Stories by Joab Jackson

SAS wants to supercharge your business analysis, through new software that automatically builds multiple models of data and picks those that best predict future events.

In a move to beef up its portfolio of analysis software and services, Microsoft is acquiring Revolution Analytics, a major commercial distributor of the R statistical programming language.

Facebook has released as open source some software modules that can speed image recognition, language modeling and other machine learning tasks, in a move to advance computer artificial intelligence for itself and others,

From ordering pizza online to pinpointing the exact location of a breaking news story, an overwhelming portion of data on the Web has geographic elements. Yet for Web developers, wrangling the most value from geospatial information remains an arduous task.

If 2014 was the year that Apache Hadoop sparked the big data revolution, 2015 may be the year that Apache Spark supplants Hadoop with its superior capabilities for richer and more timely analysis.

It turns out that a vital missing ingredient in the long-sought after goal of getting machines to think like humans -- artificial intelligence -- has been lots and lots of data.

With the newest commercial service to spring from its highly publicised Watson cognitive computing initiative, IBM is attempting to streamline the process of analysing data so business managers can pull insights from data sets without the help of IT experts.

Taking what many see as the next step in big data analysis, Google is previewing a service called Google Cloud Dataflow that analyzes live data, potentially giving users the ability to view trends and be alerted to events as they happen.

Microsoft is targeting the growing volume of data being generated by both machines and humans: CEO Satya Nadella on Tuesday showed off tools that could help organizations better understand -- and profit from -- this trove of information.

Attempting to quickly recover from a contentious and ultimately failed CEO appointment last month, the Mozilla Corporation has appointed board member Chris Beard as interim CEO.

Continuing its run of digital marketer acquisitions, IBM has announced its purchase of Silverpop, which specializes in managing personally-customized Internet promotions.

Many Facebook users got an unpleasant surprise on Monday as they logged into their accounts only to find that some of the services were not working properly.

Hewlett-Packard has assembled a number of its data-mining software programs into a service, called the HP Digital Marketing Hub, that can synthesize multiple sources of marketing data to help organizations better identify potential customers.

Continuing to build its portfolio of software for supporting electronic commerce operations, IBM has acquired Xtify, a provider of push notification-based marketing services for mobile platforms. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Splunk continues to enhance its flagship machine data search engine so it can be used by business analysts and managers, in addition to its typical audience of system and network administrators.