Don Pierson gave a presentation on how small companies can use big data. He defined big data as harnessing information in novel ways to produce useful insights or goods and services of significant value. He provided examples of how big data has shaped search engines, type-ahead corrections, and Netflix predictions. Pierson explained that big data levels the playing field for organizations of all sizes and allows companies to solve problems with fewer constraints. He listed sources of publicly available big data and analysis services that companies can use like Google Analytics, QuickBooks Trends, and Google Cloud Services. Pierson also described how his company used big data to collect necessary information while respecting users' personal privacy.

1. •Big Data for Small Companies

2. Don Pierson
CEO, SalesFitRx
@dpierson3

3. Agenda
• What is Big Data, anyway?
• 3 examples of how Big Data has shaped our world
• Big Data and you… why?
• Big Data – where can you get it?
• For use running your business
• Data sources
• Analysis services you can use to do/discover cool things
• Use Case: how we used Big Data to slay Big Brother
• Q&A

4. “Big Data” Defined
• #1 - The ability... to harness information in novel ways to produce
useful insights or goods and services of significant value
• Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution that Will
Transform How We Live, Work, and Think
• #2 - The new tools helping us find relevant data and analyze its
implications
• Gil Press, Forbes

5. 3 examples of how big data has shaped our
world
• Search engines (smarter and smarter)
• Type-ahead & auto-correction (dumber and dumber)
• Netflix (and other prediction engines)

6. Big Data and you… why?
• Big Data allows you to focus on solving real-world problems with far
fewer constraints than in the past
• The playing field is leveled between organizations of all sizes
• If you don’t take advantage of it, you’re missing incredible
opportunities… and others are going to run right past you

7. Big Data – where can you get it?
[for running your business]
5 Tools you may already use:
• Google Analytics – Analytics on website traffic
• QuickBooks Trends – Industry insight based on anonymized Quickbooks data
• Facebook Insight – Analytics on Facebook pages
• Twitter Analytics – Analytics on Twitter engagement
• Salesforce Wave Analytics – Analytics platform for Salesforce data & more

8. Big Data – where can you get it?
[data sources]
5 Categories of Open Source Data Banks:
• Environmental [7]
• Demographics, population, economics & resources [6]
• Geographic [3]
• Engineering & science [1]
• Food, land use, and nutrition [1]
• Transportation [1]
[from 5 minutes browsing the web]

9. Big Data – where can you get it?
[analysis services]
Google Cloud Services
• Cloud Datastore
• BigQuery
• Translate API
• Prediction API*
• [and 10 more…]
IBM Watson Developer Cloud
• Language [11]
• AlchemyLanguage*
• Speech [2]
• Vision [3]
• Data Insights [2]

10. Use Case – how we used Big Data to slay Big
Brother
The challenge: “how do we collect the data we need to fulfill our
mission of helping individuals become more productive in their
business lives without infringing on their personal lives?”

11. What we do…

12. The challenging case of URL’s
Prediction APIAlchemy Language
First we learned how to solve the problem,
then we used ‘big data’ services to scale

13. Q&A

14. don.pierson@salesfitrx.com