cross pond high tech

Numenta is a startup with a cloud-based prediction engine for streaming data. The company launched in 2005 and went into beta earlier this year. It is ready enough now to start making a difference that the New York Times profiled its founder, Jeff Hawkins, this week and called his company a brainy big data company--a play on Hawkins' theories on neuroscience.

In fact, Numenta's core technology, the Grok prediction engine, was developed based on a theory of the neocortex. Hawkins' approach may upset the big data applecart, according to the Times, because it focuses on real-time streaming sensor data and goes against the grain of mass storage that is driving much of the development on databases such as Hadoop.

Hawkins told the Times that "much of this will be a relic within a few years." He said Hadoop won't go away, but it will manage a lot less stuff and that querying databases won't matter as much. "It only makes sense to look at old data if you think the world doesn't change," Hawkins said.