surpassed 100 petabytes of storage as the world’s largest cluster. But can FB leverage its data and monetize it quickly, in real-time, while keeping advertisers happy?
Hurricane Sandy has almost obliterated the memory of the big Big Data week in New York last week (can you imagine what would have happened to our state-of-of-big-data-excitement if Sandy had arrived a week earlier?), but a number of wrap-ups (e.g., Steve Miller’s) helped keep the Strata+Hadoop flame alive.
During last week’s influx of big data-related news, one announcement about two growing open source projects, Kafka and Storm, caught our attention due to their prevalence in some of the web’s largest big data operations: LinkedIn and Twitter.
Big Data is on every CIO’s mind this quarter, and for good reason. Companies will have spent $4.3 billion on Big Data technologies by the end of 2012.
The term data market brings to mind a traditional structure in which vendors sell data for money. Indeed, this form of market is on the rise with companies large and small jumping in. Think of Azure Data Marketplace (Microsoft), data.com (Salesforce.com), InfoChimps.com, and DataMarket.com.
Jim Kaskade’s crystal ball shared with him recently a list of upcoming big data acquisitions: EMC will buy MapR, Oracle will buy Cloudera, and Teradata will buy Hortonworks. Kaskade, the newly-appointed CEO of Infochimps, believes CIOs are ready to embrace open source big data software and that the established IT players, lacking open source experience, will have to buy their way into the market.
Data indexing company Infochimps Inc. has enlisted technology industry veteran Jim Kaskade as its new CEO.
Infochimps has released version 1.1. of its platform that the company has described as Heroku for Hadoop. The new version takes things a step further, though, turning the platform into an engine for easily creating streaming workflows that don’t require using Hadoop at all.
OpenStack started as an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing project by Rackspace and NASA, and has grown at a rapid pace with more than 150 companies participating in the project. On Wednesday at the OSCON open-source convention in Portland, Ore., an expected 3,000 attendees will salute OpenStack.
For digital agencies, big data as a competitive advantage is still very nascent, somewhat terrifying, and not tangible at all. However, marketers are starting to hear that it’s the new secret sauce, and they’re scrambling to figure out how to use it. And for good reason. Given the current trajectory, there’s a large chance that big data will change the face of digital agencies in as little as five years. If you’re part of a digital agency, here’s what to consider.
Clouds, APIs, Big Data. Big buzzwords. Often, it is not clear what exactly companies are offering their customers and how the technology can be put to good use. We interviewed Infochimps’ Tim Gasper to get a better perspective.
The folks at Datameer created this infographic to show just how expansive and interconnected the Hadoop ecosystem is.
Have you noticed that many logos of big data companies feature jungle animals? Have you ever wondered why? I have. Logos aren’t there just for fun–they signify something and often have an interesting back story. Take Amazon’s logo for example; notice the arrow that points to the letters A and Z? It means that they have everything from A-Z and deliver from A-Z. Clever, huh?
So let’s look at some of the interesting logos on big data companies and find out what these animals have to do with big data in particular.
With the recent IPO of Splunk (currently valued at just over $3 Billion), a lot of attention has turned to Big Data. Problem is, it’s tough to keep track of all the companies involved in the space.
To address that, I’ve created the Big Data Landscape to organize this rapidly growing technology sector.
Infochimps is a big data firm that is known for its analytics platform, as well as the data set and API market it operates. The company is also behind a number of open-source innovations such as the Ironfan configuration tool, one that is a very important element of VMware’s new Serengeti project.
Austin-based Infochimps said today that its Ironfan tool, an open source project developed by the firm, is part of an effort by virtualization firm VMware to enable big data applications running on the Hadoop cluster software to run on virtual and cloud-based IT environments.
At the Techcrunch: Disrupt Hackathon, metaLayer announced integration with the Infochimps Platform and Hadoop.
A spate of Specialized search and data analysis can be extremely valuable and handy as the online world continues to expand at a breathtaking speed. The key is to pinpoint exactly the quantity and quality of data in terms of immediacy, relevance and location.
Infochimps has already gained notoriety as a leading provider of business intelligence tools and all eyes are on them as they release their new dashboard Dashpot.
If you never attended Under the Radar, the format is to have four startups that already have a real product present for 6 minutes and are then judged by a panel of experienced executives at more established companies. The presenters had to be companies that are actual startups with a unique value proposition and a real product that they are able to monetize. Alumni or companies that are already more established can also present as a “Grad Circle” member but they are not included in the awards presented at the end of the show. And like American Idol, the audience also has a vote on their favorites for each category. I included the Judge’s choice and Audience choice for each category but also added my own choice which reflects my own opinion and not that of GoGrid
By 2015 over half of the world’s data will touch Hadoop—a striking figure that has echoed loudly in the expanding ecosystem around the open source platform. Let’s shine the light on some dramatic, large-scale Hadoop deployments that are reshaping big data-dependent companies in social media, travel, and general goods and services.
