Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Bill Simmons, CTO of DataXu (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: This obviously has to happen with great speed. How strong and how speedy are the APRs that you are offering to do all this?

Bill Simmons: The real-time bidding in general – and there is some variation in this – is 100 milliseconds round-trip requirement for a response. Large exchanges like Google or Appnexus have data centers on the East and West Coasts, Europe, and Asia. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Bill Simmons, CTO of DataXu (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like you need a series of ads to get people to even take a survey. Is that the right measure? Because some people will never take surveys, right?

Bill Simmons: That is true. But we also work with other ways to measure awareness. This methodology works well in some cases, and in others it doesn’t. The other way to measure awareness is to go to the site and interact with car construction widgets. This way we can measure interaction, and we can score this as a positive signal. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Bill Simmons, CTO of DataXu (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take a couple of your customers, whomever you feel comfortable talking about, and please be granular in describing the use case. Our audience are high-end technical entrepreneurs, so they would both understand and appreciate a granular description of how this all works.

Bill Simmons: We work with many large automobile manufacturers. One of those manufacturer’s marketing strategy is that whenever they release a new car model, they want to blast out to the public the new, interesting features of that model. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Bill Simmons, CTO of DataXu (Part 1)

Bill Simmons is a co-founder and currently the chief technology officer of DataXu, a digital marketing management firm that offers platforms and services for advertisers and agencies in order to increase their advertising efficiency and marketing ROI. Bill obtained a PhD in astronautics and aeronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Before working for DataXu, Bill was engaged in developing and testing programs for space launch vehicles. He is known as one of the pioneers in real-time software and optimal system design. In this interview, Bill talks in detail about how DataXu helps its customers and processes billions of big data streams every day, and what kinds of opportunities there are for entrepreneurs who wish to start in this field.

Sramana Mitra: Bill, let’s start by introducing DataXu to our readers.

Bill Simmons: DataXu is a technology supplier to advertisers and agencies. We build a digital marketing management platform. What that means is we help advertisers and agencies manage their big data and put it to use to make their marketing more efficient. We have everything from data management to analytics and insight management platforms all the way down to media buying optimization technologies. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Venkat Viswanathan, CEO of LatentView Analytics (Part 8)

Sramana Mitra: The only issue there is you would need people who can learn in that mode. That means you would need a high-end set of people already.

Venkat Viswanathan: I agree. There is no getting away from the quality of people issue. The only aspect that has been a revelation for me is that we underestimate how big a country India is in terms of sheer number of people. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Venkat Viswanathan, CEO of LatentView Analytics (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Part of the issue is that India is experiencing this talent crunch as well. How do you see it panning out if there is such scale of growth? This is not low-end talent; we are talking about high-end skill sets.

Venkat Viswanathan: History may not repeat itself. I don’t believe India will be the only source of this kind of innovation. I think China is making the right investments. The only big gap they had in their arsenal was English language skills. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Venkat Viswanathan, CEO of LatentView Analytics (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Where do you hire from in Chennai?

Venkat Viswathan In Chennai the two top universities are IIT Madras and Anna University. Those two universities are top on our list. We also work with the department of math and statistics at the University of Chennai. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Venkat Viswanathan, CEO of LatentView Analytics (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The question I am asking is: What tools and technologies are you using to address that problem?

Venkat Viswathan: The tools and technology case is interesting, and again it is another area that has been going through a lot of change during the past 10 to 15 years. >>>