LOS ANGELES – Democratic mayoral candidate Emanuel Pleitez says his ‘big data’ expertise can help Los Angeles’ city government become more efficient and improve conditions in some of its poorest and most crime-plagued neighborhoods.

Technology plays a strong role in Pleitez’s vision for education reform in the city. Pleitez, a Stanford graduate molded by the rough and gang-ravaged public school system of East L.A., wants to address the city’s disappointing high school graduation numbers, specifically that only 50 percent of students finish high school in four years.

The candidate believes a greater emphasis on digital literacy, and incorporating more tech-focused courses in school curriculums might help steer struggling students towards better academic performance. “The foundation of a sound economy is a skilled workforce,” he noted.

But can you teach gangbangers to code?

“It’s cheaper than incarcerating them.”

We asked Pleitez for specific numbers, and he referenced a statistic from the documentary about the state of the U.S. educational system, “Waiting for Superman,” that concludes a year of educating a student in a private school costs less money than a year of educating an inmate in prison.

L.A. votes on a new mayor Tuesday.

Another facet of Pleitez’s tech- education plan is his desire to convert the city’s official website, lacity.org, into a brand-name learning portal that offers visitors free or low-cost applications that teach digital skills. Pleitez thinks L.A. can become a leader in nationwide digital education and even raise revenue by charging non-California residents to enroll in the city’s online tech applications.

The candidate claims the city’s website’s draws 500,000 to a million unique visitors a month and says this proves lacity.org’s potential to be a vital educational resource and city-revenue driver.

I asked Pleitez about his thoughts on the locally hyped Silicon Beach movement, concentrated in L.A.’s more affluent Westside nodes. Pleitez praised the rise of startup activity and technology investment on the beach but said, “It shouldn’t be concentrated in one or two places.  We need to make sure we are providing these hubs across the city, but especially in the most underserved communities.”

He said investors do not promote innovation in South L.A. communities because they fail to recognize their value propositions, ones that are significantly enhanced by the candidate’s plan to transform the area into a hub of clean energy production.

“These are emerging domestic markets,” he said.

Pleitez, who resigned from the role of chief strategy officer at the social-network aggregator Spokeo, to pursue politics, said he also strongly believes in technology’s capability to improve the political process by enabling campaigns to engage the public on many more platforms.

The broadened scope of online communication channels available today enables a political candidate’s message to be more “targeted,” said Pleitez, sounding more like a media strategist than a politician. “I took a lot of notes from the Obama campaign,” he added.

Part of Pleitez’s voter-outreach strategy involves “house meetings,” where the candidate invites the public to hear him discuss issues at a private residence. Pleitez says these functions have attracted a total of 40 to 50 people, who learned about the event through Facebook advertising alone.

We asked Pleitez if his campaign’s data strategy was truly innovative and if it signified a real disruption of politics in L.A..

Pleitez cited the team of in-house data scientists that compile and organize his voter base’s raw analytics. An in-house team eliminates the need for data-vendor middlemen, and saves the campaign $40,000 to $80,000, he estimates.

“We did it ourselves, so were able to overlay data,” he said. That, in turn, enables his data scientists to perform more specific analytics queries in real time, resulting in better microtargeting initiatives. Pleitez highlighted his team’s ability to create subsidiary campaigns tailored to the voter sentiments of specific neighborhoods as one example of his micro-targeting advantage.

“I am more tech-savvy and innovative than the other candidates, period,” he said.

But that might not be enough to win him the mayorship. The L.A. Times notes that he’s still fifth in the polls and that he’s raised significantly less funding than the leading candidates.

Photo: Emanuel Pleitez and his wife, Rebecca (far-right), field questions from supporters.

Image courtesy Pleitez for LA.

After three years of operating under the radar, Think Big Analytics is ready for its big debut.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based startup leverages open-source computing frameworks Hadoop and NoSQL to bring “big data” to large companies. The company may also offer consulting services, such as assisting clients in prioritizing use cases before working with a Hadoop vendor like Cloudera, GigaOm reports.

To bring its product to market, the founding team has raised a massive $3 million seed round from former Cisco executive Dan Scheinman, with participation from the venture firm WI Harper Group.

The market is full of big data and analytics startups, which are competing for customers against legacy vendors like SAP.

However, investors see massive opportunity for these startups to appeal to companies that are grappling with vast quantities of potentially valuable data. Analysts have reported that both chief marketing officers and chief information officers will carve out a slice of their budget to spend on big data technologies in the coming years.

