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Google tricked out its entire I/O conference with hundreds of sensors this week. Today, we got a glimpse at some of the data and the work that went into making it happen.

Michael Manoochehri, with Google’s cloud engineering group, explained the project from Google’s perspective: It’s a big experiment designed to help Google figure out how to use its many cloud tools to collect, organize, and analyze large quantities of sensor-driven data.

To pull off the project, Google needed some hardware-hacking experts. So it called on Kipp Bradford, a professor of engineering design and entrepreneurship at Brown University; and Alasdair Allan, a hardware hacker with Babilim Light Industries in the U.K.

The pair designed a sensor module based on the Arduino Leonardo R3 chip, a popular microprocessor that many DIY hobbyists use. Each module, or “mote,” carries a mix of temperature, humidity, noise, and other sensors. Some have air quality monitors that measure the amount of particulates (dust) and volatile gases (from cleaning fluids or alcoholic drinks). Some are connected to floor mats that record footsteps.

The devices send their data via a Zigbee-based mesh network back to Google Data Store, a NoSQL database running on Google’s App Engine. BigQuery, a tool for doing analysis on large datasets that is based on Google’s own internal data analysis tool, “Dremel,” allows the team to perform rapid queries on the enormous dataset (see sidebar for some of the project’s metrics). The team even used the Google Maps API to display data from each sensor on a map of the conference center.

Tableau Software, which held an IPO this week and whose stock is already up 60 percent in its first day of trading, provided real-time visualizations of the data. That’s a Tableau-generated chart at the top.

Bradford and Allan are editors at Make magazine and have done similar work with O’Reilly’s Data Sensing Lab, albeit on a smaller scale. (O’Reilly is the publisher of Make and the organizer of the Maker Faire, coming up this weekend in San Mateo, Calif.) For O’Reilly’s Strata conferences, the Data Sensing Lab build networks of about 50 such devices.

Also helping Bradford and Allan were Julie Steele, a project manager for O’Reilly, and Harry Johnson, a Stanford engineering student who laid out the project’s first circuit board and acted as the project’s “sanity check,” Bradford said.

“When the first prototype came back and it worked, I breathed a huge sigh of relief,” Bradford told me.

Once the team had built several working prototypes and ironed out the kinks, Bradford send the circuit board design to Sunstone, a company in Oregon, which produced hundreds of custom circuit boards. He then arranged to have the boards and various components sent to VR Industries, a company in Rhode Island, which assembled all 525 devices. The per-unit cost was about $120, though that’s with volume discounts figured in (it would cost you more than that to build one or two of these things).

After that, the team spent a nearly-sleepless week configuring and setting up all the devices.

“We basically spent the last week locked in a room at Google Boston doing integration and testing,” Allan said.

For Google, it was a chance to get its hands dirty with real-world data.

“We wanted to understand how this kind of use case could work with the Google Cloud platform,” Manoochehri said.

Did they learn anything about the conference? So far, the takeaways seem pretty obvious. For instance, in the steps-per-minute graph above, there’s a big spike of activity as people lined up to enter the Google I/O keynote on the first day. Then activity settles down as they all sit to watch the presentation. There’s a flurry of activity as people attend the first evening’s party, and the noise level spikes during Billy Idol’s concert. Air quality tends to go down when people are milling about, as they raise dust, and it gradually improves after they go away. Also, a cleaning crew comes through the Moscone Center at 4 a.m. every morning.

The company is making all the hardware, code, and data from the project available freely to the public. The goal is to make it easy for others to use the same kinds of technologies in their own data-gathering projects.

There are already lots of sensors out there. From wristband health and fitness sensors to smart thermostats like Nest to automobile sensors, we are increasingly surrounded by connected sensors. These devices are already collecting a lot of data, and soon will be collecting orders of magnitude more, Manoochehri said.

“This is a really big deal,” Manoochehri said. “So we need to understand this use case, and test that our platform is good for this use case.

“People collect all this data, and they go, ‘Oh my god, what do I do?’”

This project provides an answer to that question — provided you’re willing to use Google’s many cloud services.

Also, if you are looking for the best place to take a nap, check the graph below, which shows Manoohchehri’s “serenity metric,” showing a combination of low average audio noise and low noise variance. Conference rooms in the far corners of the building are your best bet. The least serene location? Apart from Google’s radio-controlled blimps (which carried sensors over the crowd), the second floor escalator was the least serene location.

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Enterprise tech IPOs have seen big movement over the past few years. Now we can add big data and data visualization company Tableau Software to the list of successful enterprise IPOs, as its share price has popped as much as 60 percent in early trading today.

Last night, Tableau priced its IPO at $31 per share, raising $254 million with an offering of 8.2 million shares. Now that price has shot up to about $49 on the New York Stock Exchange, as of this writing.

Tableau offers products to help technical and nontechnical users create interactive charts and simulations based on raw data. Tableau generated $127.7 million in annual sales in 2012, more than double its 2011 revenue and more than quadruple its 2010 revenue. Back in November, we picked Tableau as one of 10 startups leading the way in big data.

“Our mission, to help people everywhere see and understand data, isn’t all that different from Google’s,” Tableau CEO and cofounder Christian Chabot told us in a recent interview.

Tableau originally filed for its IPO in early April. At that time, it was just looking to raise $150 million in its initial public offering.

Prior to the IPO, Seattle-based Tableau raised $15 million in funding over two rounds from New Enterprise Associates. NEA’s partners and investors have got to be pretty happy with this deal, as the fund was seeing a 20x return on its investment in Tableau, according to Fortune’s Dan Primack — and that was before today’s pop.

Screenshot via Tableau/YouTube

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

In a media release, Seattle-based Tableau announced that it has raised $254 million by offering 8.2 million shares at $31, above the revised range of $28 to $30. The shares are expected to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange on May 17 under the symbol DATA.

The company originally filed for its IPO in early April. Back in November, we picked it as one of 10 startups leading the way in ‘big data.’

“Our mission is to help people see and understand data,” Tableau’s prospectus says. The company offers products to help technical and nontechnical users create interactive charts and simulations based on raw data. Tableau offers a variety of public, corporate and premium products, and caters to a range of customers.

Source: Tableau

Tableau CEO Christian Chabot

Tableau’s is the latest in a series of high-performing enterprise IPOs, including Workday, Splunk, and Palo Alto Networks, making 2013 the year for business software.

“Data visualization applications like Tableau are ushering in a post-spreadsheet era, threatening to kill Excel as the killer app for desktop analytics,” said data scientist Mike Driscoll, who is also the CEO of Metamarkets.

Still, Tableau faces strong competition from giants like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP as well as startups like Tibco Spotfire. And maybe even Google.

“Our mission, to help people everywhere see and understand data, isn’t all that different from Google’s,” Christian Chabot, the company’s cofounder and chief executive, said in a recent interview with VentureBeat.

Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Morgan Stanley are acting as lead joint book-running managers for the offering.

The “big data” and analytics startup EdgeSpring officially launched today with $11 million in financing from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Lightspeed Ventures.

The company’s business intelligence and analytics platform enables you to quickly obtain business information from any size, structure or data without having to depend on data analysts or information technology professionals.

The platform makes it easy for average users to ask questions about data like financial or user information any time and anywhere across data silos.

“From day one, our vision was to democratize information access in the enterprise,”  Vijay Chakravarthy, the founder and CEO of EdgeSpring, said in a statement.

EdgeSpring says the platform enables users to drive timely decisions by asking and easily answering first and second order questions across structured and semi-structured data.

To show off the new platform, EdgeSpring developed an application called CrunchEdge. The “playground” enables users to explore Crunchbase to map out the data sets of venture investments and company information. CrunchEdge will be released at the beginning of June.

