Investors have high hopes for Big Data

The need to analyze large amounts of information quickly goes beyond purely commercial use.
Big Data has a major impact on people's decisions, starting with the presidential elections and ending with the purchase of a cup of coffee. The scope of analyzing large amounts of information has become so profitable that investors from Massachusetts are in a hurry to find another future multibillion-dollar company in order to invest in it now.
To date, the commercial use of Big Data mainly exists in the form of contextual advertising - it is worth remembering the prophetic service of Google ads in this regard.

However, Chris Lynch, co-owner of the Cambridge Venture Company, Atlas Venture, noted that Big Data analysis can benefit all businesses and non-profit organizations. For example, Prize4Life, a Cambridge non-profit organization that supports research on Lou Gehrig's syndrome (the ALS disease), awarded three winners of the competition to analyze and predict the course of the disease using data from thousands of patients.

In the meantime, PatientsLikeMe, a health care social network also based in Cambridge, collects and analyzes data from more than 100,000 patients reporting their illness symptoms, treatment, and the final result.

Big Data can also transform retail and catering.
')
Objective Logistics, in Boston, analyzes all the information coming from the POS systems of their customers in order to best identify the best-selling products, as well as to understand what allows the products to sell better. As a rule, on average, from 3 to 15 million transactions are made through each POS system, which is from 2 to 10 gigabytes of data.

“We can more accurately say, for example, which type of cake should be sold more or, for example, find out that when ordering a particular type of pizza, customers are likely to prefer also antipasto,” commented Philip Beauregard, executive director of Objective Logistics.

Big Data can even help attract new customers. For example, the LevelUp mobile application from a young startup SCNVGR tracks the dependence of sales on weather conditions.

The project team found out that a very small part of customers decided to go out in rainy weather, however, customers who wait out bad weather in cafes tend to spend 20% more.

Seth Priebatsch, founder of SCVNGR, stated that according to LevelUp, retailers should provide an additional incentive for the market by advertising in mobile applications and e-mail distribution just before bad weather in order to increase sales, otherwise in sales there will be a lull.

Massachusetts has almost become home to a significant number of companies working with Big Data, for which, in part, you can thank the research activities of Boston universities and the rich heritage of giant IT corporations. But even in all these circumstances, the state is losing precious cadres in Big Data analysis, as people are increasingly attracted to new opportunities somewhere outside the state.

“We train 5,000 highly qualified data analytics specialists annually,” Lynch said. “However, most of them we lose.”

So, Lynch and his partners organized a non-profit community to support the development of Big Data in the field of analysis, providing researchers with access to large data arrays and sufficient computing power capable of processing this data.

“In my opinion, there are currently a lot of experts working with Big Data in the world, and I co-founded the community to create all the conditions for generating several thousand more specialists a year,” Lynch said. “We are capable of creating a center specializing in Big Data, since we have all the necessary source material for this.”
And this source material is a set of complex and, at the same time, interesting problems and tasks.
“We just have to show how these problems change the situation in many industries.” - declared Byurgard.
“If there are no interesting companies around, constantly emerging and receiving start-up capital here in Boston, people will certainly leave for San Francisco.”

“The following fact is extremely clear: you work among intelligent, educated people, but you also try to get to exactly where companies are working on solving interesting and fascinating problems.”

At the moment, there are numerous efforts to preserve the status of the center for working with Big Data for Boston. There is even a new venture company, Big Data Boston, operating exclusively in this area.
“If everything goes according to plan, then some of today's investments may well grow in companies like SAP or EMC,” Lynch predicts.

How do you see the future of Big Data?