Early customers include NetApp and Quantcast — the former company of Think Big founder Ron Bodkin. In an interview, Bodkin said inspiration hit on in spring 2010. He announced to dinner guests that he intended to quit a steady job at as the vice president of engineering at Quantcast to help companies use analytics tools.

“Our goal is to be to enterprises what Google is for consumers — the fastest response engine for ad-hoc queries,” said Bodkin. The technology is different from legacy vendors due to its emphasis on helping companies generate real value from the data, and the speed — “questions [are] answered in minutes, not hours,” he said.

---

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.

---

Big banks have been keen early-adopters and patrons of the “big data” movement.

One early proponent, Citigroup famously hired Watson, IBM’s number-crunching supercomputer, to help it decide what new products and services to offer customers. Big data technologies are already being used to clamp down on fraud and determine which customers are credit-worthy.

But similar technologies are also bolstering the efforts of competitors to traditional banks that are providing small-dollar loans to people in need. One such firm is ZestFinance, the brainchild of a former engineering lead at Google, which gives loans to people with bad credit histories. ZestFinance crunches far more data than a Main Street bank — it looks at thousands of indicators to determine which customers are most likely to repay a loan in full. These indicators might include the rate of answering emails or the level of interaction with potential employers on LinkedIn.

Likewise, Kabbage offers loans to online merchants that have little or no access to capital (editors’ note: Kabbage won the Innovation Showdown at VentureBeat’s cloud computing conference, CloudBeat). Kabbage looks at a range of external data, including social media streams. ”If a small-business owner is interacting with customers on Facebook and Twitter, that’s an important sign for us,” said Rob Frohwein, the company’s CEO in a recent interview.

LendUp, a startup that Frohwin admires, recently raised a fund to dole out small dollar loans to give to people in need. The team of engineers developed a “big data” analytics engine to get a better picture of the borrower. In addition to demographic information and credit history, the algorithm also pulls in social data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other data sources such as email.

LendUp’s goal is to provide relief to a deserving market. It’s a nice idea in theory, but is the company’s algorithm advanced enough to truly pick out the borrowers that won’t default on a loan? As Wired’s Marcus Wohlsen points out, payday loan experts aren’t convinced that it is. Critics say that the tech community’s efforts to provide loan alternatives to people traditional banks turn away are misguided and that tech entrepreneurs are not going to overturn cycles of crippling debt anytime soon.

To better gauge the arguments on both sides of this question, we asked financial-technology investor Jon Soberg to duke it out with big data entrepreneur, Roman Stanek. Can big data play a role in alleviating poverty? And if so, what type of data is most useful to this new wave of lenders? Here’s what they had to say.

Related: Read our inaugural debate, “Can Big Data solve America’s gun problem?”

Yes. Especially in countries where there is no credit bureau

Jon Soberg, fin-tech investor, Blumberg Capital (disclosure: Soberg is an investor in Lendo and Kreditech) 

I almost feel like the question should be, “How can we justify not using big data to help alleviate poverty?” I say absolutely that big data can, will, and should help alleviate poverty; we are just starting to scratch the surface.

In many countries, there is no credit bureau. Credit is simply not accessible for many people; this is not only true for individuals, it is also true for firms. Nobel Peace Prize-winning Professor Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank, believes that credit is a human right, and the Grameen Bank is at the forefront of making this happen in the most impoverished nations through micro-finance.

We are also seeing a new generation of profit-seeking lenders who are making credit more accessible to both firms and individuals though big data technology.

In countries lacking basic financial data that we take for granted in the US, companies such as Lenddo are using alternative data sources, particularly social media data, to underwrite loans. Lenddo is operating very successfully in the Philippines, catering to the emerging middle class, and offering access to credit that has not existed before in a profitable and non-predatory way. Using social media, they are able to understand enough about a person to assess their ability and willingness to pay and even influence payment using micro-finance-type approaches.

When I worked at Ditech.com in the mortgage industry, underwriting was the critical component of the lending process. I always found it perplexing that the data used in underwriting essentially didn’t change. A FICO score was the key determinant between a prime and subprime customer but was not necessarily highly correlated to the customer’s viability. Today we are seeing a new breed of entrepreneurs going into the financial services industry with a refreshingly new approach.