EdgeSpring was founded in 2010 by entrepreneurs with backgrounds at Salesforce, IBM, and Oracle. The company wants to make it easier for business end users to make data-based decisions based on questions from their data. The $11 million Series A is the first financing round the company has completed.

Photo via EdgeSpring

The business software behemoth 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.

The SAP HANA fund launched in 2012 and primarily makes investments in early stage venture capital funds and startups building off SAP’s technology. HANA, which stands for High-Performance Analytic Appliance, is SAP’s next generation in-memory database. It can store up to 500 terabytes of data and execute at high speeds.

Big data technology is hot right now as large corporations and enterprises look for better ways to store, process, and analyze their data. SAP’s head of database and technology product marketing Amit Sinha told VentureBeat in an interview last year that “innovation in data management has stagnated” and there is a $2 trillion market opportunity for HANA and related database management technologies. HANA is SAP’s answer to the big data trend.

In an effort to stimulate innovation, SAP began the SAP Startup Focus program which is like an accelerator program for enterprise and IT companies that are working on predictive analytics products. Innovation can be tough in large companies and initiatives like Startup Focus and the Real Time Fund are intended to keep SAP ahead of the curve, or at least keeping pace with it. The company has actively been acquiring startups to this end as well.

The increased size of the fund is a reflection of the strong interest of entrepreneurs and VCs in participating in the SAP ecosystem. Elizabeth “Beezer” Clarkson, COO and Managing Director at SAP Ventures, said it is also indicative of a changing venture capital landscape.

“We believe we have a new model for corporate venture the start-up ecosystem is embracing,” she said. “The additional funding allows us to broaden the scope of what the SAP HANA Fund invests in to include all SAP platform technologies, for example, cloud, mobile or analytic technologies as well as HANA.  We will also be able to extend our investment horizon for the SAP HANA Real Time Fund from 3-5 years to 7-10 years. Further, we will hire a business development staff and develop programs and partnership opportunities with the SAP ecosystem that deliver additional business value, like helping companies to grow internationally and exchange insights with industry experts.”

So far the fund has made investments in three startups — Gild, a recruiting solution that helps organizations find developers skilled in big data, FeedZai, a Portuguese startup that provided real-time fraud detection and prevention, and a third unnamed Israeli company. SAP HANA RTF (enough abbreviations for you?) has also committed funds to ten early stage venture capital funds including SV Angel, August Capital, and Data Collective in the Bay Area, and Point Nine and Magma in Berlin and Tel Aviv, respectively.

The fund is managed by SAP Ventures, which also manages a $353 million direct growth fund that invests in growth-stage IT companies. Over the past 15 years, SAP Ventures has invested in more than one hundred companies round the world including LinkedIn, Box, Violin Memory, and Lithium.

Photo Credit: SAP’s president Sanjay Poonen on stage at CloudBeat/Michael O’Connell

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Apptio’s software is used by businesses to manage their IT systems and services. Its Technology Business Management (TBM) solutions monitor financial and operational data about IT and technical customer support to provide added transparency and cost-efficiency.

IT systems are complicated and expensive. Developments in computing, such as the migration to the cloud, have changed the way businesses structure their IT systems. With these shifts comes the need to gain an understanding of how the various products, services, resources, and assets are being used. Apptio gathers and analyzes data about IT system performance so businesses can make data-driven decisions and get the most out their IT investments.

Apptio has subscriptions from 29 of the Fortune 100 companies and has more than 125 global enterprise customers, including Boeing, Royal Bank of Scotland, Safeway, Target, and Xerox. This financing will support Apptio’s accelerating growth and expand its international presence. New investors Janus Capital and the Hillman Company led this round, with participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowtiz, Grelock Partners, Madrona Venture Group, Shasta Ventures, and accounts managed by T.Rowe Price Associates. The company closed its $50 million Series D last March.

“Apptio has everything we like to see in investments — a big market with a significant problem,” Ben Horowitz said to VentureBeat about the 2009 investment. “The way companies get information about modern IT is extremely broken, and they’ve built a terrific product to address that.

Apptio was founded in 2007 and is based in Bellevue, Washington.

Kabbage announced today that it will provide loans to both online and offline businesses, and will reject or approve a claim in minutes.

The Atlanta Georgia-based company’s bread and butter is to provide cash advances to sellers on online marketplaces like Amazon and Etsy. It is one of a handful of startups in the “alternative finance” space that offers an alternative to the traditional bank loan.

Today, the company is expanding its scope to brick and mortar stores. The expansion was precipitated by an integration with Quickbooks, Intuit’s small business accounting software that is used by millions of small businesses.

The company claims to be the first to leverage Quickbooks data to determine whether to give out a loan.

Kabbage has experienced rapid growth since it launched two years ago. It recently closed a credit facility of $75 million, and projected that it would fund 100,000 businesses by the end of the year.

Kabbage makes its money by charging fees to merchants for the working capital. Fees depend on how long the online merchant keeps the cash, and the customer’s repayment risk. Rates range from two percent to seven percent of the original advance amount.

Chief executive Marc Gorlin said that he’s received a ton of requests for Kabbage to serve offline businesses — “that day has arrived,” he said. “Today’s expansion dramatically accelerates Kabbage’s vision of democratizing access to capital for all small businesses. ”

Or, at least, where they’re the most open about displaying their antisocial views.

The picture doesn’t look good for the Eastern states, although admittedly the bulk of the population is there as well. Areas in Virginia, North Carolina, Texas, and Alabama show up bright red on the map, as do areas in more central states Indiana, Iowa, and Minnesota.

The map is part of a larger project, called the Geography of Hate, by Humboldt State professor Dr. Monica Stephens. The data that forms the map comes from an analysis of every tweet posted between June 2012 and April 2013 that contained at least one of 10 designated “hate words,” including dyke, fag, chink, gook, wetback, and cripple.

Source: Hate Map

California seems relatively hate-free

But while the original list of tweets was generated by a machine, every single one of the 150,000 tweets containing one of the target words was individually examined by undergraduate students. As the project description states:

Because algorithmic sentiment analysis would automatically classify any tweet containing “hate words” as “negative,” this project relied upon the HSU students to read the entirety of tweet and classify it as positive, neutral or negative based on a predefined rubric. Only those tweets that were identified by human readers as negative were used in this analysis.

To protect the identity of potentially racist, homophobic, or otherwise bigoted Twitter users, the tweets were aggregated up to the county level, and counties with high levels of hate speech were colored red on the map. Areas with moderate levels — though still higher than the national average — are varying shades of blue, and unshaded areas were below the national average.

Smaller towns seem to have a higher incidence of hate speech — in Virginia, for example, Palmyra is more hateful on Twitter than Richmond. And in Louisiana, New Orleans and Baton Rouge are less hateful than smaller towns nearby.

Image credits: Geography of Hate

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

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

Boston-based Cloudant was initially founded in Cambridge, Mas. in 2008 by three MIT physicists. The team struggled to move around multi-petabyte data sets and analyze those data sets wherever they went. So they ended up creating what would become Cloudant.

Cloudant offers a highly scalable database-as-a-service that makes it possible to store, access, and analyze your operational data in the cloud. In the layers of the cloud, Cloudant becomes a “data layer” that can be run on top of most infrastructure-as-a-service providers, including Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, SoftLayer, Microsoft Azure, and Joyent.

Cloudant CEO Derek Schoettle told VentureBeat that this “agnostic” approach to infrastructure deployment separates it from its biggest competitor — Amazon database services. “We believe in not having vendor lock in,” Schoettle said.

Cloudant has attracted some big-name customers with its approach, including Samsung, Microsoft, Adobe, Nokia, Salesforce, Expedia, Zynga, and Flurry.

The new funding was led by Devonshire Investors, Rackspace Hosting, and Toba Capital, with participation by current investors Avalon Ventures, In-Q-Tel, and Samsung Venture Investment Corporation. Including the new round, Cloudant has raised $16 million to date.

“One of the reasons we let Rackspace invest is because of their committment to customer service,” Schoettle said. “We also believe in that.”

In addition to funding, the company has opened up a new office in San Francisco, which joins the Boston HQ and offices in Seattle, the U.K., and South Korea. In the next 90 days, Schoettle said the company will open another office in Hong Kong.

Money in the clouds via Andy Dean Photography/Shutterstock

If you’re one of the 6,000 developers attending Google I/O this week, you should know that sensors will be tracking your every step.

Not your individual steps, of course. That would just be spooky. But there will be sensors distributed throughout the conference (May 15-17) tracking anonymous crowd data such as noise level fluctuations, footsteps, temperature, humidity, air quality, and more. In all, Google will be collecting more than 4,000 continuous data streams, according to a post on Google’s Developer blog.

The data, along with the devices and code used for the project, will be made available for public consumption via an open source license after the conference.

During the event, several screens around the conference will display real-time visualizations of the data, showing things like how the crowd is flowing from place to place, which are the quietest places for a nap, and which developer Sandbox sessions are the busiest. I’m hoping the data will also tell us which sessions have the best and worst air quality.

Google’s cloud team is teaming up with O’Reilly’s Data Sensing Lab to deploy hundreds of Arduino-powered environmental sensors to collect the data. These “motes” will be connected to one another via a ZigBee-based mesh network and managed by Etherios’s Device Cloud. Google’s Cloud Platform will collect and manage the data, while Google BigQuery will help analyze the data.

The O’Reilly connection is a timely one, as O’Reilly also puts on the Maker Faire, coming up this weekend, May 18-19. So if you’re a hardware-hacking, Android- and Arduino-loving maker type, you can take all the coding skills you learn at Google I/O and show them off at the Maker Faire just a couple days later.

Photo credit: Google

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CEO Noah Pepper announced the acquisition this afternoon on the Lucky Sort’s website. The company has been building a visualization and data navigation engine called TopicWatch, which can discover real-time patterns in streams of data, and took in $500,000 in seed funding from Neu Venture Capital in early 2012.

The startup had operated in stealth mode, but it caught the attention of investors and the press when it raised seed funds from a roster of “big data” experts, including chaos theory physicist Dr. Norman Packard.

Pretty clearly, there’s a strong Twitter tie-in, as Twitter is nothing more than a live stream of data, continuously updated by millions of people. Where Twitter will use the technology was not fully disclosed, but Pepper did offer a hint.

Several of us will be moving to San Francisco to join Twitter’s revenue engineering department, so if you’re in the neighborhood and want to talk about text mining or data visualization, give us a shout.

Twitter has been beefing up its ad tools in the past few months, releasing new functionality for keyword targeting, self-service tools for interest, platform, fan, and gender targeting, and more. And as it ramps up for a possible IPO this year, it needs to give advertisers even better tools for placing, targeting, and evaluating their Twitter ad spend. It’s likely that Lucky Sort technologies will be helpful for that purpose.

In any case, the existing Lucky Sort toolset will be shut down, Pepper stated:

We’ll be helping current customers transition off our system in the coming months such that we can focus fully on our future at Twitter.

Twitter has been acquiring small companies at a fairly rapid pace lately, having just acquired big data startup Ubalo. And in 2012, Twitter was the fourth-most acquisitive company, buying a total of 10 startups and ranking just behind Facebook, Google, and Groupon.

Here is Lucky Sort’s full announcement:

Lucky Sort acquired by Twitter!

Two years ago I started Lucky Sort with several friends. Our goal was to make huge document sets easier to analyze, summarize and visualize by building elegant and user friendly tools for text analysis.

Today I’m very excited to announce that our journey has entered a new phase: Lucky Sort has been acquired by Twitter!

Several of us will be moving to San Francisco to join Twitter’s revenue engineering department, so if you’re in the neighborhood and want to talk about text mining or data visualization give us a shout.

We’ll be helping current customers transition off our system in the coming months such that we can focus fully on our future at Twitter.

In building Lucky Sort we had an enormous amount of support from friends, employees, advisors and investors. It has been uplifting to have so many people help us and it highlighted just how much business is a social endeavour.

Best,

Noah Pepper
Chief Executive Officer
Lucky Sort

‘Big data’ startup LucidWorks has raised $10 million to help enterprise companies “turn multistructured data into business gold.”

LucidWorks product suite contains two development platforms that enable organizations to search, discover, and analyze their data. LucidWorks Search is built on top of Apache Lucene/Solr open-source search project and seeks to simplify and improve the process of building embedded search applications. The other product, LucidWorks Big Data, then helps businesses make sense of the data.

The company employes one-fourth of those who originally committed to the Apache Lucene/Solr project. It started as Lucid Imagination in 2008 to provide support, training, and consulting services for open-source search technologies Lucene and Solr. However, it saw greater opportunities to make open-source search more accessible and “unlock data’s ability to power competitive advantage” and set down to build LucidWorks Search and Big Data, which released in 2011 and 2012, respectively.  AT&T, Nike, Sears, Ford, Verizon, The Guardian, Elsevier, The Motley Fool, Cisco, Macy’s, Netflix and Zappos are customers. 

LucidWorks claims to be the largest supporter of open-source search in the industry. Organizations are struggling to draw business insights from mountains of unstructured (texts, emails, and so on) and structured data and a crop of well-funded big data startups are trying to provide the simplest way to crawl through petabytes of information, store a massive volume of data, and extract the most relevant information. Endeca, Autonomy, ElasticSearch and recently launched SRCH2 are other players in the space.

According to a form filed with the SEC, existing investors Shasta Ventures, Granite Ventures, and Walden International contributed to this third round of funding. It brings LucidWorks’ total capital raised to $26 million. LucidWorks is based in Redwood City and has not yet responded to request for comment.

And like in all big rushes, the companies providing the picks and shovels can make a killing.

Lately, 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.

One of them is Datameer, a Silicon Valley (San Mateo, Calif.) company that offers a tool to help other companies analyze and visualize their big data quickly and easily — by providing it in a spreadsheet-like user interface that most employees can understand.

Datameer has tripled revenues over the past 12 months and looks on track to hit a $10 million run rate by early Q3, according to back-of-the-envelope math. Datameer CEO Stefan Groschupf says the company will reach 100 enterprise contracts by that time, and the average contract is $100,000 in value. The company offers annual software subscriptions, including an enterprise version can cost $100,000 or more, depending on data throughput.

Groschupf says many of his customers like to keep the details of their contracts confidential. But if you check Datameer’s web site and other announcements, you’ll see it serves companies like Sears and Visa, as well as emerging companies like hot gaming firms Kabam and Kixeye. Datameer says it also has four of the five largest global banks as paying customers as well as three of the four largest credit card companies and the U.S. government, though Groschupf is mum on specifics, citing confidentiality agreements.

Datameer’s traction comes as news emerges about other big data companies with similar growth. GoodData, a San Francisco company that provides business intelligence from data, said it too has tripled revenues over the past year. GoodData has been around since 2007. Datameer was founded in 2009. The coinciding explosion of growth this year suggests we’re seeing the “hockey stick” growth part of the big data cycle.

