Strata ‘14 in 1 minute

What’s “hot” in big data

People often ask venture capitalists what the next “hot” technology is — we tend to ask the smart people what they’re interested in: founders, portfolio company employees, domain experts, engineers with side projects.

The O’Reilly Strata conference is a good place to do that for all things data-related. Many people from many current and former Greylock Portfolio companies are presenting (including Cloudera, Facebook, Linkedin, SumoLogic and Trifacta). I’m also personally looking forward to Chris Ré and Leo Meyerovich’s presentations on enabling easier feature selection and harnessing GPUs for interactive visualization.

Below is a quick and dirty look at word density across different categories in the Strata program. Doing a little grouping and cleaning (i.e. the word “data” is used 300 times), here’s what people are talking about.

What stands out? People are talking about interactivity, graphs, and streaming/event data, and also both about data security and harnessing data for better cyber security (no talks last year on this).

Note: Obviously many other contributing factors. Some presenters will write longer session descriptions, others will have 5 people listed from the same company as presenters for a single session — e.g. DataBricks.

Shoot me an email to meet up at Strata! sarah (at) greylock