Former Yahoo! and BEA Executive Joins Cloudera Board of Directors

June 3, 2010 By Leave a Comment

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, Jun 02 (MARKET WIRE) —
Cloudera, the commercial Apache Hadoop company, today announced that
software industry veteran Scott Dietzen is joining its Board of
Directors. A former senior executive at Yahoo!, Zimbra and BEA Systems,
Dietzen brings a wealth of experience and leadership to Cloudera.

“Dietzen had a hand in establishing the web application platform category
with WebLogic and in the open source and Web 2.0 waves with Zimbra,” said
Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera. “His experience growing innovative tech
startups into wildly successful software businesses will be a tremendous
asset to Cloudera.”

Dietzen has extensive leadership experience, having helped build, sell,
and transition three major Internet technology companies. Most recently,
he was SVP, Applications at Yahoo!, where his responsibilities included
Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Flickr, Answers, Groups, and Zimbra. He came to
Yahoo! via the acquisition of open source email startup Zimbra, where he
served as President and CTO. Before that Dietzen was CTO of BEA Systems
– acquired by Oracle in 2008 — which he came to with the acquisition of
Java and web application server pioneer WebLogic. Dietzen holds a Ph.D.
in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon.

“I have been very lucky in getting to work with hugely talented teams on
transformative technologies that address essential and growing business
needs,” said Dietzen. “Cloudera is in precisely this sweet spot — the
Hadoop technology family has the chance to redefine how enterprises deal
with exponentially growing data, and thereby deliver substantially more
compelling and more customized products and services.”

Cloudera provides products, professional services, technical support and
training that complement the popular Apache Hadoop open-source software
package, enabling enterprises to lower their data-processing costs and
get more value from the information they collect and generate. Hadoop is
widely used in finance, government, telecom, media and entertainment,
technology, research institutions and other markets.

About Cloudera
Cloudera (www.cloudera.com), the commercial Hadoop
company, delivers the scalable platform for a new generation of
data-intensive applications. Founded by leading experts on big data from
Facebook, Google, Oracle and Yahoo!, Cloudera helps traditional
enterprises tap into the power of Hadoop. Headquartered in Silicon
Valley, Cloudera has financial backing from Accel Partners, Greylock
Partners and angel investors who include Diane Greene (former CEO of
VMware), Marten Mickos (former CEO of MySQL), and Jeff Weiner (CEO of
LinkedIn).

Media Contact
Ray George
Page One PR
Phone: 650-922-3825
Email: ray@pageonepr.com

Copyright 2010, Market Wire, All rights reserved.

Filed Under: International News Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Former Yahoo! and BEA Executive Joins Cloudera Board of Directors

June 3, 2010 By Leave a Comment

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, Jun 02 (MARKET WIRE) —
Cloudera, the commercial Apache Hadoop company, today announced that
software industry veteran Scott Dietzen is joining its Board of
Directors. A former senior executive at Yahoo!, Zimbra and BEA Systems,
Dietzen brings a wealth of experience and leadership to Cloudera.

“Dietzen had a hand in establishing the web application platform category
with WebLogic and in the open source and Web 2.0 waves with Zimbra,” said
Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera. “His experience growing innovative tech
startups into wildly successful software businesses will be a tremendous
asset to Cloudera.”

Dietzen has extensive leadership experience, having helped build, sell,
and transition three major Internet technology companies. Most recently,
he was SVP, Applications at Yahoo!, where his responsibilities included
Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Flickr, Answers, Groups, and Zimbra. He came to
Yahoo! via the acquisition of open source email startup Zimbra, where he
served as President and CTO. Before that Dietzen was CTO of BEA Systems
– acquired by Oracle in 2008 — which he came to with the acquisition of
Java and web application server pioneer WebLogic. Dietzen holds a Ph.D.
in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon.

“I have been very lucky in getting to work with hugely talented teams on
transformative technologies that address essential and growing business
needs,” said Dietzen. “Cloudera is in precisely this sweet spot — the
Hadoop technology family has the chance to redefine how enterprises deal
with exponentially growing data, and thereby deliver substantially more
compelling and more customized products and services.”

