Data Exhaust and other thought provoking trends.

 Matt Turck with Gilad Lotan from Betaworks.

I had the chance to attend the 
Data Driven NYC # 20 last night at the Bloomberg LP building. This meet-up was founded by Matt Turck from First Mark Capital and offers some of the best data analytic thought leadership around, for free.

The event featured an all-star lineup of data talent, from Hilary Mason - Data Scientist in Residence at Accel (with almost 30,000 followers on Linked In) to Giland Lotan - Chief Data Scientist from Betaworks, a firm that utilizes data driven approaches to draw insights and understanding from social streams. What this guy did with visual analysis of a social flow audience study was amazing.

Betaworks social flow audience study graphic.

The event featured smart content, well presented with engaged speakers. They fielded a broad range of questions from the audience, and were around afterwards for lively one-on-one conversations. As a non-tech person I did not feel as if these people were taking over my head at any point. Better yet check out their personal blogs for really interesting content and thinking.

One of the most thought provoking presentations was from Blake Shaw, Data Scientist from Foursquare - the location based social networking website / app for smart phones. I thought they just offered an annoying service that allowed people to tell the world where they are.

I was dead wrong. Blake explained how Foursquare is using contextual data feeds - of "data exhaust" from mobile device users to build a contextual data feed. In plain English - news you can use based on where you are going and what you plan to do.

They've evolving the service into push content that will help people get smart about just about anything they plan to do, ahead of time based on near real-time information. This really advanced the idea of people being able to use their mobile devices to interact with their environment.

I recommend signing up for the December Data Driven NYC event well in advance.