Strata Newsletter: January 25, 2012

“didn’t shower today, avoiding all things SOPA sounding…#StopSOPA…”
—Tweet reprinted in the Winnipeg Free Press

Top-of-the-List Thinking from Edd and Alistair

“Today, advantage and innovation depend on filtering large amounts of information to create insight from data so plentiful and diverse it often looks like noise,” Edd says, framing a big announcement. “Offering the ability to cheaply analyze such big data, Apache Hadoop technology has already played a pivotal role in bringing big data analysis to industry, and it continues as a key foundation for the future IT landscape.”

O’Reilly Media and Cloudera announce that Hadoop World and the Strata Conference have merged. O’Reilly and Cloudera will co-present for the first time at Strata Conference in New York City, Oct. 23-25, 2012, combining two of the premier data science events into one program. The call for proposals for Strata Conference New York opens Feb. 28, 2012. We’ll be certain to keep you up on the details here. It’s fair to say we’re excited. . . .

Cheers,
Edd Dumbill & Alistair Croll
Chairs, Strata

Strata California 2012

Making Data Work

February 28 – March 1, 2012 | Santa Clara, CA

Tracks include: Data Science, Business & Industry, Visualization & Interface, Hadoop & Big Data, Policy & Privacy, and Domain Data.

Quick Bytes

Short Items of Massive Interest

Survey Says

Some 100 kind souls agreed to take a survey for us after our Dec. 7 Strata Online Conference. We asked them about various questions and probed their relationship with big data. The big take–away is that this couldn’t be a better moment to be a big data vendor. This is the time to be fighting for mindshare.

Solutions, Solutions

Microsoft has placed Apache Hadoop at the core of their big data
strategy. In this article, Edd Dumbill takes a look at what’s inside Microsoft’s Big Data Solution and explains Microsoft’s commitment to the open source big data platform.

Data Privacy Day
You probably already knew that Jan. 28 is Data Privacy Day, but there’s a good chance that your Mum does not. Help her and others stay safe.

Stunning Stamen
Stamen Design’s year in review shows how elegant and gorgeous data visualizations can be. Take the quick moment to rest your eyes.

Elephants in the Room!
Because the big data ecosystem is quite naturally evolving, we’re always looking for ways to better understand it and to pass that understanding along. Much of what we post about data on O’Reilly Radar we intend to pull together into a short book that will help us and others map the space. Edd just posted a new piece, Big Data Market Survey, that catalogues the Hadoop sphere, the players in it, and where each fits in. It’s worth a bookmark.

Common Good

Good news for innovation and research! Common Crawl is a free crawl of the web, and it’s now being hosted gratis along with the rest of Amazon’s public data sets. It also reinforces an important aspect of tomorrow’s data centers: as well as computing power, redundancy and the usual features, customers are going to look for proximity to key data sets. Access to the Twitter firehose or web crawl will be a key feature for cloud providers and data centers.

Be Here Now
Have you heard of SenseiDB? SenseiDB is an open-source, distributed, real time, semi-structured database with real time being the real draw.

Presidential Analysis
Having trouble convincing colleagues, higher–ups, and your spouse that “data scientist” is a real job description? Why don’t you introduce them to Rayid Ghani, President Obama’s personal Data Scientist.

The Final Bit

Biz Viz

Want to keep an eye on the progress of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) now that the great Jan. 18 blackout protest is over? Drew Conway has created a handy chart that shows the cumulative daily reference to SOPA and PIPA by democrats and republicans in the U.S. Congress. Doesn’t look like they thought about it much in December.

Looking for more? Visit oreilly.com/data.

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