 and welcome to the Big Data Deep Dive with theCUBE on EMC-TV. I'm Richard Schlesinger, and I'm joined today by Tech Industry Entrepreneur and Wikibon Analyst, Dave Vellante, and Silicon Angle CEO and Editor-in-Chief, John Furrier, also known collectively as the Cube guys, and we are very grateful to have you here. Welcome. Good to be here. Thanks for having us. Welcome to EMC-TV. You guys have had a busy summer, I guess, keeping track of everything going on in Big Data. Where have you been? The Cube has been on tour. John, I think we've done almost 10 Big Data events this year. Yeah, I mean, Silicon Angle TV has been going out to all the events, extracting the signal from the noise, and that's our passion, that's our mission, and we're excited to continue the second half of the year. We've got a lot of great events, but the world wants to know more about this game-changing technology. And it's amazing, because it's really gotten a lot of steam in the last year or so as the technology has evolved and the people are thinking about the uses of it. Yeah, I mean, the technology has always been a geeky thing, especially in Silicon Valley and here in Massachusetts and New York, it's expanding, but with Big Data, it's become not just about the technology, it's about the business impact, and I think that's the one thing that I'm really excited about, and what we're seeing is across the board, every industry is being disrupted by these new technologies, and it's probably one of the most exciting things I've seen in my entire career. And it's gonna change the way people look at technology. It is gonna change the way, and it's gonna change people's lives, and so as you guys know, EMC has been working on the human face of Big Data project, which we're about to roll out, actually we're rolling out right now. And I just thought we'd take a quick look at a spot that we produced here at EMC TV about the human face of Big Data, what it means to put a human face on Big Data. Take a look. Big Data, the key to transforming chaos into meaning. Torrents of information from billions of sources. Data that is unstructured, constant, diverse, complex. But with the potential to change the way we live our lives. Enabling us to ask fundamental questions about the world around us and our future. Revealing new answers. Big Data is changing our relationship with the information we create. Just imagine the possibilities. Whole industries transform. Meet Sebastian, extreme athlete and type one diabetic. Who uses biometric sensors and analytics to measure and improve his performance. Sebastian is just one of millions harnessing Big Data. Realizing his power. Become a part of a new generation. Become a part of the human face of Big Data. I love that spot because it boils this whole thing down to what we're talking about. Lots of data influencing individuals, changing people's lives. You'll be hearing a lot more about the human face of Big Data project. Basically what we're trying to do is paint a digital picture of the world using human beings as sensors with their cell phones telling people where they've been and all that sort of thing. It's going to be fascinating. You'll be hearing about that in the months to come. I like to think of it as taking sort of impersonal technology to change a person's life. It's a very direct effect. You guys have seen a lot of that sort of stuff in your travels. What is the state of the art here? Where are we with Big Data? How much do people really understand about it? Videos like that are inspiring. At the same time, they're intimidating. People are concerned about what are they going to do with all this data. But I think the reality is where we're at is this is a freight train that's happening. It's going to be ubiquitous. It is becoming a fundamental part of our lives. It's going to change your life. Maybe whether you know it or not, it's going to help you in ways that we'll talk about later on. In cities, as you guys know, a lot of cities are beginning to look at the potential for Big Data to gather data on what's going on in real time. How advanced is that? I think the Big Data thing really empowers people, you mentioned that earlier. And these new people that are going to be emerging out of this next generation are empowered to do new things like the PC revolution that was created by Steve Jobs and Bill Gates back on the day. And people are doing two things with Big Data. They're getting older questions answered faster and they're allowed to ask new questions and solve new problems that they could never do before. And that's really the most important thing that we're seeing on the impact of business and empowering people. So if you're running, say, a large city, you could use Big Data technology and sensors to figure out what's going on in your Big City in real time, right? Instrumenting a city, think of instrumenting a building and then taking that to the concept of a city has so much potential in terms of eliminating waste, protecting people, you know, cameras are popping up everywhere. Massive amounts of data are being ingested. As they say, it's inspiring and it's scary. It's a little scary because you have to make sure that it's handled properly. Well, you know, we went down, EMC-TV went down to Rio, which has done a lot in this area. They're getting ready for the Olympics and so they've pretty well wired that city and they use it to keep track. Again, in real time, that's the key of what's going on there and they can solve problems quickly, they can get on stuff quickly. And so we went down to take a look at that and here's what we found. It's the brain, the heart of Rio de Janeiro City. It works seven days a week, 24 hours a day. We have... several information. We have more than 30 bodies, inside here, bodies of the municipality, public services, which are electrical energy companies, gas companies. We have the prefecture, which takes care of the city, but we have more than 560 cameras today, just