Alex Williams
Latest from Alex Williams
Abstracting Data Science for the Every Day User
Unlike my cohorts in San Francisco for the circus that is Oracle OpenWorld, I spent two days last week in sunny San Diego, talking to the folks from Teradata, a company with its roots in data analytics since its founding in 1979. Teradata has a true data analytics offering. Oracle? I am still unsure about ...
Big Data TV – Was This Steve Jobs’ Next Breakthrough?
Tim O’Reilly appeared on theCube earlier this year and made a remark about Apple’s killer app. He said it was the app store. Why? It’s the data that is in those apps that draws people. This network of mobile apps and services gave people a community that refreshed their confidence in technology. Why? It actually ...
Gaping Void on Steve Jobs – Here’s to the Crazy Ones
I just received an email from Gaping Void. Every day, cartoonist Hugh MacLeod does one of his iconic drawings that often points to the humor, absurdity and reality of our lives. Today he gives tribute to Steve Jobs. Go to his site to see the cartoon. The drawing pays homage to Jobs’ and what he said ...
Ellison and Benioff Battles Now Look Meaningless with Jobs Passing
The dueling, the growling and the insults between Marc Benioff and Larry Ellison this week at Oracle OpenWorld stopped having any relevance late yesterday afternoon. Steve Jobs is dead. Every rivalry in the tech world now seems trivial. Benioff looked up to Jobs. Ellison called Jobs his best friend. Today, Benioff and Ellison chided each ...
The Benioff “Unkeynote” and How the Community Trumped Larry Ellison
This is a historic week. During the height of Oracle OpenWorld, it’s the social Web and the revolution of mobile that has become the focus of the conversation. It’s not Larry Ellison. It’s not Exalytics or Exadata. It’s the social enterprise. That is the voice being heard more than ever before. By canceling Marc Benioff’s ...
Oracle: We Did Not Cancel Benioff Keynote, We Just Moved it to a Broom Closet
The joy of the circus is in seeing what next act will make you gasp, fill you with surprise and make you laugh at the spectacle of it all. Today’s act at Oracle OpenWorld? An Oracle source now says that Marc Benioff’s keynote did not get cancelled. It has instead been moved to make way ...
Apple.com Web Site Goes Down
The Apple.com Web site went down today, following the keynote by new CEO Tim Cook. The site could not be reached for about 20 minutes. It went back up around 12:20. The question – what happened? Apple is not talking but it appears the sit went down as people rushed to the site following the ...
Hadoop, NoSQL and Big Data Job Trends
Apple is looking for a Hadoop administrator to help “redefine” adverting on mobile devices. TripAdvisor needs a software engineer to build out its bigger than 25 terabyte database. Nokia seeks an engineer to help analyze unlimited data points. And EMC wants a software engineer to build its Hadoop ecosytem and work closely with the Apache community. ...
In Possibly His Worst Keynote Ever, Larry Ellison Unveils “Exalytics”
Larry Ellison (in his worst keynote ever?) announced Exalytics today, an appliance for in-memory analytics. As I reported on Friday, the hardware/software integration is the next permutation of Exalogic, what Ellison last year called a cloud in a box. Ellison said Exalytics is based upon Times Ten, which Oracle acquired in 2005. This keynote seemed ...
Oracle Adopting Open-Source R to Connect Legacy Systems
Oracle looks like it is investing in R, the programming language of choice for statistical analysis and rich, data visualization. Oracle says it will integrate R with its Oracle Database. Other signs from Oracle show the deeper interest in using the statistical framework for integration with Hadoop to potentially speed statistical analysis. This has particular ...
