Google acquires Kaggle in boost to data play

Technology giant Google has announced the acquisition of Kaggle, a start-up that hosts a number of data scientists, for an undisclosed amount at the Cloud Next 2017 conference.

"Kaggle is going to maintain independent brand for a while... what Kaggle has contributed to the community is democratisation of data, developer community... partnership with Kaggle is going to be very positive for us," said Chief Scientist Google Cloud (artificial intelligence and machine learning) Fei Fei Li here.

Founded in 2010, Kaggle is home to the world's largest community of data scientists and machine-learning enthusiasts.

More than 8 lakh data experts use Kaggle to explore, analyse and understand the latest updates in machine learning and data analytics.

"We are providing them best technology to take advantage of Google Cloud, libraries etc," she said.

"We must lower the barriers of entry to AI (artificial intelligence) and make it available to the largest community of developers, users and enterprises so that they can apply it to their own unique needs. With Kaggle joining the Google Cloud team, we can accelerate this mission," she pointed out.

Kaggle and Google Cloud will continue to support machine learning training and deployment services while offering the community the ability to store and query large datasets.

"Making Google Cloud technology available to our community will allow us to offer access to powerful infrastructure, scalable training and deployment services and the ability to store and query large data sets," Kaggle co-founder and Chief Executive Anthony Goldbloom wrote in his blog post.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, the two public clouds that are bigger than Google Cloud, also offer data science services.

Google Cloud already provides Cloud Machine Learning Engine, among other managed services for working on data.