A blend of opinions & news on tech topics like cloud, mobile, big data, app development and app performance from geniuses inside the technology industry.
We hope you’ll both enjoy and benefit from this inside look at the world of ‘big data’. The authors will cover data management trends, in addition to big data architecture, predictive analytics, and inspiring use cases.
The following big data articles represent the latest features from Inside Tech Talk. If you would like to receive new big data features as they become available, simply subscribe, for free via RSS or email.
Big data fascinates me. It also frustrates me. First, the fascination: Some years ago, I read a book called “Freakonomics”, written by economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner. The book analyzes hidden socio-economic data to connect events and trends that conventional wisdom says aren’t connected. For instance, “What do school teachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?”, and “Why do drug dealers … [Read more...]
The other day I ran a Pig script. Nothing fancy; I loaded some data into HBase and then ran a second Pig job to do some aggregations. I knew the data loading would take some time as it was multiple GB of data, but I expected the second aggregation job to run much faster. It ran for over 15 hours and was not done at that time. This was too long in my mind and I terminated it. I was using Amazon Elastic Map Reduce as my Hadoop environment, so … [Read more...]
The same way some businesses are gathering collective intelligence from product usage patterns or social media chatter, teams like Michigan State University basketball or Superbowl champ Baltimore Ravens are already tweaking their game plans and delivering individual instructions to their players to gain a competitive edge. Before MSU pummeled highly ranked state-rival University of Michigan last week, scouting staff was preparing a database … [Read more...]
Is it wrong to covet another company’s big data implementation? If so, I am so very guilty. I attended a great conference earlier this week called the B2B Corporate Social Media Summit (#CSMB2B). Through most of the presentations, I was feeling pretty good about my efforts in social media. I was getting validation of my strategy and getting inspired by the examples of my peers. And then Greg Gerik, the head of social media for 3M took … [Read more...]
When I read articles like "How algorithms will help us spend, spend spend"… It’s inspiring. The things that can be done with information are endless. My passion is Business Intelligence. When I read information like this, I consider all of the possibilities and can’t wait to start helping the next customer do great things. But the practical side of me tends to remind me of all the preparatory steps that most organizations need to … [Read more...]
In the last weeks I visited several Cloud and Big Data conferences. Especially the Big Data Innovation in Boston gained me a lot of insight. Some people only consider the technology side of BigData technologies like Hadoop or Cassandra. The real driver however is a different one. Business analysts discover Big Data technologies as the means to leverage tons of existing data and ask questions about customer behavior and all sorts … [Read more...]
[VIDEO] Companies are investing in big data and predictive analytics because it is a hot trend. Big data is a big deal, but only because it is a means to an end. The real emphasis needs to be on what types of problems we can solve with the data. The companies that are focused on providing real business value and not just collecting data are the companies that will “win”. … [Read more...]
Let me start this post with a brief preface. If you are not a baseball fan who is interested in baseball statistics, this post will probably not hold much interest for you. However if you are, then you may be familiar with the MLB Gameday application and its data which is a great source of richly detailed MLB statistical data. This post will show you how to take that data from the MLB server and put it on your local machine for easier use, using … [Read more...]
