On April 20, 2010, the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab held the event The Real Time Web: Imperative or Insanity? that I moderated. The packed, standing room only auditorium participated enthusiastically in the lively discussion of the panelists:

• Kevin Burton, CEO and founder, spinn3r
• Todd Levy, Head of Product and Engineering and co-founder, bit.ly
• Jan Pedersen, Chief Scientist for Core Search, Microsoft
• George Zachary, Partner, Charles River Ventures

For those who could not attend, Jeremy Carr (course assistant for MS&E237, Social Data Revolution) and I recorded a 12-minute audio summary of the key points of the event. I also posted my 3-page outline of the kick-off speech.

Please tell us what you think! Leave a comment below or on facebook.com/socialdatarevolution.

Thanks!

Event Description:

The cost of creating, sharing and distributing data in real time has become essentially zero, leading to an explosion of user generated content. Currently, every minute,

• 4,000,000 queries are entered into  search engines,
• 500,000 pieces of content are shared on Facebook,
• 100,000 product searches are done on Amazon.com,
• 100,000 bit.ly urls are clicked,
• 40,000 bit.ly urls are created,
• 40,000 tweets are sent, and
• 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube.
  

Over the last decades, the amount of data created by individuals has doubled every 1.5 to 2 years. Technologies like pubsubhubbub and xmpp are making it easier to push that firehose of data out to users, with only a fraction of a second of latency from thought and distribution. But how do we effectively use that data to make decisions that drive value for consumers and businesses?  And what’s the opportunity for the entrepreneur?

In this event, we engage with entrepreneurs, investors, and established players to separate reality from hype, and explore the following questions:

• Is real-time technology just for pesky marketers and profit-hungry wall street traders, or is there something in there for the rest of us?
• Where and how can real-time data help us make better decisions?
• How can we enable users to effectively digest and manage the ever-increasing torrents of information?
• What are the opportunities and possible new business models?
• What psychological principles drive the addiction of ever changing, seemingly relevant real time data?
• And what’s the real time entrepreneur to do about it?

MODERATOR

Andreas Weigend studies people and the data they create. He works with companies that are eager to develop strategies to realize the untapped power of data.  Previously, as the Chief Scientist of Amazon.com, he helped build the customer-centric, measurement-focused culture that has become central to Amazon’s success. His career as a data scientist combined with his deep industry experience across information-intensive organizations allows him to successfully bridge the gap between academia and industry. He received his PhD from Stanford in Physics, and is teaching this Spring MS&E 237 (The Social Data Revolution). He lives in San Francisco, Shanghai, and on weigend.com.

PANELISTS

Todd Levy, Co-founder and Head of Product and Engineering, Bit.ly

Todd Levy is a co-founder of New York City based bit.ly, where he serves as the head of Product & Engineering. bit.ly is the pre-eminent platform for online distributed analytics and content sharing, allowing users to shorten, share, and track links in real-time as they propagate through social distribution networks. Previously, Todd was an architect with Betaworks, a new media company focused on startups in the real-time communications, public collaboration, and distribution spaces. He holds degrees in Economics and Neuroscience & Behavior from Columbia University. Prior to university, Todd was at AOL, where he was a member of the engineering team that developed MapQuest and Moviefone, amongst other web properties.

Jan Pedersen, Chief Scientist for Core Search, Microsoft

Pedersen began his career at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where he managed a research program on information access technologies.  In 1996 he joined Verity (recently purchased by Autonomy) to manage their advanced technology program.  In 1998 Dr. Pedersen joined Infoseek/Go Network, a first generation Internet search engine, as Director of Search and Spidering.  In 2002 he joined Alta Vista as Chief Scientist. Alta Vista has later acquired acquired by Yahoo!, where Dr. Pedersen served as Chief Scientist for the Search and Advertising Technology Group. Prior to joining Microsoft, Dr. Pedersen was Chief Scientist at A9, an Amazon company. Dr. Pedersen holds a Ph.D. in Statistics from Stanford University and a AB in Statistics from Princeton  University. He is credited with more than ten issued patents and has authored more than twenty refereed publications on information access topics, seven of which are in the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) proceedings.

Kevin Burton, Founder/CEO, Spinn3r

Kevin is an industry expert in search with over 15 years experience, and is a co-creator of RSS1.0, one of the first successful standardized formats for publishing frequently updated web works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video.  Kevin founded several companies in the past, his current company is Spinn3r.com – an industry leader for blogs and social media monitoring and data.

Spinn3r currently serves as a crawling platform for major search engines and powers most social media analytics companies internationally. As a part of social good, Spinn3r provides data to over 400 researchers around the world supporting all major universities.

George Zachary, Partner, Charles River Ventures

George Zachary joined Charles River Ventures in 2004, bringing more than 17 years of operating and investing experience in computing and consumer technology. Zachary focuses on building services and software technology companies, and he’s led CRV’s investments in Areae, Geni.com, GoTV, Millennial Media, Skyrider, SocialMedia Networks and Twitter, and he is a board member for all but Twitter.

Previously, Zachary was a general partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures (MDV). His directorships include: Accrue Software (Nasdaq:ACRU), Andale, Critical Path (Nasdaq: CPTH), Ovation Entertainment, Sandcastle (acquired by Adobe, Nasdaq:ADBE), Securify (acquired by Kroll-O’Gara, Nasdaq: KROG), Shutterfly, Supertracks (acquired by Centerspan) and Telebot (acquired by Z-Tel, Nasdaq: ZTEL).

Prior to MDV, Zachary led the Nintendo 64 development business at Silicon Graphics, managed sales and marketing for virtual reality pioneer VPL Research, and served as a product marketer at CATS Software.

Zachary is a board advisor at the MIT Sloan School of Business and Stanford BASES. He is also an advisor to X PRIZE. George earned a joint BS from MIT and the MIT Sloan School of Business.

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