The Next Web Conference 2013 Live Blog: Amazon CTO Werner Vogels

tnw-2013-live-blog

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels will be one of the keynote speakers at The Next Web Conference 2013. His session focusing on data will begin in about ten minutes and we will be live blogging every second of it. Keep refreshing the page for more updates.

1:43 P.M. EST: The conference hall is slowly filling up as Vogels prepares for his speech in two minutes. The PHD and tech exec will discuss how data will play an influential role in new industries. Data analysis has been a huge help for Amazon in terms of customers making purchases as they grew from an antiquated website to a retail powerhouse.

1:48 P.M. EST: The announcer told everyone to make sure their mobile phones are turned on! Never thought I’d hear that before in a conference.

1:49 P.M. EST: Boris VVZ, the founder of Next Web has taken the stage.

1:52 P.M. EST: Werner Vogels has taken the stage to talk about “Data Without Limits.”

1:55 P.M. EST: Vogels has never liked the term “Big Data”

1:57 P.M. EST: The field of Science has been where the the origin of Big Data, Introducing the fourth paradigm written by Tony Hey. The doctor discusses working your way through these models and theories during time.

1:57 P.M. EST: To help understand data, Vogels discusses the human genome project which was transferred through a Gigabyte scale datasets through iPods.

1:58 P.M. EST: Vogels explains how genomic processing influences product development.

1:58 P.M. EST: Research is driven by facts, not models.

1:59 P.M. EST: The Climate Corporation is building a whole new model of insurance premiums when it comes to damages.

2:02 P.M. EST: Data is important when making consumer products since you need to have a great understanding of what consumers want.

2:02 P.M. EST: Personalization requires data but can guarantee excellent returns on demand. Netflix runs on the Amazon cloud and 75% of customers pick movies cause of personalization.

2:05 P.M. EST: Data enables “Bigger Is Better”. Vogels goes over amazon’s recommendation system and shows how occasionally the algorithm could go wrong and not recommend anything. You need a large amount of data to give a more refined result for customers.

2:07 P.M. EST: Big Data will always be an essential part of politics. Customer segmentation will help with consumers & politicians who want to target select groups.

2:09 P.M. EST: Big Data has a tremendous drive towards real time. Vogels mentions Netflix again and their colossal customer database. He shows how Netflix must analyze how customers watch they want and then identify which movie or TV show works so well.

2:11 P.M. EST: Vogels mentions how Channel 4 tries a second screen approach for their viewers.

2:11 P.M. EST: Big Data techniques can be applied to industrial companies. He uses an example of gas turbines that contain multitudes of sensors. The data is analyzed and sent back to the owners to ensure certain problems don’t occur among other issues that need a quick response.

2:13 P.M. EST: Vogels mentions how data can help hospitals predict patients illnesses to find new ways off efficiencies.

2:15 P.M. EST: Shell drops sensors into their oil tankers in order to deploy them to help archive information to retrieve later on instead of a quick reaction when a situation occurs.

2:16 P.M. EST: New service by SAP will use data to talk about the environmental impact of your company.

2:16 P.M. EST: He transitions into Moneyball and how it was one of the best data books written for sports.

2:18 P.M. EST: Soccer teams in the English Premier League is looking at data to analyze how players can control the ball. Every team has a data scientist to help create new strategies.

2:18 P.M. EST: The sports segment was brief before transitioning into startups.

2:21 P.M. EST: Don’t think of data in terms of one day or one small sets. Many different domains will start with data: Time, Properties, Locations, Sensors.

2:23 P.M. EST: Don’t think about this just as analytics. Collect, store, organize, analyze, share which will be valuable advice for aspiring data scientists.

2:26 P.M. EST: Microsoft speech comes up next.