IBM’s Watson supercomputer could be the cure for awful customer service

Watson is going from the stage of Jeopardy! to world of customer service. And that's a great thing to hear.

Who needs databases? Orchestrate closes massive $3M seed round to turn NoSQL into NoDB

Who needs SQL? In fact, who needs databases?

How Practice Fusion plans to use patient data to save lives

"We have all this patient information that doesn't reside anywhere else," said Practice Fusion CEO Ryan Howard on stage at HealthBeat.

Obama campaign’s chief data guy gets candid about the data strategy that won the election

President Barack Obama is known for running one of the most tech-savvy political campaigns in the history of US politics. The chief scientist of the Obama campaign's data analytics team, Rayid Ghani, shared some insights on how that campaign worked at the TiEcon 2013 conference.

Google’s I/O experiment unites sensors, ‘big data,’ and the cloud

Google used 400 custom-built data-sensing "motes" to collect 150 million database records during Google I/O. Here's how the team built the devices and collected the data.

‘Big data’ biz Tableau shares explode 60% in strong IPO debut

Enterprise tech IPOs have seen some big movement over the past few years. Now we can add big data and data visualization company Tableau Software to the list.

‘Excel killer’ Tableau Software ups its IPO price to $31

Data visualization company Tableau Software has raised the price range of its initial public offering to $31 per share.

EdgeSpring launches with $11M in Series A funding to help simplify analytics

EdgeSpring, making data analytics easy for the average user, launches with $11 million in Series A funding.

SAP boosts startup fund by 2.6X to stimulate big data innovation

is more than doubling its commitment to the SAP HANA Real Time Fund, going from $155 million to $405 million, to support innovation surrounding real-time applications and big data.

Andreessen Horowitz’s first investment Apptio closes $45M fifth round

Back in 2009, Apptio was famed venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz's first investment. Today Apptio announced closing a $45 million fifth round of funding, bringing the company's total to $136 million.

Kabbage expands its loans business, now supports Quickbooks

Kabbage announced today that it will provide loans to both online and offline businesses, and will make a decision in minutes.

Twitter ‘Hate Map’ shows where racist, homophobic, and offensive tweets originate

Students at Humboldt State University in California individually reviewed 150,000 geocoded tweets containing racist, homophobic, or otherwise offensive terms to build a "hate map" indicating where people in the U.S. are most bigoted.

Database-as-a-service Cloudant nabs $12M from Devonshire, Rackspace, & more

Hot database-as-a-service startup Cloudant has raised $12 million in its second round of funding.

At its conference, Google will be tracking your every step

Google will be collecting and publishing 4,000 individual data streams from its Google I/O conference this week, providing real-time visualizations on crowd activity.

Twitter acquires data visualization startup Lucky Sort for … revenue engineering?

Twitter has acquired data visualization startup Lucky Sort, possibly to bolster its ad sales and reporting tools.

LucidWorks pulls in $10M to turn open source data into ‘business gold’

Big data startup LucidWorks has raised $10 million to help enterprise companies "turn multi-structured data into business gold."

Big data hits the big time: Datameer triples revenues in a year

a number of enterprising startups that sell big data analysis tools to large companies are seeing explosive revenue growth -- the latest sign the big data gold rush is fully on.

‘Big data’ can predict weather up to 40 days into the future

EarthRisk Technologies has developed a new model for predicting extreme weather events based on 60 years of data and 82 billion calculations.

Meet the 10 startups competing in the HealthBeat ‘Innovation Showdown’

We’re blown away by the quality of the more than 150 applicants to the HealthBeat 2013 “Grand Rounds Innovation Showdown,” one of the highlights of VentureBeat’s inaugural health tech conference (May 20-21 in San Francisco).

We asked startups throughout the …