Cloudera provides products, professional services, technical support and
training that complement the popular Apache Hadoop open-source software
package, enabling enterprises to lower their data-processing costs and
get more value from the information they collect and generate. Hadoop is
widely used in finance, government, telecom, media and entertainment,
technology, research institutions and other markets.

About Cloudera
Cloudera (www.cloudera.com), the commercial Hadoop
company, delivers the scalable platform for a new generation of
data-intensive applications. Founded by leading experts on big data from
Facebook, Google, Oracle and Yahoo!, Cloudera helps traditional
enterprises tap into the power of Hadoop. Headquartered in Silicon
Valley, Cloudera has financial backing from Accel Partners, Greylock
Partners and angel investors who include Diane Greene (former CEO of
VMware), Marten Mickos (former CEO of MySQL), and Jeff Weiner (CEO of
LinkedIn).

Media Contact
Ray George
Page One PR
Phone: 650-922-3825
Email: ray@pageonepr.com

Copyright 2010, Market Wire, All rights reserved.

Filed Under: International News Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Twitter sentiments may soon replace public opinion polls

May 12, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Washington, May 12 (ANI): The next time you want to get a quick read on the public”s opinion on politics or current events, consider sampling Twitter.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have determined that, at least in some instances, combing Twitter for data can be as good a way of researching opinions as conducting an actual poll.

Computer analysis of sentiments expressed in a billion Twitter messages during 2008-2009 yielded measures of consumer confidence and of presidential job approval similar to those of well-established public opinion polls, the researchers report.

Noah Smith, assistant professor of language technologies and machine learning in the School of Computer Science, said that the findings suggest that analyzing the text found in streams of tweets could become a cheap, rapid means of gauging public opinion on at least some subjects.

He, however, warned that tools for extracting public opinion from social media text are still crude and social media remain in their infancy, so the extent to which these methods could replace or supplement traditional polling is still unknown.

“With seven million or more messages being tweeted each day, this data stream potentially allows us to take the temperature of the population very quickly,” Smith said.

“The results are noisy, as are the results of polls. Opinion pollsters have learned to compensate for these distortions, while we”re still trying to identify and understand the noise in our data. Given that, I”m excited that we get any signal at all from social media that correlates with the polls,” Smith added.

The study findings will be presented May 25 at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence”s International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media in Washington, D.C. (ANI)

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Screening of porn flick by students threatens college funding

April 9, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, Apr 9 (ANI): A porn flick has been receiving stiff resistance from critics, who have said that universities should not be paying for the screening of such smut.

But the film’s supporters have fought back saying that it does not fit the legal definition of obscenity, and that schools have a First Amendment right to show it.

The movie ‘Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge’ produced by Digital Playground has been airing on campuses is unrated, although Digital Playground has produced an R-rated version.

Colleges that have screened the film are the University of California-Davis, UCLA, Carnegie-Mellon, the University of Maryland and Northwestern University.

The screenings usually include discussions led by Planned Parenthood or professors on First Amendment rights and pornography.

But the University of Maryland’s planned screening has infuriated one state lawmaker, who tried to pass legislation to withhold school funding for universities that don’t develop policies that note “the serious social and health concerns associated with screening pornographic film.”

Sen. Andrew Harris tried to attach his proposal April 8 to force the governing boards of the state’s public universities to adopt policies on pornography before the schools receive any capital funds for the next fiscal year.

“The health problem with pornography is not birth control,” Fox News quoted Harris as saying of Planned Parenthood’s participation.

He noted that porn creates addicts, breaks up families and degrades men and women.

“Our taxpayers think it is a misuse of taxpayer funds,” he stated.

Harris’ effort did not survive a 35-12 vote favouring a ruling by state Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. that the amendment was out of order.

Harris offered his amendment despite a decision made by a panel of lawmakers Tuesday to require public colleges to submit policies concerning the screening of pornographic films by Sept. 1.

