My Themes for 2015. Yours?

Yet another new year has begun. As I write this, I am looking out on a glorious, sunny day. There has been rain these past few weeks, after many years of draught. This morning, the sunlight shines beautifully on orange and yellow leaves – the last few on the pear tree in our garden. There is a sense of well being in nature.

Is there a sense of well being in the world at large?

The question doesn’t meet with an unambiguous yes. War. Destruction. Terrorism. Children being killed. Rising inequality. Looming water crisis.

In our personal lives and choices, it is important to remember:

“It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.”

As I think about our sphere of work – the industry, technology, entrepreneurship, business – I carry much the same feeling with me.

And with that sentiment, here is a reflection on some of the themes I am pondering for 2015.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Eldad Farkash, CTO of Sisense (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Where would you point entrepreneurs to look for new problems to solve a new startup to build now?

Eldad Farkash: If you’re coming from a scientific background, I would say focus either on deep learning or NPI. These would be the two major topics I would focus on if you’re a scientific kind of startup. If you’re trying to solve a problem by combining a stack together, I would try to start from the lower level. I would start looking around and see what hardware and what data sources are not existing yet and how do we tap into those data sources and make something meaningful out of that. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Eldad Farkash, CTO of Sisense (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: There is one area that I think still has some openings. Some of this is very large opportunities but a lot of it is also small to mid-scale opportunities of these vertical solutions that take advantage of the more mature infrastructure layer underneath. But then, you need a serious amount of domain knowledge on top to be able to actually do meaningful things with that infrastructure. Are you in agreement with that statement?

Eldad Farkash: Yes, I do agree with that. I think there is a lot of potential for innovation on how to simplify those huge projects. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Eldad Farkash, CTO of Sisense (Part 3)

Eldad Farkash: Another trend would be regarding the sources of data. Today, we’re just starting to grasp the value of data. What’s missing is more sources. When I say more sources, I’m not talking about the conventional databases. I’m talking about machines and environment. Blending this data into what we do on databases has tremendous impact. I’ve seen only the huge companies able to do that usually because it requires a massive amount of investment in technology and infrastructure. As for the hardware trends in the upcoming years, we expect to see more and more getting squeezed up into smaller machines that can do much more with much less.

Sramana Mitra: Would it be fair to say at this point that the infrastructure landscape and ecosystem is becoming pretty mature or would you say that there are still issues with that side that need to be solved?

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Eldad Farkash, CTO of Sisense (Part 2)

Eldad Farkash: A different example would be Galaxy Semiconductor. I’m taking you to a completely different spectrum. They actually test hardware, usually in Asia where most of the semiconductor industry is. They want to use analytics to crunch billions of records that represent wafer cost. They want to have the visualization that shows them, during the QA process of wafers, how well the wafer is produced. They visualize this by drawing this heat map over the wafer and giving an indication which points are valid and which are invalid. To get this simple picture, they need to go through billions of records and crunch them in real time. We’re talking about asking around 5,000 SQL queries running over a few minutes over billions of records and getting visualization out. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Danny Yu, CEO of DainTree (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It takes time to fully deploy the solution. If you have one customer with 20 to 40 facilities, it takes time to get it fully deployed, right?

Danny Yu: Yes. The way this works with existing buildings is they typically want to do some type of an upgrade to the facility. You time yourself with capital budget around energy efficiency. If you do well and they like that, they will keep rolling it out. We have had one customer, in the grocery area, that went from talking through our channel partner in December 2013 to getting the first trial to a particular end customer of theirs. We did our trial in February 2914, and we received orders for 50 facilities about three months later. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Danny Yu, CEO of DainTree (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You are more of a service side?

Danny Yu: It was a network analysis product. By helping companies solve problems with networking, it gets us to understand the problem better because a test company has to understand the test cases. What effectively happened is we gathered all these expertise across all these different applications about what problems we need to solve at a system level to enable all these applications to work together. The company shifted to being the solutions platform company. The company then picked the lowest-hanging fruit of vertical application to go after, which was commercial lighting.

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: E-commerce has been a category where a lot of people have bootstrapped businesses to some scale. You talked about your sweet spot being this half a million to million range. A large portion of that is probably bootstrapped businesses right?

Rick Wilson: Absolutely, I would say the vast majority.

Sramana Mitra: What are you hearing from this community? Are these people trying to scale? What is the thought process in your community? >>>