 Okay, we're back here live at theCUBE. Our flagship program will go up to the events that start to seal it from the noise. This is SiliconANGLE's coverage of O'Reilly Media Stratoconference. Getting winding down on the most amazing show, day three of what we call blanket coverage. Wall-to-wall coverage. Interviews from nine to six every day. I'm John Furrier, I'm joined by co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of wikibon.org and we've got our friend Ed Dumbbell back. Ed, day three, we're winding down. We're all hitting the wall here, but you and Alistair are just amazing. I mean, everybody always tells John and me how amazing we are and how we keep going. You guys, really, I have to say, cogent, insightful, non-stop. So again, congratulations on a fantastic, insightful event. Thanks, you know, cogent's probably overselling it for me at this point, but I'll take it where I can get it. Autopilot. You know, this is a heck of a toy that you get to play with, so you suddenly get a high off the energy. You know, it's a consistent theme we hear from folks and certainly we use the term intoxicated intoxication around some of the concepts here because there's a range of topics at Strata. It really kind of teases out. Again, we talked about when you were on last time, but, you know, mentally it's intoxicating and to me it's like a TED at a level that just is not so much in the clouds and just, you know, fantasizing about the future. It's a little bit of both. You get the intoxication of the future, inventing and dreaming up the future, and also, but you're down at the tactical, operational, you know, execution level of both geeks and business, so it's exciting. And so with that, what are you now, end of the show's coming down, what are you seeing as kind of bubbling up now that all the hype is dialed down over the distributions? Things are settled in. We're getting ready to close out the show. What's your takeaway right now? You know, I think, I said at the beginning that we were just getting down to work, and I think that really is my takeaway that the people here that have come as attendees are ones who do want to get down to work. We kind of pass this big conceptual stage about big data and we're talking about how it makes it work, and you talked about how broad this conference is, and it is because we take in right from the data infrastructure through to management factors and business strategy and everything in between, you know, even in the science, the data science, there's the actual coding. It's such a broad domain, but actually it needs to be a broad domain because what we're doing with big data is modeling customers, modeling the real world, modeling people, and it's a vertical activity. This is not your old IT, right? This is something that touches business and ripples all the way down through to the actual tech at the bottom. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to see the enterprise IT guys here, but again, it's a big canvas and the paint brushes are out. A lot of things are starting to be scratched out in terms of designs and architectures. So before we get into that, I want to kind of ask you just kind of on a different tangent around communities, right, because obviously you guys have a really developing community with Strata around Nouns Global, multiple venues. Are there any communities that are coming out that you see developing fast that aren't necessarily on everyone's radar screen right now that surprises you or maybe not surprises you in terms of new kind of flowers that are blooming with communities? That's a great question. I think in a way we form communities at the show. One thing that interests me, I think in particular, is whether user experience community are going to come in and interact with data because how you even create interfaces, how you collect data very much affects what you can do with it, it affects the results you get and also how you communicate it. Even the layout of a screen can really have a dramatic impact on data-driven decision-making. So for me, one of the things that is going to be continually interesting is how we grow the overlap with those communities. We've certainly found, you know, we take the show all over the place and we announced the dates earlier today for we have Strata London in November and Strata New York with Hadoop World in October. And you see, particularly in London, you know where there's a big design culture that the user experience element definitely comes out a lot more over there. So that's some interesting keynotes this morning. We heard things like a little semantics goes a long way. That was sort of a good mantra. And then Nathan Mars from Twitter, John, was talking about how to plan for humans to fail and a new data model for the mutability. So that was interesting to hear Twitter up talking about immutability and sharing that data model. Some of it seemed, you know, quite intuitive, but it's not applied broadly, is it? Right, you know, I was saying when I was back on here yesterday about the three things, three places that there's value in this industry. And the third one I said was people. And I think they really brought it out. That you're not, unless you understand the fact that this actually is all about people one degree or another, you're going to make a mistake. Jeannie Harris yesterday at her great keynote was talking about the things that you miss every time, you know, and if you were born a little too late to realize it from the BI and analytics world, you're going to make the same mistakes again in big data. And one of them is there is no magic bullet, right? There is no software package you can install that mitigates all the people factors in an organization or even around a product. So being cognizant of people and I have this mantra that computers sounds very simple, but computers ought to help people. But very often the way in the IT industry build things where people need to bend around our product. And what we're hearing a lot more of is this kind of mantra coming out again that we should build things with humans in mind, even if it's data backends. Yeah, and you have some of the hyper scale guys, like Twitter and obviously Facebook and Google leading