Last night's Tech Tuesday, Developers Wanted! held at Microsoft NERD, was a big hit. We had 275 attendees, many of those students! We had 23 exhibiting companies that demoed some of the cool technologies they are working on. The attendees enjoyed great demos (and lively music!) from our 23 exhibiting companies, a chance to catch up with peers and other students, and some tasty pizza!
For a complete list of exhibiting companies download our Rockstar Developers app, http://rockstarma.app.gp/.
Exhibitors and MassTLC members were given the opportunity to give 20-second "shout outs", which were really fun pitches on why they are the best companies to work for. Those that went over the 20-seconds were subjected to the infamous duck whistle!
Also highlighted in the evening was the launch of the MassTLC Ed Foundation Internship Program. In addition to an internship website, there will be some great Ed Foundation events taking place starting in June, stay tuned for more details!
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Monday, February 20, 2012
A Chalk Talk with the "Coach of Silicon Valley"
With our Annual Meeting, Accelerating the Next Technology Revolution less than three weeks away we're excited to welcome Bill Taylor, Co-Founder of FastCompany and author of Practically Radical, who will be leading our Fireside Chat with Bill Campbell, as a guest blogger. Read on for some great insights into what he and Campbell will cover at the event.
We look forward to seeing you all on March 7th!
Tom Hopcroft
President & CEO, MassTLC
**********************************************************************************
by William C. Taylor
Apple and Google don't agree on very much these days, and Silicon Valley's top venture-capital firms spend most of their timing maneuvering against each other to fund the next generation of hot startups. But if there's one thing on which the hyper-competitive leaders of Silicon Valley can agree, it is on the unique role and vital contributions made by Bill Campbell, who may be the tech world's best-kept secret.
Google chairman Eric Schmidt has said of Campbell, "His contribution to Google-it is literally not possible to overstate. He essentially architected the organizational structure." John Doerr, the legendary partner at VC giant Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, talks about Campbell this way: "Every person Bill has touched has been empowered to be the best he or she can be. He is my mentor." Steve Jobs once said of Campbell: "There’s something deeply human about him."
No wonder Fortune magazine has called Campbell "a quasi-religious force for good in Silicon Valley." Of course, most people who work with him simply call him "Coach." That's because Campbell began his leadership journey in the rough-and-tumble world of football, first as a player at Columbia University, then as an assistant coach at Boston College, then as head coach at Columbia for six years.
But Campbell eventually traded competition on the gridiron for competition in the trenches of technology. In 1983, John Sculley, then-CEO of Apple, recruited Campbell to Palo Alto. Thus began a nearly 30-year journey in which Campbell has run, coached, and worked with many of the most important and fascinating companies, entrepreneurs, and financiers in Silicon Valley and beyond.
Intuit. Apple. Google. Amazon. Kleiner. Andreesen Horowitz. Benchmark Capital. The one thing they all have in common? They've all called on Bill Campbell for his advice, counsel, and leadership insights.
On March 7, at the Mass TLC 2012 Annual Meeting, we'll get the chance to call on Bill Campbell's insights as well. I'm excited to be leading a "chalk talk" with the Coach of Silicon Valley, a session in which we'll encourage the audience to become a big part of the conversation. Sure, we'll talk about the world-famous companies and entrepreneurs with whom Campbell has worked. But we'll focus the conversation on how his knowledge and leadership savvy can improve how you work. What does it take to build a successful company? What does it mean to be an effective leader? What are the right ways to build productive teams? How do you know great people when you see them? What are the lessons all of us can learn from the biggest success stories in technology today?
Any successful venture begins with a clear definition of success. Our definition of success for this chalk talk is whether or not it delivers ideas, strategies, and lessons to help your success. I'm excited to hear what Bill Campbell is prepared to share. I hope you'll join the conversation.
William Taylor is the cofounder of Fast Company and bestselling author of Practically Radical.
Please click here to register for the Annual Meeting.
We look forward to seeing you all on March 7th!
Tom Hopcroft
President & CEO, MassTLC
**********************************************************************************
by William C. Taylor
Apple and Google don't agree on very much these days, and Silicon Valley's top venture-capital firms spend most of their timing maneuvering against each other to fund the next generation of hot startups. But if there's one thing on which the hyper-competitive leaders of Silicon Valley can agree, it is on the unique role and vital contributions made by Bill Campbell, who may be the tech world's best-kept secret.
Google chairman Eric Schmidt has said of Campbell, "His contribution to Google-it is literally not possible to overstate. He essentially architected the organizational structure." John Doerr, the legendary partner at VC giant Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, talks about Campbell this way: "Every person Bill has touched has been empowered to be the best he or she can be. He is my mentor." Steve Jobs once said of Campbell: "There’s something deeply human about him."
