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More than 250 people attended a Hadoop developer event at Yahoo! this week, demonstrating again the level of interest the company has in open-source big data initiatives. Yahoo! says it is the world's biggest Hadoop supporter. We say that's undoubtedly correct. Yahoo! supports community developer events throughout the world. In February it supported the first Hadoop! event in India. In June, it will host the Hadoop Summit. Sponsor Yahoo! is not always recognized for its cloud computing efforts but its deep commitment to Hadoop shows how the company views the ways that big data can be used to solve major technology issues such as spam. Hadoop, according to Wikipedia , "is a Java software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications under a free license. It enables applications to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data." The developer conference featured discussions from the Hadoop community, including a presentation about using it to fight spam lead and a discussion led by a lead engineer from Facebook. Vishwanath Ramarao is director of anti-spam engineering for Yahoo! Mail. According to the Yahoo! developer blog, Vish described the intricate cat-and-mouse games played with spammers, and how Yahoo! uses Hadoop to abstract away the complexity of large scale data analysis and provide deep insight into spammer campaigns. Yahoo! Mail antispam - Bay area Hadoop user group Johhn Sichi, lead engineer for Facebook's data infrastructure team provided an overview of Facebook's work using Hadoop to manage data that is growing 8x annually, In March, 2008 traffic volume hit 200 GB per day. By the end of last year, traffic bumped to 12 terabytes per day. Hadoop, Hbase and Hive- Bay area Hadoop User Group Companies like Yahoo! and Facebook use Hadoop to organize data and process it from multiple sources. For instance, Facebook might use it to organize how it deploys its ad network. Yahoo! may be on to the most powerful use for cloud computing or at least the most interesting. And it shows how the company is thinking about cloud computing and the ways it applies to its overall strategy. Discuss
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Yahoo!'s Smart Investment: The Hadoop Community
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As a parent (now there's a phrase you don't see here that often), I'm dazzled by the range of entertainment options my kids and I have. From the educational (I swear!) shows we have loaded up on PVR, to the educational (really!) kids' apps on my iPhone to the not-even-a-little-educational clips we watch on YouTube, we could easily while away every hour in a digital haze. But there's this whole other world out there of face-to-face interaction, fresh air, exercise and - loath though our children's parents are to admit it - sleep. And when the time comes to power down the Wii and say goodbye to MySims Agents for another day, tantrums sometimes ensue... and the almighty power of parental discipline has to come into play. Sponsor Sometimes just counting sternly to five will do the job. Sometimes something more stringent is called for - like shelving a game for a few days. And sometimes, well, sometimes we're groping for solutions, like generations of parents before us. At least for the next few years, Alex and I are in the enviable position of knowing the tech better than our kids do. (We're reasonably sure than when our then-two-year-old son locked Alex out of her iPhone, and created a ghost partition on our home server, it was random button-pressing at work.) Ask me in another decade, and you may hear a much different story. With that, let me wish a very happy first birthday to my favourite budding little pair-coding team in the world, and to their parents who could single-handedly make geeky look cool (to me, anyway) all over again. More Noise to Signal. Discuss
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Cartoon: What's a Time-out in 2010?
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Friday is the last day of New York Entrepreneur Week which upon its completion will have featured over 100 speakers from across the globe sharing their thoughts, advice and experience with attendees, but interesting stories have been surfacing around the event since as early as last week. A guest post on the event's official blog by Janine de Nysschen , a business consultant and endorser of change dynamics , raises the interesting truth that women play a very small role in startups and venture capital , but as her passion might indicate, she feels this trend is changing. Sponsor It's true. Though there are significant exceptions, we seldom here about female CEOs launching startups and receiving boat-loads of venture capital funding, heaven forbid it be from a female venture capitalist. But it's not just a startup problem, its a problem that persists in the majority of business fields; business is an industry that was only a man's game for a very long time, and women are still playing catch up. However, de Nysschen thinks there are factors about venture capital that make it less appealing to the businesswomen of the world. "The truth is that VCs invest in a stereotype, and that right now, the stereotype of high risk-tolerance, abnormal work ethic and business acumen seldom comes in the female form," says de Nysschen. She also says that a lot of VC deals are formed from existing relationships in the community, and points out that men and women tend to socialize in different circles, "especially in business," she adds. She also notes that while there is a shortage of female VCs and entrepreneurs, 70% of female VCs have been involved in deals that included female-led companies. Based on this, it's only fair that de Nysschen concludes that "if there were more women doling out money, there would be more women getting it." But things may be beginning to change. According to de Nysschen, women are the fastest growing subgroup of entrepreneurs - a fact she attributes to a growing trend of women choosing new career paths and educations. One of the reasons she says women have struggled in the venture-backed sector is that many VCs and founders come from backgrounds in which women are traditionally in the minority, such as engineering, computer science and biotechnology. However, women are statistically better startup founders than men, she says. "Women have been proven to build companies that are more capital-efficient than those founded by men, and they use less capital to achieve the same or higher revenue performance in early-stage years," she says. "Women don't fail as often as men: in fact, women-led high-tech start-ups generate higher revenues per dollar of invested capital and have lower failure rates than those led by men." Gender issues are nothing new to ReadWriteWeb, as in the past we've discussed the need for female oriented tech events , the unique market of female bloggers , while at the same time opening up discussion about whether women should be specifically catered to or not. As de Nysschen mentions in her post, there are more women in the world, and women do more purchasing of products and services than men do, so why shouldn't there be more women in the VC industry? Let us know you thoughts on female entrepreneurs and VCs in the comments! Discuss
