In what the US Federal Communications Commission has termed as an “unacceptable”  usage of personal consumer information for marketing purposes, telecom giant, Verizon Communications has agreed to pay a fine of $7.4 million to the US Treasury. Travis LeBlanc, Acting Chief of the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau said in a statement,

Telstra, Australia’s largest telecom and media company, has been ordered by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) to recompense a family judge with AU$18,000 and an apology after it failed to inform him of having published his details in the White Pages directory and in print through its

The European Commission in conjunction with the European Data industry has pledged €2.5 billion in a public-private partnership (PPP) in order to reinforce Europe’s data sector. The EU will contribute €500 million of the tax-payer’s money over the next five years, to the industry consortium’s €2 billion purse. European Commission

MapR Technologies, Inc., provider of the top-ranked distribution for Apache™ Hadoop®, today announced that Dentsu razorfish, a joint venture between digital agency razorfish and Dentsu, the world’s leading advertisement firm, has deployed the MapR Distribution including Hadoop as the underlying technology for its Next Generation Communication Platform (NGCP) solution. The

Facebook released the third edition of its Government Requests Report, earlier this week, and it bears grim tidings. The report brings out the number of Government data and content removal requests received by the social networking site over a period of time, along with requests in matters concerning national security

Last Thursday, the Big Data community of Berlin came together in the aptly named Innospace (Innovation Space) for Big Data, Berlin. Over 350 people attended, providing an incredible cross-section of business and data science interests from Europe’s Silicon Valley. The venue — which usually caters to a max audience of

Splunk Inc. (NASDAQ: SPLK), provider of the leading platform for real-time Operational Intelligence, today announced that mail.de GmbH, a German provider of email services, is optimizing its email service and gaining real-time business insight by indexing, correlating and visualizing its machine data with Splunk® Enterprise. mail.de relies on Splunk Enterprise

Azul Systems, the award-winning leader in Java runtime solutions and DataStax, the company that delivers Apache Cassandra™ to the enterprise, announced a partnership to allow DataStax Enterprise (DSE) customers to leverage the enhanced performance of Azul Zing. Zing is now a certified Java Virtual Machines (JVM) for DataStax Enterprise (DSE),

The new but rapidly evolving field of Data Science, seems to be taking its toll on the “gears” of its machinery. As more organisations focus on unlocking the insight held in ‘big data’, data scientists are under a lot of work-related stress reveals a psychometric survey launched by SAS. 600

Private equity and investment adviser Veritas Capital has announced the acquisition of IT security firm BeyondTrust. Announced earlier this week, the deal went ahead for $310 million with the intent of direct business tie-ups with the US federal government. However, specific details of the deal were not disclosed. Kevin Hickey,