If the Shoe Fits: Mobile Feeding Big Data
by Miki SaxonA Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here
“It’s shocking we don’t see more engineers and entrepreneurs interested in enterprise. (…) In the last 10 years, there have been 56 IPOs in the enterprise space that have gotten north of a billion [dollars in market capitalization] and just 23 in consumer.” —Jim Goetz, partner at Sequoia Capital
I cited Goetz’s comment in a post last fall chiding entrepreneurs for trying to be the next Facebook instead of solving enterprise problems.
Six weeks later I asked Walter Paliska, marketing VP at long-time client EMANIO, to attend a Big Data conference and write about it. I turned to EMANIO because 1) I no longer live in the Bay Area and 2) EMANIO recently pivoted and is building a truly disruptive big data product.
Mobile is considered the hottest field, but many of its most innovative apps are a result of the explosion of big data; on the flip side mobile is feeding big data inspiring yet more innovation in that area.
When the Data 2.0 Summit came along I turned again to EMANIO and asked Randy Hyshiver, Director of Delivery and Services to give us an update on the effect of big data on innovation.
Big Data: Inspiring Innovation by Randy Hyshiver
It’s clear to me that the Big Data movement is inspiring a new wave of Innovation and the birth of a new set of entrepreneurs. The pace of growth of ideas and the proliferation of new companies dedicated to solving big data problems is amazing.
The massive growth in data that is spurring the big data movement is leading to an increasing degree of interest not just from technologists, but also from investors looking to capitalize on the technological breakthroughs.
Big Data touches our lives in numerous ways in an effort to help improve how we work, how we live, travel and just about every other aspect of our daily existence.
The massive adoption of mobile devices has also been a huge driver in big data interest. As mobile devices generate massive amount of data, a whole new set of applications has emerged in just about all business sectors, to take advantage of the data generated.
- The fitness industry is marrying concepts from the gaming industry and bringing portable sensors into the mobile space creating a dynamic data collection model that can be leveraged to help users accomplish fitness goals through competition with friends.
- The automotive industry is using sensor data to understand driving behaviors and to create better driving environments in new generations of vehicles.
- Big data is also helping the environment as ecological companies use massive amounts of sensor-generated data to help farmers, travelers and ultimately to help us understand how our actions impact our World every day.
The growth and rapid adoption of Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms during the past decade has also helped drive demand for the usage of evermore readily available data in new ways.
Concepts like Data as a Service (DaaS) are beginning to drive a democratization of data to help build radical new consumer and business applications using now widely available resources.
The World of technology and innovation has found a new impetus by the growth of data.
The collection of vast amounts of data is driving the adoption of new technologies and is inspiring a new generation of entrepreneurs.
Mobile devices, cloud services and the widespread adoption of sensor-based applications are all just the tip of the iceberg in the drive to generate more data – data that can be analyzed and leveraged to improve our lives.
Image credit: HikingArtist