that charge. And you see here at the conference a number of the sort of big industry IT vendors as sponsors, you have, you had set up for this event some tracks on enterprise IT. Right. Do you see those kind of worlds coming together where the hyper scale world is a harbinger for the traditional enterprise? Will they essentially just outsource it to the enterprise? Or will those worlds sort of stay separate for quite some time? What's your view on it? I think what the trend, I mean, the whole big data industry in fact, and the trends we're following here is technology that was invented to serve web scale operations brings benefits to enterprises. And really that's kind of the story we're following as these things come down. So one of the key things that I talk about a lot that web scale operations of going for themselves is agility, right? You know, typically enterprise IT is all about governance and policy and making sure nothing goes wrong. Where, but at the expense sometimes of innovation and agility. And from the opens, before the web world, the open source world as well. You know, we've already seen a lot of open source methodology and agile and collaborative programming come into the enterprise. I think in the data side as well, that ability to move quickly and iterate is something that's going to come from the web scale companies through the technology and also the methodology into the enterprise. Well, I haven't seen, you know, once an idea gets out there, Google publish a paper. I've been talking about Stuxnet all week and now we see the story today where essentially taking a playbook out of Stuxnet. So the ideas get out there. The question I've always had though is will the enterprises end up just sort of outsourcing that to, you know, cloud players, the sort of NICCAR big switch model or will they actually develop that expertise in-house? It's kind of gone both ways that, you know, for a while it was like, wow, these guys won't be able to compete with cloud service providers, but, you know, the private cloud has sort of made some progress there. And I wonder from a, you know, a scale and a plan for human failure, if that level of skill will sort of repeat itself once that knowledge base gets out there within the large enterprises and, you know. There's a spectrum, right? Yeah. There's always a spectrum between people who kind of get it, people can move with this kind of thinking and those who just want, who just, you know, it's not a priority or they're milking a cash cow and eventually they drop off the end. Generally, very few companies survive more than a couple of times around the block. If you look at the way people are falling out of the, you know, the top 100 stocks these days, they just drop off and you don't hear about them again. What I do think is very interesting about the technology world we're in now is because we're so networked, right? First move of advantage is huge. If you get in and lock it down, get control of the network, you know, obviously in the web that's very obvious what that network is, but as more things are digitally mediated via social and apps, there's a network effect available to a lot more organizations. So suddenly your brick and mortar stores are entirely vulnerable to people who will create an app to sell it, you know, maybe just a third of their product line and then zap, right? And that's the end of them. So I think the laggards will be treated less kindly by, you know, the general conditions of doing business now. We have a story breaking on silkenangle.com this morning that's going viral. It's an exclusive report from some of our sources about the Iranian hacker threat, death threats on Joe Biden and also commandeering the drones and that's come in from a white hat tipster and we validated that and it's significant. And I want to bring that up because we've chatted about data and the impact of data and scarcity and what's not scarce and data will be scarce and will be a resource. You know, and as Tim O'Reilly said yesterday is that, you know, data is where the value will be created, not the software anymore and it's going to shift. And I've been doing my rant around the whole, you know, second amendment, data is the, you protect your data, to write the bare data is a theme that no one's really talking about because if you think about where we control the data and I think we might have been talking about this briefly is in control and that could be a government. But yet these hacks are bringing out data that's private about government installations, people involved in nuclear research in the U.S. and it's really sensitive data. So, you know, and also Tim brought up the blacks had scientists yesterday so security was in our top story today. So, you know, this is a really big society global problem not just for the U.S. Right, take on that. You know, I mean, historically, it's information that wins wars, right? World War II, the nigma machine and all that tactics as part of it. This has always been true, you know, it's Roman times and basic ciphers. So, again, just to refer to what I said today, what we have now is huge network effects, right? The how fast that information can get out and be used to threaten people whereas before if a bad actor found the information out they didn't have the means of dissemination to do too much with it. So, my feeling is I was sitting on an expert that we're going to go through a few cycles of real, the oscillation before we figure out what not to do and maybe a case and we'd narrowly averted disaster through nuclear nonproliferation, right? When we suddenly realize the risk and step back from it. It's entirely possible that at some point we'll feel that information is going that way and we will have to take a step back from our capabilities and say yes, just because we can use data sets A, B, and C to derive this dangerous fact D doesn't mean that we should, you know, or that we should let that information out. Yeah, and again, I bring this up only because it's a provocative, intoxicating kind of conversation to think about and just mind bending just to kind of put your arms around it, but it's a social science issue and we had Kenneth Kukie on about his new book, Big Data Analytics of