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Why There Are Hardly Any Female Founders and VCs
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The U.S. Library of Congress announced this morning via its official Twitter account that it will be acquiring the entire archive of Twitter messages back through March 2006. In addition to a massive printed collection, the Library already has an extensive collection of other digital assets. The Library of Congress is the biggest library in the world. The Library does extensive work with data format standards , the semantic Web and other platforms for outside analysis. The addition of Twitter into the organization's offerings could foster an enormous amount of academic research. From a new kind of historical record to an unprecedented opportunity for discovering patterns of social interaction, this is big. Sponsor When the Library of Congress was founded in the year 1800, publishing was very expensive and relatively few people did it. Today, thanks to blogs, YouTube, Facebook and certainly Twitter it's a new world. Publishing is far faster, easier and more accessible today than at any point in human history. That might seem obvious, but on a day like today it's worth thinking about some more. For now there are more questions than answers with regards to this Library of Congress Twitter news. Will the archive include friend/follower connection data? Will it be usable for commercial purposes? Will there be a Web interface for searching it, and will that change the face of Twitter search for good? Is there any way that the much larger archive of Facebook data could be submitted to the same body for analysis of the same kind? These kinds of large data sets are poised to become one of the most important resources the Internet creates. As Kenneth Cukier wrote in The Economist's recent Special Report on Big Data , "Data are becoming the new raw material of business: an economic input almost on a par with capital and labour." The Library's blogger Matt Raymond put it like this in the blog post about the announcement : Expect to see an emphasis on the scholarly and research implications of the acquisition. I'm no Ph.D., but it boggles my mind to think what we might be able to learn about ourselves and the world around us from this wealth of data. And I'm certain we'll learn things that none of us now can even possibly conceive. Nate Anderson at ArsTechnica offers this context: There's been a turn toward historicism in academic circles over the last few decades, a turn that emphasizes not just official histories and novels but the diaries of women who never wrote for publication, or the oral histories of soldiers from the Civil War, or the letters written by a sawmill owner. The idea is to better understand the context of a time and place, to understand the way that all kinds of people thought and lived, and to get away from an older scholarship that privileged the productions of (usually) elite males. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said today that there are 105 million registered users on the service. How will those users feel about their tweets being archived for posterity? Will non-U.S. users be included (it is a U.S. based company) and object? Lots of questions remain. There's no word from Twitter itself about this news but we expect details to become public during the Chirp developers conference starting in just a few minutes. Update: Twitter HQ just told us that a blog post about this news is forthcoming. It's hard to imagine a more significant milepost in social media's early march toward becoming an essential component of our social experience. Discuss
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Twitter's Entire Archive Headed to the Library of Congress
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Google's CEO Eric Schmidt addressed the American Society of News Editors yesterday in D.C. As part of an apparent strategy of mollifying the media, he insulted the integrity and professionalism of bloggers and the quality of blogs. You know. Like this one. "There is an art to what you do," he said to the real journalists. "And if you're ever confused as to the value of newspaper editors, look at the blog world. That's all you need to see. So we understand how fundamental tradition and the things you care about are." Sponsor My hand to G-d, I'm not even sure where to begin with this one. First, I am a journalist. I mean an I-worked-for-a-newspaper, I-was-a-stringer-for-Reuters, I-was-a-host-for-NPR, I-freelanced-for-Newsweek type journalist, the sort of journalist our CEO friend was presumably talking about. But I've also been a blogger since 2004. This blog I now write for is in the top ten of blogs for readership and has a sterling rep for...can you guess? JOURNALISM, you blowhard. How many journalists blog? How many bloggers are journalists? How many blogs are chockablock with journalism? This motif of the whirly-eyed blogger in his pajamas was getting stale before I started my blog. (And for the record, I haven't owned pajamas since I was old enough to shave.) "We have goals in common," Schmidt oozed. "Google believes in the power of information. We believe that it's better to have more information than less." Well. It's funny he should mention that. Schmidt, if you've been rusticating outside the Kuiper belt, first attracted journalistic attention, for more than his balliwick as head bean-counter at Google, when he blackballed all CNET journalists . This was a reaction to a journalist doing her job. In response to his pooh-poohing privacy questions, Elinor Mills Googled him and then published what she found. How...dare she? He's also gained some WTF-points by trying to silence his alleged former mistress, Kate Bohmer. She had what appeared to be a fictionalized portrait of him on her blog until he marshaled a horde of lawyer-bots and sicced them on her. But being creepy is not enough to warrant coverage, not on this blog anyway. The problem is, Schmidt's actions create a pattern of hypocrisy in relationship to the information and privacy issues on which he has so frequently pontificated. If Schmidt were the CEO of the world's largest culvert manufacturer, it would hardly matter. But he isn't and it does. Schmidt is a man who guides one of the world's largest online information chaebols . He sets, or influences, policy that affects millions of people. And his Byronesque declamations of Google's position in the moral vanguard of the Internet age seem difficult to countenance when they are set off at every turn with actions that contravene the company's public values. Maybe Google needs some sort of guiding trope, a first-principal that all of its people could refer to; something that, if Google employees found themselves unable to harmonize with it, would oblige them to give notice and maybe run off to develop more efficient well-poisoning systems for orphanages. Something like... DON'T BE EVIL. Discuss
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Google's Schmidt to Bloggers: Drop Dead!
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