The marketing hype of “big data” seems to have died down. The question is, what’s next? Boston-area companies like RStudio, Tamr, and DataGravity are working on new classes of data-related problems. One area is providing analytics tools and insights for specific industries like finance or real estate. Another is making smarter storage systems that can tell corporations more about their own data. There’s also a market for cleaning up the data so it can be better analyzed — that’s called “data wrangling.” Together, these efforts aren’t very glamorous, but they do highlight where big data might actually be used in the business world.
In other innovation news:
— GE Healthcare is moving its life sciences headquarters from New Jersey to Massachusetts. The $21 million facility is slated to open in Marlborough next spring and could create up to 300 new jobs.
— Our deal of the week is a $54 million funding round for Xamarin, a mobile software startup based in Cambridge and San Francisco. A big, mid-stage VC round raises the question of whether the mobile-development company will go public or get bought out.
— And lastly, the Boston City Council has voted to ban parking-app Haystack and other companies trying to make money off of public roads. The city is also taking a closer look at home-rental sites like Airbnb, but it’s trying to take a measured approach to regulation.
