Cloudera acquires Datapad; has Python client for Impala (SQL on Hadoop)

By Vasudev Ram

Saw this via a tweet by GigaOm.

Cloudera has acquired Datapad.

GigaOm article about it:

Cloudera bought DataPad because data scientists need tooling, too

Summary of the GigaOm article about the acquisition:

[ Cloudera has acquired a data-visualization startup called DataPad, the founding team of which specializes in data analysis using the Python programming language [1]. As Hadoop competition heats up, Cloudera might be ramping up its Python tooling in order to attract more data scientists and developers. ]

[1] The founders of DataPad (Wes McKinney and Chang She) are also the creators of the pandas Python library for data analysis.

Here are a few other interesting links related to Cloudera buying Datapad:

A New Python Client for Impala

I had blogged earlier about Cloudera's Impala engine that allows SQL querying of Hadoop data:

Cloudera's Impala engine - SQL querying of Hadoop data

SQL coming to Hadoop

Cloudera: Impala’s it for interactive SQL on Hadoop; everything else will move to Spark

Apache Spark - "Lightning-fast cluster computing"

Apache Spark page on Wikipedia

WIRED magazine article about Apache Spark:

Open Source Superstar Rewrites Future of Big Data

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Google to acquire Nest for $3.2 billion?

By Vasudev Ram

Saw the news here on Hacker News, and then read the post on Google's site:

Google to Acquire Nest

Excerpt from that Google page:

[ MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA – JANUARY 13, 2014 — Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced today that it has entered into an agreement to buy Nest Labs, Inc. for $3.2 billion in cash.

Nest’s mission is to reinvent unloved but important devices in the home such as thermostats and smoke alarms. Since its launch in 2011, the Nest Learning Thermostat has been a consistent best seller--and the recently launched Protect (Smoke + CO Alarm) has had rave reviews. ]

So it looks like the news is true - I thought at first it might be a joke of some sort.

TechCrunch article about it:

Google Is Buying Connected Device Company Nest For $3.2B In Cash

The Hacker News thread about the acquisition of Nest by Google, has someone mentioning how this ties in with the Internet of Things.

Coincidentally, I had talked just recently about the Internet of Things, in this post:

websocketd and Python for system monitoring - the JavaScript WebSocket client,

which in turn referred to this post:

PTC Acquires ThingWorx, Internet of Things Platform Provider

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Dropbox buys Snapjoy

Dropbox Acquires Snapjoy And Puts Photos Into Its Focus - TechCrunch

Google buys BufferBox

Google snaps up Waterloo startup BufferBox

Interesting - was not aware of this variant of e-commerce earlier.

HN thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4854648

Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

By Vasudev Ram

Seen via this Hacker News thread:

Priceline.com acquiring travel company KAYAK for $1.8B.

Sramana Mitra has blogged about Kayak in the past.

The NextWeb article above says that one of the founders of Kayak was earlier at Orbitz: "Kayak was launched in 2004 by Steve Hafner of Orbitz, Terrell Jones of Travelocity and Greg Slyngstad of Expedia."

The Wikipedia article about Orbitz (linked above), says that Orbitz licenses ITA Software's Lisp-powered QPX software to power their site. ITA Software was acquired by Google a while ago, and I've heard that they have / had a large number of Lisp developers working for them.

The Wikipedia Orbitz article also says that "Orbitz runs on a Red Hat Linux, Sun Solaris based platform and was an early adopter of Sun's Jini platform in a clustered Java environment.".

I did know about Jini from the earlier Sun days :), but hadn't checked it out. Interesting to see that Jini is now called Apache River, and that Ken Arnold was one of its architects. Ken was a big contributor to UNIX. See linked Wikipedia article.

I like this Ken Arnold quote:

"Every program has at least one bug and can be shortened by at least one instruction — from which, by induction, it is evident that every program can be reduced to one instruction that does not work."


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Job site Indeed.com acquired by Recruit Co. Ltd. of Japan

Indeed Announces Acquisition by Recruit Co. Ltd of Japan

Google acquires Snapseed / Nik Software

By Vasudev Ram


Mashable article about Google acquiring Nik Software, makers of Snapseed, "one of the most sophisticated photo-editing and enhancement apps on the market".

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Google buys VirusTotal anti-virus provider

Google beefs up its security by acquiring online virus scanner VirusTotal - The Next Web

I had blogged some time ago about VirusTotal, IIRC, on my earlier blog jugad.livejournal.com .

LinkedIn to buy SlideShare

http://blog.slideshare.net/2012/05/03/linkedin-acquires-slideshare-2/

Twitter acquiring Posterous

Twitter is  going to acquire Posterous:

http://blog.posterous.com/big-news

Seen on HN. Could be interesting. I like the email-to-blog-post feature of Google's Blogger, have used it a lot, and have often thought that an email-to-tweet feature would be useful for Twitter (as also similar features for other services). IIRC, I tried one such feature either, from Twitter or a third party,  a while ago, but it did not work well. The Posterous acquisition might mean that that feature will come. Hope so.

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