Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly is on stage with Tom Krazit, Executive Editor of Gigaom. He's now talking about the $160M(!) his firm just raised — from T. Rowe Price (which invests primarily in public companies), Google Ventures, and Dell (led by Michael himself).

How soon will Cloudera be a $1B company? "In a large, accelerating big data market ($50B?), we believe we'll be the largest company?" How soon will you IPO? "We have a long way to go before that." (They just hired their first ceneral counsel!) He's done it before, so he's quite familiar with the process. "Gotta get off Quickbooks first." 🙂

Talking about product and their Enterprise Data Hub: "We have dozens of companies behind us building the platform. We don't need to build up," said Reilly. Cloudera is hiring more engineers to ensure the integrations with partners go smoothly. "Predictive support capability" is part of version 5.0. "Machine learning and SQL are working side by side."

APIs are, or will be, putting cutting-edge capabilities in deep learning, cognitive computing, and artificial intelligence into the hands of developers everywhere.

Stacey Higginbotham, Senior Writer at Gigaom, is interviewing Elliot Turner, CEO of AlchemyAPI, and Stephen Gold, VP-WW Marketing and Sales Operations, Watson Solutions, IBM Software Group.

"How soon before developers can access computer vision capabilities?"  Stacey asks. Turner: "We'll see more and more of this — it won't be called cognition or AI, it will just be solving real world problems — like helping the blind to see."

Stacey: "How much will cognition-as-a-service cost?" Gold: "The original Watson is now 90% smaller and 24 times more powerful…We'll see people who will pay for a given portion of that brain." (More on Watson.)

Okay, "but will cognition ever become a commodity?"  Gold: "For the foreseeable future, I don't think that's in the picture." Turner: "We have seven billion people who can migrate skills and solve problems."

Stacey: "What do you tell your children about what you're doing?" Turner: "We need to move away from rote memorization." Gold: "There's a big movement in universities in how we educate. We need curriculums on how to build these cognitive capabilities."

(UPDATE: Here's an article I found that dives deeper, shall we say, into a topic addressed in this session: The Gigaom Guide to Deep Learning.)

Derrick Harris, Senior Writer at Gigaom, is doing this final session: "For the first time, Gigaom presents its selections of the best and brightest big data startups" and gives each of them an award. Each founder is onstage for a four-minute interview before we break for a reception.

We're now hearing from David Soloff, CEO of Premise, about how microdata can make a big impact on macroeconomics. His company is using crowdsourcing to bring economic indicators into the age of globalization and real-time data. Armed only with smartphones, Premise’s volunteers take pictures that are potentially worth – you guessed it – billions of dollars. I told you this Big Data thing could be monetized, didn't I?