Luminoso, a Cambridge, MA-based text analytics company announced $6.5M in Series A funding today, led by Acadia Woods with Digital Garage also participating. That brings their total funds raised to $8M.

Luminoso was born out of research at the MIT Media Labs and spun off in 2010. After getting their seed funding in 2012, they have continued to develop the product, which provides text analytics in the cloud — and this money should give them a big lift to continue building the company and hire more personnel.

Y Combinator-backed Amplitude, a startup taking on big-name analytics providers like Mixpanel, Kontagent, Localytics and others, has raised $1.975 million in seed funding from a number of investors, including SV Angel, Charlie Cheever, Dave Morin, Quest Venture Partners, Data Collective, Merus Capital, BoxGroup, Adam Draper and several more.

Imagine that your local ambulance and fire dispatch runs on an algorithm developed with the help of the data scientists who built Lyft’s grid-optimization system.

Bayes Impact, a big data focused nonprofit, launched its fall 2014 fellowship last week to make that actually happen.

If you’re looking for more details about how all of your tweets are doing, Twitter today released a new analytics dashboard for advertisers, Twitter Card publishers, and verified users.

The company already gave its advertisers data about tweets that they’d paid to promote, covering things like impressions, replies, and link clicks, but there was nothing equivalent for “organic” tweets

Apache Spark landed on the map of many data professionals on May 30 when the Apache Software Foundation announced the 1.0 release of the open-source platform. Spark has since continued to grab headlines, but is it ready for enterprise prime time?

IBM is pushing big data software to Chinese universities, by way of an agreement with China’s Ministry of Education.

Under a program called IBM U-100, IBM is donate a whole mess of big data and analytics software worth $100 million and provide support for 100 Chinese universities, according to a statement IBM issued earlier this week. Among the offerings are IBM’s InfoSphere and SPSS software.

Looking to harness the flood of data streaming from every networked and sensor-enabled smart device, computer, and machine that circumscribe our modern world, FuturePerfect Ventures has launched a small venture fund to focus on the bedeviling problem of big data.

Continuing the growth of its software business applying big data analytics technologies to the human resources market, Visier has managed to attract $25.5 million in new financing.