by Angela Guess
A new article by Derrick Harris takes a look at how Big Data startups might benefit from narrowing their view. Harris notes, “Organizations keep on hearing about big data and about how big an opportunity it is, but even though the technology to capitalize on this opportunity is getting democratized, organizations still face a big challenge to hire personnel that understand not only the technology, but also how to ask right the right questions. Sure, analyzing social media data sounds great to find out what consumers like or how they might act sounds great, but actually being able to do it accurately is another issue. It’s a situation just begging for startups to fill the void between big data tools and actually using them for a particular task.”
Harris continues, “Whether the focus is by industry (e.g., tools for financial services, retail, etc.) or by use case (e.g., sentiment analysis, recommendation engines, etc.), one can easily envision an emerging class of companies tuning technologies like Hadoop or predictive analytics software to directly address these discrete classes of users. Organizations won’t necessarily need data scientists to ‘turn information into gold’ if the data scientists employed by their software vendors have already done most of the work.”
Harris concludes, “Companies of all types want to be the next Yahoo or Facebook in terms of big data, and there are plenty of companies willing to help them do that in terms of infrastructure. The real opportunity now is in helping companies figure out how to use it.”