No wonder Fortune magazine has called Campbell "a quasi-religious force for good in Silicon Valley." Of course, most people who work with him simply call him "Coach." That's because Campbell began his leadership journey in the rough-and-tumble world of football, first as a player at Columbia University, then as an assistant coach at Boston College, then as head coach at Columbia for six years.
But Campbell eventually traded competition on the gridiron for competition in the trenches of technology. In 1983, John Sculley, then-CEO of Apple, recruited Campbell to Palo Alto. Thus began a nearly 30-year journey in which Campbell has run, coached, and worked with many of the most important and fascinating companies, entrepreneurs, and financiers in Silicon Valley and beyond.
Intuit. Apple. Google. Amazon. Kleiner. Andreesen Horowitz. Benchmark Capital. The one thing they all have in common? They've all called on Bill Campbell for his advice, counsel, and leadership insights.
On March 7, at the Mass TLC 2012 Annual Meeting, we'll get the chance to call on Bill Campbell's insights as well. I'm excited to be leading a "chalk talk" with the Coach of Silicon Valley, a session in which we'll encourage the audience to become a big part of the conversation. Sure, we'll talk about the world-famous companies and entrepreneurs with whom Campbell has worked. But we'll focus the conversation on how his knowledge and leadership savvy can improve how you work. What does it take to build a successful company? What does it mean to be an effective leader? What are the right ways to build productive teams? How do you know great people when you see them? What are the lessons all of us can learn from the biggest success stories in technology today?
Any successful venture begins with a clear definition of success. Our definition of success for this chalk talk is whether or not it delivers ideas, strategies, and lessons to help your success. I'm excited to hear what Bill Campbell is prepared to share. I hope you'll join the conversation.
William Taylor is the cofounder of Fast Company and bestselling author of Practically Radical.
Please click here to register for the Annual Meeting.
Friday, February 17, 2012
How to satisfy the demand for Big Analytics on Big Data? Different approaches showcase the strength of Big Data Industry in Massachusetts.
On February 15th I attended the The Big Data Disruption Summit at the appropriately named Microsoft NERD, in the high tech glass building overlooking Charles River and Boston.
Big Data clearly has a lot of buzz this year, and is approaching the top of the hype cycle according to Gartner. MassTLC's recent report Big Data and Analytics: A Major Market Opportunity for Massachusetts, identified 100+ Big Data related companies in Massachusetts.
The meeting was packed with business leaders, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and those data scientists that were present were very much in demand.
The event was opened by Dr. Michael Stonebraker, a leading database researcher for over 30 years and a serial entrepreneur - he started several successful database companies including Ingres, Illustra, Vertica, VoltDB, and most recently Paradigm4. Michael succeeds at doing several things at once, so some described him as a "parallel" entrepreneur. Click Here to view Michael's presentation on 'What is Big Data'.
After an overview of the 3 Vs of Big Data: Volume, Velocity, and Variety, Stonebraker argued that the focus of analytics in the past was "Little Analytics" on Big Volume, like finding an average closing price of MSFT on all trading days in the last 3 years - a request easily expressed in SQL.
Now there is demand for "Big Analytics" on Big Data, which may include complex math operations, such as machine learning or clustering. Dr. Stonebraker argued that most of these can be specified as linear algebra operations on array data. A typical inner loop in such algorithms may include matrix multiplication, SVD decomposition, or linear regression.
He gave an example of Big Analytics, where you need to compute a covariance between closing prices of stocks, and covariance which can be expressed easily as array operations, but not so easily in SQL. Imagine computing covariance for all pairs of stocks on NY Stock exchange for the last 1000 days. If you could do this, then do it for hourly prices, etc. Click Here to view Michael Stonebraker's presentation on 'How to do Complex Analytics.'
Christopher Ahlberg, CEO of Recorded Future (and co-founder of Spotfire, sold to Tibco in 2007) talked about the unstructured web as the most compelling source of predictive information. He described a project where they are monitoring South American Cities for potential unrest by scanning documents from 70,000 sources, with the need to visualize the results quickly. He described the evolution of their architecture from a key value store to mongoDB + sphinx. They have many users in finance, and interestingly, processing the overnight accumulation of information is very important for the trading signal in the first second of trading in New York.
Other speakers in the first panel outlined different approaches. Fritz Knabe of Netezza talked about new possibilities enabled by rapidly falling price of flash storage. When terabytes of memory is about $1000, much different and faster architectures become possible. However, the seamy underside of advent of flash is that the bottleneck moves from storage to power supply. This leads to interesting ideas like microservers, which have 8 servers on one board. Click Here to view Fritz's presentation.
