Consider this scenario: You walk into a building and a sensor identifies you through your mobile phone. You then receive a welcoming text telling you when lunch will be served, or perhaps a health warning based on allergy information you’ve stored in your profile. Maybe you’ll be flagged as a security threat. How is that possible? This O’Reilly report explores ambient computing—hands-free, 24/7 wireless connectivity to hardware, data, and IT systems. Enabling that scenario requires a lot of work behind the scenes to determine network connectivity, device security, and personal privacy. With an ambient-computing technology stack already in the works, resolving those issues is only a matter of time. Through interviews with front-line tech pioneers—including Ari Gesher (Kairos Aerospace) and Matthew Gast (Aerohive Networks)—author Mike Barlow explores how real-time analytics can enable real-time decision making. How will simple beacons broadcast information to your phone as you pass businesses on your morning walk? How can emotional speech analysis monitor the emotional state of employees, students, or people in crowds? Pick up this report and find out.

Technology does not exist in a vacuum. In the same way that a plant needs water and nourishment to grow, technology needs people and process to thrive and succeed. Culture (i.e., people and process) is integral and critical to the success of any new technology deployment or implementation. Big data is not just a technology phenomenon. It has a cultural dimension. It's vitally important to remember that most people have not considered the immense difference between a world seen through the lens of a traditional relational database system and a world seen through the lens of a Hadoop Distributed File System.This paper broadly describes the cultural challenges that accompany efforts to create and sustain big data initiatives in an evolving world whose data management processes are rooted firmly in traditional data warehouse architectures.

Five or six years ago, analysts working with big datasets made queries and got the results back overnight. The data world was revolutionized a few years ago when Hadoop and other tools made it possible to getthe results from queries in minutes. But the revolution continues. Analysts now demand sub-second, near real-time query results. Fortunately, we have the tools to deliver them. This report examines tools and technologies that are driving real-time big data analytics.