A Look Inside BigBoulder 2013 with Kevin Cawley

Well, now that we have that out of the way, it follows that a Big Boulder Conference must be double awesome. I've been living in Boulder for almost 20 years and I love this place for so many reasons. Big and Boulder; it’s like peanut butter and chocolate. So, when I heard about the Big Boulder conference, I just had to go. So, I requested an invite and got denied.

At this point, I am like, “What is going on?” How can you get denied access to a conference in your own backyard? Well, now I know why. The conference is invite only and top notch in every single detail, from the venue to the welcome kit, amenities, food, drinks, snacks, speakers, and agenda. This is truly a testament to the time and energy Judd and the folks at Gnip have put into this event.  If anyone was allowed to come, the budget for this event would be astronomical and there is just a hard limit on the number of people the St. Julien can accommodate.

Well about a week before the conference, I got an invite. There must have been a few slots that opened up, and the Gnip folks kindly allowed some local entrepreneurs to fill the slots. So, off I went to the St. Julien to check things out.

The St. Julien is a beautiful space and the conference was run like a well oiled machine. The emcee was funny and engaging, although the constant jabs at Chris Moody got tiring, and she kept everything running on time. The food and snacks were great and the discussions were fascinating.

The context of the event is around big data with a slant on social data and companies that are either producing or consuming this data. Every company needs to be thinking about Big Data. For some companies, data is their bread and butter. But for everyone else, at a minimum, product decisions need to be data driven. You need to be collecting and analyzing log, social, and event data. And you need to be able to process and act on this data. If your product or service gets any traction, the dataset will grow quickly. You'd better understand how to deal with Big Data.

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Much of the conversation at Big Boulder was higher level. I love to write code so I generally like to talk about things that can be done right now. But thinking big picture is critical to a nascent industry like the Social/Big Data space. The thoughtfulness, energy, and passion of the panels and side conversations were stimulating, and seeing how other companies are dealing w/ their big data challenges was refreshing and educational.

So, back to the conference. There were a few thoughts, topics and threads that stood out to me, and here they are in no particular order.

Data Scientists. It is a good thing to be a data scientist right now. This is an uber cool geek career and the panelists did not disappoint. At the moment, it takes a mixture of computer science, math, statistics, probability, artificial intelligence and a whole lot of smarts and ingenuity to do this job effectively. The data scientists from Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr have the goods.

Right now the majority of the work in this field is relegated to answering internal ad hoc queries. Hey data scientist, “how many males aged 18-26 from the East Coast clicked on the Ford Mustang image and then navigated to the sponsored video of the Body Builder, and how long did that process take?” Many sophisticated companies are building internal tools to answer questions like this and accomplish these goals, but the rest are lagging behind.

As the tools mature and become more accessible to everyone, all companies will benefit and the data scientist may go the way of the DBA. You know the database administrator who held the keys to the stored procedures, triggers, and schema changes back in the day? Today, every developer has direct access to the database without needing to coordinate with a man in the middle. When this happens to data science, it will be a good thing for all except data scientists I suppose.

Competition. Your competitors are people too. At one point in the genesis of Birdbox, we were thinking about building a platform to aggregate hashtags for brands and events. One company on our competitive matrix was Tagboard. The startup culture can be competitive and you may want to vilify or ridicule the competition. It can be a natural thing to do; just watch any professional sports and you will see it happen in a similar fashion.

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Well, on day one of the conference, I met the CTO of Tagboard, and turns out he was a super smart and really nice guy. “Those guys at Tagboard” became real people and I liked them. The reality is, they have a great product and they are, at heart, entrepreneurs and geeks just like us. We hit it off well, and I sincerely wish tagboard the best of luck! (Check out my writeup on competition in the startup world, here.)

