Thought Leaders in Big Data: Dmitri Williams, Professor USC and CEO of Ninja Metrics (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: When you’re working within an industry sector where the data is all self-sufficient like a video game industry, that’s obvious. What is the state of the union in other sectors? What percentage of the e-commerce clients that you have are actually using social sign-in and trying to marry social graph data with their transaction data?

Dmitri Williams: Certainly, none of them are trying to do this. This is not on anyone’s radar. I’m educating and evangelizing as I go. For the most part, when we walk in, the answer to your question is do they have social sign in, and what percentage of their user >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Dmitri Williams, Professor USC and CEO of Ninja Metrics (Part 4)

Dmitri Williams: I have no idea if I impacted sales because I have 10,000 followers. I don’t know if I have generated $1 or $3 million. I’ve got no clue. It’s all an assumption. You’re really looking at a proxy for action. Any marketer with their head on straight would rather have proof. What we do is much more difficult but it results in proof. We are not a business-to-consumer technology. We are a business-to-business technology, which means that we have the buying data. We will connect the social graph to get that social whale phenomenon measured. We will connect it to the actual purchases or actual buying of tickets. We will link those two sources of data together – the social and the behavioral. As a result, our scores aren’t scores. They’re in the units that the company cares about.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Dmitri Williams, Professor USC and CEO of Ninja Metrics (Part 3)

Dmitri Williams: We had a model which started explaining these social influence ripple effects, and catch what we call social whales. These are people who may or may not have a lot of behavior on their own but clearly are causing the behavior of others. That’s where the commercial stuff starts to become much more interesting and obvious. If you know who the largest influencers are in a social system, this is extremely useful on a business model side for acquisition, retention, and for monetization. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Dmitri Williams, Professor USC and CEO of Ninja Metrics (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Maybe pick three client use cases who have these large amounts of data. Let’s double-click down on understanding specifically what that data contains and what kinds of intelligence are you able to derive out of it. What processes and methodologies have you innovated to bring that together?

Dmitri Williams: Let’s start with an academic one and maybe jump into some commercial ones. The first project that we did was on predictive analytics and we were doing this for the intelligence community. They were interested in looking at someone’s online behavior and understanding something about them offline. Those are all declassified stuff that you can read about online. We would take a look at someone playing a video game like EverQuest 2, which is the game that we were looking at most of the time. >>>

Serial Entrepreneur David Steinberg’s Four-Startup Journey (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Your customer base is enterprise customers?

David Steinberg: Yes, our customers are enterprise.

Sramana Mitra: You were just talking about specifically how you’ve differentiated and brought the pieces together using, to some extent, a roll-up strategy. Is that part of the strategy now?

David Steinberg: No, we’re not a roll-up strategy. >>>

Serial Entrepreneur David Steinberg’s Four-Startup Journey (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: These companies that you brought together to get the base level offering going, how did you identify them?

David Steinberg: That’s a great question. I took a core team from my last company who focused on M&A and corporate strategy. That team started looking around and calling everybody on earth. For example, we started the company in October of 2007, but we didn’t do our first deal until April of 2008.

Sramana Mitra: They were looking for companies within a certain domain. What constraints did you give them?

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Building A Unicorn Company By Resurrecting The Dead

We’ve looked at a number of Unicorn companies so far: Tableau, FireEye, RightNow, Palo Alto Networks and Kayak. Today, we look at SuccessFactors.

If you’ve been around long enough, you’ve heard this narrative before: The market is grinding to a halt, the IPO window shut, and only a few brave souls dare venture out into the turbulent seas. The mergers and acquisitions market is adrift as well; public companies are under stock price pressure; further down the value chain, the startups – especially the venture-funded ones – are stuck in an exit-starved no man’s land.

You can sit around, depressed, or as some technology startup veterans will tell you, you can pick up great technologies at rock-bottom prices and build businesses out of them. Big businesses.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Egnyte CEO Vineet Jain (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: If we keep on this model where everything is going to be free, then the whole economic structure of capitalism is going to get destroyed. Then, when people who are supposed to provide these services disappear or go out of business, we’re going to be left with an economy full of holes.

Vineet Jain: With the current valuation and liquidity, do you think the Valley will continue on the same path or do you think we will have some deflation?

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