Blog

2015: The Era of the Zettabyte

It’s nothing new that the world is creating more data then ever before. However, its not always easy to visual just how much data is out there. The info-graphic below shows us in a very digestible manner what the world of data will look like in 3 years from now. After I saw this I couldn’t help myself from asking what will our world look like in 20 years? 50 years? Or even 100 years? How will the era of the Zettabyte impact us differently? The rate at which data is being consumed and created is astonishing and we are really delighted to be part of this exciting time!

Big Data for A Small World.

“Today we know more about Jupiter than the guy who lives next door to us. We can predict where an election will go, we can turn a gene on or off, and we can even send a robot to Mars, but we are lost if asked to explain or predict the phenomena we might expect to know the most about, the actions of our fellow humans.”
― Albert-Laszlo Barabasi,

Jeff Jonas talks about Big Data

Jeff Jonas of IBM* talks about Big Data and the challenges to enterprises. We love his definition of what big data is:

*Our own Giri Iyengar is also an IBM Research Alumni, and we are proud!

Three New Team Members join the Sociocast Family!

We are ecstatic to announce 3 new senior hires to add to our already impressive arsenal over here at Sociocast and we opened a San Francisco office this week too! Sociocast just went national. You may have come across the announcement on citybizlist.com sometime late last week. Steve Morin, Alex Bernstein and Deniz Sarioz have joined the Sociocast team at a very exciting time and individually each brings a great deal of expertise in their respective fields.

Steve Morin joins us as VP of Product Development and brings a swath of experience with him from his  time at Yahoo, AT&T, and his natural entrepreneur instinct. Prior to Sociocast Steve worked at AT&T  Interactive as Director of Engineering for Advanced Advertising Solutions. He worked at Yahoo! for many years on their Mobile Search Marketing Platform, and was one of the founding members and leading architects at Buysight. Steve will be working out of the Sociocast San Francisco office.

Alex Bernstein has joined the Business Development team. Alex recently graduated with an M.B.A from NYU’s prestigious Leonard N. Stern School of Business. He is bringing a great depth of knowledge and experience from his time at Merrill Lynch and Groupon China. Alex enthusiastically acknowledges how his past roles and opportunities have helped develop his awareness of different company profiles and the importance of adapting business frameworks for different audiences, whether it is a hedge fund trader, a local merchant, or an online advertiser

Deniz Sarioz is our first Data Scientist to join the team! He just recently defended his Computer Science Ph.D. dissertation under the supervision of the infamous Janos Pach. Deniz has taught undergraduate courses at both the Brooklyn College Computer and Information Science Department, and the Hunter College Department of Computer Science. He has co-authored well over 10 fascinating papers on graphs and various other subjects in the field. Deniz is proud to have an Erdos number of 2, and will undoubtedly bring his experience and perseverance in problem solving to Sociocast.

We welcome Steve, Alex, and Deniz to Sociocast Family!

Big Data for a Small World.

We live in a Data Driven world

One of our favorite thinkers, Andreas Weigend, Ph.D Stanford, Head of the Social Data Lab at Stanford, former Chief Scientist Amazon.com, says

“We live in a data-driven world. Increasingly, the efficient operation of organizations across sectors relies on the effective use of vast amounts of data. Making sense of big data is a combination of organizations having the tools, skills and more importantly, the mindset to see data as the new ‘oil’ fueling a company. Unfortunately, the technology has evolved faster than the workforce skills to make sense of it and organizations across sectors must adapt to this new reality or perish.”

Is your organization ready?

Audience Building: Think “Better Data” before “Bigger Data”

At Sociocast we believe that ‘better data’ equals ‘better out-put’ which is one of the many reasons that we process all data from/for our clients from raw formats.

While everyone is talking around the concept of ‘Big Data’ right now, a study on data quality from the University of Texas at Austin (sponsored by Sybase) suggests that ‘Better Data’ might be a more relevant first goal for many companies, rather than setting their sights immediately on implementing ’Big Data’. Better data could translate into more sales and higher productivity.

