“Above the Trend Line” – Your Industry Rumor Central for 4/5/2016

Above the Trend Line: machine learning industry rumor central, is a recurring feature of insideAI News. In this column, we present a variety of short time-critical news items such as people movements, funding news, financial results, industry alignments, rumors and general scuttlebutt floating around the big data, data science and machine learning industries including behind-the-scenes anecdotes and curious buzz. Our intent is to provide our readers a one-stop source of late-breaking news to help keep you abreast of this fast-paced ecosystem. We’re working hard on your behalf with our extensive vendor network to give you all the latest happenings. Heard of something yourself? Tell us! Just e-mail me at: daniel@insideAINews.com.  Be sure to Tweet Above the Trend Line articles using the hashtag: #abovethetrendline.

Just heard in funding news that data Artisans, founded by the original creators of Apache Flink, announced Series A funding of €5.5 million (US $6 million) for its high performance, low-latency data stream processing solutions. Led by Intel Capital with participation from Tengelmann Ventures as well as existing investor b-to-v Partners, this Series A round brings data Artisans’ total funding to date to US $7.3M. The new funding will be used to build better support for users of Apache Flink, and to further develop analytics products based on the Apache Flink advanced Open Source scalable stream data processing framework … We just learned that Pyze emerged from stealth to introduce Pyze Growth Intelligence®, a business intelligence platform enabling mobile app publishers of all sizes to maximize app growth and personalize user engagement, free of charge. The company has also secured $1.7M in seed funding … Neo Technology, creator of a leading graph database, Neo4j, revealed the results of an independent global survey titled, State of The Graph Database. Conducted by Evans Data Corporation, the survey reveals that graph database users most frequently turn to the technology to address and solve business problems. The study also found that performance is the core consideration surrounding their graph database use … As a compelling use case, we found Yandex Data Factory announced that the Bank of Russia is using its machine learning technology to identify unlicensed money lenders, and the websites hosting them. Yandex Data Factory’s custom search algorithm has helped to reveal 2,500 suspicious organizations – successfully assigning a web page to its correct category in 71% of cases; and correctly identifying if an organization is licensed in 98% of cases. As a result, potentially fraudulent organizations will not be overlooked by officials … IBM just unveiled a new deal with Aeroflot to help Russia’s leading airline to apply the latest analytics technologies to personalize the experience of its customers and increase passenger numbers. The new system will use data mining, machine learning and predictive modelling technologies to analyze customer buying behavior from over 300 data points including last purchase, purchase history, number of purchased tickets, destination type and price sensitivity. It enables Aeroflot to create business value from the data within across its organization and create unique customer profiles and an accurate picture of customer lifetime value. The agreement supports Aeroflot’s aggressive growth plan through which it increased traffic across the Aeroflot Group by 13.4% last year to almost 40 million passengers … More people movement has Iron.io, a leading provider of enterprise-grade job processing solutions, announcing the appointment of veteran technology executive Bart Schachter as chief operating officer. In this new role, Schachter will lead the company’s general and administrative expense (finance, legal, human resources), corporate and business development efforts, as well as oversee key go-to-market initiatives and partnerships … EverString uncloaked a new partnership with Microsoft that brings the power of its artificial intelligence-powered platform to Microsoft Dynamics CRM. This integration will help sales and marketing teams increase conversions and boost revenue through advanced predictive analytics technology. It also furthers predictive marketing as a critical piece of intelligent customer engagement solutions … Nutonian (data science app company) announced Jeff Dickerson will join the company as CEO to help lead the growing business and meet demand for Nutonian’s data science applications. Jeff joins Nutonian after serving as the Chairman and CEO of The Neat Company, where he led corporate strategy and managed operating functions including finance, technology, marketing, sales and administration … Commenting about the major shift in hybrid cloud strategies and companies expanding beyond just AWS as seen at last week’s Strata and Google’s Cloud conference, Chris Sharp, CTO of Digital Realty, observes – “Hybrid cloud strategies enable companies to gain control over the data, as well as utilize the flexibility and elasticity of the public cloud to move quickly, especially as speed and performance are increasingly becoming differentiators. Being able to efficiently access, analyze, and exchange data quickly is a big win for companies who are dealing with exabytes of data. As more and more companies become data companies, the amount and the diversity of data sets will necessitate hybrid cloud strategies for SaaS companies to operate successfully and execute on action. Because we are becoming a more data enriched environment, the amount of data is astronomical. You have to have space and the ability to land and expand the environment” … Rumor has it that MapD Technologies just received $10 million in series A from Nvidia, Google Ventures, among others. MapD has developed a new database and analytics platform is orders of magnitude faster than competing solutions, due to its use of GPU processing to accelerate queries … In big data tech news, Qubole, the big data-as-a-service company, today announced that it has open sourced Quark, a cost-based SQL optimizer that helps to simplify and optimize access to data for data analysts. Traditionally, the data sets generated by data teams are aggregated and copied to multiple analytics systems to balance performance and cost, making it near impossible to query the data in a way that can quickly inform business decisions. Quark simplifies and optimizes access to data by managing relationships between tables across an organization’s databases … OMG, the WSO2 Deep Huge Project predicts a 99.4% chance of presidential win for Donald Trump if Arnold Schwarzenegger joins ticket as VP candidate! … In start-up news, we heard that the Techstars Healthcare Accelerator, in partnership with Cedars-Sinai, announced that 11 companies have been selected to participate in its inaugural class. From mobile health solutions to new devices and disruptive services, these innovative healthcare-focused startups are working to transform health and healthcare delivery as part of the Los Angeles-based accelerator program. Included in the class is Deep 6 Analytics, a company that analyzes unstructured data to build cutting-edge artificial intelligence applications for healthcare … Pitney Bowes unveiled a new solution that addresses the issue of veracity by helping organizations quickly design, deliver and evolve contextually-relevant views about a customer. The new capabilities will allow the processing of data quality checks to move directly inside Hadoop-based environments, and ensure organizations derive relevant and meaningful insights from these platforms with a complete and accurate view of customer information. Explore the power of big data cleaning with the Spectrum Technology Platform from Pitney Bowes …

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