NoSQL + Hadoop Without the Headaches: MapR Technologies Announces New Big Data Platform for HBase #stratany2012

Live from O’Reilly Strata Conference and Hadoop World: MapR M7 brings enterprise-grade reliability and performance to HBase, adding integrated snapshots, mirroring, instant recovery, and delivering consistent, low latency.

The Big Data Treasure Chest

Within most enterprises there sits a large and precious treasure chest. Inside that chest sits data which holds great, untapped value. While CEOs might have recognized this a few years back, they didn't talk about it much because it was impractical and near impossible to extract wealth from the data.

Not so much anymore. Hadoop’s speedy data processing and analytics capabilities have changed that dramatically.

Enterprises worldwide are now using, or plan to use, Hadoop to unlock the value in their big data stores. But doing so isn't simple and it’s not without risks. This has opened the door for vendors to add reliability, stability and host of bells and whistles to Hadoop. MapR is one of the companies that leads that space.

MapR Announces New Big Data Platform

This morning at the O’Reilly Strata Conference + Hadoop World 2012 MapR unveiled M7 which promises to bring unprecedented Hadoop and NoSQL capabilities together on an easy, dependable and fast platform. With MapR M7, Big Data operations ranging from batch analytics to real-time database functions can be performed with enterprise-grade reliability and protection.

“We've made Hbase enterprise grade,” says Tomar Shiran, director of product management at MapR, explaining that MapR M7 can withstand multiple software and hardware outages and keep applications running without needing any administrator intervention at all. It’s the only Hadoop distribution that provides instant disaster recovery and full data protection with snapshots and mirroring, he adds.

But MapR M7 doesn't stop there, it also provides constant and consistent performance at unprecedented levels because it doesn't require compactions and because its innovative data structures minimize the read- and write-amplification factor. Updates and inserts are also much faster.

“We start with Hadoop and by adding our own innovations we make it much better,” says Shiran. 

MapR & the Google Compute Engine, Plus More

And while we know that every vendor has a pitch to explain why they are the best, MapR points to its recent wins. They snagged an exclusive to run Hadoop services on the Google Compute Engine last June, which says a lot because Google wrote the paper on Map Reduce. In that same month, Amazon announced that MapR’s Hadoop distributions would be available on Amazon Web Services vs. its own Elastic MapReduce service that runs on Apache Hadoop.

MapR has other impressive enterprise level Big Data ground-breakers on its client list as well, such as the Rubicon Project, a digital advertising infrastructure company that automates buying and selling for the global online advertising industry; Ancestry.com which crunches human genome, text and other data to lead you to your ancestors, and many, many others.

MapR is setting a new benchmark in the world of Enterprise-grade Hadoop. It will be interesting to see if anyone is able to exceed it before it “bests” itself.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

WoodWing Enterprise 8: New Collaboration Tools, Support for Adobe Creative Suite 6

WoodWing's Enterprise 8 multi-channel publishing system has been released. It includes new collaboration features, performance updates, and support for Adobe's digital publishing system.

Because WoodWing is popular among newspaper and magazine publishers, support for Adobe Creative Suite 6 — particularly its two key components, InDesign and InCopy — should be welcome.

New Features + Future Release Teased

One of the main highlights of Enterprise 8 is an annotation feature that will look very familiar to long-time users. Commenting on in-progress documents is now possible, notes can be approved or rejected, and comments can be answered. 

New collaboration features like commenting on in-progress documents had been requested by WoodWing customers.

Under the hood, performance updates have made uploading large files into Content Station up to three times faster. That's because WoodWing has added the JSON and AMF protocols in Enterprise 8. AMF is the format used by Adobe Flash, and that means Enterprise 8 can build Flash movies across all devices.  

Additionally, Enterprise 8 has made some internal changes to accommodate any future upgrades or support for publishing industry requirements. Woodwing has hinted that those future updates could include better reporting and digital asset management tools. 

Also inside Content Station, the Planning Tab has been extended to allow issues to be created across channels. This should speed up starting tasks and creating dossiers (what WoodWing calls articles or stories). The final new feature is a tool for setting up a specific workflow for archive files (such as zip files) or presentations that may have an alternate route in the workflow.

Adobe-WoodWing Partnership

For the past year, WoodWing has been an Adobe partner on its Digital Publishing Suite, and that is one reason for the tighter integration of Flash and InDesign. However, with the addition of the JSON protocol, Enterprise 8 is also more extensible with other third-party software. That means any of WoodWing's authorized partners can integrate Enterprise 8 and Content Station with their preferred add-ons.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Brain Games Company Lumosity Is Business Up Front, Experiment In The Back End

With its large database of human cognitive performance, Lumosity has become a small but significant force in the science surrounding its products.

As a neuroscience PhD candidate at Stanford, Michael Scanlon explored the effects of cognitive training through small-scale experiments on fish and rats. Now, seven years after dropping out to start a company that makes brain games, he can base his research on anonymized data from 25 million people.

Lumosity, the company Scanlon co-founded, makes games that promise to sharpen memory, focus attention, enhance creativity and improve attention. At least by Silicon-Valley terms, it’s been successful. The startup announced a $31.5 million investment from Discovery Communications last week, bringing its total amount of funding to $70 million. Its mobile app has reached the coveted No. 1 spot in the App Store, and its userbase has swelled to 25 million.

Studies about whether playing games like Lumosity's can indeed make people smarter have produced conflicting results. One study, for instance, found subjects who trained in cognitive tasks improved only at those specific tasks. Others, meanwhile, have showed improvement in fluid intelligence among those who played a brain game.

Lumosity's research branch, Lumos Labs, runs its own studies about how the games impact intelligence. But it also lends assessment tools and, in a few cases, its massive data set to independent researchers who are studying cognitive training. It's running an experiment and a company at the same time and has thus become a small but significant force in the science surrounding its products.

As new understandings emerge about how cognitive training works, it's a good bet that Lumosity will be the first to arrive with updated games.

According to a paper the company published in the MENSA Research Journal, after 10 hours of training, subjects improved 10% in memory and 20% in divided attention. At the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting in October, it will present further research on the transfer of cognitive training to core underlying cognitive capacities and whether older adults need to train more frequently than younger adults to receive equivalent benefits.

With the exception of the research published in MENSA Research, however, none of its findings have been submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

“We know it’s possible,” Scanlon says. “We haven’t submitted enough times to know if we we have a high rate of success or a low rate of success.”

Regardless of whether Lumos Labs successfully publishes more studies, Scanlon acknowledges that research produced by organizations without revenue at stake are more likely to be trusted. Which is one reason Lumosity has helped supply about 100 independent researchers with brain games their subjects can play at home instead of at the lab.

Researchers from Stanford, the University of New South Wales and other schools have used Lumosisty brain games in published studies, many of which support Lumosisty's findings, and scientists at Harvard and UC Berkeley are among the 25 researchers that are currently incorporating the games into experiments.By default, testing their subjects on Lumosity games also helps cement the company’s position as the most data-equipped researcher in the space.

That's the business genius in Lumosity's research programs: As new understandings emerge about how cognitive training works and in what ways it is or is not effective, it's a good bet that Lumosity will be the first to arrive with updated games.

“The product is informing the science, which then turns back into the product,” Scanlon says. “Not all companies have the option of having their R&D and business models in such alignment.”

Source : fastcompany[dot]com