Did you know that people running a specific version of Windows in Poland are least likely to pay back a loan? Kreditech and ZestCash use literally thousands of data points to assess credit worthiness, and Kreditech can get cash to someone typically in 15 minutes.

One of the key pushbacks when I discuss this new breed of lenders is privacy. Clearly, giving a financial institution carte blanche access to social media is akin to giving away your first born. However, the depth of data necessary to make better underwriting decisions does not need to be as personal as some might assume. Paying attention to the particular schools you attended, where you live, and the employment levels of your friends can be extremely meaningful in a financial decision, and that data is usually publicly available.

I’m not going to argue for a complete lack of oversight or for no regulation over the use of data, but I am saying that there is huge upside for everyone in using some of this data. It is even more pronounced in places where little financial infrastructure exists, and for people who have little or no financial history.

The bottom line for me is quite simple: Big data will provide the ability to make credit available to a much larger percentage of the population and to do it more efficiently than other methods. Using big data responsibly, we will make the world a better place.

No. Using social media data is unethical

Roman Stanek, CEO, GoodData

I see it all the time: the notion that data mining by itself can cut risk — to the point where banks decide whether or not to issue loans. How? By evaluating and analyzing revealing social media data pertaining to a person or small business requesting funds.

I’m obviously a proponent of using data to help make money, whether that’s by increasing revenue, boosting profits, or minimizing risk. But I have to draw a line against the latest concept being currently discussed in the banking industry: capitalizing on the barrage of social media, such as Tweets and Facebook posts, to decide who does (and does not) deserve of a loan.

To me it’s a question of ethics. We need to set boundaries so that companies aren’t mining intimate information we deliberately or unknowingly reveal about ourselves. Is it fair, for example, to hold a college grad’s photo of celebratory drinking against her when she asks for a small-business loan years later? To me, the answer is an obvious no. Society should not let someone’s moment of innocent indiscretion affect her life. If we are to be held accountable for information that defines us, let it at least be something over which we have control, such as our credit score.

As a society we sometimes forget about ethics as we strive to find new ways to build wealth. We’re still living with the ramifications of that ethical lapse when banks fell over themselves to issue subprime loans to people who could never afford them and other banks sold unsafe mortgages to unsophisticated buyers. Without an ethical compass, the financial industry lost its way and dragged down the global economy.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting data has no role in a bank’s risk analysis. Collecting the appropriate data, processing it, and presenting it in a way that enables business people to glean insight will become even more vital to the banking industry. I am saying that the decision process needs to incorporate the right data, seasoned with a healthy dose of ethical consideration.

Girl with cash image //  jcjgphotography, Shutterstock

Sumo Logic, the “big data” startup that focuses on analytics, has pulled in $30 million for its third-round of funding.

Most large companies will generate terabytes of log data every day. This data can be used to troubleshoot operational issues, uncover security risks and ensure regulatory compliance.

Sumo Logic wants to replace company’s traditional log management systems, which typically leave 98% of data unanalyzed. Its founders say that Sumo Logic is unique as it’s cloud-based and can be set up in a matter of minutes.

The Silicon Valley-based startup, which competes most closely with Splunk, has scored some major-league enterprise customers that are willing to pay for its “premium” offering. The startup also offers a free service that is popular with startups and small businesses.

According to the company’s CEO, Vance Loiselle, Sumo Logic has signed on almost 40 paying customers since launching this February. It is used by the likes of GoDaddy, Netflix, Ooyala and Formspring to turn their log management data into actionable insights.

“Our log reduce engine can take thousands of pages of results and then shrink it down into logical patters based on our machine learning algorithms,” said Loiselle. “That’s a better way to get direction and insight than sifting through thousands of results.”

With the funding, the company will build out its sales, marketing and operations team.

Accel Partners, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm with a $100 million fund dedicated to big data startups, will lead the financing. Existing investors Sutter Hill Ventures and Greylock Ventures also participated in the round.

Sumo wrestling image // Aspen Photo, Shutterstock

---

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.

---

Platfora, the startup that made a splash at the recent Strata conference with a promise to “unleash the potential of Hadoop” has raised its second round of funding.

The San Mateo, Calif.-based company has been baking its technology for over a year. In a nutshell, it crunches raw data in Hadoop, the popular open source framework, and turns it into intelligence for business users.

