Earlier this week, Fred Gallagher of Actian Corporation, wrote a guest post on GigaOm titled, “Big Data: The quick and the dead”. In the post, Fred challenges the conventional thinking about Big Data; specifically, “the implied premise that bigger is better and that adding more data will naturally produce insights.” Fred goes on to note that about 95 percent of data in a data warehouse is dormant and that adding terabytes or petabytes of unstructured data to this data warehouse is likely to make dormant data, dead data. What businesses need and what ultimately drives business value, Fred correctly notes is “live “quick” data not dormant or dead data.”

At TrendSpottr, we believe that one of the most disruptive Big Data opportunities is the real-time analysis of “live” data elements. More specifically, our focus is on identifying trends and predictive insights from real-time, incremental streams of Big Data; i.e, a predictive early warning system based on real-time pattern recognition and analysis of the velocity and acceleration of living data. The reality, as Fred notes, is that most of the data that is being analyzed today by Big Data implementations is dormant or dead. By focusing on only those data elements that provide the potential for insight and action, we can leverage the potential of Big Data by making sure it’s alive! 

Finally, a quick plug for TrendSpottr cofounder and CTO, Alain Chesnais. In addition to being the technical architect of the TrendSpottr service and the source of one of our favourite recent quotes, “What we’re doing is actually playing the role of an automated data scientist for you. Now you can consume big data without needing a Ph.D in statistics”, Alain also serves as President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest scientific and computing organization.

This week, the ACM is in Warsaw, Poland hosting the prestigious and highly competitive International Collegiate Programming Contest. The results are now in and the winner of this year’s ICPC is St. Petersburg State University. The University of Warsaw came in second place and our very own University of Waterloo came in ninth place. Congratulations to all the teams and to the ACM and Alain for hosting this amazing event.