Category: Big Data (Page 5 of 13)

Stacey Higginbotham of Gigaom is moderating this one. The panelists are Sven Strohband — Partner and CTO, Khosla Ventures, Jalak Jobanputra — Managing Partner, FuturePerfect Ventures, Shivon Zilis — VC, Bloomberg Beta, and Hilary Mason — Data Scientist in Residence, Accel Partners.

First off, real applications! And please don't say you're a big data company when you pitch, because that probably means you're not.

"Data does not have value. You have to build the technology that makes it valuable," says Hillary, who points out she's the only one on the panel that's actually not an investor (rather, she's a data scientist who hangs around with VCs).

"Where do you find deals?" Stacey asks the panel. They look for "early signals," of course. (As in data!) They look to university researchers, corporate refugees, and the panelists that are NY-based really feel they have an edge, with "so many domain specialists located here." Sven likes to connect smart people and see what they can come up with.

"What pitches do you not want to hear anyore?"  Don't say you're "like the AirBnB of something – we can figure that out." Hilary Mason: "No more Hadoop in the cloud."

Big data is speeding its demise. The CEO of Pivotal tells Om Malik that the old guard can’t handle it – starting with infrastructure. Telcos, for one, are especially challenged.

What does the future hold? “We’re beginning to see what can happen when all the machines in the world are connected to the Internet – radical change.”

I say no — too distracting. Let people track the stream on their own. Attention should be on the speakers.