Effective Data Visualization Techniques, from Business to Social Advocacy

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No matter how much data you amass, or how ingenious your models may be, your efforts are only as effective as how you communicate the insights revealed. Data visualization is not a new art, but one which has grown significantly more important in recent years, as organizations must respond to an increasing amount of data faster than ever.

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Pivotal: All Systems Go

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Pivotal, the new company uniting EMC Greenplum’s decade of big data R & D, agile development trailblazers Pivotal Labs, and VMWare’s cloud services and app framework acumen, is ready to launch. In a letter to employees sent Monday, April 1st, CEO Paul Maritz announced Pivotal as “a new and exciting company with great promise,” and outlined the Pivotal vision.

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Chorus In Action at Data Science London

Logan Lee at Data Science London. Image via Data Science London (@ds_ldn)

Over the past few years, organizations like Data Science London have sprung up in major metropolitan cities all over the world. This is yet another sign of increasing momentum behind the data science community. It’s a community capable of transformative impact, one enabled by the dramatic improvements in technologies to effectively analyze and model massive data volume.

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eBay’s Beth Axelrod: Predictive Analytics is Transforming Human Resources

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The challenges of hiring skilled data scientists is well-documented, but what of Big Data’s impact on talent recruitment within other fields? According to Beth Axelrod, eBay’s Senior Vice President of Human Resources and the co-author of the new book The War for Talent, Human Resources is the latest department to be significantly disrupted within the data-driven enterprise.

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Paul Maritz Calls for a “Consumer-Grade Enterprise” Platform

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Over the past decade, consumer-facing web giants such as Google and Facebook have invested heavily in user data — storing it, analyzing it, and using the insights revealed to rapidly iterate on products. These companies recognized early that user data is a treasure trove, and devoted significant in-house resources to reap its value.

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Finding Problem Solvers Who Provide Big Answers: An Interview with Harper Reed

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Harper Reed, CTO for the Obama 2012 Presidential Campaign, delivered the keynote speech at EMC Greenplum’s Hadoop: The Foundation for Change event on Monday, February 25. Reed delivered what he called “A Big Data intervention,” urging the audience to move the conversation beyond Big Data, toward what he called “Big Answers.” He noted that technologists are “often bad at listening when it comes to data,” and said that practitioners “should be using these insights from data to do more listening.” He stated technologists must ask themselves, “‘How do we use targeting to have a conversation?’”

Running the most data-driven Presidential campaign to date presented unique challenges.

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The History of Hadoop: From Small Starts to Big Data

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Named after a toy elephant belonging to developer Doug Cutting’s son, over the past decade Hadoop has proven to be the little platform that could. From its humble beginnings as an open source search engine project created by Cutting and Mike Cafarella, Hadoop has evolved into a robust platform for Big Data storage and analysis.

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Demonstrating the High-Performance Future of Hadoop at Strata

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The ten- and hundred-fold gains in productivity, speed, and accessibility that Pivotal HD brings to Hadoop took center stage at an afternoon breakout session at the Strata Conference on Wednesday, February 27th. Josh Klahr, Greenplum’s Vice President of Product Management, and Gavin Sherry, Senior Director of Engineering offered a deep dive into the High-Performance Future of the platform.

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Scott Yara’s Strata Keynote: Data and Collaboration In “An Extraordinary Time”

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Greenplum co-founder, Scott Yara struck an inspirational tone during his keynote at the Strata Conference #strataconf on Wednesday, February 27th in Santa Clara. Yara cast a wide net, paying tribute to the practitioners who have pushed the data community forward and inspired Greenplum’s vision, emphasizing collaboration and the wide swath of sectors and issues that data science can deliver insight on.

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HAWQ: The New Benchmark for SQL on Hadoop

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Business data analytics has changed tremendously in recent years. When enterprise datasets consisted entirely of structured data generated from ERP, CRM and other operational databases, businesses would typically use heavyweight ETL process to load data into Enterprise Datamarts or to EDW systems.

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