#BigBoulder

This week I went to the Big Boulder conference to learn about all things social data. The conference was hosted by Gnip — a reseller of the Twitter firehose as well as many other social data feeds — and was attended by the representatives from the big social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Disqus) as well as the best and brightest in social media analytics and engagement (Klout, Crimson Hexagon, NetBase, Stock Twits).

Since I was among the Twitterati, I took it upon myself to record the best observations and insights via my own Twitter stream. This resulted in by far the most tweets I’ve ever sent in a 2-day period — but there was so much to talk about!
Here are my highlights of Big Boulder:

The first panel featured 2 leaders from Twitter: Ryan Sarver (@rsarver), Director of Platform and Doug Williams (@dougw) Partnerships. They shared some staggering stats:

I also learned about Twitter’s new Embedded Tweets product that I’m using to embed all the tweets in this post!
In the most bitter irony, Twitter went down for over an hour — right while the Twitter guys were on stage!

A recurring theme at Big Boulder was Big Data: how to collect it, analyze it and take action from it.

Next up was @JoeFernandez, CEO of Klout who gave a few juicy, behind-the-scenes insights:

With all this tweeting, I’m expecting my Klout score to skyrocket!

The last panel of Day 1 was also the most interesting. @Moeed Ahmad, Head of New Media at Al Jazeera, @RumiChunara from HealthMap at Harvard Medical School and my friend Katie Baucom (@katieb3505) from NGA spoke about how media, health and government are using social data for social good.

Day 2 kicked off with the exceptional Brad Feld giving an inspiring vision of how to create a startup community.

Given the job he’s done and the success he’s had in Boulder (e.g., with the Foundry Group, TechStars and investments like Gnip), we should all take note! I invited Brad to share his vision with San Diego entrepreneurs next time he’s on the West Coast.

Some of the toughest questions of the conference were directed at the only people in the room wearing suits: the guys from Facebook!

It was great to catch up with @MylesSutherland from ESRI who’s working with Tomnod to bring our crowdsourcing to their tools and data. Myles and his colleague SJ Camarata talked about Tomnod’s favorite topic: geo data.

Social Media Analytics

The conference wrapped up with a discussion of Social Data in the Markets with the always-engaging @HowardLindzon of StockTwits as well as Richard @Tibbetts, CTO of StreamBase who shared some great insight on working with the government.

As well as all the great speakers, I was really glad to meet some old friends and make some new colleagues, including:

• John Lucier (@trigorilla) from DigitalGlobe.
  John and DG are great partners of Tomnod. We spent a lot of time discussing how Tomnod will put human eyeballs on all of DG’s pixels: 240 billion of them every day!
• Megan Costello (@megcos) from Crimson Hexagon.
  Megan is working with me and the UN Global Pulse initiative to use Crimson Hexagon’s powerful tweet-mining to monitor social trends in Indonesia.
• Katie Baucomm (@katieb3505) from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.
  Katie never fails to impress and show how the stereotype of government being old, slow and non-innovative is completely wrong.
• @SeanGorman from GeoIQ.
  Sean and his team at GeoIQ are an inspiration to Tomnod: they show how to combine great technology with massive geo data to develop successful products for government and commercial customers.
• @SophiaBLiu from the U.S. Geological Survey.
  As custodians of the National Map and creators of Did You Feel It?, one of the best examples of geospatial crowdsourcing, Sophia and her colleagues at USGS push the boundaries of what can be done with geo data.
• @HowardLindzon, his wife and Chris Corriveau from StockTwits.
  Great to meet another awesome company from America’s Finest City!

I’d like to end by sending some huge thank-yous to:

• Everyone from Gnip who put on a fabulous conference.
• The people of Boulder who hike, talk, think, cook, drink, play, party — and startup — like few other places on earth.
• Joanna & @CharlesInce, true friends of Tomnod, for their endless hospitality, comfy couch and for letting me give Zoe her bottle!