We hosted our first Startup Office Hours meetup almost two years ago as a means of supporting New York’s vast entrepreneurial community with insights into what it takes to build a successful startup. Our presenters included startup founders in areas like real estate, edtech, social media, brain/bio hacking, software consulting [guess who...]—and even tech veterans like John Pavley, current CTO of Viacom.
We’ve had a blast hosting these events, but with time comes change, and we at The Hackerati have decided to use this event to start digging deeper into the tech side of things. Starting in September or October [still working out the details], we’ll be kicking off a new series: NYC Tech Talks with The Hackerati.
Our goal for these NYC Tech Talks is to share the in-depth insights we’ve gained from engineering successful technologies across various industries. We expect to focus on topics including Web/Mobile, Big Data/Analytics/Visualization, Machine Learning, and Distributed [Cloud] Computing with presenters from The Hackerati and other leading NYC Tech companies.
We’ll be kicking things off with a presentation by Rob Marano, Cofounder of The Hackerati. He's planning to show us how to leverage new AWS
components and Spark to analyze clickstream data for online advertising.
Hackerati cofounder Rob Marano had some interesting opportunities as a purveyor of technical wisdom over the past couple of weeks. With over twenty years of experience in the industry—from building rockets and satellites with GE Aerospace to founding his own tech startups—Rob has deep insights into running businesses and architecting the technologies that support them.
Big Data
On Wednesday, June 4th, Rob spoke at a Northside Innovation event hosted at a temporary Dell Venue in Soho. Northside collaborated with Dell on numerous events at this space throughout their four-week residency, and Rob was looped into their Big Data discussion. He was on a panel beside Michael Lewis [Creative Director of Data Visualization at R/GA] and Liv Buli [Data Journalist at Next Big Sound], with moderator Justin Hendrix [Executive Director of NYC Media Lab].
It was great to hear Rob speak in depth about a topic that I can typically only appreciate from his high-level comments like, “I’m seriously jammed on this Hadoop project!” The details of what he’s actually doing to build out what he calls “Big Data plumbing” are really interesting. This is the kind of technology that’s going to allow my dreams of a truly quantified self come to fruition. As a writer, I’m constantly thinking about how my everyday speech could be recorded, converted to searchable text, run through natural language processing and sentiment analysis algorithms, and then processed via machine learning to give me feedback on what I’m saying, what factors contribute to what I say, how I can speak more effectively, etc. And this will ultimately lead to a complete reimagination of the writing process.
All of the answers are in the data. It’s up to us to discover them. Rob’s candid discussion of this is illuminating:
“Information that exists [in a database] may not come from a particular transaction that you care about. It’s gonna come from the things that go around the transaction: How long is that transaction? Where’d they do it from? What was the demographic of that person who just did that transaction? Were they driving a CitiBike? Were they driving a car? Were they on I-95? By answering the who/what/where/when/how, we can answer the why with analytics. Answering the first questions helps you acquire and sort the data, and answering the why helps you monetize that data.”
You can see a video of this talk here. [Recorded by yours truly via Google Glass—please excuse any chatter and laughter!]
Cyber Security
The following morning, Rob was interviewed by Shraysi Tandon of China Central Television [CCTV]. CCTV is the world’s largest broadcaster, with 1.3 billion viewers across 80 countries—40 million in the United States alone! Safe to say, this was a pretty big opportunity! Shraysi has interviewed greats like Noam Chomsky and Steve Wozniak, and she reached out to Rob for his perspective on the importance of cyber security roles in America.
With the increasing presence of hackers [i.e. crackers, or cyber security hackers], cyber security jobs in both the federal government and the private sector are on the rise as security threats increase. This is very much in line with the rise of security breaches in major corporations like Facebook, eBay, and Evernote, as well as the government, such as thetheft of F-35 fighter jet plans. As we continue to rely on digital technology in all aspects of life and business, more and more of ourselves become susceptible to such attacks. The only true response is to ensure that we have knowledgeable leaders guarding the helm.
“I think [having a chief information security officer is] as important as having a chief financial officer. And the reason being that anyone’s business is run on technology today. Try to name one business that doesn’t touch technology. I bet…you can’t even say a mom and pop shop anymore. It’s everything. It’s infiltrated our entire life. Just like the concept of money. It’s part of our daily lives in anything and everything we do. Technology is the same. So we should give it its own seat at the table where the largest and most important decisions are made and that’s in the board room. And it’s starting to happen.”
