Welcome!

From the Founder and CEO, Cloudscale Inc.

Bill McColl

Subscribe to Bill McColl: eMailAlertsEmail Alerts
Get Bill McColl via: homepageHomepage mobileMobile rssRSS facebookFacebook twitterTwitter linkedinLinkedIn


Top Stories by Bill McColl

Over the next few years, the "realtime commerce" space is set to experience phenomenal growth. Companies such as One Kings Lane, Groupon, LivingSocial, Ideeli and others are developing a whole set of new retail business models. Others such as Amazon and Netflix are developing ever more powerful recommendation engines, and a huge number of companies are looking to develop more accurate models for personalization and targeted advertising. A new "realtime commerce" revolution is underway that will be as profound a shift for the business world as the eCommerce revolution of the 1990s. To be successful in realtime commerce, companies will have to put in place a whole raft of new capabilities, many or most of which will require, and be powered by, new realtime big data analytics platforms. The winners in data-driven realtime commerce will be those that can best handle som... (more)

The Client-plus-Cloud Revolution

Data is growing exponentially everywhere - in business, web, finance, government, science, and in the world of sensors and smart grids. Speaking earlier this week at OSBC, Tim O'Reilly said  "The future will be all about who has most data, and who is able to extract meaning from it and deliver it in real time".  He noted that the IT industry is now in the process of being reinvented around the idea of realtime analysis of "Big Data" in the cloud, as a must-have adjunct to the much more limited kinds of data processing and analytics that can be performed on desktop PCs or mobile d... (more)

Cloud Analytics: Dataflow vs Databases

For twenty years, analytics has been viewed as just one specific area within the broader relational database industry. So, analytics has meant databases. Today that view is changing. Over the past year or so, a new movement, the "NoSQL" movement has emerged promoting the advantages of doing a variety of kinds of analytics without using any relational database technologies at all. Whatever one thinks of the capabilities and limitations of distributed key-value stores relative to relational databases, one thing is clear - the stranglehold that SQL has held over all aspects of data an... (more)

Excel Meets The Cloud

Cloudcel on Ulitzer Data is revolutionizing how we live and work, and it's growing exponentially everywhere. Faced with this information explosion, experienced programmers are now using parallel processing tools such as MapReduce/Hadoop, rather than SQL databases, to analyze large repositories of stored, historical data. The next major step in this direction is to bring the full power of advanced data mining and analytics, realtime stream processing, and massively parallel computing to everyone, not just to experienced programmers. The cloud is central to bringing about this radi... (more)

Cloud Computing for Everyone

Early Bird at CLoud Expo In computing, big revolutions happen whenever a new technology comes along that enables everyone to do something that could previously only be done by a small number of technology experts, or only by those with tons of money and technical talent. Personal computing (Microsoft, Apple), Publishing (Adobe), Search (Google), Video (YouTube), News/Journalism (blogs) are all examples of this kind of disruptive revolutionary change. What's the next big game changer? In a word - Apps! We are about to move to an era in which everyone will be able to build their o... (more)