The best piece I read this month was about how to build a recommendation engine in R by Data-Mania. It’s a little bit tangential to the BI space but it was interesting to me personally because I’m not a data scientist.

This quote from Niccolò Machiavelli – an Italian politician, historian, and philosopher from the Renaissance period, has profound relevance to emerging technologies.

Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies have captured the imagination of technologists, financiers, and economists. Digital currencies are only one application of the underlying blockchain technology. Earlier this year, we made the Bitcoin dataset publicly available for analysis in Google BigQuery. Today we’re making the Ethereum dataset available.

In this article, I’ll walk you through the process of building a machine learning model using BigQuery ML. As a bonus, we’ll have the chance to use BigQuery’s support for spatial functions. We’ll use the New York City taxicab dataset, with the goal of predicting taxi fare, given both pick-up and drop-off locations for each ride — imagine that we are designing a trip planner.

July was a huge month for merger and acquisition (M&A) activity in the BI space. Thoughtspot raised $145 million, Salesforce acquired Datorama, Workday acquired Stories.bi and Tableau acquired Empirical Systems.

We’re delighted that Yellowfin has been awarded a place on the public sector’s G-Cloud 10 (G10) framework, which enables us to supply British public sector organisations with the Yellowfin platform more easily.