Big Data Conference, StampedeCon, Heads Back To St. Louis Featuring Walmart, Ford & More

If you’re in a big data startup, the StampedeCon big data conference in St.Louis is a can’t miss event. Last year we partnered with StampedeCon as their official media sponsor. Speaker after speaker explained this fast growing technology sector, that’s spawning new, great startups every day.

Last year’s inaugural event featured speakers from Facebook, Read Write Web, Kraft foods and more.

This year’s event will be held July 30-31st at the Washington University School of Medicine and will feature speakers from; Walmart, Ford Motor Company, Deloitte, Riot Games and more.

“Big Data is growing exponentially. Understanding how to control the amount of data available and create a strategy to leverage it is vital to today’s workplace,” said Gary Stiehr, StampedeCon organizer. “Companies without an understanding of Big Data are at a severe disadvantage in today’s marketplace. StampedeCon’s goal is to provide that knowledge to everyone.”

StampedeCon runs July 30-31. The first day will provide insight into developing data and analytics strategies. The second day presents a view into the technologies available to implement data and analytics strategies.

StampedeCon 2013 training partners include Cloudera and Inferology. On July 29^th, Inferology is offering a pre-conference course on NoSQL databases. On August 1^st, Cloudera is offering post-conference training workshops on Hadoop, Hive and Pig.

StampedeCon features presentations benefiting both seasoned IT professionals and those getting started with Big Data. The agenda includes twelve speakers and a panel discussion, with the following agenda highlights:Big Data Analytics: Inside and Out
Michael Cavaretta, Ford Motor Company
Cavaretta will present three areas of opportunity for Big Data Analytics: improving internal processing, understanding customers though external data (including social) and vehicle sensor networks. The presentation will include tips for starting your own Big Data projects.

Big Data at Riot Games

Jerome Boulon, Riot Games

Riot Games sought to understand and improve the player experience for its 32 million users. Boulon will review the challenges they faced creating a Big Data infrastructure that delivers the ability to provide continued insight.

Five Trends in Analytics… How to Take Advantage Today

John Lucker, Deloitte Consulting

Lucker will discuss the latest advancements in the world of analytics and offer strategies for tapping into their potential. The topic areas include visualization and design, mobile analytics and strategy analytics.

Big Data, Big Law

Anthony Martin, Walmart

This presentation will tell the story of one global, multi-channel company’s walk through the increasingly complicated legal, compliance security maze while trying to recognize the implicit value of Big Data programs.

For more information visit Stampedecon.com

St. Louis is one of the fastest growing tech cities in the U.S., here’s why.

Enigma Reinvents Public Data And Wins TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield

Public data is a huge gigantic mess. Some municipalities offer everything in indexed searchable sites, while others send you cd roms of property values and tax records. Still, some municipalities require that you go down to their town hall or courthouse and sift through filing cabinets as if they’re trapped in the 1970s.

Cumulatively you’re talking about 100’s of millions if not millions of records of data, and none if it’s uniform. It’s possibly the largest big data project in the world. An ambitious project, taken on by Hicham Oudghiri and Marc DaCosta co-founder sof Enigma.io, as well as CEO Jeremy Bronfmann.

There are mountains upon mountains of public data. What is “public data” it’s really determined by the municipalities themselves. For instance, tax records, property records, marriage licenses, etc are just about public data in every town and city across the country and around the world. In some municipalities though, restaurant food scores, public transportation records and even dog licenses are considered public data.

Sure there are scammy data sites that off-shoot to wanna be background reports, but Enigma is out to do something bigger. They want to create an entire new layer of the internet in the next five years.

Enigma has already raised $1.1 million dollars in seed funding from Triple Point Ventures, CrossLink Capital, and angels like YouTuber Brent Hurley. They’ve also inked some important partnerships with Harvard Business School, Gerson Lehrman Group (a research firm), S&P Capital IQ and The New York Times.

One of the challenges Enigma faces is the rapid rate at which more and more data is released to the public. Yet another thing that Bronfmann says their team is ready for.