Mark Watkins, co-founder of Goby and currently General Manager, Entertainment Content at Telenav, talked about mobile applications. His company is a pioneer in location services and providing a traffic-aware routing engine, which learns from traffic behavior. He also described an already deployed mobile recommendation system at Telenav, which can recommend interesting restaurants, events, and activities to you based on your interests and the data it has. Click Here to view Mark's presentation.
The first half was followed by the keynote presentation by Deepak Advani, Vice President, Business Analytics, Products and Solutions, IBM. He gave a very good overview of the many use cases where analytics and IBM technology produces good results, from IBM Watson technology now being applied to improve health care diagnoses, to The Oscar Senti-meter which provides sentiment analysis of Twitter messages about Oscar nominations. Click Here to view Deepak's presentation.
The second half of the event was focused on case studies of 4 start-ups and their learning experiences and challenges, with Andy Palmer, Startup Specialist serving as the moderator.
Kicking off the panel was Bill Simmons, CTO, DataXu. He talked about how their company tracks ad performance by using anonymous cookies. They build models to predict which ad impressions will lead to purchasing activity, and this is hard because for a million impressions there may be only hundreds of purchases (a very unbalanced class distribution). However, the ad cost is low and the economics work as their model is 2-3 times more accurate than random ads. Their software stack includes Hadoop, Hive, Postgres, Hbase, and Greenplum.
Alan Hoffman, Founder & President, Cloudant, talked about his experience as a physicist where he dealt with GB/sec of particle data. His company provides a noSQL data layer service and uses couchdb. He suggested there is no big magic solution to Big Data, but lots of small useful solutions.
Puneet Batra, Chief Data Scientist, Kyruus also has a physics background. Kyruus wants to provide rating information for providers - see Kyruus Aims to Become the Bloomberg for Hospitals.
George Radford, Field CTO, EMC Greenplum talked about adjusting to EMC acquisition of Greenplum. He commented that the last thing you want to do with big data is move it.
Andy Palmer wrapped the session emphasizing the need to think about a continuous upgrade path. Since design patterns in the system change rapidly, he argued for an MPP shared nothing architecture which scales well.
I asked the panel if they thought the potential of Big Data was overhyped.
Bill Simmons (DataXu) said that their method works and is able to improve accuracy by a factor of 2 to 3. However, the cost also need to be considered - what works in the US, where media is expensive, would not be cost-effective in China where media is cheap. Puneet Batra (Kyruus) suggested that one of the results of big data would be exposing bad decisions done without it and may will bring more rationality into business decisions.
Another question was whether as a result of changes in privacy practices driven by Facebook, we will see changes in medical privacy as more medical data becomes available for sharing. The panel felt it was more likely that personal medical data was the Quantified Self movement.
The meeting had a lot of energy and showcased the depth of Big Data Industry in Massachusetts. New ideas will likely percolate to new start-ups!
Guest Blogger Gregory Piatetsky, Editor, KDnuggets (twitter: @kdnuggets)
Big Data clearly has a lot of buzz this year, and is approaching the top of the hype cycle according to Gartner. MassTLC's recent report Big Data and Analytics: A Major Market Opportunity for Massachusetts, identified 100+ Big Data related companies in Massachusetts.
The meeting was packed with business leaders, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and those data scientists that were present were very much in demand.
The event was opened by Dr. Michael Stonebraker, a leading database researcher for over 30 years and a serial entrepreneur - he started several successful database companies including Ingres, Illustra, Vertica, VoltDB, and most recently Paradigm4. Michael succeeds at doing several things at once, so some described him as a "parallel" entrepreneur. Click Here to view Michael's presentation on 'What is Big Data'.
After an overview of the 3 Vs of Big Data: Volume, Velocity, and Variety, Stonebraker argued that the focus of analytics in the past was "Little Analytics" on Big Volume, like finding an average closing price of MSFT on all trading days in the last 3 years - a request easily expressed in SQL.
Now there is demand for "Big Analytics" on Big Data, which may include complex math operations, such as machine learning or clustering. Dr. Stonebraker argued that most of these can be specified as linear algebra operations on array data. A typical inner loop in such algorithms may include matrix multiplication, SVD decomposition, or linear regression.
He gave an example of Big Analytics, where you need to compute a covariance between closing prices of stocks, and covariance which can be expressed easily as array operations, but not so easily in SQL. Imagine computing covariance for all pairs of stocks on NY Stock exchange for the last 1000 days. If you could do this, then do it for hourly prices, etc. Click Here to view Michael Stonebraker's presentation on 'How to do Complex Analytics.'