Ben Werther, CEO, Platfora

At a recent dinner hosted by its investor, Andreessen Horowitz, Ben Werther, the company’s CEO told me he was astonished by the reaction when Platfora launched at Strata. When it comes to this “big data” trend that everyone is talking about, companies are navigating uncharted waters.

Data can no longer be stored in columns and rows in relational databases. To be truly useful, the most unwieldy data (whether it’s texts, emails, or records) will need to be processed and visualized, so it can inform business strategy. Plenty of companies claim to offer a solution, but are still in the nascent stages of development.

According to Werther, Hadoop is the answer, but only a small cadre of developers use it. “We want to make it possible for everyday business users to interact, analyze, and drive Hadoop,” he said in a recent interview.

Startups like Datameer and Karmasphere also claim to bring Hadoop straight to your desktop; but for Platfora, speed of deployment is a competitive edge. “People can visualize and ask questions about data within hours,” said Werther. “There is no six-month cycle time to make Hadoop amazing.”

Customers (10 signed up for the beta) can view the data on a web-based interface. Platfora claims to be the first big data startup to use HTML5 canvas technology, which makes it easy to use and enables collaborative data analysis on any device.

Battery Ventures led this round of funding, with participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Sutter Hill Ventures.  In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture arm is also an investor, but is not specified in this round.

“We believe that Platfora represents the future of business analytics. With the emergence of Hadoop, legacy ETL, data warehouses, and BI solutions no longer make sense,” said Mike Dauber, principal at Battery Ventures in a statement.  “The early demand for Platfora speaks to the company’s vision and understanding of how businesses need and want to access and analyze data.”

Roger Lee of Battery Ventures will join the company’s board.

Top image courtesy of Shutterstock

Workday, the human resources software maker that defied expectations with its initial public offering, unveiled its strategy today at its annual user conference, Workday Rising.

In short, the Pleasanton, Calif.-based company is committed to building a recruiting mobile app for hiring teams, as well as a big data analytics toolset. With these technological advancements, it is better positioned to compete with giants in the space, Oracle-owned Taleo and SAP’s SuccessFactors.

The idea for the big data tool originated when AIG, a large insurance company, requested an analytic capability to better understand the profitability of each employee. Workday combined data from its internal HR systems with finance and external claims information. It processed and stored the data using Datameer’s Hadoop-driven analytics tool.

As is the case with the majority of big data solutions, it will incorporate social data from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, along with the most relevant public information that pertains to salary and employment. All the data will be presented on a spreadsheet-like interface so analysts can make changes, and any user can play with the reports — all without the involvement of IT.

The analytics solution is still under development and is expected to ship to the first pool of customers in the spring of 2013.

“We are combining Workday data and any type of third-party data into our unified platform to create the analytics and dashboards in the intuitive Workday user experience our customers have come to expect,” said Aneel Bhusri, chairman, co-founder, and co-chief executive officer of Workday in a statement. “With Workday Big Data Analytics we are re-thinking how insights that lead to better decisions should be delivered to businesses.”

In addition, the company has announced its new recruiting platform, which is intended to be useful throughout the sourcing and signing process. Of course, the solution is described as “mobile first” and “collaborative” (more buzzwords). Specifically, customers can expect an application that can assist with headcount planning, social sourcing, background checks, job requisition, and pipeline management.

The company is also in the process of building a UI tool for Windows 8 mobile devices — although it’s still in the idea stages at this point. Read more about unexpectedly cool features for the Windows 8 phone here.

For Pentaho, the  startup that claims to be the first business intelligence (BI) provider to shift its focus to  ”big data”, the bet is paying off.

The Orlando, Fl. based startup has secured $23 million in third-round funding, bringing its total funds to $55 million. It will devote the resources to its expanding its sales and marketing efforts, and will continue to invest in its analytics toolset that competes with  players like Tableau and QlikView.

In January, the company announced it would move its open-source business intelligence capabilities to the Apache license to make them more compatible with Hadoop, a mainstay of the big data movement. Hadoop, an open source computing framework, is offered under the Apache license, as as are most of the NoSQL databases that can process vast volumes of businesses’ structured and unstructured data.

It’s a similar story across the big data space — companies are experiencing unprecedented growth and are raising massive funding rounds with ease. Pentaho has found its niche with consumer tech and e-commerce companies; it is currently used by the likes of BeachMint, Kiva and Travian Games.

