Big Money for Big Data

Innovations in the management of big data are getting encouragement to the tune of $100 million in potential investments from a new venture fund established by Accel. "Databases have gotten so big that we need to develop the next generation of technology that can capture, store, analyze and report on datasets that are measured in quadrillions of bytes," noted Richard McCarthy, head of the business school at Quinnipiac University.

Accel Partners is launching a US$100 million fund to identify -- and fund -- entrepreneurs at every layer of the big data stack, in particular, those developing projects for the Apache Hadoop platform.

The Accel Big Data Fund is aligned with Cloudera, which is pushing development in Hadoop. These products could be anything from next-generation storage and data-management platforms to software applications and services, including data analytics, as well as vertical and mobile applications...