Description:
Every hand, every pocket, and every bedside table is now an interface for both the collection and the delivery of data. Today's mobile platform pushes the limits of data collection systems. Harvesting information from billions of sources, processing them in realtime, and feeding the content back to hungry handsets is a constant challenge.
In this Strata Online event, we'll look at some of the ways the rise of the always-on world is feeding the hungry engines of Big Data. From new approaches to interface design, to the Internet of Everything, to the lifeline of a single SMS, our mobile phones are fast becoming a prosthetic brain—and Big Data is its synapses.
About Jon Bruner
Jon Bruner is Deputy Editor for New Products Forbes, where he develops new editorial concepts for the web site and magazine and writes occasionally about politics, technology, and finance. He earned a B.S. in mathematics and economics at the University of Chicago.
Today's mobile platform pushes the limits of data collection systems. Harvesting information from billions of sources, processing them in realtime, and feeding the content back to hungry handsets is a constant challenge.
About Alistair Croll
Alistair has been an entrepreneur, author, and public speaker for nearly 20 years. He's worked on a variety of topics, from web performance, to big data, to cloud computing, to startups, in that time. In 2001, he co-founded web performance startup Coradiant (acquired by BMC in 2011), and since that time has also launched Rednod, CloudOps, Bitcurrent, Year One Labs, the Bitnorth conference, the International Startup Festival and several other early-stage companies.
Alistair is the chair of O'Reilly's Strata Conference, Techweb's Cloud Connect, and the International Startup Festival. "Lean Analytics" is his fourth book on analytics, technology, and entrepreneurship. He lives in Montreal, Canada and tries to mitigate chronic ADD by writing about far too many things at "Solve For Interesting".
The inevitability of Smart Dust
Alasdair Allan
The era of the commodity beige box is coming to an end, and the days of the general purpose computer are almost over. Most people never needed or wanted a computer, and they're going to be happy with more limited devices optimised for a single, or a few, purposes so long as those devices just work. Today the black rectangle has replaced the beige box, but don't get too comfortable, because it won't last as long. Today's cellphones and tablets are transition devices, dependent on our current level of technological progress, and around you everyday objects are already becoming smarter.
In ten years' time, every piece of clothing you own, every piece of jewelry, and every thing you carry with you will be measuring, weighing and calculating. In ten years, the world — your world — will be full of sensors. The end point of this evolution is already clear: it's called smart dust. General purpose computing, sensors, and wireless networking, all bundled up in millimeter-scale sensor motes drifting in the air currents, flecks of computing power, settling on your skin, ingested, will bemonitoring you inside and out, sensing and reporting — both for you and about you.
About Alasdair Allan
Alasdair Allan is the author of a number of books about iOS, Arduino and connecting them together. A couple of years ago he and Pete Warden caused a privacy scandal by uncovering that your iPhone was recording your location, all the time. This caused several class action lawsuits and a U.S. Senate hearing. He still isn't sure what to think about that. From time to time, he stands in front of cameras, and you can often find him at conferences run by O'Reilly Media, normally doing things with distributed sensor networks.
Alasdair runs a small technology consulting business writing software, building hardware and providing training. He sporadically writes blog posts about things that interest him, or more frequently provides commentary about them in 140 characters or less.
Alasdair is a former senior research fellow at the University of Exeter. As part of his work there, he built a distributed peer-to-peer network of telescopes which, acting autonomously, reactively scheduled observations of time-critical events. Notable successes included contributing to the detection of the most distant object yet discovered, a gamma-ray burster at a redshift of 8.2.
Texting That Saves Lives
Nancy Lublin
Millions of teens are quietly suffering every day. They struggle with bullying, homophobia, suicidal thoughts and more. The solution is beautifully simple. On August 1st, the nations first 24/7 text line for teens will be launching: Crisis Text Line. We'll provide effective and secure counseling and referrals to teens via a medium they already use and trust: text. Visit CrisisTextLine.org to learn more.
About Nancy Lublin
Twice recognized on the "Top 50 Power and Influence" list by the NonProfit Times and chosen as one of Fast Company's "League of Extraordinary Women," Nancy Lublin has led two of the most popular charity brands in America. At the age of 23, she turned a $5,000 inheritance into Dress for Success, which helps women transition from welfare to work in more than 120 cities in 10 countries. She is currently CEO and Chief Old Person of DoSomething.org, the largest organization for teens and social change. In 2012, 2.4m teens participated with DoSomething.org. Nancy is also the founder of Crisis Text Line, the nation's first 24/7 helpline for teens via text. The service will launch on August 1, 2013. She studied politics at Brown University, political theory at Oxford University (as a Marshall Scholar), and has a law degree from New York University. She is the author of Zilch: The Power of Zero in Business and wrote a popular monthly column for Fast Company for two years. She is a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, participating in Davos for the last five years. She is also a member of the 2013 Henry Crown Fellowship class. Lublin is married to Jason Diaz and the mother of two children who have never tasted chicken nuggets.