Datameer has raised $17.8 million from firms like Kleiner Perkins and Redpoint, but it may raise an expansion round to ensure it can grab more market share even as other competitors pile in. It can reach profitability based on the money it has already raised, said Groschupf.

Datameer’s value comes in offering an easy-to-use application layer on top of Hadoop, the popular open source software framework that allows companies to store and organize data on the fly. While companies can try to hire hard-to-find and expensive Hadoop experts to analyze the data themselves, Datameer’s app layer dumbs things down. Just about any manager in any unit can integrate, analyze, and visualize any data for their own needs. Does an HR manager want to track the performance of sales executives in new ways? Well, they can query that.

The advantage of the Hadoop-spreadsheet approach is that it allows companies to interact directly with new or existing data sources, without actually changing the underlying data. And it lets them run new types of queries on-the-fly. This contrasts to the cumbersome technology that has dominated until now, where data queries are constrained by slow and expensive data manipulation process: Generally, ETL (extract transform load) technology is used to feed data into enterprise warehouses for subsequent manipulation by business intelligence apps. This process can take up to 18 months to set up, and requires preconceived data modeling. In other words, if your intended queries aren’t thought up beforehand, you’re out of luck. No peering into your data with new sorts of queries.

Datameer’s CEO Stefan Groschupf recently shared evidence of his company’s traction during a panel discussion I moderated at Interop Tuesday (see a good summary here).

Here are five interesting ways Datameer, or services like it, are creating value:

Making money

Datameer helped a large anti-virus software company double the conversion rate of some of its marketing campaigns, netting it more than an additional $20 million in revenue within six months. Before using Datameer, the company had sunk more than $1 million into advertising campaigns that weren’t converting very well: It had used Google ads and tried to market through weblogs, its download logs, and sales accounts. Datameer helped it optimize across all of these areas, with no additional investment in infrastructure or advertising outlays. Similarly, Datameer is helping fast-growing gaming companies like Kabam and Kixeye respond more dynamically to data collected by their users, giving them a leg up on more mature companies like Zynga, which isn’t using Hadoop and is reliant on the more traditional, less flexible ETL/warehouse technology. By encouraging Kabam and Kixeye game developers to write to log files that can be instantly analyzed, Datameer can run 1,000 reports a day on them, checking to see say, what color — red or blue — is best used on game buttons for enticing gamers to click. Similarly, hundreds of other variables can be tracked on the fly, about how gamers are clicking, buying virtual goods, and then leaving.

Identify fraud

Datameer worked with a credit card company to help it save billions by identifying fraud before it happened. Groschupf wouldn’t identify his customer. However, the WSJ recently reported how Visa has used big data to save “billions” by identifying fraud that could have cost it $2 billion; it mentions Visa is using Hadoop but didn’t mention the app running on top of it. The technology allows credit card companies to view data at the individual merchant terminal level and across hundreds of attributes from average authorization volumes to the frequency of purchases that turn out to be fraudulent.

Prediction

Datameer helped an unnamed “hardware company” analyze server usage among its customers to predict when those customers will need a new server. Instead of waiting for the customer to realize servers are at full capacity, Datameer’s data knows capacity will be hit in, say, two weeks, and ships a new server to the customer before they realize they need it. That has helped the hardware company improve sales by more than $100 million “over a few years,” according to Groschupf. Datameer can perform a range of other needs for customers based on trends. One example is price optimization. While online retailer Amazon is using price optimization techniques to update prices up to 12 times a day, traditional retailers have typically optimized pricing once every 12 weeks. Datameer recently helped Sears shorten that time to three days.

Matching people

Datameer’s principal competition is not other providers, says Groschupf, but when companies decide to do the job themselves. Relationship site eHarmony, for example, was an early adopter of Hadoop, and claims this has helped eHarmony allow 550,000 U.S. marriages to happen. eHarmony matches people by running Hadoop every night on the questionnaires filled out by its customer base.

Another big step for the big data industry occurred late last year, when Datameer announced an OEM deal with online human resource software vendor Workday to embed the Datameer analytics platform as part of their big data analytics application for customers. “This marks one of the first deals to integrate Hadoop analytics into the enterprise packaged application ecosystem,” said Tony Baer, an analyst at research firm Ovum at the time. The firm called it a “key milestone in the process for big data securing mainstream enterprise acceptance.”

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EarthRisk Technologies has developed a new model for predicting extreme weather events. The model identifies weather patterns based on over 82 billion calculations and 60 years of data. It then compares those patterns to current conditions and uses predictive analytics to predict the weather up to 40 days in advance.

The technology is derived from research at the University of California at San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Cofounder and CEO John Plavan said the old standard for weather prediction is built on subjective forecast models that are not accurate beyond a week.

“Hundreds of thousands of atmospheric variables are changing constantly around the globe and the old models aren’t robust enough to take these into account,” Plavan said in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. “If there is a change to the initial conditions, the whole thing breaks down. We use statistical relationships to predict eventual outcomes and this technique is not subject to the same chaos. We are applying analytics to an industry that is begging for reinvention.”

EarthRisk has collected data from the U.S. and U.K. governments as well as observational data from thousands of scientists and researchers working in the field and the database is updated every day. EarthRisk’s engine searches for correlations and patterns of “statistical significance” and generates forecast probabilities based on this information. The approach uses the past to predict the future.

“Utilities corporations, energy traders, and energy producers are majorly impacted by big temperature changes and spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to predict them,” Plavan said. “If they know there will be an extreme cold event a month from now, they can use that data to make an actionable decision, and these guys will do anything to gain a small edge.”

EarthRisk’s flagship product TempRisk is the first commercial application of this technology and is geared towards the research and energy trading communities. The company has been developing, refining, and testing the technology for a few years and now plans to expand the business dramatically and explore more commercialization opportunities. There could be more consumer-focused applications down the road, like the ability to check weather in a tropical location before booking a vacation.

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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We asked startups throughout the health care industry to apply and stipulated that founders must only have raised a seed or series A round of funding. In each category, our expert judges selected five finalists who will pitch their products and services live in front of more than 400 health care executives, leaders, IT decision makers, venture capitalists, and press.

The judges include representatives from Norwest Venture Partners, Morgenthaler Ventures, Venrock, Qualcomm Life, Burill & Company, AARP, and one patient advocate. During the competition, they will look for digital health and health IT startups that are developing innovative solutions that serve the smart hospital, patient, and provider and has early signs of industry traction and user engagement.

The finalists have the opportunity to win editorial coverage in VentureBeat, four hours of partner meetings and mentorship from Morgenthaler Ventures, a $250,000 convertible bridge loan from Venrock Quarry (only in the seed category), and more. Read the full list of prizes here. 

It wasn’t easy to narrow down our finalists, so we included an honorary mention for promising startups that just missed the cut.

Here are the finalists for HealthBeat 2013 Grand Rounds Innovation Showdown.

Seed Stage

Smart Patients is an online community where cancer patients and caregivers learn from each other about treatments, the latest science, and how it all fits into the context of their experience. A built-in clinical trial search engine helps patients find relevant trials and discuss them with the community.

Clinicast builds risk scores, cost scores, and workflow tools that identify high risk patients, match patients to appropriate interventions, and streamline workflow. By mining actionable insights from health data, CliniCast enables providers to optimize outcomes and minimize unnecessary costs.

ReferralMD is an enterprise business relationship management health care service that helps primary care and specialist providers bridge the communication gap by providing real-time status updates, business intelligence, and performance measurement for referrals, insurance authorizations, and progress updates. ReferralMD complements all electronic medical record software.