“Pentaho has a proven big data strategy with over 300 percent increase in big data sales for the first nine months of 2012 over the same period in 2011,” said Quentin Gallivan, chairman and CEO at Pentaho in a statement.

The round was led by New Enterprise Investors with participation from existing investors Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and DAG Ventures.

NEW YORK: Platfora, the Andreessen Horowitz-backed “big data” startup, unveiled the product it has been baking for over a year at the Strata conference today.

The Silicon Valley-based company publicly launched its technology that crunches raw data in Hadoop, the open source framework, and turns it into intelligence for business users.

For years, data was contained in structured columns and rows, and stored in relational databases. Today, companies are dealing with large volumes of unwieldy data. Every big data startup worth its salt will tell you that once it’s processed, this unstructured data contains potentially valuable insights.

Ben Werther, Platfora’s CEO

In a phone interview, Ben Werther, Platfora’s CEO, made a similar case: “Businesses want to know if they can derive business intelligence from Hadoop [and] the answer is yes.” Werther told me that the startup’s first customers (there are 10 companies signed on to the beta) are struggling to manage petabytes of corporate data in the form of texts, emails, reports and so on.

He explained that Hadoop is a feasible solution but can only really be of use to a small cadre of developers. ”We want to make it possible for everyday business users to interact, analyse, and drive Hadoop,” he said.

Werther says it’s the speed of deployment that makes Platfora unique. “People can visualize and ask questions about data within hours,” he said. “There is no six month cycle time to make Hadoop amazing.” In addition, there is an analytics component; users can visualize the data on an HTML interface.

Werther claims that the closest competitor is the “status quo” — the companies that still rely on traditional data warehouses. However, there are a number of other startups that claim to bring Hadoop straight to your desktop, including Datameer and Karmasphere.

Platfora has over $12 million in first-round venture funding in the bank from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture wing, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sutter Hill Ventures.

“Big data” isn’t just an enterprise trend. It’s a technological innovation that is already making a difference in your life.

Police are mixing crime data and sociological information to anticipate incidences of crime. A small cadre of scientists in Silicon Valley is harnessing genetics data to detect early signs of disease. For business owners and harried IT executives, it’s easy feel overwhelmed with the flood of so-called big data options on the market. That is, if you buy into the trend at all.

We believe it’s time to cut through the hype and show you some cool companies that use big data to further research in the fields of healthcare, law, government, and education. To assemble our inaugural list of 10 standout companies, we spoke with investors, analysts, and experts.

We narrowed it down to some ground-breaking favorites who helped define the field. You’ll notice that the companies cover a lot of ground — we anointed a leader in every category, such as data science, business intelligence, data visualization and analytics. We also threw a few impressive newcomers into the mix as well.

Meet our inaugural list of big data companies that are exploiting data in ways that you wouldn’t expect.

Data as a Service/Metamarkets

Michael Driscoll, Metamarkets’ CEO.

It’s been one heck of a year for Metamarkets, a startup that analyses things like tweets, payments, and check-ins for online publishers and web companies to better answer questions like: “Why are customers canceling their memberships?” or “How are users moving through the site?”In the spring, investors clamored to pour money into the San Francisco-based company, which currently has about $23 million in the bank. Aside from being freshly minted with venture funding, here’s why Metamarkets makes our shortlist.

It took guts to down an offer from Twitter: Michael Driscoll, who was Metamarkets’ chief technology officer at the time, wouldn’t back down from his vision to build a bigger company.

It has some cool customers: The technology sees use from digital media companies like the Financial Times and AOL, who need to get better insights on the value of their ad inventory.

“At the customer level, we’ve learned to paint our product in more emotional and less technological terms. Ultimately, big data and its technologies are not the story, it’s about helping people do their job better,” says Driscoll, who is now Metamarkets’ chief executive.

It has one straight-talkin’ CEO: Driscoll told me that we need to reexamine all the hoopla around Hadoop, the open-source computing software that is leveraged by companies like Twitter to store terrabytes of tweets per day: “It’s a service, not a solution,” he said. Driscoll told me he looks up to Aaron Levie, the 20-something CEO of cloud storage startup Box. He told me we need more founders who are willing to bring a natural-born salesman’s brand of personality and smarts to enterprise.

The technology is designed to be easy to use: Metamarkets provides a packaged Software-as-a-Service application so customers can get up and running in a few days. It scales as customer data volumes grow.

Bonus: Don’t miss Driscoll’s appearance at VentureBeat’s upcoming CloudBeat conference.