Christopher Ahlberg, CEO of Recorded Future (and co-founder of Spotfire, sold to Tibco in 2007) talked about the unstructured web as the most compelling source of predictive information. He described a project where they are monitoring South American Cities for potential unrest by scanning documents from 70,000 sources, with the need to visualize the results quickly. He described the evolution of their architecture from a key value store to mongoDB + sphinx. They have many users in finance, and interestingly, processing the overnight accumulation of information is very important for the trading signal in the first second of trading in New York.
Other speakers in the first panel outlined different approaches. Fritz Knabe of Netezza talked about new possibilities enabled by rapidly falling price of flash storage. When terabytes of memory is about $1000, much different and faster architectures become possible. However, the seamy underside of advent of flash is that the bottleneck moves from storage to power supply. This leads to interesting ideas like microservers, which have 8 servers on one board. Click Here to view Fritz's presentation.
Mark Watkins, co-founder of Goby and currently General Manager, Entertainment Content at Telenav, talked about mobile applications. His company is a pioneer in location services and providing a traffic-aware routing engine, which learns from traffic behavior. He also described an already deployed mobile recommendation system at Telenav, which can recommend interesting restaurants, events, and activities to you based on your interests and the data it has. Click Here to view Mark's presentation.
The first half was followed by the keynote presentation by Deepak Advani, Vice President, Business Analytics, Products and Solutions, IBM. He gave a very good overview of the many use cases where analytics and IBM technology produces good results, from IBM Watson technology now being applied to improve health care diagnoses, to The Oscar Senti-meter which provides sentiment analysis of Twitter messages about Oscar nominations. Click Here to view Deepak's presentation. The second half of the event was focused on case studies of 4 start-ups and their learning experiences and challenges, with Andy Palmer, Startup Specialist serving as the moderator.
Kicking off the panel was Bill Simmons, CTO, DataXu. He talked about how their company tracks ad performance by using anonymous cookies. They build models to predict which ad impressions will lead to purchasing activity, and this is hard because for a million impressions there may be only hundreds of purchases (a very unbalanced class distribution). However, the ad cost is low and the economics work as their model is 2-3 times more accurate than random ads. Their software stack includes Hadoop, Hive, Postgres, Hbase, and Greenplum.
Alan Hoffman, Founder & President, Cloudant, talked about his experience as a physicist where he dealt with GB/sec of particle data. His company provides a noSQL data layer service and uses couchdb. He suggested there is no big magic solution to Big Data, but lots of small useful solutions.
Puneet Batra, Chief Data Scientist, Kyruus also has a physics background. Kyruus wants to provide rating information for providers - see Kyruus Aims to Become the Bloomberg for Hospitals.
George Radford, Field CTO, EMC Greenplum talked about adjusting to EMC acquisition of Greenplum. He commented that the last thing you want to do with big data is move it.
Andy Palmer wrapped the session emphasizing the need to think about a continuous upgrade path. Since design patterns in the system change rapidly, he argued for an MPP shared nothing architecture which scales well.
I asked the panel if they thought the potential of Big Data was overhyped.
Bill Simmons (DataXu) said that their method works and is able to improve accuracy by a factor of 2 to 3. However, the cost also need to be considered - what works in the US, where media is expensive, would not be cost-effective in China where media is cheap. Puneet Batra (Kyruus) suggested that one of the results of big data would be exposing bad decisions done without it and may will bring more rationality into business decisions.
Another question was whether as a result of changes in privacy practices driven by Facebook, we will see changes in medical privacy as more medical data becomes available for sharing. The panel felt it was more likely that personal medical data was the Quantified Self movement.
The meeting had a lot of energy and showcased the depth of Big Data Industry in Massachusetts. New ideas will likely percolate to new start-ups!
Guest Blogger Gregory Piatetsky, Editor, KDnuggets (twitter: @kdnuggets)
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
PAX East Makes Decade-Long Commitments to Massachusetts
Reed Exhibitions and Penny Arcade Expo, the organizers of the giant PAX East digital games convention, announced a deal to keep the convention in Boston and to contribute $325K to the Mass Digital Games Institute (MassDiGI) at Becker College over the next decade.
MassTLC participated in the announcement and applauded the deal citing the need to "double down" on our strengths -- like our vibrant digital games community -- in order to achieve MassTLC's 2020 Challenge of creating 100K new technology jobs over the coming decade.
PAX East came to Boston's Hynes Convention Center two years ago and last year moved to the Boston Convention & Expo Center. The 2012 PAX East Conference will be held April 6-8th and is expected to attract over 70,000 digital game executives, developers, and enthusiasts.