Liviam is a personal sharing site that give you a simple way to bring together your team of supporters when you need them most. Anyone who has ever been hospitalized knows, care for a sick or injured loved one, coordinating family members seeing the new baby, or asking for help from friends during a tough time knows that it can be really hard to find the right way to say, “I need you.” Your friends and family want to help, Liviam makes it easy.

mHealth Technologies makes any compiled application (.ipa, .exe, .apk, etc.) on any platform HIPAA compliant with proximity-based security. The patented three-part solution consists of the Token, an application or container, and a dashboard. MHT embedded security enables any application to defend itself or self-destruct without a network connection, making breach impossible.

Honorable Mentions: 

Socialblood is a social network that connects blood donors and recipients of the same blood type through Facebook. They are on a mission to connect the entire Facebook population of over a billion users to their blood types. So when in need users could help each other and potentially save lives.

Jumpercut engages patients through personalized video. It’s increasingly difficult to reach patients in a busy media environment. By using JumperCut to engage patients with instantly personalized videos based on their immediate needs, you’re reinforcing the personal nature of your relationship with them, increasing their loyalty, and driving them towards positive action.

Series A+

Procured Health helps hospitals tackle their fastest growing cost item, medical products, with a web-based device analysis platform and an evaluation workflow solution. Procured also proactively highlights savings opportunities based on purchasing tendencies and market insights. In the face of multiple revenue pressures, hospitals can take control of their input costs with Procured.

Empower Interactive brings scale to behavioral health by transforming evidence-based psychotherapy into interactive e-learning programs, teaching structured coping techniques in a cost-effective, highly accessible way. The underlying platform is structured to ensure that end users will benefit from data-driven, proven methods that help them improve their psychological well-being.

Beyond Lucid is an award-winning company that makes software to connect Fire, EMS, and Industrial Emergency Response Teams in the field with the care facilities they serve. BLT’s MEDIVIEW platform incorporates industry-leading, mission-critical features to make emergency response safer, more efficient, and cost-effective, with zero integration engineering required.

Ringadoc simplifies communication between doctors and patients. Ringadoc empowers doctors, giving them the capability to triage patients, centralize communications, and manage their after-hours calls on any device. Based in San Francisco, Ringadoc is backed by top Silicon Valley investors, including FF Angel.

Better Doctor helps people find the doctor that’s right for them. Each year over 70 million Americans struggle to find the right doctor. BetterDoctor seeks to solve this by offering web and mobile apps that make doctor discovery simple and transparent. Since the launch in October, BetterDoctor’s health marketplace has helped a million patients find the right doctor

Honorable mentions:

Tiatros Inc. is a cloud computing company that dramatically improves coordination across the healthcare sector to make clinical services, telemedicine services, and clinical research more efficient. Pioneered in alliance with experts across the University of California Health System, the Tiatros solution is a private, secure mobile solution that connects healthcare providers to each other, to their patients, and to family members and other caretakers using social-network styled tools and interfaces that are already familiar to 1.5 billion people.

Zeel is a revolutionary way to book same-day, in-home massages with the best licensed massage therapists in New York City.

Check out the full HealthBeat 2013 program here, which is packed with over 70 industry leading speakers and two days of high-level chats, breakout sessions, and networking initiatives. And make sure to register today. There are only a few seats remaining!

Thanks to the following industry leaders for supporting HealthBeat 2013: AARP and ArchPoint Partners as Silver Sponsors and Allayo, athenahealth, California Healthcare Foundation, Morgenthaler Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Practice Fusion, Venrock, and Voalte as Event Sponsors.

Top image via Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cameron Peron is VP Marketing at Newvem, a cloud operations optimization service.

Amazon has launched a series of local Amazon Web Services summits across in key cities across the world. Capitalizing on the re:Invent conference in November of last year, the AWS summits are a great forum for local AWS users to learn about featured AWS services and meet partners exhibiting at the event itself.

The AWS Summit in San Francisco a number of days ago lived up to this expectation. Here are 5 insights from Amazon senior VP of web services Andy Jassy’s keynote, and the exhibition itself.

It’s all about the enterprise

Adoption of the public cloud by the enterprise was a key message through the introductory keynote.  In sharp contrast to the keynotes delivered in re:Invent in November, Andy Jassy emphasized the public cloud as part of an enterprise’s IT and cloud strategy as opposed to a complete alternative to on-premise and virtual private cloud.

Andy highlighted use cases of AWS services that the enterprise can use to both move workloads to the AWS cloud as well cooperate between on-premise and AWS environments.

Security = priority #1

Jassy stated that AWS is committed to providing a secure public cloud, highlighting the addition of advanced security controls, certifications and accreditations.

No doubt this was a direct message to enterprise level CIOs that are considering moving small variable workloads to the public cloud, but need to deal with security and compliance risks that run deep into their respective organizations.

Redshift, redshift, redshift

The keynote contained many use cases and examples of using AWS RedShift, a data warehousing and data analysis solution.

Based on an hourly pricing model, RedShift enables AWS customers to analyze large volumes of data with their existing business intelligence tools.  The RedShift use case was a common theme throughout Andy Jassy’s address, use cases delivered throughout the keynote, and breakout sessions. RedShift follows in the footsteps of enriched AWS services such as OpsWorks and Trusted Advisor.

Cost is still the driver for onboarding new business

Throughout the keynote Jassy championed many organic AWS services, as well as solutions provided through the AWS Partnership Network that enable companies to scale once on the AWS cloud.  Despite this, low cost is still king.

Just as Werner Vogel discussed cost savings in the beginning of the New York City keynote, Jassy emphasized that AWS lowered prices 31 times in the absence of competitive pressure to do so.  In line with the success of the Amazon.com model, Jassy implied that that AWS will continue to reduce prices.

Jassy also offered examples of customers reducing costs by using solutions beyond EC2, highlighting that Foursquare reduced their analytical cost by 50 percent with AWS.

Launch of the AWS Certification Program

Jassy also shared the launch of an AWS program that certifies solutions architects, SysOps Admin, and developers.

To qualify, applicants must complete an exam that covers both proficiency in AWS as well as general IT knowledge and experience.  The program should complement and reward AWS users who have championed both onboarding and scaling AWS within their organizations by mandating and regulating their skill sets throughout the career.

In other words DevOps and other AWS users can add AWS certification alongside experience and proficiency in code, such as Ruby and Python.

Cameron Peron is VP Marketing at Newvem, a cloud operations optimization service designed for cloud users. Offering a business view into a company’s public cloud operations, Newvem actively tracks cloud health in order to help reveal and solve cloud irregularities related to cost, security, utilization and availability.  Follow Cameron at @cameronperon

Ubalo announced the acquisition on its website, saying that the company was founded to focus on making large-scale computing easier and that after fruitful collaborations with Twitter’s infrastructure team, the two agreed to come together.

The startup was working on simple ways of scaling code beyond single machines. Using the Ubalo infrastructure, developers could write code for multiple machines with no additional overhead, using the same tools, languages, and libraries that they would ordinarily use for single-computers applications. Case studies that the team published include reducing image processing tasks from eight hours to five minutes using 100 processor cores on Amazon S3 and using Ubalo to generate 8GBs of data by drawing one billion samples from a set of data and computing sample averages, all in just .7 seconds.

Ubalo achieved this by creating modular “pods” that run calculations in replicatable environs you set up once and can run anywhere as well as APIs and messaging protocols to keep all the calculations in sync, and data management techniques to access, manage, and store gigabyte-sized data files.

The startup’s name, Ubalo, means “counting,” according to the site, and it had just four employees including the founders.