Legislators inserted the provision in the separate operating budget, but that provision does not include financial ramifications for failure to comply.

Robert Shibley, vice president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), said the movie doesn’t rise to the level of obscenity and is therefore protected by free speech rights.

He added that it’s not the place for the state to determine how student clubs use their funds.

“We’re very concerned about the Maryland Legislature interfering, and here’s the reason why,” he said.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that this movie is pornographic in nature but I think there is a very active question about whether this movie constitutes obscenity in any sense.

“I don’t think this would be found to be obscene in the legal sense under the Miller v. California test because I do think this has artistic value.

“I am not comfortable with the government deciding what kind of art has value and what does not.

Using state money as a leverage is also a “red herring,” he said, because state money is not being used to show the film.

“Student clubs are almost always funded through mandatory student fees … The Supreme Court has ruled that those fees aren’t actually funding for the schools” so “the university can’t impose its viewpoint on how they spend those fees, neither can the student government,” Shibley added. (ANI)

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Cricket gets serious in the US again

March 25, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Florida (US), Mar.25 (ANI): The game of cricket is getting serious attention again in the United States these days, more than a century after it first made its presence felt in the region.

Players taking part in the recently held American College Spring Break Cricket Championship in Florida feel they have brought the sport one step closer into the American mainstream.

Though cricket counts its fans by the billion worldwide, the sport does not register a pulse in the United States.

Of the five teams in attendance at this experimental event last weekend – Montgomery, from Maryland; Boston University; Carnegie Mellon, from Pittsburgh; the University of South Florida and the University of Miami, none have club team status, and the sport is not officially recognized by the N.C.A.A.

“This is an opportunity for us to really show athletic directors at a Division I level that cricket matters, cricket is a big sport and cricket has a marketing capability in this country,” the New York Times quoted Sumantro Das, an all-rounder and junior at Boston University, as saying.

Nearly 60 players drove or flew at their own expense to the lush cricket pitches of Central Broward Regional Park and played Twenty20, a version of cricket in which many stuffy traditions are left behind and matches are completed in about three hours instead of taking up to five days.

The only custom-built cricket stadium in the United States stands in this park, but securing the 5,000-seat facility was far too rich a luxury for the tournament’s shoestring budget.

Competing on the park’s manicured fields was already an upgrade over the converted soccer fields and tennis courts the players were used to.

Lloyd Jodah, the founder and president of American College Cricket, said the idea for the college tournament came to him last year as he campaigned to have cricket included in the Olympics.

Standing on Wall Street with a cricket bat in one hand and petitions in the other, Jodah, 50, an immigrant from Guyana who works selling health club memberships, met Kalpesh Patel, a Jamaican business student from the University of Miami.

Once Jodah heard how difficult it was for college cricketers to find regular games, he began toying with the idea of a nation-wide organization for collegiate clubs and founded American College Cricket. He made a group on Facebook as a way to reach out to players.

Jodah and Nino DiLoreto, 62, a former soccer player from Abruzzi, Italy, spent many evenings tracking down college cricket players, and the group swelled to more than 500 members.

At the Boston University Cricket Club, expenses for the trip became the subject of six- and seven-hour meetings. After much deliberation, and financial help from the university, the roughly dozen members agreed that the opportunity to play for a long weekend was worth 400 dollars each.

Unlike a couple of the teams, which had snazzy uniforms, the University of South Florida contingent did not even have a team until a few weeks ago. They were just a few guys who played a regular pickup game. They settled on sweatpants and green T-shirts from the college bookstore. Not having names on their shirts caused a few awkward moments when a player would run to the borrowed picnic table/scorer’s table with no idea of which of his new team mates was batting next.

But the players all knew the finer points of cricket etiquette.

Nearly all the players were born abroad. And even though the sport had a rich history in the United States until World War II, it is still widely seen here as an obscure game played exclusively by foreigners. Most who play it here are from countries that belonged to the British Commonwealth. (ANI)

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