“Above the Trend Line” – Your Industry Rumor Central for 11/28/2016

Above the Trend Line: AI, machine learning and deep 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 industry including behind-the-scenes anecdotes and curious buzz. Our intent is to provide our readers a one-stop source for 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.

In new funding news, we’ll start with PatSnap, a technology solution provider of innovation intelligence to Fortune 500 R&D teams, today announced it has closed its Series C funding. The round was led by Sequoia Capital, and Shunwei Capital and Qualgro also participated. This funding round puts PatSnap amongst an elite group of B2B SaaS companies to close their Series C round this year. The strength of PatSnap’s intelligence platform lies in its ability to comprehend the entire R&D life cycle of a technology company’s intangible assets – from idea generation and research, through product development and commercialization. For many of PatSnap’s customers, their intangible assets, including intellectual property, could account for up to 80% of the company’s value. However, prior to using PatSnap, these companies did not have a strategy to make sense of these assets. With advanced deep learning capabilities applied across globally dispersed datasets such as patent and trademark registrations, PatSnap customers can reach actionable insights without prior knowledge of complex IP data structures, unlocking innovation opportunities faster than ever. Founded by CEO Jeffrey Tiong, the company spent several years building early versions of the PatSnap platform within an accelerator program at the National University of Singapore. PatSnap now has offices in London, China and Singapore, operating in 40 industries and serving over 3,000 customers worldwide, including NASA, Vodafone, L’Oreal and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. PatSnap has earlier raised a Series A of US$3.6 million in 2014 and a Series B of US$11 million in 2015 … ArangoDB GmbH, the company behind one of the fastest growing next generation databases, has landed a 2.2 million Euro investment led by Munich-based venture capital firm Target Partners. The company develops the open-source NoSQL database ArangoDB, which combines three major data models (graph, key/value, JSON-documents) in one database and one query language. ArangoDB’s product allows startups and enterprises alike to speed up their innovation cycles, simplify their technology stack and increase on-time and on-budget delivery of software projects.

In the new products, services and solutions department we learned that MapR Technologies, Inc., provider of the Converged Data Platform, announced the immediate availability of the MapR Customer 360 Quick Start Solution powered by the MapR Converged Data Platform.  Using advanced, real-time analytics to deliver hyper-relevance at the point of sale, social interaction or e-commerce site, marketing organizations can engage with MapR data scientists to deploy the MapR Converged Data Platform on their road to digital transformation. The core of the Customer 360 QSS is to plan and execute machine learning models to address key digital marketing imperatives for the CMO.

In the area of new partnerships and integrations, we heard about Panoply.io, the data management for analytics company that enables customers to seamlessly implement a self-optimizing analytics cloud infrastructure, announcing its partnership with Stitch, an ETL service built for developers.   This integration provides free one-click access to a managed Redshift instance for both new and existing customers of either or both companies. This integration will allow customers using Stitch’s simple, powerful ETL services to connect to Panoply’s self-optimizing data warehouse, in one click from inside of Stitch. These customers can now easily and affordably provision their data analytics infrastructure,  with a Redshift-powered Panoply.io instance,  completely free for up to 5 million rows.

In M&A activity this past week, rumor has it that HPC, storage and data analytics integrator, OCF, has acquired a majority share of Intense Computing Ltd, a provider of data and analytics consultancy and solutions. Intense Computing will be a subsidiary company of OCF Plc and is being renamed OCF DATA Limited, strengthening and enhancing OCF’s data and analytics service for customers. The growth in data and analytics together with the Internet of Things (IoT) is estimated to add £322bn to the UK economy by 2020, in addition to creating 182,000 new jobs, according to research carried out by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR). Its report was based on 409 interviews with senior UK decision makers, as well as official government data. OCF DATA Limited is led by Prof Cliff Brereton (co-founder Intense Computing Limited), former Director of the Hartree Centre, the World’s largest high performance and data analytics centre devoted to delivering industry focused solutions. OCF DATA Limited develops transformative solutions using data and analytics for customers, specifically in manufacturing, health, education, construction and Government.

And in new designations, we learned that Talend (NASDAQ:TLND), a leader in cloud and big data integration software, announced that Forrester Research recognized the company as a “Leader” in its newly published report, “The Forrester Wave™: Big Data Fabric, Q4 2016.” In naming Talend a “Leader,” Forrester reports that Talend “offers a big data fabric that delivers high scale and performance and supports various big data use cases.” According to Forrester Research the big data fabric “market is growing largely because EA pros see big data fabric as a strategic platform to support their next-generation applications and insights. When selecting a solution, enterprises should look for scale-out architecture, security, automation, and cost as the key factors.” In a separate report, Forrester also estimates that 100% of large enterprises will adopt Hadoop and/or related big data technologies such as Spark for big data analytics by 2018.

And finally, our Vendor of the Week is The NYC Data Science Academy (NYCDSA), regarded as one of the top data science boot camps in the US, announcing a new online education program called Remote Data Science Bootcamp. The full or part-time program offers a complete and comprehensive data science curriculum, interaction with peers and faculty, and job placement assistance for students anywhere in the world with an internet connection who wants to become a data scientist.

 

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