Here’s the team’s announcement:

We’ve got some exciting news: The Ubalo team is joining Twitter. In early 2011, we started Ubalo to make large-scale computing easier and more accessible to a technical audience, and we’ve had a great time working with our partners and customers on a number of interesting products. When we met the infrastructure folks at Twitter, we realized that it’s a company with brilliant people, strong momentum, exciting challenges and a promising future. We quickly became enthusiastic about the possibility of collaborating with them and the impact we could have there.

A few days ago, Twitter agreed to acquire our technology and we agreed to join their staff. We look forward to working with Twitter in the years to come.

Thanks for your support and interest in Ubalo!

— Jacob Mattingley (@jem_nz) and Ian Downes (@ndwns), May 9, 2013

It seems to be more than simply an acqui-hire, as Jacob Mattingly, whose Twitter account says “I like making complex things simpler,” tweeted that his startup’s intellectual property was acquired. Cofounder Ian Downes apparently just started using Twitter today and has only one tweet — a retweet of Twitter Engineering’s tweet — to his credit.

Twitter, of course, can always use top-notch expertise on its infrastructure teams. The company’s days of fail-whale adventures seem to be in the past, but with a continuously growing network of users and new services like Twitter #Music, among others, there’s a strong need for ongoing talent acquisition.

Ubalo was based in Palo Alto, Calif., and was funded by Harrison Metal.

HealthBeat 2013 is less than two weeks away, and we’re confident it will be the most provocative and influential health-tech event of the year. The program is packed with over 70 industry leading speakers, high-level chats, breakout sessions, networking initiatives, and a brand-new health-tech startup competition.

CEOs of the nation’s most disruptive health-tech companies will share the stage with the long-established and respected giants of the health care world. They’ll share insights, analyze trends, highlight solutions, and showcase breakthrough products that are transforming health care.

Check out the full agenda here, and make sure to grab your tickets today. New participants include:

Albert Santalo, CEO, CareCloud
Albert Santalo is president and CEO of CareCloud Corporation. An experienced entrepreneur, he founded the company in 2009 with the vision of becoming a health care information technology leader focused on eliminating the waste and inefficiency in the healthcare industry today.

Albert will be participating on “The Next Generation Electronic Health Records.” With provider incentives being issued by the government (CMS) for electronic health record (EHR) adoption, overall hospital adoption of EHRs has doubled since 2009 (up to 35 percent). To date, about $5.7 billion in incentive payments have been made. With all this money pouring out to providers, what is next for EHRs? How can vendors stay competitive and fresh in this regulatory landscape? And how can they keep up with the building towards the new criteria for Meaningful Use Stages 2 and 3? Will cloud-based solutions take over legacy software systems because they are easier to update? How will interoperability between competitors really play out?

Other panelists include: Ryan Howard, CEO & founder, Practice Fusion; MaryKate Foley, VP, user experience, AthenaHealth; and moderator John Cooper, partner, ArchPoint Partners

Paul Tang, VP, chief innovation & technology officer, Palo Alto Medical Foundation
Paul Tang, M.D., M.S., is an internist and VP, chief innovation & technology officer at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF), and he is a consulting associate professor of medicine at Stanford University. He directs the David Druker Center for Health Systems Innovation and also oversees PAMF’s EHR system and its integrated personal health record (PHR) system, MyHealthOnline.

He’s speaking on “The Death of the Personal Health Record (PHR): Rebirthing the SMART Patient.” Why did Google Health and other nontethered products fail? Are PHRs really what patients want? With Meaningful Use Stage 2 going into effect in 2014 and CMS starting to ding hospitals for poor survey results on patient satisfaction, will “engaging the patient” really be more than an industry buzz word? Come see how entrepreneurs are re-creating this space: PHRs 2.0, social networks, mobile apps, and transparency and payment tools in health care.

Other panelists include Kristin Baker Spohn, director of business development, Castlight Health; Tomer Shoval, CEO & founder, Simplee.com; Sterling Lanier, CEO & founder, Tonic Health; Eric Peacock, CEO & founder, My Health Teams; and Chini Krishnan, CEO & founder, GetInsured.com

Jody Holtzman, SVP, thought leadership, AARP
At the AARP, Jody Holtzman leads the thought leadership group, where his focus is to find ways for AARP to stimulate innovation in the market that benefits people over 50. This involves areas such as the future of technology and the 50-plus, technology design for all, and 50-plus entrepreneurship.

Jody will be part of “How to Use Tools for Patient Activation/Patient Engagement: A Cross-Generational Look.” Everybody knows it’s important to eat well, exercise, get plenty of rest, and quit smoking. This is easier said than done. Harder still is adhering to medication schedules and weight loss programs. Patient engagement is not just for the young and healthy. Here from a panel of experts as they share tools and strategies for what works for all demographics.

Other Panelists include: Chanin Wendling, director of eHealth, Geisinger Health System; and Alexandra Drane, cofounder & chief visionary officer, Eliza Corporation

Joshua Newman, M.D., director of product management & health strategy, Salesforce.com
Dr. Joshua Newman works on building and promoting clinical health applications, developing partner presence on the Force.com platform and enabling health applications for nonprofit organizations through the Salesforce foundation.

He’s speaking on “The Health Care Cloud: Everybody’s Jumping In.” Is health care embracing the cloud? Are we seeing more personal health information (PHI) stored in private clouds? What are the advantages to hosting and storing document data in the cloud in health care? How can cloud solutions increase productivity, real time pushed product updates and scalability of data and analytics in health care? How can on premise solutions be integrated with cloud-based solutions in health care?

Other panelists include: David Chao, product management, MuleSoft; and moderator Tim Kwan, senior associate, Booz Allen Hamilton

Register today for HealthBeat 2013. There are only a few seats remaining!

Thanks to the following industry leaders for supporting HealthBeat 2013: AARP and ArchPoint Partners as Silver Sponsors and Allayo, athenahealth, California Healthcare Foundation, Morgenthaler Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Practice Fusion, Venrock, and Voalte as Event Sponsors.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Sales professionals rely on phone calls for making connections, following up on leads, and closing deals. RingDNA released a voice communications platform today that provides sales reps with relevant, contextual data when they need it to make the most of their sales calls. The company also announced raising a $1.9 million seed round.

This iPhone app integrates with Salesforce, Twilio, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and company news feeds. When a call comes in, RingDNA delivers CRM data, social media activity, and behavioral marketing information to eliminate “blind spots” and give reps “actionable business opportunities” in real time.

“Sales reps spend most of their day making and taking calls, but existing mobile CRM apps do little to improve those conversations,” said CEO Howard Brown in an interview. “We don’t see anyone addressing the fact that phone calls and surrounding data are the center of a sales reps’ world. Reps want to know as much as they can about their prospects. Our app focuses on helping enterprise sales reps close more deals by delivering sales intelligence data before, during and after any call.”

RingDNA is not the only startup addressing the demand for data in today’s business environment. Base and Close.io provide comparable products, but Brown said they require switching to a new CRM while RingDNA integrates with existing ones. There are also other products that focus on email, and RingDNA’s approach is “intelligent telephony,” which focuses on the phone as the hub of activity.

Brown previously founded a marketing consultancy called DemandResults and observed the challenges his clients had integrating call metrics from marketing, sales, and service centers into their workflow. Furthermore, he said over 40 percent of sales reps fail to hit their quotas each year. He wanted to build a way to get the right call data to the right person at the right time and improve sales performance as a result.

RingDNA presents users with contacts’ past account history, previous communications, and social data as well as activities from Salesforce. The calls are automatically logged and recorded and the resulting data collected. Executives and marketers can access performance metrics through a dashboard and track what percentage if revenue is closed over the phone, how many inbound calls became leads, and call volume by campaign, channel, or region.

