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IT services company Virtela announced today a new IT infrastructure management service based on predictive analytics. VirtelaPredict will monitor system logs and event data for both on-premise and cloud based infrastructure and look for patterns that signal trouble. The company will then correct issues, hopefully before an outage ever occurs.

Facebook is working a new dashboard for developers to gain better insights about their Facebook applications, it was revealed during a Tech Talk at the company's Seattle office this week. The old analytics dashboard often contains data that is no more recent than 48 hours. The new analytics dashboard will be real time. The data will be anonymous - people won't be able to find out WHO is looking at what, just how popular different items are.

Facebook is building the solution with the MapReduce database HBase. The Tech Talk goes into more technical detail about how the solution was built and scaled.

Last year Douglas Rushkoff took on the conventional wisdom of brand marketers at the Pivot conference. Earlier this year we posted his talk and it caused a good bit of debate about the nature of so-called "brand conversations" in social media, and the future of branding itself. This is an important topic as social CRM solutions begin to proliferate. According to Gartner, 4/10 of the businesses it polled are planning to roll-out social CRM initiatives within the next five years.

A presentation by branding agency Face takes a different view and advocates a synthesis of data-driven social media analytics and qualitative methods such as ethnography to make branding relevant in the social media age. The presentation quotes Mark Earls saying "Consumers' most valuable relationships are not with brands but with other consumers."

Cloud hosting provider Joyent re-launched its Node.js hosting service no.de this week. Joyent, the sponsor company of Node.js, is now offering versions 0.4.0 and 0.4.1 to no.de users. It also announced Cloud Analytics, a new service for finding problems with Node.js applications.

Earlier this week, thanks to the iPad, Apple overtook HP as the biggest vendor of mobile computers. Challenging HP, one of the largest vendors of both consumer and enterprise technology, is quite a feat. Expect this trend to continue. Recent surveys show increasing support for tablets in the enterprise, and more vendors are releasing iPad apps for business users. Here's a look at some of this week's data and new apps.

A job posting from Apple reveals the company is using or will use Hadoop for its iAds system. The job listing is for a "Senior Software Engineer - Hadoop" with experience in MapReduce, Hive and either HBase or Cassandra. Oozie and Flume are also mentioned. The ad was first spotted by The Register, and has since been removed from Apple's website. However, searching through Apple's job listing reveals other places that Hadoop may be in use, including improving the iOS experience.

Gartner predicts that by 2013, 33% of business intelligence functionality will be consumed on mobile devices. And it seems that these sort of forecasts are usually over-aggressive, our commenters seem to agree that Gartner's forecast is a bit too modest. BI going mobile quickly, and tablets are leading that movement.

Here are 10 BI apps that support the iPad right now. Some are existing BI products with iPad native apps, some are Web-based BI applications with iPad support and some are clients that can connect to your existing BI solutions.

This week, Greg Linden noticed a conference paper that reveals that YouTube is using Amazon.com's recommendation engine to power its own recommendations. Last week, Fast Company ran an article about how a former Amazon.com engineer is trying to help discover a better recommendation engine than his former employer. And we rediscovered a tutorial from way back in December of 2010 on how to get your hands dirty building your own recommendation system using NumPy.

Geckoboard, a real-time business analytics dashboard we covered previously, has officially come out of beta and been given a price tag.

Businesses can plug a wide variety of data widgets into Geckoboard, giving them an overview of important metrics in one simple interface, which can be displayed on desktops, smart phones, tablets or a large television that might be hanging in the office. It has built-in integrations with a number of commonly-used Web apps and services, in addition to customizable widgets from any data source in XML, JSON or any plain old RSS feed.

Anybody who wrangles analytics data for a living knows what a pain it can be to get a handle on social media metrics. Different sources offer different metrics in different formats, and even Twitter's official real-time analytics dashboard is not yet publicly available.

Export.ly is a new Web app that aims to ease some of that pain by giving social marketers the means to export data from Twitter, Facebook and email into a Excel spreadsheet or CSV file.