Data Visualization/Tableau

Christian Chabot, CEO of Tableau

Tableau is a data visualization startup that appears on nearly every list of hot big data startups, but it hasn’t raised a funding round in four years. It is one of the small cadre of companies that are responsible for putting data visualization on the map. Here’s why Tableau made our shortlist.

It doesn’t need your VC cash: The startup’s last funding round in 2008 was for $10 million. It hasn’t taken a dime since then, and it’s on the road to profitability.

It’s changing the way we consume digital media: Tableau is a favorite for media folk experimenting with new ways to use data in their stories. Tableau offers a tool that lets anyone create gorgeous charts and maps for free, no programming expertise required. Reporters at the Wall Street Journal and the Huffington Post use it.

It’s putting data in the hands of people who need it: Big data can be useful for everybody in many ways — it’s not just a money-making tool for businesses. By putting this tool into the hands of a nonprofit like government watchdog California Common Sense (a current customer), Tableau’s software is analyzing volumes of political data to expose fraud and inconsistencies so voters can make informed, data-driven decisions before they vote.

Eat your heart out, 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, told VentureBeat.

Pages: 1 2 3 4

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Attivio, a Boston-based “big data” startup has pulled in $34 million to help customers make sense of their data — whether it’s sitting pretty in a database or is strewn haphazardly around the enterprise.

This first round of funding is led by Oak Investment Partners, a private equity firm with $8.4 billion in capital under management.

“Attivio is the only company answering both the ‘what’ and ‘why’ big data and analytics questions that swirl unanswered in board rooms, war rooms, data centers, support centers and cubicles around the world,” said Ifty Ahmed, general partner at Oak Investment Partners, in a statement. Ahmed will join the company’s board.

Companies are aware that all their potentially valuable semi-structured and unstructured data — texts, emails, Word documents, reports — is scattered. Attivio wants to integrate all that data that is siloed so companies can run queries on it.

As is often the case with enterprise startups, its early customers are primarily government agencies and financial services firms.

Ali Riaz, CEO of Attivio

According to Ali Riaz, the company’s chief executive, (pictured left) “We will utilize the funding to expand our sales and marketing efforts and, in particular, more deeply penetrate core vertical segments.”

With its boost of funding, the company will also be hiring in all areas of its operations from engineering to marketing and sales. It currently has offices in Massachusetts, Israel, Germany, and the UK.

The company was founded in 2007 by Riaz, the former president of FAST Search & Transfer, an enterprise search company that was acquired by Microsoft for $1.2 billion in 2008. Competitors include FAST, as well as search vendors Endeca, Autonomy and Lucid Imagination, that provide the tools for IT teams to search and analyze valuable “dark data” that is hidden within the enterprise.

Existing investors, Per-Olof Söderberg and Tenth Avenue Holdings, also participated in the round.

For businesses, building ‘big data’ capabilities is far easier said than done. Precog wants to change that by making it easier for companies to ask questions about their data. The startup has launched its product to the public today.

With all the buzz around ‘big data’, it’s easy to forget that there are a number of stumbling blocks: data scientists are expensive and tough to hire, IT may not have the budget to deploy a full on-premise architecture, and developers will need to pick up new technical skill-sets.

Indeed, companies have been told time and time again that their data is filled with valuable insights, but they can’t afford to get to them.

Precog CEO, John De Goes

Precog is already making ‘big data’ simpler and cheaper for application developers. It has earned the comparison to Twilio, a developer-favorite known for its dead simple APIs.

As the company’s CEO, John De Goes (pictured, left), told me, “Precog allows for companies to ask very deep statistical questions about their data easily, without having to rely on cumbersome big data infrastructures or use complex tools like R, MatLab.”

For developers, Precog offers an API to package analysis into applications and load data from social networking sites (Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook), enterprise applications like Salesforce and more, as well as transactional data stored in existing databases, including SQL, Hadoop, and MongoDB.

Similarly to the vast pool of ‘big data’ startups it competes with like Splunk, Sqrrl, and Continuuity, Precog’s platform is cloud-based. It’s not just data warehousing and analysis; today, Precog has also launched a front end analysis tool called LabCoat, and ReportGrid for app layer reporting.

Since launching its private beta in May, De Goes told me the biggest challenge has been to find technical talent. “Our vision of redefining how data is captured, stored, and analyzed is a tremendous engineering challenge,” he said.

