Business

The data scientist is a mystical spirit. A wizard, whose skills are fired in the deep unknown of a developer’s lair. Their secrets are worth the gold of a million empires.They possess the keys to eternity.They have pet dragons. Not! It’s time to take away the staff and stop thinking of data scientists as lord wizards of middle earth lore. The reality is something much different as business intelligence provider SiSense found in a study it recently commissioned about the state of the data professional market. It’s important to consider the source with commissioned surveys. Obviously, SiSense has an interest in providing business intelligence solutions to companies. But the survey they funded does have findings that provides insights into the data professional market. It’s true that data scientists are highly sought after. And there are more people who want to have the job. What companies need to do better is look at the overall data professional market. By doing that they may find tha...

Editor’s note: Nadav Gur is the founder and CEO of  Desti , a virtual personal assistant for travel incubated by SRI. Previously, he was founder and CEO of Worldmate, the first mobile travel app. “Any fool can know. The point is to understand.” –Albert Einstein Since the launch of Siri on the iPhone 4S last year, the media has been abuzz with the potential implications of what’s next – from Google’s Eric Schmidt commenting that Siri poses a great threat to Google, to countless articles by VCs and thought leaders. Has artificial intelligence finally come of age? And is it ready for broader applications in industries ranging from travel to finance? Are we destined to grapple with fast-following Siri clone after Siri clone, or will the category evolve? Siri excels at setting reminders (and a little less so at ordering Scottish lunches). But is she ultimately more than a better front-end for basic smartphone functions? This post is about changing how we use computers to manage knowledge...

Today Bitly announced a new Bitly Labs project called Realtime, a service for finding the most clicked on Bitly links. Realtime, now in private beta, allows users to filter searches by social network, keyword, subject and more. For example, here are the results for a search for the keyword “startups” in technology on Twitter: As you can see, it’s not perfect yet (why is that article on hidden Mountain Lion features being displayed on a search for startups?). But with Bitly’s traction in URL shortening, this could become the go to reference for trending articles and sites. Bitly has been working on expanding its business beyond URL shortening in recent months and announced a new round of funding lead by Khosla Ventures earlier this month. In May the site launched a controversial redesign that recast the service as a bookmarking service rather than just a URL shortening service, and in January it launched an updated version of its enterprise dashboarding service. But the really big ide...

Matt is currently working as a writer for TechCrunch. Matt Burns is a family man first and attempts to be a writer second. Born and raised in the heart of the automotive world, only cars eclipse his love of gadgets. He previously wrote for Engadget and EngadgetHD before moving into the party house that is TechCrunch. He learned the retail... ? Learn More Google is going vertical. In the latest revision of its search page, Google moved the search tools from the sidebar to several drop down menus under the search field. This is just the latest of several notable changes to Google’s core function that also included adding a fully functional scientific calculator to the search page and enabling a handwriting mode in mobile search. This new version is slowly rolling out to users. TechCrunch was first tipped about the layout this morning and I just spied it on my computer a few minutes ago. I’m honestly torn over the new design. On one hand I love the vertical layout. My mind never fully e...

Matt is currently working as a writer for TechCrunch. Matt Burns is a family man first and attempts to be a writer second. Born and raised in the heart of the automotive world, only cars eclipse his love of gadgets. He previously wrote for Engadget and EngadgetHD before moving into the party house that is TechCrunch. He learned the retail... ? Learn More Oh Google. Sometimes you’re so awesome. Google search has long featured a built-in calculator function but a recent update added a fully functional 34-button scientific calculator. Previously, when a user entered, say, 2+2, Google would simply display the sum above the search result. Now, when that equation is entered into the search bar, the answer pops up along with the new calculator. Best of all, this works in mobile browsers and voice search, too. This isn’t a stripped down calculator, either. It’s a full-power, voice-enabled scientific calculator with nearly all the functions of a tangible model. Plus, it doesn’t require two AA...

Ingrid is a reporter for TechCrunch, joining February 2012, based out of London. She comes from paidContent.org, where she was a staff writer, and has in the past also written freelance regularly for other publications such as the Financial Times. Ingrid covers mobile, digital media, advertising and the spaces where these intersect. When it comes to work, she feels most... ? Learn More Search is going very strong in China, and leading player Baidu continues to reap the benefits. In its Q2 results, the company reported sales of 5.456 billion yuan ($858.8 million), up 59.8 percent compared to the same quarter in 2011. The company’s chairman and chief exec, Robin Li, said in a statement that Baidu will “maintain momentum” going forward by investing in new technology, new talent, and more products specifically geared to mobile and cloud services. But these are long-term strategies: for all intents and purposes, just about all of Baidu’s revenues today are coming from online advertising a...

Wajam, one of the most promising players in social search besides Google and Microsoft, today announced that it is partnering with Shopping.com to add comparison shopping to its social search results. With this, the browser plugin now goes beyond just showing you relevant social media posts from your friends when you use one the major search engines and look at sites like Yelp, YouTube, Tripadvisor, Amazon and eBay. Once installed, this update will show alternative shopping destinations and their prices right next to your friends opinions about a product when you shop online. The Montreal-based company indexes all the public tweets and status updates from your friends on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Wajam then uses its proprietary algorithms to rank this data and displays it next to your regular search results whenever you search on a supported site. With today’s update, the company now also lets users comparison shop right from every supported site. This, says Wajam founder and CE...

I wrote last week that GitHub is the Library of Alexandria of code. That’s not quite accurate since there are still many important open source projects hosted else where, including other repositories like Sourceforge as well as open source foundations like the Apache. Google Code Search, introduced in 2006 was meant to make it easy to search for open source code no matter where it’s stored, but Google recently pulled the plug on the service this year. The team at Black Duck hopes its recently relaunched Ohloh site will fill that gap. Black Duck Director of Developer Marketing Dave Gruber explains that the new version of Ohloh will replace Koders, a code search engine that Black Duck has operated since before the launch of Google Code Search. Black Duck makes money through its products and services for companies that use open source, such as a code auditing service that checks to make sure that open source licenses are being followed correctly. Gruber says that while Google shut down ...