According to various surveys, about half of all organizations are either using or evaluating Hadoop for Big Data analytics.  Hadoop has become a strategic platform for analyzing Big Data because it provides a purpose-built and cost-effective way to capture, organize, store, search, share, and analyze disparate data (whether structured, semi-structured and/or unstructured) across a large ...

While we mostly agree Big Data is that which constitutes some combination of the 4 V’s – it does have other attributes, which are generally driven by the specific industry and overall business use-case. According to Gartner Group’s Big Data Hype Cycle report issued in July: “Although Big Data is not necessarily just about MapReduce ...

According to U.S. Census report released in late July, the U.S. lost roughly 223,800 small businesses between 2008 and 2010, representing a loss of 3.1 million jobs. Even though these figures are from two years ago, prospects for SMBs haven’t returned to pre-recession levels. Small businesses have been growing and hiring slowly since the height ...

So, you’ve decided to build a private IaaS cloud. Great idea! By encouraging self-service IT in your organization, you’ve made your support staff happier by reducing their workload and you’ve made your users happier by giving them instant access to the resources they want. Now your users won’t be hounding the IT department (as much) ...

It’s no secret that mobile apps are all the rage. Last year, tap-happy consumers downloaded more than 30 billion of them—that’s almost 1,000 per second—and show no signs of slowing down. In fact, some experts are predicting that app downloads will reach nearly 100 billion by 2015. The insatiable demand for apps is now moving ...

As smartphones uprise, mobile advertising becomes essentially important for businesses of all kinds.  It suggests a modern elegant way to reach targeted audience and develop loyal relationships between brands and clients. With a range of mobile advertising options, including video and push notifications, SMS, WAP, mobile app display ads, mobile campaigns become a necessary part ...

Smartphones are becoming an all-in-one gadget that initially started off making calls and sending texts, and now have evolved into our livelihoods. Phones are now tackling another frontier and becoming our wallets, says the LA Times. The smartphone is replacing the credit card and cash as a preferred method of payment, and by 2016 there ...

We don’t always get around to doing those things we know are good for us… whether it’s exercise, getting enough sleep, taking that holiday, or eating healthy. The same thing goes for emergency planning and things like creating a disaster recovery plan if you’re an IT administrator. We know that our business needs one, but ...

Let’s take a quick look at the attention grabbing headline that was issued for maximum publicity rather than maximum fact: Mark Zuckerberg called Facebook’s HTML5 app “one of the biggest mistakes if not the biggest strategic mistake that we made.” Before you stop reading (and thinking), let’s look at what else he said in the ...

Co-Written by Ben T. Smith IV, CEO of ShopCo Holdings and Victor Belfor . Have you ever seen the startup competitions and investment panels, such as those run by the VC TaskForce, JumpStartDays and the SVForum? These events are designed for early stage startup founders to sharpen the pitch and practice speaking about their companies to ...