I attended “Social Data Week Seattle” hosted by the Tableau Software today. An overview of the workshop stated that “Social Data Week Seattle will explore the business opportunities and practicalities of creating a socially intelligent business by leveraging big data, social data and analytics.”
I arrived 30 minutes late, and there were no seats left. In front of the packed room, Rahul Khandkar from Google was giving a presentation on “Google and Big Data”. He mentioned that smart sensors, machines and social data sources will generate large volume data which will grow with time. He also demonstrated how data collected by Google Sensing Lab is analyzed.
- Sensors (RFID or NFC?) pick up data.
- Endpoints/App Engine ingests and processes data.
- Datastore stores data.
- Compute Engine BigQuery computes data.
- Data is visualized by a Dashboard after big data analytics work.
In a previous blog, I’ve mentioned how Google is collecting purchaser’s data. Now, I’ve learned that Google is planning to collect more data from proximity sensors. What a vision!
Daniel Hom from Tableau spoke on “Using Social Analytics for Insights”. He demonstrated analyzing social data with Tableau:
- Datasift, a Cloud platform for extracting value from social data, collects data.
- Googlebigquery, a web service, performs interactive analysis.
- Tableau displays the analytics in a dashboard instantaneously.
Tableau seems to be a very robust tool at making sense of and visualizing big data. How fortunate it is that we have these innovative companies in Seattle.
I like the idea of “creating a socially intelligent business by leveraging big data, social data and analytics.” Web2.0 provides a self-expression platform and we have a large self-expressed population. What could be easier to understand our customers than understanding their needs and wants through social data?
