Today Microsoft Research announced the availability of a free technology preview of Project Daytona MapReduce Runtime for Windows Azure. Using a set of tools for working with big data based on Google's MapReduce paper, it provides an alternative to Apache Hadoop. Daytona was created by the eXtreme Computing Group at Microsoft Research. It's designed to help scientists take advantage of Azure for working wit ...

Last fall, Twitter announced a partnership with Gnip, making the latter company the only commercial provider of the Twitter activity stream. And although the "firehose" metaphor has been beaten to death, says Gnip CEO Jud Valeski, it still holds true. Valeski spoke today at Gluecon about the challenges of handling the firehose - what it means to process high volume, real-time data streams and to be able to ...

Millions of tweets run through Twitter. It's the poster child for big data on the Web. To get data out of Twitter and use it to track sentiment requires tools with considerable processing and computational capabilities. BigSheets is a tool created by IBM that takes terabytes or even petabytes of Web data and turns it into information that provides business intelligence. The tool can be used for structured o ...

We wonder if Ray Ozzie ever thought that he would someday looking from Microsoft's executive suite to see IBM release his Lotus Notes creation into the cloud. That's what IBM did today. Lotus Notes is now as much a cloud platform as it has ever been with a set of new features that have traditionally only been available on-premise. Before we dive into the details of the news, let's look at Lotus Notes from a ...

EMC Corporation and Cloudera have announced the formation of an alliance so that Hadoop-based services that Cloudera offers will be integrated with EMC's Greenplum technology. This move will help businesses better manage and analyze the challenge of ever-growing big data - including log files, sensor data, emails, images, receipts, research data and so on. The integration between Cloudera's Distribution for ...

We are fascinated here at ReadWriteWeb about Hadoop. It can be used in so many ways. It gives you that sense of excitement that shows how big data can open up all kinds of possibilities. So we got a tad excited tonight when we ran across a post by Mike Pearce about "10 Hadoopable Problems" or in other words, 10 things you can do with Hadoop. But excitement turned to disappointment when it reminded us of how ...

The flood of news from Google I/O continues as the company has announced a pair of services available to developers that provide public access to some of Google's internal data-analysis tools. BigQuery, a service for analyzing massively large sets of data, and Prediction API, an interface for utilizing Google's prediction algorithms, are now available to developers in the Google Code Labs. Follow this posti ...