Enigma started to amass this huge collection of data by sending a ton of Freedom of Information Act requests. They’ve had to compile the data in one simple, easy to use format even though it comes in a variety of sources. Bronfmann told us in an interview that some data even comes on “print outs”.

The scope of what Enigma is looking to achieve along with the powerhouse team and the work they’ve done to date, was enough for them to win the TechCrunch Battlefield competition on Wednesday. That honor comes with a $50,000 non-equity prize and of course startups that have won in the past like UberConference and GetAround, have gone on to raise huge rounds.

Check out our interview with Bronfmann below and sign up for more info about Enigma here at enigma.io.

See how this Cincinnati startup went from Startup Weekend to TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield.

Forget Seeing In The Data Center, Albuquerque Startup ProCog Lets You See In The Data

Last month Google made a historic move and let reporters in to see some of it’s many data centers. These data centers manage search, gmail and all of the many other pieces of data that Google stores. In the photos (like the one on this page), showed very colorful pipes, wires, and stacks upon stacks of servers.

Now imagine if Google let you see what it was like inside the data. More specifically, imagine if you could see how the results of your search were scrubbed and located throughout the vast internet.

That’s what Albuquerque start up ProCog is doing. ProCog is a full scale search engine which is totally transparent. ProCog users can see every little bit of information that ProCog uses to deliver it’s search results. Such open access to the data used in search can be very useful when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine research.

ProCog is short for “Proficient Cognition”. The site returns more data than you could ever dream of in a single search engine tool. Information you would need to scour the internet for hours to find, is all right there in your ProCog search results. Every entry has an seo report, scoring, duplicates report, site inlinks, traffic, cached data and reindex. All of it compiled together in one easy to use tool.

ProCog boasts 1 billion pages indexed so far and it continues to grow.

We got a chance to talk to Steve Cook, Co-Founder of ProCog. Check out the interview below:

StampedeCon 2012 – Kraft Food’s Frank Cotignola on Understanding Consumer Behavior

St. Louis, MO – StampedeCon 2012 – Kraft Food’s Frank Cotignola presented Using Social Media Conversations and Search to Understand Consumer Behavior. His bio reads

As part of Kraft Food’s CIS (Consumer Insight and Strategy Group), Frank focuses on three key areas: (1) Global Analytics; (2) Social Media Listening and Measurement, and; (2) Community Management and Knowledge Sharing. He also authors the Kraft “Randomness” blog, which focuses on digital and analytic topics. His efforts to develop both free and paid listening platforms and insights have led to the integration and usage of such research into traditional “asking” research and shopper insights at the company.

Throughout the presentation there were zero mentions (or very few) of searching for the “brand” instead he discussed searching for relevant terms. Using twitter and or Facebook to identify sentiment about dessert, cookies, and hot peppers and Pinterest to see the pinned recipes. He highlighted two factors that make this such a powerful tool.

First is immediacy. There is practically no wait to see what people are talking about. Twitter and Facebook bring never-ending streams of information directly to him. Instead of waiting for survey results or “going out to talk to people” many queries can be done within an hour. Second is cost. It is ostensibly free.

An additional benefit is being able to gauge response – desserts typically elicits a positive response whereas snacking is something considered a need. Hot peppers presented an interesting variable – in North America the popularity of hot peppers peaks in mid-summer. Being Kraft Foods something like this is invaluable, allowing them to see when they should release a new flavor or when they might release an ad campaign or special.

One of the takeaways, for me, was that many businesses are missing the benefits that come from social media are focusing solely on their brand sentiment. Kraft seems to have figured out one of the largest benefits of social media and search as well. It is not necessarily about the brand at all. Many times, in the food industry certainly, the discussion is not necessarily about the brand itself. Using what customers are talking about nationally and globally Kraft is able to glean insights from the chatter and can use that to plan for products in the near-future.

What Is Big Data? We Find Out From David Strom At StampedeCon In St. Louis

StampedeCon kicked off in St.Louis this morning with David Strom speaking on how big data can help your business. Strom is a seasoned technology journalist who’s currently writing for Read Write Web. He was able to engage the audience at StampedeCon with a brief overview of what Big Data is and how it’s applied in real life.