Infochimps CEO and cofounder Joe Kelly presents at the Under the Radar Conference.
The cloud OS’s achievement list managed to grow even longer immediately after Rackspace’s announcement, when Infochimps revealed it now supports the former’s hosting service via the OpenStack API. This is another push on behalf of the Hadoop ecosystem into the cloud; the big data munching engine can now be deployed on yet another platform (see the video here).
Infochimps, the first open data marketplace and a leading provider of tools, content and operational expertise for big data infrastructure, now supports the next generation Rackspace Cloud, based on OpenStack. Through integration with the OpenStack API the Infochimps Platform can now power big data applications based in the Rackspace Cloud, expanding the reach of the Infochimps Platform and making the running of complex big data infrastructures quick and easy for a broader range of users.
Cloud provider Rackspace on Monday unveiled a portfolio of new and updated data center products, aiming to enhance the performance of its OpenStack cloud platform. Infochimps in Austin, Texas, which offers cloud-based data services, has been using Rackspace’s new services for about a month.
The first item on our list is the Infochimps Dashpot launch. The dataset marketplace operator has been offering the Infochimps Platform to customers since earlier this year, and Dashpot represents a very large extension to the solution.
Earlier this year big data marketplace operator and tools maker Infochimps unveiled an enterprise data-as-a-service offering for managing large scale analytics, which is offered as a hosted solution or an on-premise license.
This week the Infochimps Platform has been brought to another level with the launch of Dashpot, a dashboard that runs on top of its core product with the purpose of getting the data closer to the decision makers. It does so in a number of ways, all of which either introduce simplification, extended functionality or both.
This morning the Big Data online marketplace vendor Infochimps announces a new analytics dashboard for their services called Dashpot.
Dashpot lets users configure their dashboard with exactly the information they need. For example, users can visualize their data in the form of line graphs, heat maps, geographic maps, counters, pie charts, or lists. You can also customize with selects, filters and sorts, to let users setup drilldowns for zooming in and out on their data, too.This lets users of different types and skill levels create multiple views depending on who is interacting with a given dashboard, and also specify what information each view should show.
There are tiny firms that can fit the data they generate onto a few computers and drives–your local coffee shop, for example. There are huge firms that maintain their own huge data operations, like Target or Amazon. Then there’s everyone in the middle, who know they have what is now called “Big Data” in the industry, but don’t have a firm strategy on how to get the most out of it. That’s where co-founders Joseph Kelly and Dhruv Bansal see Infochimps making its biggest impact.
The company’s Ironfan spins up resources for large-scale data science projects. As programmers and IT operators face the challenges of agile application development and ever-expanding datasets, Infochimps’ value proposition looks prescient.
One of the themes of our upcoming Structure:Data conference is “putting big data to work,” and there’s no easier way to get started doing so than with a cloud service. You don’t have to buy hardware, you don’t have to manage systems and, in some cases, you don’t need to know the first thing about Hadoop.
Dhruv Bansal and Flip Kromer, two of Infochimps’ founders, were budding research scientists, graduate students at the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics at the University of Texas Physics Department. They had no real thought of building a startup. But it did occur to them that not only they, but lots of other people, had the daunting task of looking for answers in giant sets of data—Big Data.
Infochimps has tamed the Big Data elephant, and now it wants to hand the reins to you.
Deploying and managing big data systems such as Hadoop clusters is not easy work, but Infochimps wants to change that with its new Infochimps Platform offering. The Austin, Texas-based startup best known for its data marketplace service is now offering a cloud-based big data service that takes the pain out of managing Hadoop and scale-out database environments. Eventually, it wants to make running big data workloads as simple as Platform-as-a-Service offerings like Heroku make running web applications.
The new Infochimps Platform is essentially a publicly available version of what the company has built internally to process and analyze the data it stores within its marketplace. As Infochimps CEO Joe Kelly puts it, the company is “giving folks … the iPod to our iTunes.”
Infochimps today announced a scalable platform for big data environments. The Infochimps latform is the first formal product for the company, which, to date, has served primarily as a big data marketplace.
The Austin-based Infochimps initially developed its data system behind the Infochimps Platform as the foundation for its big data marketplace. With the Infochimps Platform, customers will be able to leverage a proven big data system to construct big data projects for less money and optimize them more deftly.
The big data marketplace Infochimps announced this week that it will begin offering the platform that it’s built for itself to other companies — as both a platform-as-a-service and an on-premise solution. “The technical needs for Infochimps are pretty substantial,” says CEO Joe Kelly, and the company now plans to help others get up-to-speed with implementing a big data infrastructure.
I originally recorded a podcast with Infochimps’ Flip Kromer way back in December 2009, when most of today’s data markets were just starting out. We spoke again last week, as part of my current series of Data Market Chats, and it’s interesting to begin exploring some of the ways in which Infochimps and its peers have evolved.