InsideLegal

I guess it is fitting that at the conclusion of Innovative Enterprise's Big Data Innovation Summit Day One, my brain is jumbled and severely overheated with big ideas all related to the 14 or so Big Data Innovation Track sessions consumed throughout the day. Topics ran the gamut from StubHub's big data strategy focused on ticketing transactions and their master plan to become a single source provider for the sports fan (not just for tickets) to how NASA is using big data analytics to make commercial airplane flights safer.

While I'll be the first to admit that a few of the sessions went squarely over my head (namely GrindGain's In-Memory Computing talk and TerraCotta's harnessing 'big fast data' session), there were many others that definitely got my 'big data juices flowing'. My overall feedback based on the nearly 7 hours of big data content is that despite many 'heavy hitter' vendors offering industrial strength analytics technology and big data architecture options, most companies (at least based on Twitter chatter and session Q&As) are still in the big data exploration phase. A good chunk of time was spent by multiple speakers explaining big data basics and sharing big data survey benchmarks, likely not being completely aware of the audience's overall big data prowess. This worked for me, plus the speakers and Twitter Nation provided some great big data resources as well (see separate, later post).

Something else that struck me was how openly commercial many of the speakers were when it came to mentioning and promoting their big data solutions and offerings. Oddly enough, this did not really bother me since hearing from the likes of IBM or HP about their Big Data Analytics and Sentiment technologies is pretty much industry standard anyway. It is just a departure from what we see in the legal vertcial where any speaker 'selling from the podium' is a big no-no and anyone doing so is pretty much 'shunned' for ever. Like I said, it did not bother me, in fact, many of the use cases featuring vendor customers were very informative and factual.

There were a handful of sessions that definetly stood out so here's my short Big Data Innovation Summit (day one) best of:

Most Memorable: The enthusiasm, energy and sheer brilliance exuded by WolframAlpha's CEO and Compuational Knowledge Engine creator Stephen Wolfram was something to behold (even just watching him via the livestream). Wolfram demonstrated Wolfram|Alpha, an answer engine with a new approach to knowledge extraction and an easy-to-use interface first launched in May 2009. In fact, Wolfram/Alpha is one of the answer engines behind Apple Siri and Microsoft's Bing. While I am still processing his explanation of the mathematics and 'logic' behind the unique search engine (he earned his Ph.D. from Caltech at age 20!), Dr. Wolfram's vivid examples of how we can all (not just math wizards) use Wolfram|Alpha engine to find and 're'-discover everything from pictures to a visual map of our facebook friend relationships were mesmerizing.

Best Use Case: Analytics & the 2012 Obama Victory. Andrew Claster, Deputy Chief Analytics Officer for President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign shared how big data analytics influenced the Obama campaign’s fund-raising, messaging, communications and voter contact strategies. He also talked in detail about the roles and duties of Obama's 50 person big data 'Dream Team' which included 3 former professional gambles, a particle physicist, stem-cell researcher; 2 former Capital One Credit Card modelers and various PHDs, engineers from Amazon and Google as well as consultants from Accenture, McKenzie.

We are running late for Day 2 AM sessions so will report back within the next few days with more big data madness.