Verizon General Counsel Randal Milch testifies in Washington Washington lawmakers on Wednesday pressed Verizon and Comcast for two hours on their plan to tag team the residential broadband and wireless markets, reselling each others’ respective mobile and cable services. Amongst the political theater at the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on the Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights hearing, two questions kept coming up: Are Verizon and the cable companies colluding to drive up broadband prices? And does Verizon really need the spectrum it’s buying from cable operators, or is it just placing it out of competitors’ grasp

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Two burning questions about the Verizon-Cable deal

For all the upsides that using vasts amounts of data has, there’s also a cost – and often, it can be measured in cold hard dollars. That was one of the takeaways from a panel of data center experts at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference Wednesday

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Mo’ data mo’ problems: The future of the data center

“Many years ago it became abundantly clear that some way had to be found to shield programmers from the complexity of the hardware… [T]his layer is the operating system.” —Andrew Tanenbaum, Operating Systems The cloud is the new operating system for enterprises, and services are the new applications. The cloud provides the computing fabric upon which the next generation of services, from Pinterest to Instagram, foursquare to AirBnB, are being built. Just as Microsoft Windows and MacOS X have provided interfaces for the previous generation of desktop applications now on the decline, cloud providers like Amazon offer interfaces for the compute, storage, and networking these services require.

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Cloud services and the new platform wars

Zynga made a huge acquisition Wednesday, snapping up  Draw Something producer OMGPOP for a reported $200 million-plus price tag. But let’s be clear: What Zynga is picking up isn’t just a hit game, the team that built it, or even the 35 other titles that OMGPOP has created over the last six years. And it’s not just buying potential ad or in-game sales revenue from Draw Something users

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What Zynga really wants from OMGPOP’s Draw Something

While Big Data is increasingly a passion of forward-thinking companies looking to extract value from a growing pile of information, it is also having an effect on some of the most vulnerable consumers, who are finding a way to secure loans thanks to data mining. That’s through the work of ZestCash, a next generation loan service, that has been applying data creatively to bring loans to consumers who have few choices beyond payday loans

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How data mining leads to loans for the underbanked

Hadoop is a great platform for storing and processing data, but it needs applications to make it truly valuable.

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Cloudera CEO: Come to me with apps, I’ll get you money

If 80 percent of new data created is going to be unstructured, where is all that data coming from? It’s coming from consumers’ activities online and it requires real-time processing, said Continuuity’s Todd Papaionnou at Structure:Data on Wednesday.

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Filtering the digital exhaust

Zynga has acquired OMGPOP, adding Draw Something to its list of popular social and mobile gaming titles. Zynga reportedly paid OMGPOP for some $180 million, plus another $30 million in employee retention, right in line with what Om Malik reported last week . That might seem like a lot, but Draw Something is a huge success : The app has more than 35 million downloads and a totally engaged audience of 15 million daily users.

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Zynga goes buy over build with OMGPOP acquisition

If you want to accurately price insurance rates for bodily injury – how much of an impact is the make of the vehicle going to have? Insurance companies have been dealing with these kinds of questions for a long time

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How Allstate uses data to calculate your premiums

Animoto updated its iPhone app Wednesday, adding a much requested feature — the ability to add videos in addition to photos when creating video slideshows on mobile devices. The startup is best known for creating automatic slideshows from user content, both on the Web and with its mobile app. Animoto already had the ability to incorporate video clips through its web-based interface , but the addition to the mobile app is new

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Animoto’s iPhone app adds automatic video editing