"data startup" entries

Startup Showcase winners reflect the data industry’s maturity

The Strata + Hadoop World 2015 Startup Showcase highlighted four important trends in the big data world.

At Strata + Hadoop World 2015 in San Jose last week, we ran an event for data-driven startups. This is the fourth year for the Startup Showcase, and it’s become a fixture of the conference. One of our early winners, MemSQL, has since raised $50 million in financing, and it’s a good way for companies to get visibility with investors, analysts, and attendees.

This year’s winners underscore several important trends in the big data space at the moment: the maturity of management tools; the deployment of machine learning in other verticals; an increased focus on privacy and permissions; and the convergence of enterprise languages like SQL with distributed, schema-less data stacks. Read more…

Esther Dyson on health data, “preemptive healthcare” and the next big thing

Dyson says it's time to focus on maintaining good health, as opposed to healthcare.

If we look ahead to the next decade, it’s worth wondering whether the way we think about health and health care will have shifted. Will health care technology be a panacea? Will it drive even higher costs, creating a broader divide between digital haves and have-nots? Will opening health data empower patients or empower companies?

As ever, there will be good outcomes and bad outcomes, and not just in the medical sense. There’s a great deal of thought around the potential for mobile applications right now, from the FDA’s potential decision to regulate them to a reported high abandonment rate. There are also significant questions about privacy, patient empowerment and meaningful use of electronic health care records.

When I’ve talked to US CTO Todd Park or Dr. Farzad Mostashari they’ve been excited about the prospect for health data to fuel better dashboards and algorithms to give frontline caregivers access to critical information about people they’re looking after, providing critical insight at the point of contact.

Kathleen Sebelius, the U.S. Secretary for Health and Human Services, said at this year’s Health Datapalooza that venture capital investment in the health care IT area is up 60% since 2009.

Given that context, I was more than a little curious to hear what Esther Dyson (@edyson) is thinking about when she looks at the intersection of health care, data and information technology.

Read more…

Strata Week: MIT and Massachusetts bet on big data

MIT and Massachusetts plan a big data initiative, Cisco predicts the Internet's big data future.

MIT announces a big data research center, Cisco predicts the future of the Internet (in zettabytes), and open data startup Junar announces seed funding.