Big Data may be a new term to some, especially on the consumer side of things, but Big Data is very real and we see more and more Big Data startups popping up everywhere else.

The setting at StampedeCon is of course people in the Big Data field but also CEO’s, and CTO’s who are just now getting into Big Data. As “the cloud” makes it’s way into every day language, Big Data is sitting on deck. Strom brought up real life use cases for Big Data like managing airlines and reservations, but also analyzing airline reviews. He also brought up a great example of FedEx using Big Data not just to manage their packages but also their fleet of trucks.

(Proctor & Gamble's Big Data Control Room at their Cincinnati HQ photo: DavidStrom)

Another company that uses massive amounts of Big Data is Cincinnati’s Proctor & Gamble (P&G). According to Strom P&G has over 4 billion transactions per day. Their massive data is managed in a “data sphere” in their Cincinnati headquarters. Key data points are extracted on gigantic screens for their data analysts and their executives to have access too.

P&G is using Big Data to track just about everything including, sales, trends, margin, customer flow, what ads are working, which countries are seeing upticks and downturns. The company is also working on automating notifications so their top level managers can be alerted when things are outside of the norm.

Strom also spoke about one of his favorite “Big Data Rockstars”, Jeff Jonas, who works for IBM. He has developed a system called Infosphere Identity Insight. This is the piece of software that analyzes facial expressions of casino goers and can track and prevent fraud including card counting.

Strom offered three key points for CEO’s about Big Data

Strategic data planning- data is the new raw materials for any business
Analytical Skills- CEOs should be incredibly smart about asking the right questions
Technology skills- Embrace the technology and make it a key part of your CEO skill set

Is Big Data boring?

Certainly not. Strom pointed out a study using Big Data on cupid.com that studied the population of North America (including Canada) and their tendency to be gay curious. The map above shows the most gay curious population in red and the least gay curious population in blue. The data revealed that Canadians are very gay curious. They also found that areas that served soy milk had more gay curious folks. (no this was a real study).

They also asked straight and gay people “Which is bigger the earth or the sun” not surprising, more women got the answer correct regardless of sexual orientation.

Big Data is definitely everywhere and conferences like StampedeCon will highlight that.

StampedeCon Big Data Conference In St.Louis Next Week, Interview Here

We’re very glad to be involved with next week’s StampedeCon Big Data conference in fact Nibletz.com is the official national media sponsor of the event that happens August 1st in St.Louis.

The StampedeCon Big Data Conference will feature a whole day of great speakers about one of the fastest growing segments of technology, big data.

StampedeCon founder Gary Stiehr, has put together a great program featuring ReadWriteWeb’s David Storm, Rob Peglar of EMC/Isilon, Bill Eldredge of Nokia, Frank Cotignola of Kraft Foods, Eric Hochmuth of Monsanto, Scott Fines of NISC, Alex Miller of Revelytix, and Jim Duey of Lonocloud.

In addition to the content packed feature speakers there will be a vendor exhibit area and a ton of great people to network with. People are coming from across the country to participate in the first ever StampedeCon and Stiehr tells us he hopes to do more of them. We got to talk to Stiehr in the interview below:

Interview With NY Startup Edamam Becoming The Worlds Food Knowledge Base

Edamam founder and CEO Victor Penev has a lofty goal. He wants his company to become the goto place for food knowledge in the world. While the goal seems quite lofty as I am writing this right now, if you watch the video below you’ll see that Edamam may well be on their way to doing just that.

They launched their consumer facing product, a mobile app which pulls over one million recipes from different sources, at the DEMO conference in April in Santa Clara California. This isn’t just your run of the mill recipes.com app though, the UI is appealing, the navigation is a breeze and you can separate and search through recipes six ways to Sunday.

On the business side Edamam offers an intense, information packed widget for food blogs and websites to tap their vast knowledge base in the same ways as the mobile app and more. They are also offering an API for developer partners to tap that big food database.

In this interview with Edamam they talk about how they plan on being the goto place for food knowledge. In a few years time they hope that the end user will be able to go to the grocery store, by a piece of salmon and get a treasure trove of possibilities wrapped around Edamam information.