Foursquare. Foursquare is a great service, and they are the place for checkins and recommendations. But the speaker was suggesting that Foursquare should be the Location Layer of the Internet. Well, there is a conflict here. Foursquare wants to collect all of these check-ins and recommendation data and leverage that data to improve the service, but also to sell to advertisers. A company or entity that wants to be the Location Layer of the Internet should have no other motivations other than being the source of location data. Fire Eagle was the Location Layer of the Internet. Yahoo... Marissa Mayer brings this back.

Tumblr. It was eye opening to hear about the origins of Tumblr. I never really understood Tumblr and its massive popularity. I have a Tumblr blog but don't participate often. But now I see why so many people do. The mission of the founder, David Karp, was to build a publishing platform that delights the users. There were existing tools for publishing content before Tumblr came around, but none were as simple and thoughtful as Tumblr. The company’s focus on details helped the product thrive. For example, let’s look at their position on commenting. Most comments that people leave on blogs are either snarky or downright mean. So in Tumblr, commenting is turned OFF by default. Brilliant. Reblogging is another subtle detail that makes total sense in context. Let’s face it, creating content can be hard and often we get lazy, so give people a tool that creates a sense of content creation without the need to do any work... let the user reblog. Brilliant as well. The takeaway from these subtle decisions is to be hyper focused on the little things that will make your customers happy.

Financial Sector. The most interesting talk for me was around the use of Big Data in the financial space. I think I was most intrigued because I know little about this sector, but recognize the enormity of the opportunities. Entrepreneurs should put some serious weight here, because the Big Guys are eager to move the needle with the help of Big Data, and it does not need to move much to make a serious impact. Startups can really iterate fast, leveraging machine learning, big data techniques and algorithms that can have an impact and be very profitable.

Brazil.  What is up w/ Brazil. Everyone was talking about the importance of Brazil... everyone. The panel from Brazil was talking about an untapped market with massive potential. But they were also talking about the majority of the population not having computers but having phones that they are not able to afford data plans for. I was confused. I Google’d Brazil. It has a population of 200 million. That’s a bunch of folks, but all the talk of Brazil still seemed odd. So I asked the panelist from Zauber Labs. Well, it turns out the interest is all due to the upcoming Olympics and World Cup. Hmm. I suppose I should watch more television. The takeaway here is that if you want your country to get the interest of big Internet companies, then all you need to do is host the Olympics or World Cup ;)

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Social TV. This is apparently a big thing. I don't watch television, but while you are killing time watching shows, you should also be wasting time chatting about it and collecting stickers. But seriously, this makes sense. Back in the day, television used to have a social component. When I was in college, a long long time ago, we used to have parties to watch Melrose Place or Friends. In a digital age, it makes sense that we bring the new social environment (social networks and the Internet) and television together. I think ultimately, the products these companies are building will just be baked into the viewing experience.

Advertising. Everyone, and I mean everyone, talked about their great services and Big Data in the context of advertising... as in, ‘we can use all this data to make better ads’, which felt a little ironic and weird. But that's a different story for another day.

Twitter. Much of the focus of the conference was around Twitter. Currently, the overwhelming share of public social data flows through Twitter’s servers and that data is readily accessible via the Api’s or through services like Gnip that provide the full firehose. The biggest challenges here are obvious. The amount of data is overwhelming, understanding sentiment is really really hard, and false positives are a problem (Twitter's hash crash for example). It is unclear whether anything meaningful and accurate is being accomplished at the moment with all this data. This screams opportunity!

Twitter clearly will want to monetize all this traffic and attention and use all the data to attract advertisers, and I think this will be a challenge. Ironically, I think Twitter is already the world’s largest advertising platform. Yet, the organic Twitter advertising engine has the unique distinction that no-one really has to pay anything. A band can promote their new concert and their followers can act as the advertising channel, or, if they already have a large following, the channel already exists. And nobody pays a cent in the entire process. It will be interesting to see how Twitter layers paid advertising on top of free advertising.

The End. All in all, Big Boulder was a fantastic event, Gnip is a great host, and I would be thrilled to come back next year!