Robert Hof
Latest from Robert Hof
New trend from Marc Andreessen: Software programs the world
When the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz announced its fifth fund a month ago, Managing Director Scott Kupor said the theme for the $1.5 billion fund would remain the same as the previous four: Software is eating the world. The notion, articulated originally by cofounder Marc Andreessen (pictured) five years ago, is that software is disrupting ...
Google buys video streaming firm Anvato to expand its cloud
Google added another small piece to its cloud platform today with the acquisition of video streaming company Anvato Inc. Anvato sells software that automates encoding, editing, publishing and distribution of video for companies such as NBCUniversal, Univision, Fox Sports and Media General. Google, whose cloud business still trails far behind those of Amazon.com and Microsoft, clearly hopes ...
Hadoop and beyond: A conversation with Hortonworks CEO Rob Bearden
As the first big data company to go public, Hortonworks Inc. has been a natural target for both competitors and investors — never more than now. The Santa Clara (Calif.) company sells subscriptions and services for its Hortonworks Data Platform, which is built upon the open source software Apache Hadoop for storing, processing and analyzing ...
Buying Magic Pony, Twitter dives deeper into machine learning
Machine learning, the branch of artificial intelligence that helps computers learn without being specifically programmed, has quickly emerged as table stakes for companies to remain competitive in everything from media and advertising to enterprise computing. Now, it’s apparent that Twitter Inc. aims to keep up in machine learning with giants such as Google, Facebook, IBM and ...
Why Spark is on fire: a conversation with creator Matei Zaharia
Apache Spark, the open source software framework for distributing computing across many clusters of machines, has caught on like wildfire among companies looking to divine insights from their growing masses of data. Nowhere was that more apparent than at a conference this week in San Francisco centered on the software. Spark Summit West drew a ...