Drinks and Data
18 June 2012 – 111 Minna Gallery, San Francisco CA
111 Minna was an eclectic and trendy venue for Big Data SF Bay’s Drinks and Data, a fitting follow-up to the very successful Big Data Drink Up held in Sunnyvale last May. I’m sure all the attendees appreciate the efforts and sponsorship of DataStax, Objectivity and VigLink .
I arrived a little early and found Lynn Bender preparing the name cards for attendees. He graciously offered me a couple of drink tickets, complements of the sponsors, to get started at the wine bar. A very pleasant and informative evening ensued.
One of the first arrivals was Megan Hopkins from VigLink, who explained that her VC-funded company has a variety of tools to help publishers monetize their content. She also mentioned that VigLink is currently hiring!
Mike Becker, big data practice manager at Lilien LLC walked up to me and explained that his company is one of the leading IT VARs in the Western U.S and their core practice includes big data and advanced analytics.
Not long after, I ran into Mark Rabkin, account executive for SQL Stream. SQLstream is the only standards-based SQL platform for real-time streaming of live data feeds such as log files, sensors and networks.
111 Minna was packed by 8:00 and as I enjoyed my glass of Riesling, I met a data scientist from Ooyala, who declared that his company powers multi-device video for the world’s biggest media companies and brands. Ooyala recently received $35MM in funding, primarily from Telstra.
I ran into a familiar face – Michael Hummel, CEO of Parstream – whom Tap the 90’s team had met at last week’s BigDataCamp in San Jose. Together we spoke with Michelle Wetzler of Keen, a stealth mode startup. Keen provides mobile development shops, digital agencies and B2B apps the analytics infrastructure they need to give their customers rich, custom analytics. I suggested she look at Roambi , a mobile analytics vendor.
I met software engineers Nong Li and Lenni Kuff from Cloudera, who explained that while both Hortonworks and Cloudera are competitors in the Apache Hadoop commercial distribution space and both contribute to the open source space liberally, only Hortonworks opens and contributes their management software to the open source community. Cloudera keeps its proprietary management software within their organization.
I then ran into folks from IBM, EMC, DataStax, Salesforce, Workday, O’Reilly, and Greenplum. By 8:45, as the crowd began to thin, I encountered Anurag Maunder, founder and CEO of DLoop, DLoop is a stealth mode start-up working on personalized discovery and distribution of content. We agreed to meet and so Tap the 90 could hear more details at a later time.
As I left the gallery to catch the train back to San Jose, I reflected on the success of this event and how fortunate we are to be part of the big data analytics technology revolution.
Until next time…
Curated by the Tap the 90 team: Shankar Gopidas, Sam Kumarsamy, Louie Yan
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