Revolution and, you know, these are concepts that bring on all the thought leads from Clay Scherke to IBM executives and industry actors to step up and participate and really, I don't want to say volunteer but be active in the discussion. We know there's a reason I like to involve a variety of people in the conference and we had Kate Crawford, a great social scientist, give a keynote this morning. One of the things I often wish for when we start to get into these conversations with frankly, you know, IT guys, right, is this emergency button that calls a historian and an anthropologist and maybe a politician as well. So we actually can help understand what the hell's going on because frankly, we're out of our depth in some of these things but we actually have the power to control it. So we need to be educating, we need to be having the conversation with the people in power. It's a blind spot, if you're in IT, it's like, it's a blind spot, right? So IT are doing their thing. You need to have that flash mob of expertise instantly to come to the table. We don't know what we're doing half the time and we need to be able to explain what we're doing with data to people with power. We cannot just say they didn't get it, right? There needs to be a lot better dialogue than we're managing right now. Yeah, that was interesting presentation. She's talking about some works that she did with Dana Boyd on solving for biases in the data and because you always say, oh, the data doesn't lie, well, if I don't understand what it means. Whether it's lying or not. We have two minutes left, we have two minutes left but I want to get to your personal life and ask you a few personal questions. What's your favorite color? No, couldn't resist the Monty Python jokes but to kind of show my age. I didn't come here for an argument. Yeah. So what are you working on these days? Actually, last time on a personal level, you have your personal interest besides strata. I'm doing an amazing job here. You have some stuff going on in your personal professional life, non-strata life. You're an editor, you're exploring concepts. What are you working on and what's got your attention these days? We know a variety of things to be honest. It's kind of exhausting but so as well as the three strata's with the California, New York and London, I also am putting together the Open Source Convention which is in Portland in July and you guys should come and ask on that. Yeah, ask on. Yes. Amazing, great fun and Open Source is a default these days in a lot of companies so that's becoming a much, an ever-growing and more exciting field to be in. I'm fascinated by the future of programming and the ways in which network programming and the kinds of parallel things we have to do now is affecting the way people have to learn to code and the kind of code that people need to write to get things done. I'm also, as you mentioned, editor of the big data journal which we have the first issue. Happily, wonderful glossy thing I could hold in my hands that we launched this week. So that's quite a lot to be doing. We're going to get the big deal. Is that print or is that online as well? That is both. It turns out that about 80% of people read it online but we have some very beautiful things. We actually worked with Rick Smollon, you know, who did the big data photography. Big data project. Yes. So we have one of his photos on the cover which is the Domino's Pizza Delivery Route from Manhattan. I've never seen anything more prosaic or ended so more beautiful in these electric blue trails over Manhattan. So that was great to work with him on that and we've had a great reception. And what's the URL for the big data journal? That's libertpub.com, which is libertpub.com slash big. Okay, we got to work on that. Yeah, we really have to work on that. That's bit.ly.com slash big data journals. Big data what? Bit.ly.com slash? No, I'm making that up. Oh, okay. That's what it should be. All right. And how is your journey with the big data journal? How has that been? That's been great so far. You know, it's a big challenge. We're doing something very different. Academic journals aren't really things that work with industry. So we're doing industry academia crossover. We're also attempting to be very multidisciplinary because even I was talking to the people at the big data lab at MIT, part of the CSAIL there, the IT department. And they were saying even though they have people who work on analytics and they have people who work on databases, even those people within one computer department don't talk to each other, right? So a lot of the journal world is very silent. That's the right one. So it's a big challenge for us to bring it all together but I think it's very much worth it and put alongside issues of policy and the visualization and the complementary disciplines around it. I think if big data is to, thankfully, it's not a hype thing that's going to fall off the cliff but my idea is that it's a long game and you need a journal or a body of record that's more substantive that'll last a longer time than conferences or blog posts that can go where people can put down markers for the important ideas and move the field forward. Well, congratulations on getting that off the ground. New print, which is, again, counterintuitive but it's so riley. We're looking for a publisher for SiliconANGLE print magazine. We don't know what to do. We wouldn't know what to do. We would not know what to do. We'd be full of photographs of you guys. Call Rick. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and wrapping up. I'll give you the final word here, ending day three for our interview here, from your perspective. Tell the folks out there, kind of a bumper sticker. Day three summarizing the entire show. How would you wrap up Strata this year? Just fantastic energy of people who, as the conference tagline says, want to make data work. Making data work, doing a great job. Again, provocative intoxicating at one end and energizing and motivating on the other. Great resource. Strata Conference, we're proud to be here at theCUBE with O'Reilly Media and Strata Conference. We'll be right back with John Furrier and Dave Vellante with our next guest of this short break.