Drinking from the Device Data Firehose
Justin Cutroni
We're generating data at an increasing pace every day, in part because of the hundreds of millions of smartphones and mobile devices that are activated every year. Unfortunately, while we're making more and more data, we're also creating new challenges for how we collect and analyze that data to turn it into usable knowledge.
The rise of a mobile, always-on society and the Internet of Everything means we need to rethink both how we collect and structure this data, and what we want to use it for. As it turns out, the technical underpinnings of large-scale, ubiquitous collection already
exist—in the form of platforms initially created for tracking web users. Analytics is quickly evolving into Business Intelligence for the Internet of Everything.
In this talk, Google Analytics advocate Justin Cutroni discusses the foundations of planet-scale analytics, and explores how Google's recent launch of Universal Analytics addresses some of these challenges.
About Justin Cutroni
Justin is a blogger, author, and the Analytics Advocate for Google. Some of Justin's former clients include Toyota, Sony Music, Universal Music, the National Hockey League, Wells Fargo, and HomeAway.
Justin commonly works with executive to help them understand how they can leverage digital analytics and online data to improve their business. He also interacts with marketing and IT teams to define what business metrics they should track and how to collect the data.
Justin is an active participant in the digital analytics community. He publishes the blog Analytics Talk and has authored or co-authored three books: Google Analytics (O'Reilly, 2007), Performance Marketing with Google Analytics (Wiley 2010) and Google Analytics, 2nd Ed. (O'Reilly, 2010).
In 2011 Justin was nominated as Innovator of the year by the Web Analytics Association. In 2012 and 2013 he was nominated for Most Influential Industry Contributor by the Digital Analytics Association.
The simpler the platform, the greater the use. Short Message Service (SMS) is the most used digital communication platform in the world, with more than 3.2 billion unique users sending over 9.4 trillion messages in 2012 alone. This one platform, included on nearly every phone ever made, is being used in more places to connect with more people than any written communication tool in human history. Despite enormous amounts of press coverage and commercial success in the West, smart phone penetration in emerging in economies remains below 10 percent and, in many places, access to the Internet is even lower. SMS, however, is phone, operating system, and application agnostic, being the only reliable, predictable way to reach everyone you know anywhere they are. And every message is a piece of digital data, contributing either to the "signal" or the "noise." The thing that separates the two, more often than not, is the tool used to send, receive, automate and structure that data.
FrontlineSMS is a better interface for managing SMS communications. Our software has been downloaded more than 45,000 times in over 135 countries, empowering thousands of organizations to reach tens of millions of people. FrontlineSMS enables users to separate the digital signal from the noise, while capitalizing on the explosive growth of mobile technologies all over the world. In the near future, the team behind FrontlineSMS will release the next generation of its product: FrontlineCloud. FrontlineCloud will be a web-hosted version of our award-winning software that enables users to message nearly anywhere in the world at local rates. FrontlineCloud marries the power of the Internet with the reach of low-end mobile phones, creating structured, usable, professional interactions using the device already in your pocket.
About Cathryn Stickel
Cathryn is the Operations Manager for FrontlineSMS,recently named the #1 tech NGO in the world by the Global Journal. Cathryn represents the organization on issues of gender, youth, and education and has traveled around the world to train social good organizations on the use of our software and mobile best practices. Cathryn also manages the operations of the FrontlineSMS social enterprise, from finances to human resources and logistics. Prior to FrontlineSMS, Cathryn worked at the George Washington University where she also received her MA in Global Communications in 2011. You can follow Cathryn on Twitter @CathrynStickel.
Placing big data in a human context
Jesper Andersen
At Donna, we seek to help our customers by utilize both the passive data they leave behind digitally and physically, as well as the data describing the context they operate in. We interpret these data and return advice to help to our users in their daily lives. We'll discuss how we our data problems therefore involve some large data, as well as wide data problems, as well as cogent analysis to make our findings actionable and comprehensible.
About Jesper Andersen
Jesper develops experimental online services designed to introduce emotional contexts into online relationships, creating more authentic experiences. He is the co-founder of Bloom Studios, developing novel data interface applications for web and tablet platforms. He is also an accomplished data scientist, working on problems including home valuations for Trulia, credit card fraud for Visa, and social network analysis for Visible Path. Jesper speaks frequently at international technology and design conferences and has appeared in print and broadcast media for projects like Avoidr, Freerisk, and his Foursquare privacy hack. He holds a B.Sc. in Physics from Haverford College and an M.B.A. in Econometrics from University of Chicago.
You may also be interested in:
