"big data startups" entries

At Strata + Hadoop World in London last week, we hosted a showcase of some of the most innovative big data startups. Our judges narrowed the field to 10 finalists, from whom they — and attendees — picked three winners and an audience choice.

Underscoring many of these companies was the move from software to services. As industries mature, we see a move from custom consulting to software and, ultimately, to utilities — something Simon Wardley underscored in his Data Driven Business Day talk, and which was reinforced by the announcement of tools like Google’s Bigtable service offering.

This trend was front and center at the showcase:

• Winner Modgen, for example, generates recommendations and predictions, offering machine learning as a cloud-based service.
• While second-place Brytlyt offers their high-performance database as an on-premise product, their horizontally scaled-out architecture really shines when the infrastructure is elastic and cloud based.
• Finally, third-place OpenSensors’ real-time IoT message platform scales to millions of messages a second, letting anyone spin up a network of connected devices.

Ultimately, big data gives clouds something to do. Distributed sensors need a widely available, connected repository into which to report; databases need to grow and shrink with demand; and predictive models can be tuned better when they learn from many data sets. Read more…