Off camera he admitted that he would love to see Edamam being tapped by the users smartphone in the grocery store, and then a smart refrigerator, stove, or other appliance that offers recipes, food guidance, wine recommendations, anything. We’re talking the Jetson’s Rosie in the big data era.

We’ve covered quite a few food startups here at Nibletz, this is the first time that a startup has such a clear path to the future. We really wish these guys well, and after you watch the video you’ll see they have their stuff together and could easily achieve that lofty goal.

Linkage:

Check out Edamam here at their website

See more of our TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012 Coverage here

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We Check Out NY Startup Knodes Social Context API At TechCrunch Disrupt

Ron Williams, the co-founder of SnapGoods and Knodes, caught our eye on the second day of TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012. Knodes is a social data driven context API. You’ve probably heard the term SaaS before (Software as a service), Knodes is a BadasS startup (Big Data As A Service) according to Williams.

Now we’re accustomed to getting pitches. We receive hundred of pitches a week via email, Twitter, Facebook, Google plus and in person. We know what to look for and how to cut through the pitch clutter that most entrepreneurs have to use to get noticed and talk the talk. We’re 100% guilty of doing the same thing. However, Williams is a show me person, so today he showed me an amazing API.

Knodes takes social data form all the major social networks. We’re not just talking profiles, likes or interests, we’re talking about all of that and actual conversation data too, to find the relevant people pertaining to whatever it is you’re looking for.

At Nibletz I’m the Content Director. We decided we didn’t want an Editor in Chief and content directing, procuring and writing is what I do among a million other things. There are a few Content Directors out there but that’s the title on my personal Twitter profile. For the demonstration of Knodes Williams typed Content Director in the box and I was the second result listed.

I thought, wouldn’t it be great for startups to be able to use the Knodes tool. If they wanted to make a pitch for coverage they could simply check the word Editor, and of course it served up hundreds of editors, and notably, the ones that were closest to us first.

Williams sees Knodes as a very valuable tool and service for developers, publishers and many more. The foundation for it is solid and it’s very fast. Williams says it was born out of a need to better search things in his other successful startup SnapGoods. SnapGoods was one of the first peer to peer rental sites in the space. Many are copying his model.

Coincidently Williams shared with me the crazy story about how they came up with SnapGoods too. Since it’s not in the video I’ll tell you.

Williams had started dating his now fiancé, back in 2009. He wanted to impress her by taking her out for a motorcycle ride. The problem was he didn’t own a motorcycle, and you can’t rent them anywhere. Sure you can rent a Vespa but if you’ve met Williams a Vespa really isn’t his style. He wanted a hog.

So on a whim, Williams took to Craigslist and was able to rent a motorcycle from a complete stranger for $250. After he did that he decided more people good do things like that. It’s more experience driven than needs. As SnapGoods grew, Williams needed to build a better search and that’s where the original idea for Knodes came about.

Enough of that, check out the video below:

Linkage:

Find out more about Knodes here at knod.es (developers especially)

For more of our TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012 coverage click here

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TechCrunch Disrupt: I Shot A 50 Caliber Rifle At A Fax Machine, Thanks To Twake

Twake, a new big data startup, had a great attention grabber at their booth at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC’s Startup Alley. Twake hired a man in a wooded area in a remote location with an arsenal of high-caliber fire arms and a junk pile of computer gear. Old cpus, monitors, fax machines, radios and other electronics were put in the pile for the man with the guns.

Meanwhile back at TechCrunch Disrupt Twake had an iPad app where passerby’s could choose a device they wanted to shoot, and the gun they wanted to shoot with. After they made their selections they would hit a button labeled “fire” which sent a signal back to the man with the guns to go ahead a fire away at the old computer junk.

This was very reminiscent of Tommy Jordan, the laptop shooting dad in North Carolina. Now even though I didn’t get to fire the gun myself, I could feel the thrill and satisfaction of popping a cap in that fax machines ass. The boys from Office Space would be proud.

So what kind of company goes through this much promotion to attract people to their booth? That would be Twake, a recently launched big data startup.