MassTLC celebrates Digital Games in Massachusetts each year with the PAX East "Made in MA" party hosted by the Council's Digital Games community. The event not only brings together the games developer community from across the country but puts a spotlight on all game companies in the area to showcase the depth and breadth of our local industry to a worldwide audience. The event takes over the Microsoft NERD center and sells out with more than 1200 developers, games executives and media from across the country. Registration for this year's event can be found here.
Friday, February 10, 2012
Maximizing Engineering Productivity - a peer to peer discussion
The MassTLC software development community met at VMware in Cambridge for a well-facilitated conversation on maximizing engineering productivity. Brad Meiseles, Director of Engineering at VMware and Susan Rossnick, VP of Engineering at Kronos lead the discussion with about 40 techies from companies such as GSN, DYN, ZoomInfo, new big data player Kyruus and start-up Incrwd. Brad kicked off the conversation with a short presentation filled with witty quotes. Take a look here. The hot topic of the night was around establishing a work environment for success. From bright colored, open environments, big headphones and red lights to remove interruptions, no meeting Wednesday’s at VMware and huddle rooms at the new Black Duck location in Burlington, the conversation was varied. However, most agreed that it is necessary to consider different work styles and personalities.The conversation moved on to productivity, the use of SCRUM and measurement. There were strong opinions in the room on either jump in full force with SCRUM or DON’T! Following the rules is key to its success.
We are looking next at a seminar focused either on culture (which is a continuous discussion for this group!), fostering and realizing a culture of quality, continuous intergartion or SCRUM. Any thoughts on what would interest you and your team? Please drop me an email at Christine@masstlc.org.
Friday, February 3, 2012
Finding, Ranking and Tracking the Online Influencers Important to Your Business
It was a great turn-out for this week's social media seminar focused on online influencers. Finding them isn't necessarily the hard part, it's getting them in your court to help promote your business. Mike Troiano @miketrap from Holland-Mark compared it to a cocktail party saying "it's the approach that matters". You can't just walk up to them and sell your services, it takes time and tact to make a good connection.Pierre-loic Assayag, CEO and Founder from Traackr, kicked off the morning and shared results from a survey they conducted. He also shared the "10 commandments to influencer communication". Check out his presentation here.
Alan Belniak, Director of Social Media at PTC and Erica Ayotte, Social Media Manager at Constant Contact presented case studies on how they are working with online influencers to support their business. Both presentations can be found on Slideshare: Erica's presentation, Alan's presentation
Next, Mike Troiano from Holland-Mark shared his expertise from the agency side. He said there are 5 key steps to influencer management:
1. decide who you're talking to.
2. listen to learn how you can help them.
3. deliver content that does so.
4. build a relationship over time.
5. ask for what you want.
Mike's presentation is available for download here.
The presentations were excellent but the Q&A session is where the best practices and tips for success were shared. Thanks to all that joined in the discussion. If you would like to be part in the next discussion, please take this short survey and let us know what you would like to see next!
TAKE SURVEY!
Monday, January 23, 2012
MassTLC Report Predicts Massachusetts to Become World Leader for "Big Data"
Download the Report -- Big Data and Analytics: A Major Opportunity for Massachusetts As reported in today's Boston Globe, MassTLC has identified Big Data and Analytics as a major opportunity for Massachusetts, possibly on the scale of the 1990's software industry growth or the later telecom and Internet boom. The Council has identified more than 100 firms and 70,000 people employed in the field, and estimates the sector could grow by another 50,000 jobs in Massachusetts by 2018.
Massachusetts has become a major hub for companies that create and use "big data" and analytics technologies, a burgeoning technology sector that is expected to continue its explosive growth over the rest of the decade. In fact, the growing emergence of Massachusetts "big data" companies combined with deep university expertise in database management technology, and the presence of both established and startup technology firms give the state the opportunity to become the global economic hub for big data and analytics by the end of the decade.
According to the report, the proliferation of data generated by humans (e.g., text, voice, video) and machines (e.g., GPS, RFID, medical sensors), combined with social and other unstructured communications (e.g., social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn) is creating vast data opportunities, and a wave of new companies, to analyze and extract greater insight and economic value from this deluge of information.
"The Big Data sector is flying largely under the radar right now but this report makes it clear that it could our state's next big tech sector," said Tom Hopcroft, President & CEO of MassTLC. "If investments in this area continue at their current rate, we could see job gains approaching the scale of the early 1990's software industry growth or the later telecom and Internet boom."
