Palantir, a big data company whose clientele includes the US Army and several government agencies, has been busy this week. They’ve announced the purchase of two startups, Poptip and Propeller. Palantir’s exact motivations for these acquisitions remain nebulous. Tuesday saw the announcement of the Poptip acquisition. Poptip is a social

Press Release: Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the launch of the Red Hat ARM Partner Early Access Program to enhance partner collaboration and facilitate partner-initiated system designs based on the 64-bit capable ARMv8-A architecture that include Red Hat software. The program will

Open data is becoming an increasingly powerful tool; especially when it has cloud resources and analytics tools from industry leaders to back it up. Recent years have seen complex datasets on social media emotion expression, genomics, and even human history in its entirety released to the public. In light of

In a recent piece on the New York Times, Harvard’s Dr. Mullainathan talks about investigating claims of planned obsolescence in iPhone models – slowing down older models as updates appear. Looking at Google trends data, Laura Trucco, a Ph.D. student in Economics at Harvard, revealed that the worldwide searches for

In Taiwan, the National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) and Fujitsu have signed a Memorandum of Understanding, that will see the two organisations building a cloud-based analytics platform and nurture talent in computational sciences. The MOU was signed by NCKU’s President, Dr. Hwung-Hweng Hwung and CEO of Futjitsu Taiwan Ikegami Ichirou,

Google X has launched a new initiative called “Baseline Study” which aims to help clinicians and doctors better understand the human body. The project will map human genetic and molecular data from 175 volunteers, where Google’s algorithms will then process this data to identify “biomarkers” that could help with detecting

New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo last week announced a $55 million grant for a number of projects at the City University of New York (CUNY), of which $15 million of the fund will be focused on big data analytics and visualisation. The grant was awarded on the basis of

The popular jobs portal and review site, Glassdoor, announced on Tuesday a new tool to help the 9.5 million long-term unemployed Americans look for jobs. The free visualisation search tool – named Job Explorer — will help American’s find the best jobs according to their preferences — city, county and

The Niayes region near Dakar in Senegal has a serious pest problem. The pest in question is the tsetse fly, known to spread sleeping sickness to humans and enfeebling diseases to cows (a crucial part of Niayes’ agricultural industry). Past methods to drive the flies out have included drenching vast

In a blog post published yesterday, the renowned data scientist Hilary Mason announced the launch of a new startup called Fast Forward Labs. The project is aimed at people and companies that want up-to-date information on the latest data technology and help on how to implement them for their specific