Posts Tagged Stock Market Data

IBM Ups Big Data Bet with New Software, $100 Million in Research

Posted by on Friday, 20 May, 2011

On the same day that IBM passed Microsoft in market cap, Big Blue showed how it will ride the growth of big data to continue its momentum. IBM announced a new 0 million investment for future data analytics along with new services and software aimed at helping improve data analysis and new services for IT professionals.

The news, shared at an event at its Watson Research Center, highlights the work IBM has done in assembling a broad portfolio of big data tools for enterprise customers. It has spent billion in the last five years on two dozen acquisitions. Increasingly, the company sees its future pinned to its ability to help customers manage and learn from the vast amounts of data produced today.

The company released 20 new services with 28 analytical tools designed to help CIOs apply data analysis more effectively. There is also new InfoSphere BigInsights and Streams software that allow clients to analyze both structured and unstructured with sub-millisecond response times, allowing companies to respond with much more speed. InfoSphere Streams, which analyzes incoming data for patterns and trends, is now able to analyze Tweets, blog posts, stock market data, GPS information and video frames up to 350 times faster. The BigInsights software, which is based on Hadoop, analyzes and stores petabyes of data, is updated with new data governance and security features along with more developer tools and easier enterprise integration.

IBM said it was also investing 0 million to fuel research on massive-scale analytics through advanced software and services.

The goal is to put all of this analytics work together into tools that help companies and clients anticipate the future, said Steve Mills, senior vice president and group president of IBM Software & Systems. He said companies are looking for better headlights to illuminate where they’re going and where they need to go.

“The more predictive you can be, the faster you can move, the better value you can extract from your business,” Mills said.

One key tool in IBM’s growing arsenal is Watson, the natural language system that won a much publicized Jeopardy challenge against former champions. IBM officials on Friday shared more how the system can be used to help companies ingest and analyze data and flesh out intelligent insights. David Ferrucci, IBM fellow and principal investigator on the Watson/Deep QA Project, said Watson’s first job will be in health care, which is fitting because Watson is built to handle information in a similar way to how doctors narrow down diagnoses for patients. He said the system essentially analyzes questions by generating queries against a number of sources and creating hypotheses that are scored on a variety of factors.

Ferrucci said IBM was able to feed Watson medical specific domain information and turn it into a budding physician’s assistant after just three months. He said Watson will be able to collaborate with doctors, helping surface possible diagnoses, ask for additional information and learn from feedback from doctors.

The future of Watson within IBM is still being sorted out and reflects the new challenges for the company, said Katherine Frase, vice president of emerging technologies and industry solutions. The company is still figuring out how it will mix and match its big data tools with Watson and what kind of business models and arrangements will work for customers. She said Watson will get deployed in two or three custom pilot programs this year in health care and likely in financial services. But it’s still unclear how Watson will ultimately get sold to users, as an entire unit, as a modular piece paired with other tools or perhaps as a cloud service.

“The problem is what should we try first and what business scenario do we do first?” she said. “He have a lot of technical and strategy work to do. But it’s a good problem to have.”

To hear more about cloud computing and Big Data, check out GigaOM’s Structure conference on June 22-23.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

  • Putting Big Data to Work: Opportunities for Enterprises
  • Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
  • Defining Hadoop: the Players, Technologies and Challenges of 2011



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50 Coolest Websites

Posted by on Wednesday, 25 November, 2009

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A website is a gathering of associated web pages, videos, images or other digital values that can be searched with a trivial IP address or domain name in an Internet Protocol-based network. One web site can exist on a web server at least, that can be accessed through a network like Internet or a particular local area network.
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A document, usually typed in plain text bulked with formatting directions of Hypertext Markup Language is called a web page. That may possess pieces from other web sites if they have markup anchors that are suitable. In order to access and transport web pages, one must use Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), that could facultative employ encryption, like HTTPS or HTTP Secure to offer privacy and security for the web page content’s user. The application of the user, usually a web browser, offers the page content through its HTML markup instructions towards a display terminal.