in the city of Rio de Janeiro. We can detect any kind of problem that's already on the road. We have, as I said, the population through the social media giving us information of what's happening in the city. We have here the media, our local, here, radio, TV, newspapers, also feeding us with these information and these information coming here, as we are with several agencies here. We can treat and according to the type of accident or occurrence, we send the A, B, C, or D, meteorological incidents, that is, a traffic accident, or some other type of building failure, or something. In the World Cup, in 2014 and in the 2016 Olympics, the center of operations, the Rio City Prefecture, will be more prepared and the center of operations will be more mature to receive this great number of tourists, to receive this great event that will take place here in 2016. Today we have much more information about what's happening in the traffic of the city. I'm proud of this Brigadier of information that Rio de Janeiro has because with that, the city has improved, the traffic has improved, and people have a better quality of life. You look at all that technology and you think, boy, this will really be put to the test when the Olympics come to town. But they've got some time to work on it, and the technology will improve over the years. Let's talk, down into the weeds, just a little bit. Where are people now? What is going on in this world? Who's doing what? I think that big data has gone from this hype, this concept, to now it's practical realities of big data. Everybody wants to implement big data because it's bringing competitive advantage. The tagline is data is the new oil. Or what does that mean? That means that increasingly it's going to be about the algorithms that you write, how you package data, how you monetize it that's going to give you competitive advantage. Where people are at today is they're struggling with how to figure out ways to bring in unstructured and structured information and then how to package it and distribute it and actually make money with it. John, who have you talked to about that? We've talked to a lot of different people at Stratoconference and at the Hadoop H-Base Conference in San Francisco, which was kind of the early, kind of the first ever conference of alpha geeks around this new database technology called H-Base. They really focus in on the fact that there's kind of a new way and an old way and that's kind of how people are looking at this. Old way is, you know, the incumbents, the people existing in the market. The new way are the new young kids coming out of college whether it's a computer science degree or a psychology degree and truly changing every single opportunity whether it's a tech geek or a data analyst or a business manager and so big data is kind of changing that. So, pardon me, let's meet some of the people who you've talked to. Who did you bring along? We had Alistair Crowell and Ed Dumbbell who run the Stratocon conference and we have a clip from them we'll show you now and these guys run the Stratocon and they talk to everyone so here's their perspective on big data. Watch this video. Okay, we're back live inside the Cube at the Stratocon conference in Silicon Valley where the future was being invented as we speak in Silicon Valley and from entrepreneurs around the globe. This is SiliconANGLE.tv and SiliconANGLE.com is the Cube, our flagship telecast. We go out to the top tech events and extract the signal from the noise and share that with you. We're all open source content. We love it. We'd love to talk to the smartest people we can find and share their knowledge with you. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com and my guests now in this segment are the founders and the guys I got a founder, I call you a founder I guess the guys who run Stratocon put it together the program chairs Ed Dumbbell and Alistair Crowell welcome back to the Cube. The first thing, how do you guys feel? Tired, exhausted, excited all of the above? Absolutely. We're thrilled because we have another sell out event you know last year we sold out about 1300 this year we're somewhere near 2500 so it's absolutely thrilling to us to just see the growth of this and feel all the excitement around the show. There is more themes, a lot more live streaming you guys have implemented but overall just a lot of great content in every direction. Big day is affecting not just one sector it seems to be a whole new industry I compared it to the personal computer industry back in the late 70s early 80s where an entire new ecosystem of entrepreneurs and players emerged it seems to have that kind of vibe here because it affects everything life, society talk about the diversity here Well the original brief for Stratocon was that this was going to be about not just big data but also new interfaces to collect and share information and ubiquitous computing that everyone can get to and that really changes not just work but also how we play how we love, how we learn how to draw on me to the Stratocon content and the reason I got involved is because big data is really where computers touch people that data is so often the parts of our lives we heard someone on Tuesday doing big data to anticipate car accidents based on weather forecast in Chicago so they could deliver the right spare parts to repair houses, someone else saying two thirds of the food that we deliver fresh fruit and vegetable gets spoiled in transit because it can't get to the right market so if you're fixing the speed of cars and replacing the food supply those are very human factors this is no longer bits and bytes and it's that humanizing element of what this stuff can do that's almost like a superpower it's almost a dual conference, you have the geeky conversations the alpha geeky conversations around the Hadoop and the Greenfields and MongoDB and all the Diff Cassandra so on so forth, the data warehousing intelligence and then you have this