The study found that if the median Fortune 1000 company were able to increase the usability of its data by just 10%, company revenue would be expected to increase by $2.01 billion with many new jobs being added. The paper explains that data can be made more usable by improving at least three areas of data:

• Better presentation
• Easier processesing
• More consistency across parallel data sets

The report argues that just having data alone doesn’t guarantee competitive advantage. Anitesh Barua, IT researcher and professor at the University of Texas McCombs School of Business, said that “For that you need other attributes like intelligence, usability, accessibility and mobility, and we now have the research results to convince CEOs and CFOs of that.” The report estimates that the following benefits could be achieved by improving data quality:

• For every 10 percent incease in usability, sales per employee increases 14.4 percent, or on average, $55,900
• For every 10 percent increase in data quality and sales mobility, the Return on Equity increases by 16 percent
• For every 10 percent increase in business intelligence from better data, businesses increase their number of products and services by 1.51 percent
• Reducing the effort to improve data usabilty by 10 percent would result in a significant productivity increase

Barua commented on the results of the survey that “if I can show that information technology can directly drive profitability, who cares whether the IT budget is three percent of the revenues? We can actually spend more.”

ReadWriteWeb.com developed an Infographic based on the results of this study showing the impact that better data quality can have across different industry segements, like insurance, telecommunications, and publishing.

This post was inspired by friend and former colleague Doug Pollack, who posted how data quality drives ROI in Digiday.

What does the number 37 mean to you? It may mean something different to me. Enter the concept of Data Harmony.

How We Can Turn Piles of Raw Data Into Usable Knowledge? How do you know you’re comparing apples to apples? Scientists from every discipline have more data than ever, but it’s only as useful as the meaning behind it. Enter the concept of Data Harmony.

Every bit of information is only explained by the context in which it was gathered, and often in the context in which it is used. “There is no such thing as raw data,” says Bill Anderson of the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin and associate editor of the CODATA Data Science Journal.

Take the number 37, Anderson says. Other than stating a numerical order, it means little on its own. But with some more information — 37 degrees Celsius, for instance — it can take on more meaning. Now give it some context: 37 degrees C is normal body temperature. Now 37 represents something useful, something a doctor or researcher could use, and it becomes a piece of knowledge that could comfort a patient or answer a question. (my own favorite 37 is NY Yankee, Casey Stengel, who famously said “All right everyone, line up alphabetically according to your height.”)

A scientist may think he’s gathering data for one experiment, but increasingly, the records will be used by many more people than just his research team — it will be parsed and re-parsed, dumped into databases and models, and scrutinized by several different teams in different disciplines. Without proper context and record-keeping, it can be difficult for others to use data in new ways, but better data husbandry can help. That way, scientists can be assured their data is congruent and they’re comparing apples to apples, or normal body temperature to high temperature, as it were.

Sociocast Delights

This is a really amazing video I dug up from the sociocast archives. Enjoy!

Datadog Barks and Bytes

We are happy to announce a newly founded partnership with Datadog, an exciting and unique systems and applications monitoring company.Datadog’s approach to monitoring applications and making performance metrics actionable is by far the best one we have come across. Their SaaS product takes a few minutes to set up and is highly and simply customizable. Having Datadog onboard will help us to maintain the highest quality service for our clients at all times with little effort.

Datadog allows us to monitor our systems and application parameters, such as from CPU, network, disk latencies and load all the way to our own Hadoop metrics so that we can quickly identify and remedy problems and bottlenecks. With Datadog we can much better align our infrastructure performance and capacity with our business needs, which in turn allows us to deliver the most substantial services available. In addition to the fundamental monitoring features, the ease of setup and customization, the novel way to share insight out of monitoring data made Datadog an obvious choice for us.

According to our CTO, Giri Iyengar, one aspect that makes Datadog so good is its ‘extreme flexibility in allowing us to be able to understand what is going on with our servers via a very powerful, yet simple query interface’. Customer service and responsiveness have also been excellent.

We look forward to a productive and strong relationship with Datadog in the future.

Alex Bernstein Joins Sociocast

Sociocast is proud and excited to announce Alex Bernstein has joined the Business Development team. Recently graduated from NYU’s prestigious Business school Stern Alex is bringing a great depth of knowledge and experience to Sociocast. His past work experience involves Business Development for Groupon in Beijing where he helped grow the start-up in several local cities.

When asked what attracted him to Sociocast Alex said, “It was the opportunity to take the initiative at an exciting company and help build the business up from the ground-floor. It was also a great opportunity to develop as a business professional by being part of the incredibly talented and intelligent team.”

Alex enthusiastically acknowledges how his past roles and opportunities have helped develop his awareness of different company profiles and the importance of adapting business frameworks for different audiences, whether it is a hedge fund trader, a local merchant, or an online advertiser.

In his free time you could find him playing basketball, coaching football, snowboarding, traveling to the far edges of the world, exercising, or seeing live music.

Well Alex… welcome to the team!

Big Data for a Small World.