However, the company is off to a good start, with eight customers already using the product. One early adopter, SnapEngage (an online sales and support provider) is using Precog to capture thousands of interactions per second and then provide its customers with insight into the effects of the support process on conversion and retention.

This is one of the most exciting companies to have emerged from Boulder, Colo., a region with a budding tech community. Founder, De Goes, graduated from TechStars in 2011, and has subsequently raised funding for previous enterprise startups — all share a mission to make data and data visualization more accessible.

In May, the company picked up its first $2 million in venture financing led by RTP Ventures, and no doubt it will be raising its second round in the coming months.

---

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.

---

Data scientists are like the supermodels or football players of the enterprise world: highly in-demand and earning sky-high salaries in their prime but insecure about their future prospects.

Business intelligence company SiSense found that 59 percent of data scientists move on after less than six years in the industry. About half of them reported they were seriously concerned about their job security, despite an escalating salary.

The survey found that the annual earnings of a data professional can range from an average of $55,000 for a data analyst to an average of $132,000 for a vice president of analytics. Almost 80 percent reported that they expected a salary increase in 2013.

Data scientists have been touted as the elite group that are poised to capitalize on the hype surrounding Big Data. A recent report by consulting firm McKinsey & Co found that there is a major, global shortage of data scientists. Those with the skills to take a large data-set, model it, and glean insights, are proving impossibly difficult to recruit.

Still, the glamour and mystique that surrounds the data scientist is relatively recent, and it’s easy to understand their misgivings about the future. As Irfan Khan, Sybase’s CTO explains in ITWorld, the newly-minted data scientist’s role will be jeopardy in if companies don’t hire the right management team.

The study also found that data scientists tend to work in groups of five or more. This is a practice that is routinely encouraged by Silicon Valley’s tech companies: LinkedIn is known for its team, formerly headed by D.J. Patil (pictured above), that developed features like “People You May Know” and “Jobs You May be Interested in.” Facebook’s pack of 12 researchers is led by “in-house sociologist” Cameron Marlow.

The survey results are based on responses from over 400 data scientists and analysts from around the world, collected online in July 2012.

Top image via Joi

At VentureBeat, we come across a lot of funding news every day. In order to bring you the most information possible, we’re rounding up the quick-and-dirty details about the funding deals of the day and serving them up here in our “Funding daily” column.

Freshdesk raises $5M

Online customer support software provider Freshdesk grabbed a $5 million in funding, the company reported Thursday. Freshdesk uses social media to connect with customers that need assistance. The new funding, led by Tiger Global with Accel Partners participating, will be used to build the engineering team and add new product features.

Ahalife nabs funding for unique, luxury online shopping

Online shop for curated one-of-a-kind, luxury wares Ahalife has raised $10.1 million in a second round of funding. The site sells luxury products, such as clothing, jewelry, and electronics, picked by experts and celebrities. Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten led the round, with participation from existing investors DCM and FirstMark Capital. The company has raised a total of $19.1 million.

MetaMarkets gets big money for big data

Big data analytics company MetaMarkets has raised $15 million in a new funding round, the company announced today. The company offers big data analytics for social and e-commerce companies that need to crunch a lot of numbers. Its data science-as-a-service helps analytics teams notice trends and forecast how future events will affect their data. Khosla Ventures led the round, and existing investors IA Ventures and True Ventures also participated.

Hulu co-owner Providence Equity sells its stake for $200M

Providence Equity Partners has sold its 10 percent stake in Hulu for $200 million. The investment firm is the only one of Hulu’s four owners that isn’t a media company. Providence’s initial investment in Hulu was $100 million back in 2007, meaning the firm received a nice ROI. Some have estimated that Hulu’s total worth is in the range of $2 to $4 billion.

SendHub raises $2M for group text messaging

SendHub snagged a $2 million investment to deliver SMS to businesses and organizations. The Y Combinator graduate developed a service that schools, coaches, community leaders, and others can use to communicate with a large group. Howard Lindzon’s Social Leverage fund, 500 Startups, Bronze Investments, Menlo Ventures, and angels including Eric Ries, Paul Buchheit, and Jawed Karim all participated in the round.

TAPTAP Networks secures $4.5 million

Spanish mobile ad network TAPTAP Network has raised $4.5 million in funding. The company puts together mobile video ads for companies and manages ad campaigns. Nauta Capital led the round.