Google releases new R package for Big Data #rstats

From the Google Open Source Blog–

HistogramTools is a new R package I have released that uses RProtoBuf to read in a compact protocol buffer representation of binned data and includes a number of helpful functions for manipulating, plotting, and measuring the statistical information loss due to the binning. In addition to protocol buffers, it also supports importing aggregate performance data directly from DTrace output.

AND
We rely on several open source tools to make our work easier. The most common tool we use for statistical analysis of the performance, availability, and resource needs of our internal systems is the R programming language.

Nice job!

With Revolution Analytics being supported and funded by Microsoft and Intel and RStudio being founded by an ex-Microsoftie, I think Google does need to step up their R game though. They take and take from the open source community yet barely fund the minimum back to projects like FOAS or R-Core (http://www.r-project.org/foundation/memberlist.html)

Come on Google – share more stuff with open source R than you do with the NSA!!!

1)  https://decisionstats.com/2009/05/29/interview-david-smith-revolution-computing/

Ajay- What are the major alliances that REvolution has in the industry.

David- We have a number of industry partners. Microsoft and Intel, in particular, provide financial and technical support allowing us to really strengthen and optimize R on Windows, a platform that has been somewhat underserved by the open-source community.

2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_J._Allaire

After the sale of his company, Allaire became frustrated at the difficulty of keeping track of research he was doing using Google. To address this problem, he co-founded Onfolio in 2004 with Adam Berrey, former Allaire co-founder and VP of Marketing at Macromedia.
On March 8, 2006, Onfolio was acquired by Microsoft where many of the features of the original product are being incorporated into the Windows Live Toolbar.On August 13, 2006, Microsoft released the public beta of a new desktop blogging client called Windows Live Writer that was created by Allaire's team at Microsoft.