By Jessica Roy 3/25 8:34am

Linkages

(Photo: Celebrity Net Worth)

Booting Up: Return of the Winklevii

Mayor Bloomberg has his own geek squad of statisticians who are using sexy, sexy big data to make the city better. [New York Times]

Zuck’s political ambitions continue to grow with the news that he will join a superpac with techies and Republican strategists that will focus on issues like immigration and education reform. Psst Zuck, if you’re gonna target Congress, you might have to start wearing an actual suit. [AllThingsD]

Lawmakers are already trying to ban Google Glass while driving. One step at a time, everyone. [CNET]

Hey all you people who care about privacy: look what you did to Google Reader! [AllThingsD]

The Winklevii are back, and they have a nicer Silicon Alley office than you. [New York Times]

By Kelly Faircloth 12/31/12 7:40am

Linkages

flickr.com/davidcory

Booting Up: Let’s All Make ‘No More Privacy Scares’ A New Year’s Resolution

At the eleventh hour, a security bug was discovered in Facebook’s “Midnight Delivery” feature, which made it possible to see and even delete users’ New Year’s messages to friends. Whoops! It’s been fixed. [TNW]

As part of a plan to cut costs, Zynga has shut down a raft of games over the course of December. The latest: PetVille and Mafia Wars 2. [TechCrunch]

Guess Nate Silver’s election-day triumph didn’t singlehandedly slay the gut feeling in favor of big data, after all: “What is intuition at its best but large amounts of data of all kinds filtered through a human brain rather than a math model?” [New York Times]

Techies we lost in 2012. [Wired]

“But there is a darker possibility, too, which is that some people will own workbots before other people do, and that the people who lack workbots won’t be able to keep up with those to do.” Happy New Year, ya’ll! [New Yorker]


By Kelly Faircloth 11/20/12 10:00am

Teen Beat

Teens! On the Internet! At the library! (Photo: flickr.com/vancouverpubliclibrary

Parents Are Completely Freaked About Advertisers Tracking Their Kids

Pity the parentals: They don’t just have to make it through the terrible teenage years, but now the Internet exists to make everything worse. According to a new report from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, the most common worry isn’t stranger danger or cyberbullying or even embarrassing Facebook photos. Parents are worried about advertisers. Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 11/07/12 11:10am

Data Mining

Nate Silver Map

Nate Silver’s Sweep Is a Huge Win for ‘Big Data’

Like “pivot” and “cloud computing,” “big data” is one of those startup buzzwords that gets thrown around indiscriminately–partly because it means different things depending on the intel you’re trying to unearth and partly because it sounds like the kind of futuristic jargon that opens doors. Using machine learning to analyze big data? We can practically see the pitch deck already!

As The Economist noted back in 2010, the deluge of large data sets unleashed by the digital age, “makes it possible to do many things that previously could not be done: spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on. Managed well, the data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value, provide fresh insights into science and hold governments to account.” Read More

By Kelly Faircloth 8/31/12 8:50am

Teach Me How to Startup

Artist's rendering. (Image: Cornell University)

A Few More Details Emerge About CornellNYC’s Inaugural Instructors [UPDATED]

CornellNYC is starting to come together. Applications are now being accepted; the infant school has a home with Google until the Roosevelt Island campus is complete. Now the Cornell Daily Sun reports that the debut roster is growing, announcing one name who’ll be doing splitting his time between Ithaca and New York and a semester-long visitor from San Diego.

That faculty lounge is starting to fill up! Provided the faculty lounge is actually David Karp’s sidecar.

Joining UCLA poachee Deborah Estrin (for the first semester, anyway) will be a Cornell professor of electrical and computer engineering, Rajit Manohar, and a University of California at San Diego professor of computer science engineering, Serge Belongie. Read More

By Kelly Faircloth 8/20/12 3:03pm

Time Machines

Mr. Saverin (therichest.org)

Way Back in 2004, TheFacebook.com Offered to Out You to Advertisers

Nowadays Facebook is very cautious around the third rail that is sexual orientation. Sure, there’s a timeline icon just for gay marriage, but the company won’t serve up ladies seeking ladies to advertisers. But that wasn’t always the case.

Digiday has gotten its hands on an interesting piece of Internet history: the social network’s very first pitch to advertisers, from way back in spring 2004. The site was still thefacebook.com, it was only available on select college campuses, Peter Thiel hadn’t invested yet and that random dude was still chilling in the upper lefthand corner.

However, Eduardo Saverin was already talking up the site’s biggest advantage: data, and the targeting that allows advertisers to do. Read More

By Kelly Faircloth 6/26/12 11:20am

Apple in Your Eye

MacPC

Mac Users Are More Easily Persuaded to Part With Their Cash, Orbitz Realizes

Even as we speak, you are leaving digital bread crumbs scattered all over the Internet, there for the taking by marketers. Nor do the details have to be anything particularly consequential to translate into a money-making opportunity.

For example: Orbitz has realized that customers who visit its site from a Mac tend to spend more money on hotels. The company is therefore adjusting its search results accordingly.

Read More

By Kelly Faircloth 4/25/12 5:47pm

The Machines

Mr. Hammond (LinkedIn.com)

In the Future, a Computer Will Probably Write this Post

Like any proud papa, Narrative Science cofounder and CTO Kristian Hammond has ambitions for his article-writing algorithm. In 15 years, he told Wired, 90 percent of news will be computer-generated. In 20 years, there’ll be no topic his company doesn’t cover. He even believes that a computer will win the Pulitzer Prize within five years. Well, it is Big Data Week, after all.

Narrative Science got its start covering the data-driven topics of sports and finance. Then came work from a fast-food company, turning sales figures into regular written reports for franchise-owners. Nowadays, they can even vary tone. Hammond wants to see the company breaking news, though that’ll require investment in data mining and natural language processing. All that leads to a future that looks a little something like this, according to Wired: Read More

By Kelly Faircloth 4/25/12 9:00am

Enterprising

Ms. Rother. (Lalisio.com)

Armed with a Big Data Offering and a Brooklyn Office, Q-Sensei Eyes America

Enterprise search is a tough market. But with the release of an upgraded search platform tailored to cash in on big data, plus a snazzy new Brooklyn office, Q-Sensei has big plans and even bigger ambitions.

Created in 2007 from the merger of a German and an American company, Q-Sensei’s primary product is an enterprise software platform, designed to help businesses sort through their vast amounts of internal clutter. But despite picking up a couple of industry awards, the company has largely flown under the radar. Enterprise work just isn’t as flashy as consumer offerings, and besides, Europe has been the team’s focus thus far.  Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 2/08/12 2:23pm

The Data Deluge

dixon1

Big Data Funding Gets Bigger: IA Ventures Raised $105 M, Double Its Previous Fund

IA Ventures, the New York City-based firm with a big data fetish, just announced that it raised $105 million towards a second fund. That’s more than double the $50 million seed fund IA Ventures founder Roger Ehrenberg raises in 2010.

With this new fund, Mr. Ehrenberg told TechCrunch, IA Ventures will be able lead seed rounds as well as series A and B rounds and follow a company through its growth. Previously, IA gravitated towards pre-revenue companies “between a Powerpoint and a prototype.” Those companies, says TechCrunch, require more “hands-on work,” and with Fund II, IA Ventures will be able to diversify its portfolio into both seed-stage and later-stage companies.

TechCrunch’s post on the new fund set off a chain of negative responses on Twitter, unrelated to IA Ventures, but rather to do with a theory Erick Schonfeld slipped into the piece about the difference between East Coast and West Coast investors below. Read More