Twake is a secure, agnostic, scalable recommendation service. In their own words they describe Twake as:

“Twake’s cloud-based service maps anonymous referential data on customers, products and services with behaviors such as view, like, buy, and comment along with the sentiment and significance of each. Our wave propagation and interaction algorithms analyze patterns, recognize highly relevant items that are far removed from the source and synthesize recommendations that resonate”

We would say it’s a predictive recommendation engine. The idea of being able to recommend what a customer may buy next is often the competitive edge companies need, provided the data is right.

Twake’s platform is scalable to most industries. Their unique adaptive recommendation engine can handle e-commerce, app discovery, deep personalization, restaurant suggestions, smart pre-fetching, sentiment analysis, genome research, social discovery, travel planning, business intelligence, and network planning.

Is that too many verticals? Twake is so new that we’ll have to wait and see how it all comes together. It will be great to see what developers can do using Twakes API’s.

Check out the video here:

TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Interview With NY Startup hoppit

We got a chance to talk with the founder of hoppit at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2012. Hoppit was the winner of the best “Big Data” startup at the recent NY Tech Day.

So what is hoppit? Well hoppit is a discovery platform that lets you discover places completely based on atmosphere. Yelp, Urban Spoon and other restaurant recommendation sites use reviews that focus on cuisine to attract customers. With hoppit their engine takes into consideration keyword phrases that describe ambiance.

For instance, hoppit looks for multiple instances of groups of words like “romantic dinner” from there it would be able to dig deeper and determine that a restaurant is smaller and more intimate. This may be exactly what someone is looking for.

Right now hoppit lets you choose from eight different vibes; classy & upscale, hipster, watering hole, romantic, cozy & quaint, mad men,swanky & posh, trendy & chic, vintage & old world, and chill & relaxed.

After a long work week you know what you want and hoppit will help you find it. Check out our interview Steve Dziedzic below:

See more of our Disrupt coverage here

Austin Startup: Cyfeon To Kick Off Disrupt NY Battlefield

The first company presenting in today’s TechCrunch Disrupt startup Battlefield is an Austin based startup called Cyfeon.

Cyfeon has only been beta testing for two months. They are a very early stage, non-funded startup. They’ve created a tool called “Answer Factory” that lets any business pull data from anywhere, anytime in any format to get better answers to queries. Answer Factory is the answer for the headaches that can come from big data.

“Businesses are being overwhelmed with the amount of data they have to rely on to make decisions,” Cyfeon CEO Brandon Smith said. “And they are missing important information that might help drive better financial or operational performance. We’re convinced there is a market for technology that makes use of all available data to improve answer quality.”

The Answer Factory dashboard allows businesses to pull data from any source at any time. The data being pulled can be structured or unstructured and then unified using the Answer Factory platform. Businesses without huge IT departments can benefit from Cyfeon’s drag and drop solution.

“Data isn’t worth anything if it cannot be effectively used,” said Cyfeon CTO Chance Coble. “When we started developing Answer Factory, we knew there were tools out there to provide answers to database queries. But we didn’t see any product that effectively brings all that information together to deliver the best possible answer. We wanted to make big data a big benefit to businesses.”

Although Austin has a thriving tech scene and TechCrunch has held events at South By Southwest, Cyfeon is the first Austin startup in TechCrunch Disrupt’s five year history to be invited to participate in the highly coveted startup Battlefield.

Thirty startups will launch during the Battlefield competition but only one will go home with the $50,000 grand prize and the Disrupt Cup. The Disrupt Cup isn’t just about the money, previous winners of Disrupt Cup have secured millions in funding after winning the prize.

Judging this years Disrupt NYC Battlefield are: Michael Arrington (founder TechCrunch/Crunchfund), Roelof Botha (Sequoia Capital), Chi-Hua Chien (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Beyers), Chris Dixon (co-founder Hunch), Marissa Mayer (VP Google), Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures).

Linkage:

Find out more about Cyfeon here

Check out our coverage of TechCrunch Disrupt NYC here

Check out TechCrunch’s coverage of Disrupt NYC here

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