Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Steve Shine, CEO of Actian (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: That is a really great use case.

Steve Shine: We have a number of exciting use cases where the gaming companies are coming to us. A small or medium business cannot afford the legacy architecture to be able to build up that platform to deal with that much data. It must be on a Hadoop platform, and it must have high-performance technology layered on top of it to be able to consume, digest, and analyze that much data. The monetizing doesn’t always just come from selling the games. If it is online, you really want to understand a lot about an individual. You want to offer up as much knowledge to your advertisers (a lot of gaming is actually making its money through advertising now), and you want to understand as much as you can about that gamer. So they are trying to figure out who is online to ask, “What is the right point in the game to serve up the ad?” What is the point of serving up the ad when the person is so intensely involved in the game that he or she won’t notice. It is the science behind running sophisticated analytics to say, “The person´s attention span is now receptive to that ad.”

Being able to design your advertising so that a) it is not annoying to the user and b) users are receptive to the ads and you know enough about a user to be able to serve up the right ad is another good example of high-quality analytics on huge data sets.

I will give you one more use case. We have had a surprising number of online dating agencies that have built their infrastructure around our technology. Online dating companies are remarkable. If you think about it: People offer up more personal information about themselves than they possibly would in nearly all other scenarios you can imagine. They basically describe themselves in a very intimate way, which is unbelievably attractive to advertisers. There is more richness in that information than you can possibly imagine.

SM: But people also tend to lie in those profiles.

SS: Yes, but here is the interesting part. You can also look at the habits of what they are doing. How are they engaging, what time are they logging on, how long are they logged on for, and what are they searching for? Those things tell you more about people than what they put on their profiles.

Let´s get back to analytics and to your point. Who is telling the truth here? What you say and what you do on that website can be different. If you are lying, it starts to show up in various ways. For example, the way you use the website is different from how you reflect your details. If you have enough data and you run enough sophisticated algorithms to look for those patterns of inconsistency, you can do two things. One is that you can help people who are genuine and are looking for help in finding somebody. I think that is a very important value-added part for being able to differentiate yourself in the online dating space. But on the monetizing side, you are also able to offer up truly sophisticated targeted advertising to those people, and you know more about them from a human nature and habit perspective than you will ever dream of. I challenge you to find another source that gives more detail than an online dating profile.

This is a classic example of organizations that are not in the Fortune 1000 and don´t have hundreds of millions of dollars of IT budgets, but they are taking on the same scale and challenge that a Fortune 1000 organization is looking for. They are data-rich companies.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Steve Shine, CEO of Actian
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