Professional Development Meetings

2 May 2012 

The Silicon Valley Google Technology Users Group had a speaker on Google Drive, a new free product. This is an extension of Google Docs, a place in the cloud where you can store all of your files. 5 GB for free.

Google built Google Drive with a software development kit (SDK). This means that developers can create and sell their own applications that store data on Google drive. For example, if someone can make a better online word processor than Google docs, they are free to do that now.

But any kind of file can be stored in Google Drive, so app developers can determine the format that their app will store data in.

If a developer makes a Google Drive app of any kind, they can sell their app in the Chrome Web Store. More about how to do that here:

https://developers.google.com/drive/apps_overview

9 May 2012 

I attended the grand opening of the new IBM Innovation Center in Foster City. This faciity is for IBM partners (i.e. customers) to try out new software and configurations. IBM provides many varieties of platforms for the prototype of new implementations.

There was a lecture on "Big data" by a VP named Anjul Bhambhri. Here are some important points I took away from it:

- Big data coexists with structured (relational) data.

- The scale of Big data is HUGE, and continually growing.

- Any analysis needs an exploratory stage where you look at the free form data to see what you can see.

- An analysis of big data is needed in every vertical market.

- The datastore is so big it can't be moved from one location to another.

- Data must be analyzed in realtime, otherwise results are out of date.

- Apache Hadoop is batch oriented. This is contrasted with Stream computing and data warehousing.

There are lots of free, self-paced classes on these topics available at IBM's big data unversity:
http://bigdatauniversity.com/courses/