Big Data / Features

The leading minds in sports convened in Boston last week at the annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference to share ideas about how big data will be a game-changer for fans, players, coaches, officials and front-office personnel.

Informatica is aiming to ease the pain of data integration with a new platform designed to allow businesses to rapidly prototype and validate before sending projects to development.

MapR's latest Hadoop distribution includes support for Hadoop 2.2 with YARN, but is also backward compatible with the MapReduce 1.x scheduler, promising organizations a risk-free upgrade path to the latest Hadoop architecture.

Marketing organizations are continuing to increase their budgets for big data marketing initiatives, but most are focusing on technology, not talent. That could be a costly mistake.

Red Hat's core business isn't software. It's actually customer service, and in order to take it to the next level the company turned to a domestic outsourcing provider to solve customer problems before they happen using predictive big data analytics.

Almost all C-suite executives at large enterprises believe data and analytics are important to their business, but most are struggling to become data-driven businesses -- and more than half say they don't even know what data to collect.

Big data and analytics permeate virtually every move Ford makes, from forecasting the worldwide price of commodities to figuring out what exactly consumers want, what it will build, where it should source parts and how to power its lineup of vehicles.

It's become a common refrain that marketers need to become more data-driven. This infographic breaks down the pressures that chief marketing officers are under and the upside to embracing big data.

The buzz is all about Big Data and how best to use it to generate actionable intelligence. To do this, companies will need to hire loads of highly trained, highly paid data scientists -- or will they?

Companies are taking matters into their own hands with internal controls, open privacy policies, ethical codes and greater candor over how they're collecting and parsing personal data. But many wonder whether it's enough to allay consumers' fears as techniques for manipulating data multiply.

A projected shortage of qualified data scientists could leave U.S. businesses unable to tap the value of big data. To help meet that demand, the University of California at Berkeley has developed a master's degree program to train new data scientists.

Big data is rapidly transforming the way we think, work and play. It is helping enterprises use their data to improve their processes, recognize anomalies and better connect with customers. The power of data is changing everything, often without our realizing it is happening. Case in point: football (and fantasy football in particular).

By layering data from 311 and 911 calls over Census data, unemployment data and other poverty indicators, Buffalo uses data analytics to identify its most challenged neighborhoods and more effectively deploy resources for everything from neighborhood beautification to combatting crime and reducing fire hazards.

There's no question that data analytics are playing an increasingly important role for marketing departments, but many marketers aren't getting what they need from the CIO. If IT can't deliver, CIOs should expect CMOs to go around them.

VoloMetrix's enterprise analytics technology uses social engineering to let CIOs quickly identify bottlenecks and pain points in their organization. Using that data, they can better allocate time, energy and resources. The only catch is they have to mine employees email to get that data.

In partnership with social media networks and the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, a nonprofit research project is seeking to show that predictive analytics can identify U.S. veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who are suicidal and need help.

Feeling the pressure to become more data-driven, marketers agree that big data analytics will be an integral part of their organizations going forward. But a lack of data analytics skills and antiquated business processes are hampering their efforts.

The votes are in for CIO.com's 10 hottest big data startups to watch. Here are the final rankings based on your voting as well as a variety of other criteria such as funding and company leadership.

Three top-tier businesses are reaping big rewards from big-data analytics. They say the keys to success include a deeply-rooted culture of analytics and a relentless focus on cost efficiency and process improvement.

Running a news website that is solely dependent on advertising for revenue means that ninemsn owner Mi9 has to mine customer data to engage in behavioural targeting.