According to the report, Massachusetts has all the elements necessary for success: a history of expertise in fields related to Big Data (including storage, security, and traditional data analytics); proven giants such as IBM, Oracle and Google already making Massachusetts investments in this field through acquisitions of companies such as Netezza, Endeca and ITA Software; a venture capital community with strong data analytics expertise; a vibrant academic research community, and a wealth of start-ups, such as Kyruus, Ginger.io, Paradigm4 and VoltDB, already gaining traction in the market.
"Massachusetts has 'Data DNA', a robust group of startups and established companies, as well as the presence of such complementary industries as healthcare, financial services, life sciences, consumer products, and on-line media" said Steve O'Leary, a co-founder of Aeris Partners and co-chairman of the MassTLC Research Committee. "We're in great position to lead, but we should be aware that other regions, most notably Silicon Valley, are moving quickly into this space."
The report identifies more than one hundred Massachusetts Big Data and analytics companies that currently employ some 12,000 workers. A variety of industries -- notably some of the state's biggest employers like healthcare, life sciences, aerospace & defense and financial services -- will increasingly utilize data analytics to grow their businesses. These Big Data users currently represent a complementary employment base of some 58,000 already using Big Data tools and results, for a total of 70,000 currently employed in Big Data jobs.
With its early start, the report estimates that Massachusetts is poised to see its big data workforce (including those creating analytics technology tools and applications within vendor companies as well as data scientists and data managers using analytics technology in healthcare, financial services, and other sectors) could grow to 120,000 jobs by 2018 -- if the region capitalizes on its early lead.
Download the Report -- Big Data and Analytics: A Major Opportunity for Massachusetts
Hard copies of the report will be made available at the Council’s 2nd Annual Big Data Summit on February 15 in Cambridge, MA (see www.masstlc.org for details). Read highlights from MassTLC's 2011 Big Data Summit by the Wall Street Journal.
The Summit will serve as the kick-off of MassTLC's Big Data Cluster.
MassTLC Launches Big Data and Analytics Cluster
In the year since our first Big Data Summit (Read WSJ highlights), MassTLC has been quietly cultivating a new Cluster, focused on the Big Data and Analytics companies in Massachusetts, and are pleased to mark 2012 as the year for Big Data with our recent research report on the sector, Big Data and Analytics: A Major Market Opportunity for Massachusetts, our Second Annual Big Data Summit: The Big Data Disruption, and the launch of a new Big Data Cluster community.
In the context of MassTLC's 2020 Jobs Growth Challenge, Big Data is a significant opportunity for Massachusetts. Massachusetts leads the nation (#6, I believe) in recovering from the recession, based primarily on the information technology and other information technology intensive knowledge sectors. According to a recent McKinsey report, Big Data could be transformative, amounting to a fifth wave in the technology revolution after the mainframe, the PC, the Internet/Web 1.0, and the mobile/Web 2.0 eras.
MassTLC believes that the Commonwealth has significant and unique advantages and an opportunity to be the geographical hub of a massive Big Data and Analytics wave of innovation, company formation, job creation, and economic benefit for the region. We feel it's ours to lose and so are, as a community, going to do everything we can to foster the success of big data companies in Massachusetts, thereby cultivating our economic future.
Towards this end, MassTLC's Big Data Cluster seeks to be an active catalyst for growth and development of the Big Data and Analytics ecosystem in Massachusetts. The Council's unique role as an organization that spans the entire technology ecosystem places MassTLC at the heart of the Big Data tsunami. Below are some of the initiatives MassTLC is undertaking to foster the growth of this important sector:
Research - In addition to it's recent report, MassTLC will continue to study the region's Big Data and Analytics community through surveys, focus groups, and an Oracle-Delphi panel of leading thinkers to inform the community about the sector and leverage points for growth.
Summit - The MassTLC 2nd Annual Big Data Summit and other programming provides an opportunity for thought leaders to share ideas while the general community learns about opportunities presented by the Big Data and Analytics tsunami.
Community - MassTLC is convening a community of Big Data thought leaders to continue the dialogue through a variety of member-only and public Cluster meetings, events, and initiatives. MassTLC Clusters enable the technology community to take a deep dive in a particular area, share knowledge, and build deep lasting relationships that lead to business growth.
Bump - MassTLC will integrate Big Data and Analytics across our many Cluster communities and key Council initiatives, thereby fostering knowledge exchange with other technology and customer segments. At MassTLC, we believe that innovation happens at the boundaries between communities where ideas often meet with novel applications. Our Clusters, Tech Tuesday, and our Innovation unConference are just a few of the Council's signature initiatives that support bump factor.
