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Friday

May 18 : Sports

Player tracking transforming NBA analytics (espn.com)

You ever wonder what NBA assistant coaches are scribbling on their clipboards during games? They’re taking down stats. But not the stats you’ll read in any box score. They’re logging numbers like touches in the paint, passes per possession, three-pointers off kick-out passes, secondary assists, fouls drawn – information central to a game’s outcome but not found anywhere near a traditional box score. read more

Thursday

May 17 : Banks


Banks know a lot abouth their customers. That information may be valuable in more ways than one. A big bank hires a star analyst from another firm, promising to pay a substantial bonus if the new hire increases revenue or cuts costs. In banking this happens all the time, but this deal differs from the rest in one small detail: the new hire, Watson, is an IBM computer. Watson became something of a celebrity after beating the champion human contestants on “Jeopardy”, an American quiz show. Its skill is to be able to process millions of documents quickly by reading and “understanding” ordinary written language. read more

Wednesday

May 16 : General Topic


As with gold or oil, data has no intrinsic value, writes Webtrends CEO Alex Yoder. Big science, which bridges the gap between knowledge and insight, is where the real value is. As the likes of Google, Facebook, Adobe Systems, and IBM embrace big data with gusto, startups are also popping up with the promise to help companies discover what one of the most valuable assets in the world can accomplish for them. read more

Tuesday

May 15 : General Topic

What effect will the new analytics have on your organizational change strategy? Technology Forecast: Reshaping the workforce with the new analytics explores the impact of the new analytics and a culture of inquiry enterprises can foster with the help of emerging data analysis tools and services. read more

Monday

May 14 : Research

Big Data in Healthcare Research (californiahealthline.org)

Collecting and manipulating enormous amounts of data soon will begin to play a vital role in research and delivery of health care, according to California leaders of the "big data" movement. "You're starting to see a crescendo of big data efforts and that's sharply increasing awareness of what that can mean in health care," said David Haussler, director of the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering at UC-Santa Cruz. read more

Tuesday

Jan 31 : Startup

5 low-profile Big Data Startups (gigaom.com)

Big data is hot, but infrastructure-level platforms such as Hadoop, which focus on storage and processing, still need help to take them into the mainstream. They need a killer app or two that will let companies analyze, visualize and act on all that data without hiring a team of Stanford Ph.Ds, or that will let developers write big-data apps without having to reinvent the wheel. read more

Monday

Jan 30 : Transit

Bus data suddenly top secret (emcottawawest.ca)

The writing has been on the wall for months, but the powers that be at OC Transpo made it official last week: the transit authority thinks it's a bad idea to give citizens direct access to information about where their buses are. The new attitude flies in the face of the city's relatively new and progressive policy on "open data" - streams of information about city services and infrastructure that can be used to power mobile and computer applications ("apps") to give people easy ways to make that data useful for taxpayers. read more

Friday

Jan 27 : Travel

Big Data meets Online Travel (forbes.com)

Big Data and a high-speed analytics engine helped a travel agency deliver answers to would-be holiday makers fast, before they impatiently moved to another site. When a large German travel company asked the Cologne-based consultancy empulse for help with its online travel site, the group agreed. The consultants had, after all, worked with the postal service on electronic tracking and with electric utilities on using smart meters. So how hard could travel be? read more

Thursday

Jan 26 : Home Living

What big data and smart thermostats can reveal about us (gigaom.com)

Energy software startup EnergyHub is powering around 100,000 connected thermostats in the U.S. with its management software called Mercury. While that might not sound like a whole lot, those 100,000 thermostats are producing around 5 billion data points each month, and that’s starting to reveal some interesting trends about how Americans consume energy.  read more

Wednesday

Jan 25 : Healthcare

Big Data delivers deep views of patients for better care (forbes.com)

Big Data has arrived st Seton Health Care Family, fortunately accompanied by an analytics tool that will help deal with the complexity of more than two million patient contacts a year, usually attended by dozens of existing patient record pages and generating more with each visit — some electronic, many notes in phyiscian’s infamous handwriting, some transcribed from dictation and others jotted down on X-rays. read more

Tuesday

Jan 24 : General Topic

10 Ways Big Data is creating the science fiction future (io9.com)

Sometimes, it already seems like the websites you visit know more about you than you know about yourself — but this is just the beginning. Every day you're helping to generate masses more data, which computers are getting better and better at crunching. How long will it be before the predictive power of these systems becomes so powerful, they're almost magical? read more

Monday

Jan 23 : Retail

Applying Big Data to 2011 Holiday Shopping (smartdatacollective.com)

By most measures, 2011 holiday sales saw solid gains. Overall retail sales rose 4.1%, according to the National Retail Federation. And while 2011 holiday sales didn’t achieve the 5.2% gains made during the 2010 holiday season, they still outpaced the 2.6% growth over the past decade. read more