whole application mindset where there's real impact not just for business but society and what are you seeing out there at that level of what are some of the exciting bullet points that you can share with folks out there and how big data is really changing the world I think one of the most interesting things is this goes into an organization is that people start off with maybe they'll do a pilot project and then suddenly they find out once they've used Hadoop wants for something and built kind of a platform they're able to get out data often it's the unexpected things that are really creating value and we're excited that one of the things we talk about alongside big data is data science and the word science is so important because people are experimenting and exploring and making discoveries in their organizations and in the world that they didn't know were there before so I think a lot of this we're still very early stage still really feeling things out still answering the questions what this is going to do for me but it's the unexpected things that are definitely the most provocative thing that you've seen here guys if you guys can both comment that would be great something that you go wow that's really provocative and also you mentioned some of the things you mentioned about the applications what's really the most provocative most interesting thing so there was a discussion which sounds very esoteric but it's actually really really important there was a big debate a couple of days ago about whether you don't need a hypothesis anymore or a domain expert anymore once you have the data and there's a great example where if you see the movie Moneyball you got all these scouts who they look for kid's arm and whether his girlfriend's attractive is an indicator of his playing success and instead a couple of people show up with a spreadsheet and beat all the other teams right that's a case where you take a guy who doesn't have domain expertise but he's good with numbers can beat a bunch of people who have been doing all their lives and so some people claim that the importance of being able to have domain experts to be an expert in your field goes away once you have enough information the data beats expertise that's a really really threatening thing for everybody who's got a career where they're a domain expert because it means that someone with a spreadsheet and the right data can beat you you guys have a strategy with Stratocity we love the data scientists workshop it's an educational need what's going on in the market what is needed and what's going on that people can go to what resources are you seeing one of our big jobs for this conference is to try and make sense of the marketplace right now I spend a lot of January writing a lot of material about exactly where everybody sits and how they stack up and what's real I think one of the other really important things coming through this year is going to be the increased importance of visualisation you talked about the skills gaps and what we want to be able to do is give non-mathematically trained people the skills to be able to have a fingertip feel for the data so it's not just about boring old dashboards and tablet technology is absolutely vital in this that people can see the data then they can stick their finger in it move it around get that dynamic which is what data scientists have built into their gut but we want that you know so business people can have that too we're also looking at geographic expansion so hopefully we'll have some news confirmed pretty shortly about China and London to add to this so we're very excited congratulations John Graham chairs from Strata at Dunville Alistair Crowell great guys you should follow them on Twitter find out where they are just go on Google search go to O'Reilly their blog is fantastic these guys are expanding this is a real real game-changing trend great to be part of it I'm really psyched for you guys congratulations John you know you said it while you were talking out there this is game changing and it'll it'll give power to people who may not have had as much power data equals equals power right I mean I think this is opportunity when you have this kind of disruption in a way that changes businesses and this is what big data does it's not only a technical innovation it's just a as a naval or disruptive enabler but it's also in the business front so you know the role of a data scientist isn't the geek anymore it's the person who's an analyst a CEO it's the it's the manager he talked about a call talked about giving information to people who are not necessarily mathematically trained which I responded to because it makes it more accessible and that is going to be a game-changing everyone can be and improve the business think about it someone in a business can actually make a material impact to that business using big data and not having to be a PhD or a math that's the promise of big data and that you see an improvement you can move on and now the technology is in place to do that there's a really important point here in that we think something we've been tracking at Silicon Angle and Wikibon is big data practitioners we believe are going to create more value than the suppliers of big data technology well what that means is that you're going to see a whole new set of use cases and applications and value creation that we've never seen before in the tech business so we've been talking about cutting costs and doing more with less for years in the technology business we're now talking about adding bottom line productivity saving lives big picture things that are going to be dramatically changing the world you know it's interesting you guys are excited about it everybody everybody's pretty excited about it and we've really just touched the tip of the iceberg here but we'll be back we have more installments of the big data deep dive coming up so stay tuned to the conversation with my new best friends from the cube on EMC TV