“Where there is data smoke, there is business fire.” – Thomas Redman
The idea of Data Smoke is quite a brilliant analogy by Thomas Redman. It adequately explains why so much emphasis has been placed on tools, personnel, and culture within companies over the past decade. To understand the quote, however, it’s important to note that this process works backwards: what companies are trying to do is extinguish the already existing fire, rather than prevent a fire from beginning at all. Essentially, they are trying to control the incredible amounts of data they have — the existing “fire” — through investing in new services and tools — to reduce the “smoke”.
It’s no wonder that Intel Capital announced this week that it would invest $62 million in innovative technology companies, where a major chunk of this money will be given to companies showcasing Big Data and Cloud infrastructure. Moreover, we saw an incredible partnership formed at the beginning of the week between IBM and Twitter to amalgamate Twitter’s vast data silos with IBM’s cloud-based analytics, customer engagement platforms, and consulting services. In other news, a new study revealed that big data jobs earn 24% more than other IT positions.
Aside from this, below we have selected a number of our favourite articles this week. We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we did writing them!
TOP DATACONOMY ARTICLES
Which Environment to Choose for Data Science?
In the past, R seemed like the obvious choice for Data Science projects. This article highlights some of the issues, such as performance and licensing, and then illustrates why Python with its eco-system of dedicated modules like Scikit-learn, Pandas and others has quickly become the rising star amongst Data Scientists.
Top Tips for Implementing a Big Data Strategy
Ali Rebaie is a Big Data & Analytics industry analyst and consultant of Rebaie Analytics Group. He provides organizations with a vendor-neutral selection of business intelligence & big data technologies and advice on big data and information management strategy and architecture. We picked his brain on big data in the Middle East, the future of BI, and his top tips for implementing a big data strategy.
How the Internet of Things Can be Best Explored Using Graph Databases
Emil Eifrem is CEO of Neo Technology and co-founder of the Neo4j project. Committed to sustainable open source, he guides Neo along a balanced path between free availability and commercial reliability. In this article, Emil explains how the Internet of Things can be best explored using graph databases.
TOP DATACONOMY NEWS
LinkedIn’s Veteran Data Science Team Splits Up to Enhance Productivity
LinkedIn, the social networking company with one of the world’s first pioneering data science teams, has split its crew to be placed under different departments. The data science team which had worked in the product division, had consisted of two branches through the years – the product data science team, responsible for “new data-powered features,” generating new data for analysis, and the decision sciences team, that tracks and monitors product metrics and usage data.
With New Tor Connector, Is There Now a Way to Hide from Facebook?
Following the rise of data breaching and web surfers defending themselves against traffic analysis online, anonymity has because more prevalent than ever. Facebook announced this week that users of the social media can now connect directly to the network via the free anonymity software, Tor.
Gridgain’s In-Memory Data Fabric Enters the Apache Software Foundation as Apache Ignite
Gridgain announced yesterday that their in-memory data fabric has been accepted into the Apache Software Foundation Incubator programme, under the name Apache Ignite. The Gridgain team hope the move will fuel greater adoption of in-memory computing technologies, and build a greater community around the data fabric.
UPCOMING EVENTS
9-12 November, 2014- INFORMS Annual Meeting, San Francisco
INFORMS returns to the City by the Bay for its 2014 Annual Meeting with a rich and varied program, bridging data and decisions. Each year, the INFORMS meeting brings together experts from academia, industry, and government to consider a broad range of ORMS and analytics research and applications. In 2014, we’ll offer that program excellence in one of America’s most exciting cities. Join us for INFORMS 2014!
9-14 November, 2014- IEEE VIS 2014, Paris
IEEE VIS 2014 is the premier forum for advances in visualization. The event-packed week brings together researchers and practitioners from academia, government, and industry to explore their shared interests in tools, techniques, and technology.
(Image credit: Bob Jagendorf)
