Launching New Sites for Data Driven NYC and Hardwired NYC

Some updates on the event/community front:

1) A little while ago, I changed the name of the data event I’ve been organizing from “NYC Data Business Meetup” to “Data Driven NYC”.   I originally started the event mostly as experiment, and didn’t give much thought to branding (so yeah, that was a terrible name).  The event has now grown quite a bit (over 3.700 members as I write this), so it was time for a better name; also at this stage, it feels more like a community than “just” a meetup, so I wanted a name that reflected this reality.

2) Back in June, I launched a new community called “Hardwired NYC”.  It covers startups, technologies and products at the intersection of the physical and digital worlds, including topics like 3D printing, Internet of Things, wearable computing, etc.  I developed a strong interest in those areas through my involvement in the Big Data world – the Internet of Things, in particular, is deeply intertwined with Big Data (the proliferation of sensors has been contributing to the Big Data “problem”; equally  the Internet of Things will be highly dependent on Big Data technologies if it is to deliver on its promise).

3) As Hardwired NYC is taking off fast (more than 700 members after just two events), I figured that both events/communities should have their own website with full video libraries, including for people who don’t live in New York and are interested in the content. So, with the great help of my FirstMark colleague Dan Kozikowski,  I’m launching this week www.datadrivennyc.com and www.hardwirednyc.com.  Both sites have a “Watch” section where, from now on, I will post pictures and videos of events (as opposed to this blog).

Data Driven NYC

Hardwired screenshot

Data Driven NYC: Special Data Science

The May edition of Data Driven NYC (f/k/a NYC Data Business Meetup) featured some of the coolest kids of the Data Science world, in NYC and beyond:

* Cathy O’Neil, Senior Data Scientist at Johnson Research Labs
* Claudia Perlich, Chief Scientist at M6D
* Drew Conway, Scientist-in-Residence at IA Ventures
* Chris Wiggins, Professor at Columbia University and co-founder of HackNY
* Max Shron – Data strategy consultant and former data scientist at OkCupid

Unfortunately, no videos for Cathy and Claudia – their microphones did not work.  I didn’t include the panel video either because large chunks of it are silent (due to the same issues with Cathy’s and Claudia’s microphones).  Bummer.

Chris Wiggins:

Drew Conway:

Max Shron

Internet of Things Meetup

At the April #NYDBM, we explored  the fascinating intersection between Big Data and the Internet of Things.

One of the reasons why volumes of data have been escalating prodigiously over the last few years has been the proliferation of sensors of all kinds (in cell phones, cars, industrial plants, etc.), providing a unique articulation between the online and physical worlds. The concept of an Internet of Things (and its cousin for the manufacturing world, the “Industrial Internet”), where objects, devices and machines are connected and operable through a network, is not a new concept, but it is now quickly accelerating.  In the Internet of Things, all objects become represented by data, and the intelligence is pushed above the level of the devices themselves, to the cloud where big data technologies help operate the devices with new levels of efficiency, factoring in not just the individual circumstances of that specific device but also those of connected devices as well as the external context affecting the network at any point in time.

We started with a few spotlight presentations by three pre-funding startups in the space:

  • Canary (fka ForceField Labs): Connected device for home security and monitoring
  • Placemeter: Smart in-store sensors capturing customer data(part of the current Techstars NYC class)
  • Dash Labs: Connected car platform (also part of current Techstars NYC class)

We then featured the following speakers:

  • Alex Hawkinson, CEO, SmartThings
  • Peter Semmelhack, CEO, Bug Labs and author of a new book, “Social Machines”
  • Jon Bruner, data journalist at O’Reilly and author of a new report on “The Industrial Internet”
  • Steve Schlafman of Lerer Ventures
  • Phin Barnes of First Round Capital

Canary:

 

Placemeter:

 

Dash:

 

Peter Semmelhack:

 

Jon Bruner:

 

SmartThings:

 

Panel:

 

Cloudera, Greylock, Platfora and Think Big Analytics

We had an all star event on March 19 at the New York Data Business Meetup with some great presentations and discussions (and some fun stuff as well: see Jeff Hammerbacher’s first few slides about how the term “data scientist” came to existence).

