My Reading Highlights 11/11 - 11/17

I haven't had much time to catch up on many interesting articles this week.   Here are a few that I found interesting.

Is Trend Following Dead

This was a pretty lengthy read which probably suck all the available time I had to find other interesting topics but I thought it was an interesting discussion on Managed Futures.  In other terms predictive analytics.  This article comes from an commodity investment point of view and provides some valuable thoughts in following the trend line and when trends are not the best indicator due to volatility   

Now THIS is the 'Right Way' to Start a Company

Having started my own business and knowing all too well the pains that go along with it I found this Business Insider post pretty spot on.  I agree with the characteristics they pointed out as the right approach when talking about a new start up called Percolate:

There are a few things Gross and Brier did in their startup's earliest days that set them up for success.

• They each worked for marketing companies before founding Percolate.
• When they had enough knowledge and industry connections, they quit.
• They bootstrapped until they proved their model.
• The used outside capital to step on the gas.

My Reading Highlights 11/4/2012 - 11/10/2012

A great deal went on this week with election results in the US flooding Internet news reports.  Even tech journalists got into action explaining how lack of focus on mobile was a key factor in the election.  Reporting on hurricane Sandy and the cleanup and restoring of power in the North East continued.  Moving past these reporting channels there were some good tech reading to be had. Below are my reading highlights for this week.  Enjoy.

As Sandy Strikes, another big data opportunity emerges

Generally I'm not a big fan of these types of posts on the Internet.  It's basically a product advertisement with little substance. I made an exception with this one where Derrick Harris from GigaOm introduced two new companies in the big data area that I wasn't tracking:  SiSense and Datum Companies.  I was especially interested in SiSense's description of Management and Mashup Data features.  I'll be looking more into SiSense and seeing how it can help with analytic operations for my clients.

Big Data Right Now: Five Trendy Open Source Technologies

Tim Gasper provides a good run down on some open source technologies in the big data arena.   Two areas he mention are stream processing (noting Storm and Kafka) and graphs analyses (Gremlin and Giraph).  Both play a unique role in some specific application areas and are work a look if you are playing in this world.

As data gets bigger, what comes after a yottabyte?

I guess they are saying it is a brontobyte and gegobyte.  In any event it is a lot of data.  New fact here in this article if the one of the Boeing jet engines which produce 20 terebytes of data every hour.  Anyone that has tried to move multi-terabytes of data knows the difficulty; not to mention how long it takes to offload and ingest for analytics. 

Samsung Chromebook Review (2012)

I have to admit that I'm a big fan of the Chromebook.  I've been using the 550 with 3G exclusively since Aug 2012 when I ditched my 13" Macbook Air.  Samsung released a newer model recently priced at $249.  This was the best review that I've seen so far on the new Chromebook.

REVIEW: Google's Latest Smartphone, The Nexus 4

I've have been waiting half a year for this phone to be release.  The problem is that it was released with no LTE.  What a disappointment.  Here's a great review from Business Insider on the Nexus 4 which sounds like a great phone running the latest Jelly Bean OS.  But no LTE.....