While big data isn’t restricted by geographical boundaries, it’s penetration is deeper in certain areas of the world than others. India is one country that has recently shown an increased interest in helping organizations make sense of the scores of data at their disposal. According to a survey by EMC, 91 percent of businesses in → Read More
The largest pharmacy benefit management company in the U.S., Express Scripts handles more than 1.4 billion prescriptions each year, which breaks down to roughly 160 quadrillion bits of data. It uses that data to help Americans make better decisions about their health. According to IBM, 80 percent of medical data is unstructured and relevant to → Read More
When it comes to big data software, data scientists often think of Cloudera, HDP, Amazon EMR, and other Hadoop distributions. Hadoop is highly recommended for such jobs because it delivers the immensely scalable platform needed to store, process, and analyze huge chunks of information. While Hadoop is all that with a bag of premium chips → Read More
Image Source: Flickr Large companies are thriving on big data. Amazon uses past purchases, likes, and comparison info to recommend future products to customers. Netflix gives subscribers additional viewing recommendations based on the ratings they submit after watching movies and shows. Twitter leverages its arsenal of user data to suggest new connections for members to → Read More
While there are some established players in the game, it may be fair to say that the biggest drivers of big data are actually startup companies. These firms are small, but have huge aspirations when it comes to spreading their wings and making a mark in one of IT’s fastest growing fields. Now if you’ve → Read More
Apache Hadoop is the engine that drives most professional big data implementations. What makes it so special? An extensive set of data management capabilities, of course. Hadoop is a robust software framework that distributes large volumes of data across multiple groups of computers. It offers the resources to support the data management needs of a → Read More
Big Data is powerful. And as with all powerful things, there are high chances of abuse. But because it is very powerful, such abuse can have very dangerous ramifications. That’s what Matt Asay of ReadWrite draws our attention to. Here are excerpts… 1. While Big Data helps both businesses and governments anticipate human behavior (thus → Read More
The world experienced a financial crisis a few years ago. Many financial institutions have recovered. But the truth remains that they have YET to get to previous levels of profit. So if there is an industry that needs all the help it can get, the financial services industry is it. Big Data offers the promise → Read More
The fight against breast cancer has gone beyond chemotherapy and radiation. Scientists have enlisted a new and powerful ally — Big Data. In a report at Gigaom.com, Ki Mae Heussner shows challenges and progress that have been made in this regard… 1. Although Myriad Genetics lost the right to patent the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes → Read More
Big Data has been used (and is being used) to improve our lives in many ways. One of the areas where it is proving to be very useful is in the fight against crime. In a report at USAtoday, Byron Acohido, shows how cyberspies, hackers and terrorists are being spotted via “revealing patterns” picked up → Read More