Many thanks to the people who made it possible:
–  Silvio Galea and Annie Dane for hosting us at the very cool WeWork space in SoHo
– David Raviv for doing amazing work with the videos
– Shivon Zilis for taking great pics and being all around super helfpul and resourceful

Here are the videos, in order of appearance:

 

 

 

 

 

And here are some pics:

Quantopian, Plaid and ZestFinance

Our February NYC Data Business Meetup was focused on the intersection of data and finance (both market and consumer finance).  Quantopian, Plaid and ZestFinance presented.

We also had a great panel presenting the customer perspective on Big Data (hype vs. reality), from a financial institutions’ viewpoint, with the following speakers:  Mike Simone (Global Head of CitiData Platform Engineering), Emile Werr (Head of Enterprise Data Architecture, NYSE EuroNext) and  Raj Patil (up until recently Data innovation CTO at UBS, now an entrepreneur).  Unfortunately, due to standard policy at some of those institutions, we can’t publicly post the video of the panel.

The slides are here: 

Quantopian

Plaid

ZestFinance

Here are the videos, in order of appearance (we also had a great “customer panel

Bloomberg App Portal:

Quantopian:

Plaid:

ZestFinance:

Panel:

Joseph Turian, Sqrrl, Infochimps and MemSQL

The December NYC Data Business Meetup was focused on big data infrastructure companies, with the co-founders of Sqrrl, Infochimps and MemSQL presenting to a full house.  We started the evening with a presentation by prominent data scientist Joseph Turian.

The slides are here: Joseph TurianSqrrlInfochimps and MemSQL.

Here are the videos:

Intro

 

Joseph Turian, “How to do AI in 2013”

 

Oren A. Falkowitz, Co-Founder & CEO, Sqrrl

 

Dhruv Bansal, Co-Founder & Chief Science Officer, Infochimps

 

Eric Frenkiel, Co-Founder & CEO, MemSQL

 

And here are a few pics (photo credit: Shivon Zilis):

 

Recorded Future, Lex Machina, DataMarket and numberFire

The November NYC Data Business Meetup was focused on “vertical-specific” applications of big data – startups leveraging the big data stack to offer new solutions to specific industries, such as finance and government (Recorded Future), the legal industry (Lex Machina), energy (DataMarket, although it offers data sets for other industries as well) and sports (numberFire).

The slides are here: Recorded FutureLex MachinaDataMarket and numberFire.

Here are the videos:

Christopher Ahlberg, CEO, Recorded Future:

 

Josh Becker, CEO, Lex Machina:

 

Hjálmar Gíslason, CEO, DataMarket:

 

Nik Bonaddio, CEO, numberFire:

 

Panel discussion:

 

Some pics:

IA Ventures, Accel, Data Collective, Precog and CCS at the NYC Data Business Meetup

Here are the videos from the NYC Data Business Meetup that was held on October 23, 2012, in order of appearance:

Jeff Carr, COO, Precog

 

Max Yankelevich, co-founder, CrowdComputing Systems

 

Roger Ehrenberg, Founder and Managing Partner, IA Ventures; Ping Li, General PartnerAccel Partners; Matt Ocko, Co-Founder and Partner, Data Collective (from left to right):

 

10Gen, Mortar, Datadog & Rick Smolan at the NYC Data Meetup

Here are the videos and some pictures (scroll down) of the NYC Data Business Meetup held on September 25, 2012

In order of appearance:

1) Rick Smolan told us about his fascinating new project, the “Human Face of Big Data” – see the NY Times coverage here: http://nyti.ms/TO5MDd.

