Big Data Week Atlanta – Growing a community around innovation

Written by Radhika Subramanian, CEO, Emcien Corp.

About fifty years ago, Atlanta was the size of Little Rock, Ark. About a hundred years before that, it was burned to the ground. Atlanta has proven again and again that it’s got gumption and can grow, and is doing so now, becoming the tech hub of the east.

With a firm foundation that includes the busiest international airport in the world, a vibrant cluster of corporate giants such as Coca-Cola, UPS, Delta, NCR and The Home Depot, top notch colleges and universities, and fast-moving entrepreneurial activity, Atlanta is now standing proudly among 18 of the top cities in the world to host Big Data Week, taking place April 22-28, 2013.

Born out of a desire to build community around the diverse challenges of Big Data, Atlanta’s tech community already excels at exploring, sharing, and learning with one another. And now, with the advent of Big Data Week, the city will have the opportunity to prove it’s as serious a Silicon Valley in terms of technology.

Featured speakers throughout the week include editors from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, GigaOM, Datanami, and executives from Cisco, SunTrust, Microsoft, NCR, the CDC and more.

Our community partners such as Hypepotamus, Georgia Tech Research Institute, Arketi, TAG, ATDC, Engauge and more are helping raise awareness for the weeklong series of events, which includes several educational panels and sessions, plus a happy hour celebration, sponsored by MailChimp, and a 32-hour hackathon.

Your Big Data Journey

We’re all trying to keep up with the beast that is Big Data, but how do you measure your success? The trends around Big Data are moving fast, and companies are trying their hardest to keep apace of innovation and how to best find insight in their data.

In order to gauge where you and your company stand in the Big Data journey, we have developed a survey to measure the challenges facing companies, how integrated Big Data is in business, and what the barriers might be to starting an analytics program in your organization.

Help us all gain a better picture of where we are in the Big Data Journey by taking this brief, anonymous survey. The results will be shared during Big Data Week Atlanta.