The World Wide Web is made of all the web sites that are publicly accessible.

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The homepage is a Uniform Resource Locator, shortly URL, that is casually used to access the pages of a web site. The pages’ URL establish a hierarchy among them, albeit hyperlinking among them transmits the observed site structure of the reader and directs the navigation of the reader concerning the site.

Some of the web sites ask for a subscription to process a part or all of the content present there. For example, a lot of business sites are subscription sites, as well as gaming sites, academic journal sites, a part of many news sites, social networking web sites, web-based e-mail, sites that provide real-time stock market data, services and message boards.

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There are many opinions concerning the 50 coolest sites in the world. According to Time, in partnership with CNN, for example, the 50 best web sites are the ones presented below. They are web sites that will require the erasing of your bookmarks, as they say joking around.

Starting with the bottom, with the one at the end of the list, Know Your Meme is the favorite dish of the fledgling. Weekly or seldom, “researchers” from the  Rocketboom Institute for Internet Studies give details about what is amusing on the Internet and why.

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Get High Now is the next in the reversed list. Do not let the name fool you, because such a thing has not been invented, at least, not yet. The web site is actually a science site wearing a mask of mind- expansion. There are 40 visual and audio illusions or hallucinations that wait for you to experience them and understand them after they are explained through brain science. For example, even if they do not change the key, the Shepard tones arrive at a lower and lower or higher and higher tone. The Risset rhythms appear to have a faster and faster pace, but if you tape them with your foot, you notice they have never changed to start from. Theta-wave synchronizations and binaural beats give you a different state, and it is true, because you can see the induced changes through fMRI. A secret to science, the highly intoxicating chronosynclastic infundibulum is also presented on the web site.

Fonolo is a web site that will make you forget about the tiresome “Press one for English”. If you have had it with the impersonal, annoying corporations, Fonolo presses some buttons for you and remains on hold until someone in flesh and bones comes to speak to you. You phone then rings and you can talk to that person. You can even record the chatting as an MP3.

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Going to the middle of the arrangement, skipping WorldWideTelescope, OMGPOP, Photosynth, Issuu, drop.io, Aardvark, TripIt, Mint, BabyNameWizard.com’s NameVoyager, CouchSurfing, Visuwords, Yelp, Supercook, Spotify, Musicovery, Pandora and Last.fm, Facebook, Pollster, Metacritic, ConsumerSearch, Kiva and Internet Archive, we find Wikipedia, the good old encyclopedia where anybody can edit and update the information.

Like in the Olympics, we skip over to the third place, leaving Redfin, PropertyShark.com, Etsy, Netflix, Kayak, Amazon, Shop Goodwill, Craiglook, Fora TV, Vimeo, Hulu, Wolfram | Alpha, YouTube, Google, OpenTable, Academic Earth, Boing Boing, Skype, Twitter, popurls and Metafilter aside.

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Delicious (once del.icio.us), began as a sort of the Flickr of bookmarks, both being owned by Yahoo!. Now it is more helpful as a search-engine hack. By filtering the tags of the web site, you narrow it down to the kind of content you are looking for.

The second site, California Coastline by its name, is a must for those who try to conquer the sky, although it is definitely NSFW. One of the most riveting sites on the Internet is created using only a digital camera, a helicopter and a man. The web site is rudimentary, it does not want to show off with its interface, but with what is says to be – 10,000 up-close-and-personal shots from the air of the entire 1,000-mile-long coast.

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You would have expected it or not, but Times’ number one choice in the list of 50 coolest web sites is Flickr. It was the first site that solved the computers’ problems with visual imagery, using the so- called  collaborative tagging. The main point is that everybody can tag everybody’s uploaded photos, then they will enter in a category created by the crowd. The archive of Flickr has almost 3 billion photos. As a cool fact, the Library of Congress has begun to poll the Flickr hive mind when it arranges its personal photos.