With competition in mobile payments heating up, Square continues to expand its offerings for small businesses to other areas where local merchants are missing out compared to big retailers and franchises.

Providing the metadata for movies and TV shows (cast list, plot descriptions, thumbnails, etc.) is big business, and it’s one that Gracenote is serious about leading.

MapR Technologies, Inc., provider of the top-ranked distribution for Apache™ Hadoop®, today announced at the Tableau Conference, breakthrough performance results achieved using standard open source software, OpenTSDB, running on the MapR Distribution. Using only four-nodes of a 10-node cluster, the MapR Distribution with its in-Hadoop NoSQL database, MapR-DB, ingested over 100 million data points per second.

Today Twitter unveiled Flight, a conferenced created specifically for mobile app developers.

Long ago, companies recognized the importance of effectively managing employee identities, data and permissions to help streamline company processes and protect valuable business assets.

Twitter says analytics are for everyone — not just advertisers and verified users.

Upsight, a mobile marketing company, and analytics firm Adjust have formed a partnership that they say will help game and app companies monetize their users better.

Bayes Impact, the big data-focused nonprofit organization, is launching Bayes Impact University Program at five pilot universities this fall. The idea is to give master’s students opportunities to solve real-world problems using big data.