
On Forbes
I started writing for Forbes this week, and should be posting there reasonably regularly. I’ll be writing about similar topics to those I cover here, including cloud computing, big data, and points in between. You can follow along here, and subscribe to the RSS feed here.

A semantic journey
Earlier this week, Gigaom announced their latest event; Structure Intelligence. “In the past year we’ve seen massive growth in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and deep learning. Our own Derrick Harris has been covering this area for years and we have decided it’s time to give this rapidly growing area a platform (and conference) of its own.”...

How to Lie with Data
Back in the early Nineties, I was working on a Ph.D applying a tool called a Geographic Information System (GIS) to the challenge of modelling archaeological deposits under cities. For those of us worrying about these things, Mark Monmonier‘s then-newly published first edition of How to Lie with Maps was required reading. It wasn’t so much a handbook...

Infochimps CEO Jim Kaskade talks about acquisition and the big data opportunity
I first came across Infochimps as they set about building one of the early Data Market offerings. I recorded a couple of podcasts with CTO and co-founder Flip Kromer over the years, in 2009 and 2012, tracking some of the ways in which the company and the market were evolving. Since then the company has...

Joining the dots with travel data
The travel industry has much to gain — and much to offer us, its customers — through smarter use of the data it already collects. This shouldn’t, as I’ve argued before, be a substitute for employing, training and empowering good people. But as an adjunct to what they can do, it has the potential to deliver experiences that...

Microsoft Corporate Vice President Quentin Clark discusses data, data platforms, and more
The Data Platform Group at Microsoft does a lot, from SQL Server and their Hadoopey HDInsight offering through to Business Intelligence and analytics capabilities which sit in or on top of the humble Excel spreadsheet. I’ve touched upon pieces of this whole before, in a 2009 podcast on Azure with Amitabh Srivastava (then Corporate VP...

Teradata Labs President Scott Gnau discusses the evolving data analytics market
With all the noise around newer technologies such as Hadoop, it would be easy to assume that the data analytics space is new — and totally dominated by the NewSQL/ NoSQL tools pouring out of the world’s startups. It would be easy. But it would also be wrong. Data analytics, business intelligence, and related ideas are not new....

Adaptive Computing CEO Robert Clyde talks about Big Data, and lessons from the world of High Performance Computing
It’s sometimes easy to assume that the large clusters of commodity servers commonly associated with open source big data and NoSQL approaches like Hadoop have made supercomputers and eye-wateringly expensive high performance computing (HPC) installations a thing of the past. But Adaptive Computing CEO Robert Clyde argues that the world of HPC has evolved, and...

Infer CEO Vik Singh talks about predictive analytics and lead scoring
As data volumes increase and marketing channels proliferate, corporate sales teams struggle to efficiently identify the real prospects worth an investment of their time. At Infer, a team experienced in applying predictive analytics to the web-scale problems faced by companies like Google and Yahoo! thinks they have a solution. By combining data from internal customer...

MapR CEO John Schroeder discusses the market for Hadoop
Big Data is undeniably hot right now, and to many Hadoop is inextricably linked to the broader Big Data conversation. And yet, Hadoop has a reputation for being complex, and unpolished, and difficult, and ‘technical,’ and a host of other less-than-glowing attributes which might cause potential users to pause and take stock. Some of that reputation...

KPMG Capital CEO Mark Toon discusses corporate perspectives on big data
That global accountancy giant KPMG should be interested in data is not, perhaps, surprising. That KPMG would use its own money to “invest in, partner with and acquire organisations that specialise in data and analytics tools and assets” was less immediately obvious to me. But that, according to KPMG global lead for data and analytics Mark...

orchestrate.io CEO Antony Falco dissects the database industry
Portland-based Orchestrate (orchestrate.io) rolls out its commercial NoSQL offering today, claiming to significantly decrease the time, cost and complexity of putting cloud-based data to work. I took the chance to speak with co-founder and CEO (and former Basho co-founder) Antony Falco, to learn more about the company and the problems it’s seeking to address. Our...