In the News

Chicago CIO Pursues Predictive Analytics Strategy

Alongside big-city problems like lowering the murder rate, cutting the number of stolen garbage carts may seem like small stakes. But lost garbage carts actually cost Chicago a lot of money and time -- it takes scarce resources to field the complaints, acquire new carts and pay staff to deliver them. What if data analysis could help the city minimize the number of lost carts?

Evaluating garbage cart losses with mapping software and comparing that information to streetlight failures, city staff confirmed what they had suspected: In certain neighborhoods, if the alley lights go down, garbage cart thefts spike. That intelligence gives a new sense of urgency to getting lights repaired.

"Government has been very good at collecting data, but not as good at using the data," says Brett Goldstein, the city of Chicago's CIO. So Chicago is in the process of building a predictive analytics platform that will do more analysis and much more sophisticated analysis. That work is being funded in part through a $1 million grant the city received in March as a runner-up in Bloomberg Philanthropies' Mayors Challenge, a competition to fund innovative ideas in city government.

The city still has far to go in completing the predictive platform. Goldstein has spent the past two years laying a foundation for this analytics work, including hiring experts from the private sector and academia with experience in big data and open source. His team has also created a single database on the MongoDB open source platform, into which data is fed from dozens of legacy IT systems, providing better visibility into municipal operations across departments.

5 Big Wishes For Big Data Deployments

Big Data's Missing Ingredients

If you've even experimented with building big-data applications or analyses, you're probably acutely aware that the domain has its share of missing ingredients. We've boiled it down to five top wants on the big-data wish list, starting with SQL (or at least SQL-like) analysis options and shortcuts to deployment and advanced analytics and finishing with real-time and network analysis options.

The good news is that people and, in some cases, entire communities, are working on these problems. There are armies of data-management and data-analysis professionals who are familiar with SQL, for example, so organizations naturally want to take advantage of knowledge of that query language to make sense of data in Hadoop clusters and NoSQL databases -- the latter is no paradox, as the "No" in "NoSQL" stands for "not only" SQL. It's not a surprise that every distributor of Apache Hadoop software has proposed, is testing, and has or will soon release an option for SQL or SQL-like analysis of data residing on Hadoop clusters. That group includes Cloudera, EMC, Hortonworks, IBM, MapR and Teradata, among others. In the NoSQL camp, 10gen has improved on the analytics capabilities within MongoDB, and commercial vendor Acunu does the same for Cassandra.

Nokia Entertainment: Why we went MongoDB

In some industries, the time taken to get new features to market is absolutely critical. One such is the fiercely competitive world of mobile services, where service providers cannot afford to be seen to be behind the curve. Further reading

Tom Coupland, senior engineer at Nokia Entertainment Bristol, explained that speeding up application development was a key reason why his team started looking beyond the Maven, EJB3, Hibernate and MySQL setup that they have been using for the past three years. Another was the complexity of developing in this environment. Hibernate (a library that maps Java objects to relational tables) was a particular thorn in his team's side.


The firm's push towards personalisation of content provided another impetus to look for new tools, a search which last year led them to open-source NoSQL database MongoDB. "We didn't really do a serious comparison," admitted Coupland. "We just wanted a nice, simple document store. At first we thought we'd just use a key value store, but then we found we'd need some more functionality so we went one step up, and Mongo fitted our use case.

Read more: http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/analysis/2260724/nokia-entertainment-why-... Computing - Insight for IT leaders Claim your free subscription today.

Square Enix has turned big data into a game development tool

The old days of developers releasing a game -- "put it in a box, pay £50, that's it, move on" -- are over, according to Square Enix's Jim Blackhurst, as gaming moves towards the more "iterative" model pioneered by mobile gaming.

Gaming is becoming a big data problem, as online multiplayer sessions and always-on consoles let developers keep track of players like never before. Square Enix starting doing this in 2007, Jim Blackhurst tells Wired.co.uk, because the company's developers were "interested to see if the decisions we had made as designers were being played out in reality".


By the time Deus Ex: Human Revolution shipped, Square Enix had developed the infrastructure it needed to both absorb all the information that was coming in and to analyse it in a meaningful way. Jelinek said: "Jim was asked to produce some statistics like how many kilometres players drove, and he had to look at all the data we had gathered since the beginning. The kernel ran and it took something like three weeks to run that single query."

Now, that same query can take around two minutes with a MongoDB database hosted on a cloud server. The implications for how Square Enix develops games are intriguing, as it significantly simplifies and speeds up much of a game's development. Something that was initially meant to be a reactive way of tracking player activity became something more proactive, a way of collecting and archiving information on actual gameplay elements. It lets Square Enix's studios create what are essentially templates that its developers know have already been tested and shown to work on other titles.

Internet Pioneer Dwight Merriman To Speak At Disrupt NY This Month

We’re very pleased to announce that Dwight Merriman, the co-founder and former CTO of DoubleClick and now the co-founder of hot New York startup 10gen, will be joining us onstage at Disrupt NY this month. He’s been at the forefront of Internet advertising and engineering for the past two decades and is an icon of New York startups.

DoubleClick began life in 1995 by serving some of the first banner ads on the web. Merriman led its technology side for the first 10 years, through an IPO in 1998 and a merger as it grew to become a main way that websites made money. Google eventually bought it in 2007 for $3.1 billion, and the company now exists as part of its core display ads business.

Merriman is now the chairman and co-founder of 10gen, which sponsors the widely used open source NoSQL database MongoDB. The company has been quietly surging, with total funding north of $80 million and an employee headcount expected to reach 500 in the next couple of years.

MongoDB FTW: Fast-growing 10gen hires first CFO

MongoDB creator 10gen is growing again, this time with the addition of Sydney Carey as the company’s first CFO. She’ll help lay the infrastructure for plans to more than double in size in two years as it eyes an eventual IPO.

10gen, the creator and proprietor of the extremely popular MongoDB NoSQL database, is growing up fast and on Tuesday announced it has hired Sydney Carey as the company’s first-ever chief financial officer. Carey comes from enterprise software company Tibco where she was executive vice president and CFO.

7 Big Data Startups With An Eye On The Channel

The big data space has attracted a big number of startups over the past few years. Some of these companies are focused specifically on Hadoop, some are focused on data management, and some are focused on analytics -- but all are vying for the industry's attention.

And, now, some of them are vying for solution providers' attention, too. While not all seven vendors on this list have formal channel programs in place, all are considering them, or at least opening their arms to systems integrators, consultants and other channel players to help fuel their big data play.

NoSQL LinkedIn Skills Index

As Q1 comes to a close its time to take another look at our NoSQL LinkedIn Skills Index, based on the number of LinkedIn member profiles mentioning each of the NoSQL projects. This is the second update since we rebooted the analysis in September 2012 to account for more products and refine our search terms.

 

10gen Releases MongoDB 2.4

MongoDB company 10gen has announced the general availability of the MongoDB 2.4 document database. New capabilities include Hash-based Sharding, Capped Arrays, Text Search, and Geospatial Enhancements.

MongoDB provides horizontal scaling by transparently sharding data across multiple physical servers and MongoDB 2.4 now includes Hash-based Sharding, a new option that simplifies the creation of large-scale MongoDB systems.

10gen has also introduced MongoDB Enterprise as part of a new MongoDB Enterprise subscription level to bring new monitoring and security features forward including Kerberos authentication and role-based Privilege

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