10 Thought Leaders in Big Data

We have a long-running Thought Leaders in Big Data series on the 1M/1M blog. We started publishing the series back in 2012. Over the last couple of years, we have featured many of the innovators in the field. Of those, today, I will introduce you to ten who I think would be interesting for you to get to know.

Let me explain why I have chosen these ones in particular.

The significant opportunities for entrepreneurship currently exist in the application layer of the Big Data industry. The platforms and plumbing are in place.

Today, the most exciting opportunities are going to be available to those entrepreneurs who harness the power of big data, but couple it with intense domain knowledge in specific areas of business.

These ten thought leaders are good examples of how to do that.

1. Sandy Steier, CEO of 1010Data – Sandy’s roots are in Wall Street. 1010Data’s roots are in the Finance industry.

2. John Plavan, CEO of EarthRisk – EarthRisk predicts weather and leverages those predictions to play the energy trading market. Very cool stuff.

3. Bill Simmons, CTO of DataXu – Bill is a PhD from MIT’s aeronautics and astronautics department. That would be rocket science, yes. But the domain DataXu has specialized in is making advertising more targeted.

4. Andy Nibley, CEO of Yieldex – Andy is also working on advertising, helping publishers optimize revenue.

5. Oliver Downs, SVP Data Sciences of Globys – Globys applies big data principles to optimize marketing campaigns for mobile operators.

6. Sasha Gilenson, CEO of Evolven – Evolven’s area of expertise is in IT Operations Analytics, and he outlines the industry’s open problems and yet unaddressed holy grail.

7. Prem Uppaluru, CEO of Transera – Transera focuses on contact center analytics.

8. Charlie Lougheed, President of Explorys – Explorys focuses on healthcare data and has, as customers, 325 hospitals.

9. Ken Leong, CEO of ZL Technologies – Ken focuses on e-discovery problems in the financial and legal sectors that deal particularly with unstructured data.

10. Kevin North, CEO of Terapeak – Kevin has created a superb real-time big data solution for merchants selling on eBay and other marketplaces. Seriously cool stuff.

I also suggest you follow Jeremy Howard, former President and Chief Scientist of Kaggle – Jeremy is a fellow MIT alum, and Kaggle is a really cool company where hotshot techies go to play. Companies post complex data modeling projects, and these hard core geeks solve them. You should check out the kinds of problems being posted on Kaggle to get ideas for new ventures.

Enjoy, and I hope this will trigger the next great big data application idea in your brain!