 

2) Mortar (presenter: K Young, CEO). Mortar (www.mortardata.com) provides a platform-as-a-service for Hadoop.  They take care of all of the necessary infrastructure (via AWS) and allow any software engineer to run jobs on Hadoop using Apache Pig and Python without special training.

 

3)  Datadog (presenter: Alexis Le Quoc, co-founder). Datadog (www.datadoghq.com) is a service for IT, Operations and Development teams who write and run applications at scale, and want to turn the massive amounts of data produced by their apps, tools and services into actionable insight.  Datadog helps software developers and web ops understand their IT Data by putting it all in context.

 

4) We finished with a fireside chat with Dwight Merriman, CEO and co-founder, 10Gen. 10Gen (www.10gen.com) develops MongoDB, and offers production support, training, and consulting for the open source database. Dwight is one of the original authors of MongoDB. In 1995, Dwight co-founded DoubleClick (acquired by Google for $3.1 billion) and served as its CTO for ten years. Dwight was the architect of the DoubleClick ad serving infrastructure, DART, which serves tens of billions of ads per day. Dwight is co-founder, Chairman, and the original architect of Panther Express (now part of CDNetworks), a content distribution network (CDN) technology that serves hundreds of thousands of objects per second. Dwight is also a co-founder and investor in BusinessInsider.com and Gilt Groupe.

 

Continuuity, Sailthru & Visual Revenue at the NYC Data Meetup

Here are the some videos, slides and pics from the most recent NYC Data Business Meetup.  The videos are unfortunately not of the greatest quality, but are good enough to watch.

Also, note to self: make sure that our audience of 200+ sits closer to the stage, so that the room doesn’t look tragically empty on camera (rookie mistake)!

In order of appearance:

1) Todd Papaioannou, CEO, Continnuuity, a stealth big data startup, based in Palo Alto, CA and backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, Data Collective and a number of high profile angels. Todd was previously Chief Cloud Architect for Yahoo.

2) Neil Capel, CEO, and Daniel Krasner, Chief Data Scientist, Sailthru, a New York based startup backed by RRE, AOL Ventures, Lerer Ventures, DFJ Gotham, Thrive Capital, Metamorphic, etc.  Sailthru provides fully automated, 1:1 email and onsite recommendations using a unique behavioral targeting platform. Sailthru helps brands cut through the clutter and build trust with their customers by recognizing and acting upon their individual interests. Sailthru’s technology creates individual user profiles associated with each person’s email address and online behavior. Sailthru’s algorithms gauge each individual user’s intent and match appropriate content and frequency of email communications such that every email is tailored to the unique user. That means they send as many permutations of an email as there are recipients. All simultaneously, all automated and all in real time.

Sailthru’s slides (PDF)

3) Dennis R. Mortensen, CEO and Jeroen Janssens, Data Scientist,Visual Revenue, a New York based startup backed by Lerer Ventures, SV Angel, IA Ventures and Softbank. Visual Revenue increases front page performance for online media organizations.  Their platform provides Editors with actionable, real-time recommendations on what content to place in what position right now and for how long. Visual Revenue’s predictive analytics technology allows media organizations to proactively manage the cost of exposing a piece of content on a front page, whilst maximizing the return they expect from promoting it.

Visual Revenue’s slides

4) Panel discussion and Q&A with the audience

 

VoltDB, Datastax, RJ Metrics and Custora at the NYDBM

Here are the presentations from the NYC Data Business Meetup on May 21:

VoltDB – Presenter:  Scott Jarr, co-founder

Datastax – Presenter: Matt Pfeil, co-founder

RJMetrics – Presenter: Robert J Moore, co-founder and CEO

Custora (presentation coming soon) – Presenters: Corey Pierson, co-founder, and Aaron Goodman, data scientist.

And here are a few pics!

Hope to add videos soon.

Thoughts, feedback, questions? Topics you’d like to discuss at the next NYDBM? (or data-related stuff you’d like to discuss, regardless of whether you attend the NYDBM or not?). Feel free to opine in the comments section.