Big Data Quotes of the Week

“We are gathering data from small and medium sized businesses but also from large merchants, online, mobile, at the point of sale. As we go omni-channel, we have one of the biggest data sources there is. What search is to Google, transactions are to PayPal. In commerce, transaction signal strength is stronger. It talks more about what people are willing to pay hard earned cash for something. It’s such a strong signal, it gives indication of interest and helps prediction.”–Mok Oh, Chief Scientist, PayPal   

“’Publishing has always been driven by supply,’ [Bookseer cofounder] Collingridge said, quoting Penguin CEO John Makinson, ‘rather than demand.’ Collingridge said Bookseer allows publishers to replace ‘intuition,’ about what is happening in the book marketplace, with real-time data that will help them ‘understand demand. It’s hard to know what marketing strategies work and which ones don’t, since there’s no proof.’ Bookseer just may be the answer to that vexing problem.”–Calvin Reid, MIP 2012: Big Data, Little Data and Angry Birds, Febreze and the Future of Reading

“Just as SaaS and the cloud completely revolutionized the way businesses operate, so will Big Data applications (BDAs). BDAs are web-based applications that interpret and use massive amounts of enterprise and web-scale data to deliver more intelligent results for their subscribers. BDAs leverage the best of the cloud; they’re web-hosted, multi-tenant and use Hadoop, noSQL and a range of recommendation and machine learning technologies.”–Raj De Datta, CEO and co-founder of BloomReach

“Data isn’t sexy… at least not by itself. And that’s a problem, because for data to have an impact, people have to actually interact with it. Dashboards and Analytics are great, if you’re running a company or tracking a website. But consumers have more interesting things to do. If we’re going to make this data impactful for everyday life, it’s got to be presented in a simpler, more engaging way.”–Notch’s creator Eli Holder

“It’s so clear we’re living in the middle of a data revolution. The cost of analyzing data has dropped so low that the average person can download terabytes of government data … and, from their bedroom, fire up a thousand computers to process it.”–Jake Porway, Executive Director, DataKind

“MeriTalk’s new survey of 151 federal IT professionals reveals agencies have less than half of the storage, computing and manpower they would need to leverage big data. Only 60 percent said their agency is analyzing the data they collect, and less than half use their data to make strategic decisions.”–Camille Tuutti, Federal Computer Week

“By the time these agencies have completed their assessment of what to do with all the data they have collected throughout their history, the size of those data stores will have nearly doubled”–Scott M. Fulton, ReadWriteWeb