The R project, born in New Zealand in 1993, has been nominated as the best open-source project in the New Zealand Open-Source Awards 2010. R's co-creator Ross Ihaka talks about the project in this article by the New Zealand Herald: Ross Ihaka from the University of Auckland started developing R 20 years ago, ... [Read more...]

Our mission at Revolution Analytics is to make R the statistical analysis tool of choice in the workplace. But even though R is pervasive in academia and rising in popularity generally, we still sometimes get blank faces when we demonstrate R to potential new clients. Sure, most people have heard ... [Read more...]

Jeff Kelly of Tech Target has just published a feature article about R. While R has been around for almost 20 years now (R&R first started the project in 1993), "its time may have finally come", he says. One thing I really like about the article is how well it highlights ... [Read more...]

Drew Conway continues his analysis of the Wikileaks data. Having concluded that the data appear legitimate (except perhaps in one region, based on a Benford's Law analysis of the numbers in the documents), Drew follows up with a spatio-temporal analysis of activity within Afghanistan, based on the datelines of the ... [Read more...]

I just discovered that R core member Paul Murrell has been maintain a list of plaudits for R: newspaper articles, book reviews, remarks on mailing lists and blogs, and even gratitudes from individual R users. He's collected dozens of entries since 2001 -- great materials here if you ever need more ... [Read more...]

TDWI (The Data Warehousing Institute) recently published a comprehensive article about R and increasing level of activity around it from commercial organizations, including Revolution Analytics. The article opens with: In statistical circles, "R" is the name of an open source programming language for statistical analysis. These days, it might also ... [Read more...]

Revolution CEO Norman Nie just recorded a live podcast with Terry Sweeney of Internet Evolution Radio. In the 30-minute interview, Norman talked about the history of R, his time with SPSS, development plans for Revolution R, and how predictive analytics is impacting businesses, the Web, and even political opinion. You ... [Read more...]

New Zealand's Sunday Star Times last weekend featured a profile on Ross Ihaka, co-creator of R: The down-to-earth associate statistics professor and his fellow researcher Robert Gentleman are famous around the world for developing R programming – a "glorified calculator" that crunches data. R programming allows for statistical computing and graphics ... [Read more...]

Jack Germain of LinuxInsider interviewed Revolution CEO Norman Nie for his "Startup to Watch" column. Amongst the topics covered: the R language (Norman: "There are no statistical expressions that can not be written in R"), Revolution's recent name-change and announcement of our development roadmap, and the challenges of competing with ... [Read more...]

Had a fun day today in a TV studio for Fox Business News, where Revolution CEO Norman Nie was giving an interview to Liz Claman at Fox Business Network. As you might expect, the interview focused a lot more on the business side than on technical capabilities of Revolution R, ... [Read more...]

Revolution's CEO Norman Nie recently gave an interview to CNET's Dave Rosenberg, who blogs on disrupting the software market. Among the topics covered: What is R (Nie: "R is the most powerful statistical computing language on the planet"), what is predictive analytics ("statistical modeling by another name") and plans for ... [Read more...]

It was quite the media frenzy for Revolution and R last week. In conjunction with our relaunch as Revolution Analytics, we spoke to more than a dozen journalists and analysts to explain why we think R is at the center of a perfect storm for predictive analytics: with routine collection ... [Read more...]

Steve Miller has posted his interview with Revolution's CEO Norman Nie at Information Management blogs. In the interview, Steve digs into Norman's motivations for taking on a new venture around R after his successes with SPSS and how what he learned there applies to Revolution Computing. Also up for discussion: ... [Read more...]

Steve Miller at the InformationManagement blog has been looking at predictive analytics tools for business intelligence applications, and naturally turns to the statistical modeling and prediction capabilities of R. Says Steve: The R Project for Statistical Computing continues to dazzle in the open source world, with exciting new leadership at ... [Read more...]

InformationWeek published today a profile of Zack Urlocker, the former MySQL executive who recently joined REvolution's board: Former MySQL staffer Zack Urlocker is going to try to do for predictive analytics what he once did for relational database systems: bring open source code to a user population that hasn't necessarily ... [Read more...]

I totally missed this the other day, but there's much more to that special report on the data deluge in The Economist. (Thanks to readers SB and DN for pointing this out.) There's an total of nine articles in the report (you can find them all in the Related Items ... [Read more...]

Analyst David Stodder at Intelligent Enterprise also noted the activity around R at the recent Predictive Analytics World conference in San Francisco, and he reviews his impressions in a column today. In fact, he attributes the increasing prominence of predictive analytics to R: Possibly the most important factor influencing the ... [Read more...]

Intelligent Enterprise has announced its 2010 "Editors Choice" Awards, and the R project is included as one of twelve "Companies to Watch" in the Business Intelligence category. R Project is an open-source statistical programming environment that is winning broad praise and accelerating uptake as a language for in-database analytics. The likes ... [Read more...]

At InfoWorld's "Open Source" blog Salvio Rodrigues found R co-inventor Robert Gentleman's appointment to the REvolution Computing board "a great impetus for me to look at R again". He notes that both SAS and SPSS have recognized the opportunity presented by R: I suspect that SPSS and SAS made their ... [Read more...]

Today marks the hardcopy availability of the first book dedicated to R from O'Reilly, R in a Nutshell. In the familiar O'Reilly style, the cover is adorned with an illustration of an animal, in this case a harpy eagle: The book is written by Joe Adler, a data analyst and ... [Read more...]