Recognition - MassTLC will encouraging Big Data and Analytics companies to participate in the Mass Technology Leadership Awards program to help shine a spotlight on the region's Data DNA.
Workforce - Though the MassTLC Education Foundation, we work to attract, retain, and develop the talent needed to grow Big Data and Analytics in Massachusetts.
Leadership - MassTLC will work to educate and advocate for policies that support the growth of big data and analytics technology development and application in Massachusetts.
Council members interested in getting involved in the Big Data Cluster should contact Sara Fraim at sara@masstlc.org. Non-members should contact betsy@masstlc.org to learn more.
In the context of MassTLC's 2020 Jobs Growth Challenge, Big Data is a significant opportunity for Massachusetts. Massachusetts leads the nation (#6, I believe) in recovering from the recession, based primarily on the information technology and other information technology intensive knowledge sectors. According to a recent McKinsey report, Big Data could be transformative, amounting to a fifth wave in the technology revolution after the mainframe, the PC, the Internet/Web 1.0, and the mobile/Web 2.0 eras.
MassTLC believes that the Commonwealth has significant and unique advantages and an opportunity to be the geographical hub of a massive Big Data and Analytics wave of innovation, company formation, job creation, and economic benefit for the region. We feel it's ours to lose and so are, as a community, going to do everything we can to foster the success of big data companies in Massachusetts, thereby cultivating our economic future.
Towards this end, MassTLC's Big Data Cluster seeks to be an active catalyst for growth and development of the Big Data and Analytics ecosystem in Massachusetts. The Council's unique role as an organization that spans the entire technology ecosystem places MassTLC at the heart of the Big Data tsunami. Below are some of the initiatives MassTLC is undertaking to foster the growth of this important sector:
Research - In addition to it's recent report, MassTLC will continue to study the region's Big Data and Analytics community through surveys, focus groups, and an Oracle-Delphi panel of leading thinkers to inform the community about the sector and leverage points for growth.
Summit - The MassTLC 2nd Annual Big Data Summit and other programming provides an opportunity for thought leaders to share ideas while the general community learns about opportunities presented by the Big Data and Analytics tsunami.
Community - MassTLC is convening a community of Big Data thought leaders to continue the dialogue through a variety of member-only and public Cluster meetings, events, and initiatives. MassTLC Clusters enable the technology community to take a deep dive in a particular area, share knowledge, and build deep lasting relationships that lead to business growth.
Bump - MassTLC will integrate Big Data and Analytics across our many Cluster communities and key Council initiatives, thereby fostering knowledge exchange with other technology and customer segments. At MassTLC, we believe that innovation happens at the boundaries between communities where ideas often meet with novel applications. Our Clusters, Tech Tuesday, and our Innovation unConference are just a few of the Council's signature initiatives that support bump factor.
Recognition - MassTLC will encouraging Big Data and Analytics companies to participate in the Mass Technology Leadership Awards program to help shine a spotlight on the region's Data DNA.
Workforce - Though the MassTLC Education Foundation, we work to attract, retain, and develop the talent needed to grow Big Data and Analytics in Massachusetts.
Leadership - MassTLC will work to educate and advocate for policies that support the growth of big data and analytics technology development and application in Massachusetts.
Council members interested in getting involved in the Big Data Cluster should contact Sara Fraim at sara@masstlc.org. Non-members should contact betsy@masstlc.org to learn more.
Friday, January 13, 2012
MBTA, Hubway, and Food Trucks Are Focus of Web and Mobile App Contest
The Commonwealth has teamed with the City of Boston on a contest called the MBTA + Boston Bikes Developers Challenge to develop Web and mobile software applications that provide innovative ways to access MBTA and New Balance Hubway information in real-time. The contest supports MassTLC's 2020 jobs growth challenge by connecting public needs with local technology talent.
The six week contest is geared towards the connections between the MBTA, Hubway bicycle rental stations, and the city's many food trucks. There are three areas of competition:
- Food Trucks - Web and mobile app developers are invited to create innovative applications that help residents get information on and locate Boston's Food Trucks. This app would ideally include menus, locations, and directions for getting to the truck via foot, bike, or MBTA.
- MBTA & Hubway Info Access - Web and mobile app developers are invited to create applications using the MBTA's real-time bus, subway, and commuter rail schedule information, and Hubway's Live Station Inventory Data.
- MBTA & Hubway Visualization - Web and mobile app developers are invited to create visualization-based apps using historical vehicle location data from the MBTA and Hubway bicycle rental stations.
Winners of the contests, which runs through February 24th, will receive prizes including a free one-year Charlie Pass for the MBTA, Hubway membership, and/or Food Truck passes.
