Xconomy: Future of Big Data

I got to moderate the startup panel at the Xconomy "Future of Big Data" Conference in Boston last week.

The audience seemed to really like the discussion which I put down to the great panel members:

• Fred Lalonde of Hopper Travel
• Jennifer Lum of Adelphic Mobile
• Zeid Barrakat of Flyberry Capital
• Jay Meattle of Shareaholic 

Greg Huang's writeup of the event mentioned several quotes from the panel, including my definition of big data ("growing faster than Moore's law") that also got picked up in Forbes.com.

Questions we covered included:

1. How is your company is using Big Data to disrupt the vertical you're in?
2. How much of your big data secret sauce is about the data (acquiring, curating, creating)  vs the algorithms and architecture used to process the data?
3. What has "big data"enabled which was not possible for startups 5 years ago. Could your companies have existed 5 years ago?

Two great quotes from elsewhere in the event were:

Big data is bullshit (Brad Feld)

and

The database people have been asleep, and Oracle has been providing the narcotics (Andy Palmer)