Your daily digest of “All Things Big Data” gathered, collected and researched by your very own 10Fold Big Data Practice team.
Big Data
Big Data is transforming the way we view medicine by means of clinical trials and studies. Clinical trials work by testing how well a treatment works and identifying any side effects. However, these trials require participants who meet rigorous scientific standards. This is where big data can help. By mining the world of practice-based clinical data — actual patient records — for information on who has what condition and what treatments are working, doctors could learn a lot about the way they care for individuals. Many different companies are searching for a way to enable healthcare providers to learn from practice-based evidence to individually tailor care. Electronic Health Records have been around for a while but with data stored across a number of different systems and formats, they are not designed with analysis in mind. A future which combines both evidence based and practice based medicine is likely to produce the best outcome for patients.
Women in tech have always been outnumbered by men, but this disproportion could be encouraging more females to enter the tech workforce. According to CNET, less than 17% of the tech industry is made up of women. Recently, Big Data and statistic fields have been attracting a surprising amount of females. It’s been noted that women are achieving more than 40% of statistic degrees, and new career paths in data science now hold multiple opportunities for women. The rise of women in the world of data could also be due to the belief that women typically excel in communication and problem solving, two main areas that are required for data-oriented roles.
How Big Data is transforming medicine – Forbes
Are Big Data Career Paths Attracting More Women to Tech? – Huffington Post
Hadoop
Hadoop has grown to two significant phases of maturity, defined by how companies first used it and what tools emerged to create a vibrant ecosystem in the process. When it became clear that Hadoop has the ability to provide real business value, many departments started building workloads for business intelligence and reporting to extract meaningful insights. Hadoop is currently in its third phase within enterprise environments. We’re starting to see multi-department uses within organizations. It also comes with a whole new set of requirements that Hadoop has not considered prior. Applications don’t exist yet that will run on Hadoop but it is predicted that will be in the future.
The Phases of Hadoop Maturity: Where Exactly Is it Going? – Data Informed
Docker/ Containerization
Containers are all the rage among developers, who use the open source software to build, test and run applications. The technology offered by companies such as Docker are not on the radar of most Fortune 500 CIOs, suggesting that it has a ways to go before it gains traction in large enterprises. Most CIOs are unfamiliar with abstract technology and express skepticism. Some of the comments from a live audience poll conducted at a recent Wall Street Journal event indicate that some CIOs believe that the VMs running their private or hybrid clouds are sufficient.
IoT
Among smart watches, smart appliances, smart homes, and smart buildings come smart cities. The market for smart cities is expected to grow from $52 billion last year to $148 billion by 2020. More than 200 smart city projects are underway around the world, fueling the demand for products and services from IoT vendors, service providers, and platform companies and consultants. North America is expected to dominate the IoT in smart cities over the next several years.
IBM just launched a tool called Quark for IoT development. Quark is based on IBM Streams, a product for processing large amounts of live data. Quark is just beginning, although IBM is hoping that by making it open source the community will catch on and help with its development. IBM has an existing suite of tools and services useful for the IoT – such as Watson – but it’s clear the company plans to continue its leadership and won’t slow down progress as competitors like Cisco bolster their own enterprise-level IoT solutions.
IoT Smart Cities Market Heading to $148 Billion – Media Post
IBM launches Quark tool for IoT development – Developer Tech
eCommerce
In the last decade, the amount of people shopping online has exploded. The US alone was responsible for 31.7% of global e-commerce sales in 2015. Forbes looked at the their predictions for the trending eCommerce products for 2016 and beyond and decided major tips and tools for launching eCommerce businesses. These include: consumer behavior research, product research, and product ideation.
Several articles covered Indian eCommerce company, Snapdeal’s $200 million in new funding, led by Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, the Canadian investment vehicle with over $150 billion in assets. The new investment puts Snapdeal’s valuation in the $6.5-$7 billion range, making it the second most valuable startup in India, after Flipkart. Snapdeal says that the capital raised will be used to further build out its technology platform, logistics, payments, and back-end infrastructure.
Business to Community recommended 9 ways to get the ABCs of eCommerce right. They are 1) analytics, 2) behavior analysis, 3) customer service, 4) discounts and offers, 5) eCommerce platform, 6) feedback and testimonials, 7) gateway (payments), 8) hacking and security, and 9) inventory management.
Tips and Tools for Launching Your eCommerce Business – Forbes
India’s Snapdeal raises $200 million to challenge Amazon and Flipkart – VentureBeat
Snapdeal raises $200M more to fuel up for India’s ongoing e-Commerce battle – TechCrunch
9 Tools to Get the ABCs of eCommerce Right – Business2Community
Openstack
Rackspace has announced a new OpenStack-as-a-Service option in partnership with Red Hat, whose enterprise Linux distribution powers the new cloud platform. The platform is a hosted implementation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, Red Hat’s main product for building open source private and hybrid clouds using OpenStack. While Red Hat’s OpenStack distribution has been available for more than two years, the Rackspace hosted offering provides another way for enterprises to deploy OpenStack as a service rather than a platform they maintain themselves. Rackspace says this is important as a way to speed OpenStack adoption.
Rackspace adds hosted Red Hat OpenStack to Cloud Services – The Var Guy