MassTLC supports public contests and other initiatives that help connect the government as a potential "first customer" to the 400+ mobile, 100+ big data/analytics, and other technology companies in the Commonwealth. This crowd sourced approach achieves the dual purposes of tapping the best technology talent to help deliver public services while creating that essential bridge that could help local entrepreneurs and start-ups access a new market.
More info on the MBTA + Boston Bikes Developers Challenge. See additional ideas on the Mayor's New Urban Mechanics website.
The Massachusetts Department of Energy and Environmental Affairs also recently launched a mobile app development contest, dubbed the Get Outdoors Massachusetts Mobile Apps Contest.
The six week contest is geared towards the connections between the MBTA, Hubway bicycle rental stations, and the city's many food trucks. There are three areas of competition:
- Food Trucks - Web and mobile app developers are invited to create innovative applications that help residents get information on and locate Boston's Food Trucks. This app would ideally include menus, locations, and directions for getting to the truck via foot, bike, or MBTA.
- MBTA & Hubway Info Access - Web and mobile app developers are invited to create applications using the MBTA's real-time bus, subway, and commuter rail schedule information, and Hubway's Live Station Inventory Data.
- MBTA & Hubway Visualization - Web and mobile app developers are invited to create visualization-based apps using historical vehicle location data from the MBTA and Hubway bicycle rental stations.
Winners of the contests, which runs through February 24th, will receive prizes including a free one-year Charlie Pass for the MBTA, Hubway membership, and/or Food Truck passes.
MassTLC supports public contests and other initiatives that help connect the government as a potential "first customer" to the 400+ mobile, 100+ big data/analytics, and other technology companies in the Commonwealth. This crowd sourced approach achieves the dual purposes of tapping the best technology talent to help deliver public services while creating that essential bridge that could help local entrepreneurs and start-ups access a new market.
More info on the MBTA + Boston Bikes Developers Challenge. See additional ideas on the Mayor's New Urban Mechanics website.
The Massachusetts Department of Energy and Environmental Affairs also recently launched a mobile app development contest, dubbed the Get Outdoors Massachusetts Mobile Apps Contest.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
State Sponsored Mobile App Contest Supports Goals of Council's 2020 Job Growth Challenge
The Massachusetts Department of Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA) announced an innovative approach to meeting some of the Commonwealth's technology needs -- they are crowd sourcing their project by way of a mobile app contest. The contest supports a key element in MassTLC's 2020 jobs growth challenge.
A couple years ago, MassTLC put out a challenge to the tech sector to create 100,000 new technology jobs by the end of the decade. Since then, MassTLC's board and special task force on job creation has developed a framework of action organized around people, capital, and infrastructure. The task force's recommendations will be communicated to the Administration in early 2012.
One of the task force recommendations is for the Commonwealth to consider the role of the "Government as First Customer." It posits that there is a significant opportunity to connect local entrepreneurs/start-ups with state agencies in need of innovative technology solutions to critical state needs. The entrepreneur/start-up benefits with a first referenceable client, the state agency benefits by accelerating development of solutions to critical needs, and together we accelerate our local job growth engine by buying local.
As an example of how 'Government as First Customer' could work, EEA Secretary Richard Sullivan announced a contest that invites designers and mobile application developers to create applications to help the public find outdoor recreation hot spots in Massachusetts. Dubbed the "Get Outdoors Massachusetts Mobile Apps Contest," the competition is open to the public and seeks participation from application developers to create a mobile app that features Massachusetts outdoor and natural resources.
EEA's Departments of Agricultural Resources (DAR), Conservation and Recreation (DCR) and Fish and Game (DFG) have published geospatial data for developers to create a mobile app designed to map public lands, state parks, farms, public water and land access points, rinks, pools, and other outdoor venues for outdoor recreation.
MassTLC is a proud supporter of this innovative crowd sourcing initiative. "Start-ups are the jobs growth engine for our economy and a 'first customer' is often the difference between success and failure," said MassTLC CEO Tom Hopcroft. "With over 400 mobile and 100 big data/analytics companies and new entrants every day, EEA's crowd sourced approach achieves the dual purposes of tapping the best technology talent to help deliver EEA services and creating that essential bridge that could help local entrepreneurs access a new market." Several MassTLC Mobile Cluster advisory board members are serving on the judging panel that will select the winner.
The submission deadline is March 30, and registration is free. Entrants will compete for prizes including the opportunity to showcase their work to local technology executives. EEA will announce the winners on April 18.
View the official Get Outdoors Massachusetts Mobile Apps contest rules and information.
See also the recently announced MBTA, Hubway, and Food Trucks Web and Mobile App Contest.
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