Last week, I attended two technical events. One was Big Data Techcon in San Francisco and another was Seattle Biz-Tech Summit 2013. My focus was on Big Data and proximity sensors.

For Big Data Techcon, there were many sessions about tools; for example, how to collect data, analyze the data and make a correct interpretation of the analytics. The emphasis is on engineering data. Two things that stood out for me was the graph data base and the keynote speech by Doug Cutting.

The graph data base has an advantage to visualize the connections between Big Data. The book, “Graph Databases”, was given away at the session led by Max De Marzi. He was passionate about Neo4j and showed us the connections between Facebook accounts using code. The connections were visualized regardless of the privacy setting in Facebook.

In the keynote speech, Doug Cutting, the founder of Hadoop claimed that “Hadoop 2 is the Big Data OS” and “Open source’s time has come”. After the keynote, Doug was available to talk to people who wanted to obtain his insights or wanted to have a photo with him. Regarding my inquiry about his view on proximity sensors and Big Data, he saw the significance of the sensor impact to Big Data and made an example with retail stores “What would be the value to the retail stores when they can figure out the shopper’s favorable route.

Seattle Biz-Tech Summit 2013 also focused on Cloud and Big Data. I particularly enjoyed the panel “Innovation and Impacts of Cloud Computing and Big Data”. Dave Segleau, Director, Oracle described the phases of the customer adoption of Big Data as:

1. What is Big Data?
2. What can Big Data do?
3. I have a Big Data (or NoSQL) problem. How can I use your product help me build and deploy a Big Data (or NoSQL) based solution?
4. I’m starting to understand the issues (limitations, requirements, administration) around managing a Big Data (or NoSQL) solution.
5. Here’s how I can leverage Big Data to benefit the Enterprise and our customers.

Ying Li, Director, ACM SIGKDD suggested that we would move from an engineering data phase to a data knowledge sharing phase in the future. She was an advocate for open data. Jay Mozek, Chief Architect & Director, iSoftStone thought that we need to be clear about the business goal before engineering data. Chris Garvery, Senior Director, Expedia encouraged us to think what we can’t do today and use data to discover the possibility. Panelists had their own perspectives and their unique views made the session informative and interesting.

Yesterday, I found this article that shared how graphics chips can help process big data sets in milliseconds and “opening up new ways to visually explore everything from Twitter posts to political donations.” This trend of facilitating big data visualization is certainly in full swing.