Big Data

Technology revolutions come in measured, sometimes foot-dragging steps. The lab science and marketing enthusiasm tend to underestimate the bottlenecks to progress that must be overcome with hard work and practical engineering. The field known as “big data” offers a contemporary case study. The catchphrase stands for the modern abundance of digital data from many sources Continue Reading →

Wearable technology is routinely being batted around these days as the cure-all for everyday health tracking gaps, but Intel’s latest venture is taking that potential to a whole new level. The Michael J. Fox Foundation has tapped the tech giant for a collaboration with the goal of improving the monitoring and treatment of Parkinson’s disease. Continue Reading →

Is the answer to our feeble human minds needing to grapple with increasing quantities of big data to stand in a purpose built room immersed in complex data visualisations while wearing an array of sensors that track our physiological reactions? A group of European Commission-backed scientists believe so. They’re attempting to quantify — and, they Continue Reading →

We’ve been hearing a great deal about the power of Big Data over the last couple of years. The hype says that as we gather more data, we will be able to get better answers to business problems, but the data levels we have seen so far could pale in comparison to what happens when Continue Reading →

Google made a big contribution to the big data world 10 years ago, when it released a paper on MapReduce, a programming model for doing big computing jobs on hefty data sets. But it turns out that, all this time, Google has been working on something far more advanced. At Google’s annual I/O shindig on Continue Reading →

The curled metal fixtures set to go up on a handful of Michigan Avenue light poles later this summer may look like delicate pieces of sculpture, but researchers say they’ll provide a big step forward in the way Chicago understands itself by observing the city’s people and surroundings. The smooth, perforated sheaths of metal are Continue Reading →

Dropbox has been acquiring companies to help it expand the services that it can offer to consumers and enterprises beyond cloud storage. But the company — which has raised $1.1 billion and is among the larger tech startups tipped for an IPO – is also making strategic acquisitions to help keep its own house in Continue Reading →

MasterCard, the world’s second-largest debit and credit card company, sees business booming from selling data to retailers, banks and governments on spending patterns found in the payments it processes, a top executive told Reuters. MasterCard, which handles payments for 2 billion cardholders and tens of millions of merchants, uses that information to generate real-time data Continue Reading →

Every day companies collect data about their customers and industries, simply as an artifact of the act conducting business. As I listened to a panel on Big Data yesterday at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium in Cambridge, Mass., I had an epiphany: every company is a Big Data company, it’s just that some get it Continue Reading →

Intel on Monday and Tuesday will have a big presence at the annual NRF (National Retail Federation) show at the Javits Center, where it will showcase several highly-visual, interactive technologies, all of which bring to life the Internet of Things and Big Data as major trends driving the retail industry’s continuing transformation. These ideas — Continue Reading →