The app was first released to beta testers in August. RingDNA raised $1.9 million from angel investors including people from Salesforce, DropBox, CloudConnect, LeaseStar, Appirio, and Propertyware. Customers include Optimizely, Appirio, and Lease Advisors.

Development testing service Coverity’s annual scan report, which is based on data from almost 500 software projects with a total of over 450 million lines of code, says that almost 230,000 defects were found and fixed. And while the average defect density per thousand lines of code was almost identical between open source and proprietary, there was an interesting diversion in the results.

Open source projects, Coverity says, tend to have .69 bugs per thousand lines of code, virtually the same as proprietary software, which tends to have .68 errors per thousand lines. But large closed-source projects — over one million lines of code — tend to have 33 percent fewer errors than small closed-source projects, with .66 errors over each thousand lines of larger projects compared to .98 in smaller projects. And small open source projects have a massive 70 percent fewer errors than large open source software, with only .44 defects compared to .75.

The difference, according to Coverity, is that small open source projects are labors of love by individual developers or small teams, who carefully comb through their code to reduce errors. Large open source projects, on the other hand, tend to lack standardized processes to ensure code quality, and so the error rate increases.

In commercial or closed-source software, developers experience almost the opposite conditions. Large projects tend to have well-defined formal testing processes, which ensure higher code quality, and small projects tend to be hasty, quick endeavors that show the effects of growing pains, as no standardized testing is in place.

In other words, if you’re looking for bug-free apps, look for a small open source project or a large proprietary piece of software, because those have the best chance of having few defects and high overall code quality.

All of the data in infographic form:

photo credit: gui.tavares via photopin cc

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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This sponsored post is produced by the SAP Startup Focus Program.

We provide technology, support, resources and community to Big Data, Predictive or Real-time Analytics startups to jumpstart development and accelerate market traction. We currently serve a network of over 250 startups across the globe.

Is your startup a Big Data, Predictive or Real-time Analytics solution that’s beyond ideation and privately held? Want the chance to get in front of 15,000 enterprise customers? Want face time with Dr. Vishal Sikka, Member of the Executive Board SAP AG, Technology & Innovation?

If so, we want to meet you.

Get started at: http://spr.ly/SAPStartups and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Enterprise software giant SAP has been throwing its hands in the air for years, exclaiming that it is indeed a cloud company. But yesterday, SAP took a big step that shows where the it and its customers are at by offering its “HANA” in-memory database technology from its own cloud.

HANA (High-Performance Analytic Appliance) is an appliance that stores terabytes worth of data and can move through that data at high speeds. As of this week, SAP and its clients are storing more than 750TBs of data in the system. HANA is an expensive solution not many companies can offer, and it’s clearly important to SAP’s future. “We expect [HANA] to have a billion-dollar future on its own,” SAP mobility head Sanjay Poonen told us in November.

SAP previously only offered HANA via the cloud through Amazon Web Services. There are many potential reasons why SAP would want to offer HANA from its own cloud rather than AWS. For example, it gives SAP more control over its product, lets SAP allocate the right high-performance hardware for HANA’s monumental tasks, and lets SAP offer HANA in the cloud at a lower overall cost.

Another reason SAP has moved HANA to its own cloud is that HANA has reportedly underperformed with current customers. SAP has even given away HANA for free to some tech startups in order to seed interest and maybe gain more big customers if those startups grow big.

But after talking with several “big data” experts, one final reason particularity sticks out: SAP needed to move HANA to its own cloud to make it easier to deploy the damn thing to businesses.

“In the last 10 years, the speed of business has significantly increased,” Stefan Groschupf, the CEO of Hadoop-based big data analytics startup Datameer, told VentureBeat. “No one has time to wait 18 months anymore.”

Essentially, many businesses have given up on overly long deployment cycles — it bogs down other processes, and the software is outdated once it’s ready to be deployed. Cloud software pioneers like Workday have shown enterprises how handy the cloud can be and they like what they’ve seen.

SAP and chief competitor Oracle have been watching this trend carefully during the past few years. Both companies have acquired smaller companies and launched new cloud-focused products to help speed up deployments and stay relevant. SAP’s biggest move in recent history was acquiring SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion back in December 2011. Similarly, Oracle has purchased a boatload of companies.

In the case of HANA, this is SAP tapping two huge trends (big data and cloud) and trying to tie the biggest companies in the world to its solution. Offering it via the cloud means companies might bring in those companies that see how the cloud can speed up their workflow.

That said, lean startups focused on big data solutions could gobble up some of the market SAP wants to attack with HANA. One such startup is SiSense, a big data company that has seen a 520 percent growth in subscription revenues in the past year. SiSense’s offering is different than HANA but it still thinks it can solve many businesses’ big data qualms.

“We can run on any hardware out there; many companies don’t want to buy new hardware,” SiSense marketing VP Bruno Aziza told VentureBeat. “There’s been a shift in the market for how people procure their big data solutions.”

For example, SiSense’s CTO recently crunched 10TBs of data in 10 seconds using an off-the-shelf $10,000 server as a conference stunt.

Another thing on SiSense’s side: it only takes “hours” to deploy.

Clouds image via PhotoAtelier/Flickr

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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That’s going back to the future, according to Monetate: going back to a time when all commerce was personal.

But there is a yin and a yang here.

While we may want personalized experiences, and we want websites to be smart — to know us, essentially, and act as an intelligent, solicitous person might — privacy is part of the picture. A good third of us don’t want our website activity tracked, and a quarter of us don’t want the websites we shop to personalize our experience at all.

Monetate has four tips for online retailers:

1. Use marketing automation technology and big data to assist with personalization
2. Target segments with relevant content based on what you know about them
3. Don’t think of channels, think of customers first
4. Be in it for the long haul, not the quick win

All the data, in visual form:

photo credit: crsan via photopin cc

Enigma launched out of beta today to shed light on this hidden world. This “big data” startup focuses on data in the public domain, such as those published by governments, NGOs, and the media. According to founder Marc DaCosta, this data is “totally in the dark” and “scattered across a dizzying array of data silos.” Enigma is building infrastructure to connect all of it together and make it searchable and accessible through a web platform and API.

“Currently, the world of public data is much like the world that existed on the Internet before search engines became available in the 1990s,” said DaCosta. “Because there is no infrastructure to search and discover public data, huge sources of real important insight and knowledge about how companies, people, and places interact in the world is hidden from view. By surfacing this data in a usable and intuitive way, Enigma empowers a factual, data-driven view of the world that currently is not possible.”

The company describes itself as “Google for public data.” Using a combination of automated web crawlers and directly reaching out to government agencies, Engima’s database contains billions of public records across more than 100,000 datasets. Pulling them all together breaks down the barriers that exist between various local, state, federal, and institutional search portals. On top of this information is an “entity graph” which searches through the data to discover relevant results. Furthermore, once the information is broken out of the silos, users can filter, reshape, and connect various datasets to find correlations.

DaCosta said that while there are plenty of notable players in public data, such as Factual, Socrata, Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, and LexisNexis, Enigma is distinguished by its “holistic approach” to data acquisition and interface which supports organic discovery of data. He was working on an interactive cartography project funded by Intel and grew frustrated with how difficult it was to easily access and use public data. His former classmate at Columbia University Hicham Oudghiri was working as a currency trader in New York and felt the same pain point. So the two founded Enigma in 2011 to map the “huge terra incognito” that is public data.

The technology has a wide range of applications, including professional services, finance, news media, big data, and academia. Engima has formed strategic partnerships in each of these verticals with Deloitte, Gerson Lehrman Group, The New York Times, S&P Capital IQ, and Harvard Business School, respectively.

For example, someone looking for a correlation between student loans and unemployment could connect Sallie Mae default data with Bureau of Labor statistics on unemployment. Or a journalist could dive into whether the plant that exploded in Texas had any safety or environmental violations with the EPA or OSHA.

Enigma launched in beta in February 2013. Today, the company is also announcing a strategic investment from The New York Times which brings its total seed funding to $1.45 million, with investment from Crosslink Capital, Tripplepoint Capital, Brent Hurley, and Strauss Zelnick. The company is headquartered in New York City and has 13 employees.

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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This sponsored post is produced by the SAP Startup Focus Program.

We provide technology, support, resources and community to Big Data, Predictive or Real-time Analytics startups to jumpstart development and accelerate market traction. We currently serve a network of over 250 startups across the globe.

Is your startup a Big Data, Predictive or Real-time Analytics solution that’s beyond ideation and privately held? Want the chance to get in front of 15,000 enterprise customers? Want face time with Dr. Vishal Sikka, Member of the Executive Board SAP AG, Technology & Innovation?

If so, we want to meet you.

Get started at: http://spr.ly/SAPStartups and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

Clicktale has raised $17 million for its ‘in-page analytics’ technology that provides insights into customers’ online behavior, down to the last click. The technology tracks every mouse move, click, and scroll, and provides visual heat maps and behavioral reports that serve as a complement to traditional web analytics, which primarily deal with page-to-page navigation.

In this data-obsessed age, online businesses are always trying to figure out what their users are doing, how they respond to various features, and what the barriers to engagement are. Clicktale’s solutions for mouse tracking and heatmap collect and present this data, while the conversion suite provides tools to improve conversion rates. Businesses can watch recordings of their visitors’ browsing sessions and “see your site through the eyes of your visitors.”

The goal is to “maximize your site’s potential” by making simple changes that can increase engagement. When businesses understand where they lose people, they can adapt accordingly. ClickTale’s Online Optimization Cycle is designed for make improving the site’s more efficient. For example, if a particular form in a field is consistently left blank, businesses can take steps to clarify, alter, or remove the field entirely.

The service is available on a freemium model. Clicktale has more than 80,000 clients including CBS, Lenovo, T-Mobile, and Groupon and brought in over $10 million in 2012. After raising $800K in 2007 from YL Ventures, Clicktale achieved this impressive traction with no additional funding. This hefty $17 million is growth financing to take Clicktale “to the next level.” Amadeus Capital Partners led the round, with participation from Goldrock Capital and Viola Credit. Clicktale is based in Tel Aviv.

Photo Credit: Jeff Christiansen/Flickr

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GoodData is a privately-held company, but that’s not stopping it from crowing about its revenues — to a point.

The business-intelligence service provider (aka cloud-based big data company) plans to announce tomorrow that its first-quarter revenues in 2013 were three times bigger than the same period a year before. The company isn’t saying say exactly how big those revenues are except to note they are “double digits.”

We got a peek at a few more numbers:

• GoodData has increased its total number of customers from 8,000 at the end of Q4 2012 to 10,000 at the end of the first quarter.
• Also in that period, it closed seven annual contracts worth $250,000 or more.

But that’s as far as its quarterly disclosures go. There were no specifics about any other performance metrics from the quarter.

GoodData may be warming up for the kind of quarterly earnings disclosures that it might do at some future point as a public company — and founder Roman Stanek has stated his intentions for an IPO in the past. But it’s a pretty limited warmup for now.

This much we do know: The six-year-old company has raised $53.5 million to date in several rounds of funding, and employs about 200 people. Its headquarters are in San Francisco. And it’s really hard to find art to illustrate business intelligence or big data, which is why we are giving you this photo of small and big Datas.

Photo credit: JD Hancock via photopin cc

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Makes some sense, no?

So the ratings site checked all the credits on the all-time top 500 movies. And then checked where those actors, directors, and producers went to school to learn their trade.

The result?

A ranked list of the top 25 film schools in the world — or, at least, the English-speaking world:

1. New York University (208 credits)
2. University of Southern California (186 credits)
3. University of California – Los Angeles (165 credits)
4. Yale University (110 credits)
5. Julliard School (106 credits)
6. Columbia University (100 credits)
7. Harvard University (90 credits)
8. Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (86 credits)
9. Fiorello H. Laguardia High School of Music & Art (64 credits)
10. American Academy of Dramatic Arts (51 credits)
11. London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (51 credits)
12. Stanford University (50 credits)
13. HB Studio (49 credits)
14. Northwestern University (47 credits)
15. The Actors Studio (44 credits)
16. Brown University (43 credits)
17. University of Texas – Austin (40 credits)
18. Central School of Speech and Drama (39 credits)
19. Cornell University (39 credits)
20. Guildhall School of Music and Drama (38 credits)
21. University of California – Berkeley (38 credits)
22. California Institute of the Arts (38 credits)
23. University of Michigan (37 credits)
24. Beverly Hills High School (36 credits)
25. Boston University (35 credits)

Using publicly available data on movie quality was critical, according to Ranker data scientist Ravi Iyer. Ranker used data from Freebase, DBPedia, IMDB, and its own rankings in order to arrive at a list of quality movies from which the source data was gathered.

Otherwise, of course, movie-mill film companies that produce reams of B-quality films would skew the rankings.

When the company mashed the data, it turns out that even though USC produced the most film credits by graduates overall, NYU produces more credits on the top 500 movies. Interestingly, some high schools made the list, such as New York’s Fiorello H. Laguardia High School, at number nine, and L.A.’s Beverly Hills High School, at number 24.

It’s perhaps not exactly big data, with 500 movies and perhaps 100-250 contributors to each, but it is a big data approach to solving a problem.

photo credit: silkolive via photopin cc

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Teradata released the third State of Business Intelligence Survey today, which found that interest in big data analytics careers is on the rise. However, there is a significant gap between the number of students interested in these opportunities and the amount of hirable talent in the pipeline.

Working as a data scientist (or related position) requires taking a large data set, modeling it, and gleaning insights. As the hype surrounding big data continues, the demand for people with these skill sets is increasing, along with salaries. But just like top tier athletics, not everyone has the requisite talent or ability to follow a career in this field and there is a major, global shortage of data scientists. And despite the fact that two out of three students surveyed agree or strongly agree that there are job opportunities for them in data-savvy careers, only 16 percent are actually considering careers in this area.

Accordingly, employers still struggle to find potential hires. Analytics hiring managers reported that their largest needs for recent graduates are for IT or systems analytics (35%), program developers (32%), data managers (30%), and business analytics (22%). In the survey, one-third of employers identified a lack of experience as their greatest challenge, followed by insufficient business skills, insufficient technical skills, and a general lack of candidates. A lack of communication skills is also an issue.

Preparing students for real-world employment is partly the responsibility of the teachers. Forty-one percent of professors reported an increase in the number of BI or analytics courses at their university, but they also identified six areas where businesses can help them meet the challenges of creating qualified employees: providing large data sets, suitable cases, staying current with practices, technical support and training, realistic and meaningful experiences, and access to contemporary enterprise software.

The tech industry is a competitive job market and companies are always looking for qualified, experienced data scientists who combine technical expertise with creative thinking and communication skills. The responsibility does not lay only on the students, but on the universities, teachers, and companies that turn them from students into successful employees. A degree alone is not enough.

The survey was conducted by Barbara Wixom, an associate professor of commerce at University of Virginia’s McIntire School for Commerce and a research affiliate at MIT’s Sloan School of management. The study was sponsored by the Teradata University Network, which includes 3,400 faculty members, 1,600 universities, and thousands of students. TUN is a free web portal for students and teachers working in this field.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock