Big Boulder 2013

Posted on May 7, 2013 by Randy Almond, Marketing

Big Boulder’s back for 2013 and better than ever.

The leaders in social data: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Automattic, Disqus and many more are descending on Boulder again this summer to talk about the future of their platforms. Last year was a huge success and the expectations this year are even higher. We have a line-up that will deliver!

We’ll go deep into Asia and Latin America with speakers from China, Brazil and Japan, including the CEO of LINE, one of the fastest growing social networks on the planet. We’ll hear about non-traditional applications of Social Data with discussions on Finance, Government, Academic Research and Data Science. And to help us make sense of it all, we’ll have industry analysts discussing their views of the future. See the agenda and speakers pages for all the details.

In addition to all the great topics covered in the sessions, we’ve left plenty of time for networking with others in Social Data, including sunset cocktails with views of the Flatirons, a bicycle pub crawl, and since this is Boulder after all, morning yoga and hiking.

Big Boulder is an invite-only event for the leaders in the social data ecosystem. Space is filling up quickly so if you’re still thinking about it, sign up now before we hit capacity. Interested in coming but haven’t been invited? First check out our blog post about social data vs. social media. If you’re all about social data, email bre@gnip.com for information.

Wrapping Up Big Boulder

Posted on July 12, 2012 by Elaine Ellis, Marketing

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Big Boulder has come and gone. Two days, 16 sessions, 36 speakers, 2,150 Tweets.

It was amazing to have the publishers who create the social data this industry is based on together in the same place with all of our customers who are the ones building impactful solutions with this data. One of the aspects that I personally loved was that people were able to interact so easily with their peers in the industry, sharing ideas and creating new connections.

The other fun aspect was to show off the best of Boulder. We had daily yoga classes, a hike on Friday morning and ended the conference with a bike pub crawl on Bcycle bikes. We also gave speaker gifts from two of my favorite Boulder companies, Kid Robot and Sphero (a robotic ball with its own gaming system.)

Check out our Big Boulder wrap-up video with the amazing Lindsay Campbell. You can also see the Facebook photo album and follow the social media highlights on our Storify page.

What Did Other People Say About the Content and Conference:

“And since my daily information consumption is substantially social, when Chris Moody, COO of Gnip, kicked off the Big Boulder conference talking about ‘Social Cocktails‘, I was all ears. It was then I immediately knew that I was in for two days of good content and smart people (and perhaps a couple of cocktails)—and I wasn’t disappointed,” said Daniela Barbosa of First Rain. Post: Social Cocktails With Your Dinner?
“I was seriously impressed by the volume and variety of interesting data that is being collected, curated, and shared via APIs,” said Adam Feldstein of SEOmoz. Post: A Few Takeaways from the Big Boulder Conference on Social Media Data
“The event was truly well done. It was hard to believe this was the first year and I look forward to next year.” Michael Myers. Post: #BigBoulder 2012 Rundown
“After the buzz factor is removed, the reality is that social data is in its infancy and what we are witnessing today is just the tip of the iceberg. I was pleasantly surprised to meet many players in the social data ecosystem: from social network / platforms to analytics companies to organizations of all sorts working to leverage social data for a myriad use case,” said Babar Bhatti of MutualMind: Post: Big Boulder: The Power of Social Data

If you missed the conference or any of the sessions, check out the Big Boulder category on the blog to read all of the updates.

Big Boulder: Transition at a Massive Scale with Ken Little of Tumblr

Posted on June 22, 2012 by Clare Tischer, Guest Blogger

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Ken Little, Director of Engineering from Tumblr, weighs in on what it’s like working inside a product team to release features and align long-term priorities.

Ken Little of Tumblr

Gnip recently announced Tumblr as a partnership. What’s makes Tumblr unique?

Tumblr has two big uses:

Blogging platform – it’s the easiest way to blog, lowering the barrier to creativity online while simultaneously allowing users to have control over content creation.
Content consumption platform – rather than going to all of the blogs you like to see the content for the day, follow a feed of what’s happening in your curated network.

Tumblr’s platform f

osters creativity and the community itself backs up this effort. Gnip had early access to the first firehose and its data science team geeked out. One of the first things they noticed was that certain pieces of content spread rapidly. Chris Moody asks Ken about the recipe for speed and Ken credits the reblog feature. While Tumblr does provide likes, by far and away their success is owed to their reblogs. Rob Johnson notes that visual content plays a big part too. In terms of data on that side, all visual content has some kind of textual component whether it’s a caption or a structured tag. Tumblr users, for the most part, are tumbling for an audience. Content is meant for the general public and bloggers want to be found. One of the most successful methods of discovery online right now is through the tag system. Ken uses the popular example of Tumblr users making an animated .gif of a scene in a TV or a movie to relate a moment they perso

nally felt in their own life. ”All roads on Tumblr lead to animated .gifs,” he says with smile.

Tumblr also has native integration for SoundCloud and Spotify. Ken likes to watch a specific track move its way around communities along with all of the commentary. Describing brands that are using Tumblr successfully, Ken talks about the Adidas football blog as appealing to all soccer fans. Coca-Cola’s content is reblogged constantly because it is themed on happiness, paging through an endless utopian summer. Users get to partake in the content as they would in any other place. The Hunger Games movie team put up a blog called Capitol Couture and rather than just posting standard movie trailers, they created a fashion blog set in the Capitol’s fictional dystopia. It’s an extension of their larger narrative and therefore exciting to its fans. New York Fashion Week is also covered live on Tumblr as it occurs annually. One of the things that makes Tumblr a success is how visual it is, lending itself as a snug fit for industries like fashion and entertainment.

Once a blogging platform gets an international foothold as Tumblr has, the ratio continues to climb. Tumblr says it is number seventeen in terms of national reach. 2011 was a crazy growth year for the company. With a fairly small and growing engineering team, this can be challenging. The focus was keeping the product stable while still building momentum and forward motion. As they reached a point of stabilization, they recognized the value in all of the data and they wanted to open their doors to the social data market using Gnip. It was a natural next step.

Big Boulder is the world’s first social data conference. Follow along at #BigBoulder, on the blog under Big Boulder, Big Boulder on Storify and on Gnip’s Facebook page.

Big Boulder: Measuring Influence Online with Klout

Posted on June 21, 2012 by Rachael Cihlar, Guest Blogger

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An interview with Klout’s Joe Fernandez and Matt Thomson about measuring influence online.

Klout began as an idea in 2007 because Joe Fernandez had jaw surgery, and his mouth was wired shut for months. Unable to communicate on his own, Joe had to depend on social sites like Facebook and Twitter. As is only means to speak, Joe’s way of thinking was radically changed. His conversations with his friends made him think about influencers, and it was while he was wired shut that he starting building Klout. Joe wanted to find the answer to “how do we help every person understand their influence?” Four years into the business, Klout is tackling a very ambitious challenge to understand conversations, relationships, and tie that back to influence. It’s an early start, but they are leaders in the space and hope to continue to grow and expand upon the idea of influence.

Measuring influence on the web can be a challenge. Joe says Klout strives to brand themselves correctly, which is why they chose their name. They wanted to push out the API for growth and not for monetization: to simple put the data out there so users can see it. It’s an easy entry point for consumers, albeit a bit counter intuitive for business plans. Though the data is often criticized for being incorrect or off, Joe says it’s a huge challenge to measure influence and they are striving to make it more measurable and more actionable. Klout is keeping up with ingesting every piece of data that is becoming available. While Klout is a leader in the space of influence, they’re still not satisfied with their product. They are consistently working toward better real world influence associated with online influence, and taking a first shot at addressing that. Matt Thomson gave the example of Google; In 2000 they had the best search engine available, but it was nowhere near where Google has taken search today. Matt says Klout’s algorithm will continue to change to incorporate the most relevant data becoming available.

Influence spans many topics and platforms online, so Klout must decide what matters more or less on the social web. They aim to include as many signals of influence as possible. Klout chooses specific data to decide where influence lies and which signals trigger value in their platform. Their team of scientists works with more than 500 different variables to determine Klout scores. However Klout uses tools like ”Who is more influential” that asks a user to rate two friends and uses that against their algorithm to benchmark themselves and their data.

The real value of Klout lies in the context of influence: what someone is influential about, and how they get to a place to have influence. Joe emphasized that if you’re doing anything with customer service, targeting, or filtering, you know data can be a lot of noise. But a Klout score can help with decision making within a business. Klout is consumer-focused because they want something really digestible. Klout hopes marketers are using this, and on some level users are investing in the future of Klout, and where it can go. Klout ranks topics in the background as well, and hopes to bring that feature to the forefront. Topics are critical, and the second biggest investment for Klout after influential people. Understanding topical analysis, is difficult because often there is so little context. It’s a big challenge, but Klout hopes to evolve to incorporate topics into their product.

Klout’s business model right now is very consumer-centric. One way users are benefiting from Klout is through their perks program. Klout Perks are exclusive products or experiences that you earn based on your influence. Influencers have earned sweet Perks like laptops and airline tickets. Chevy is a great example of this; they came to Klout looking to reach out to influencers about cars. The influencers were given a Chevy Volt for a weekend with gas money to burn, and in turn these influencers generated social proof on Chevy. While these influencers weren’t paid to do this, they felt empowered to talk about the Chevy Volt. And it worked: 180 million impressions on the Chevy volt were produced, and advertisers were happy.

Joe had a great personal example when he tweeted about a poor experience with Delta. Because Delta was using a tool that incorporated Klout into their API, they were able to immediately contact Joe and remedy the complaint. Joe says this is exactly what Klout is working toward: improving customer experience. Every interaction between a company and a consumer is an opportunity for a story to be told through social. If you have the most passionate people talking about your brand in good ways, it’s super valuable.

Big Boulder is the world’s first social data conference. Follow along at #BigBoulder, on the blog under Big Boulder, Big Boulder on Storify and on Gnip’s Facebook page.

Big Boulder: Industry-Focused Social Networks with Howard Lindzon

Posted on June 21, 2012 by Clare Tischer, Guest Blogger

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An interview with Howard Lindzon of StockTwits about the role of industry specific social networks and the growth of StockTwits.

“The first two people I met on the internet that weren’t naked was Brad Feld, who quickly got naked, and Fred Wilson. I had searched for ‘term sheet.’” Howard Lindzon can’t even finish his second sentence before the audience erupts in laughter. Inspired largely by the earliest days of blogging and Twitter, Howard believes that social data can be used to target niche markets on a very high level. After tweeting about his random locations in the early days of Twitter, it occurred to him that the product he wanted, a Twitter-like channel for stock information, didn’t exist yet, so StockTwits was born.

Howard believes anyone savvy with information can launch a data-driven vertical that makes business sense, although he does attribute much of StockTwits’ success to the fact that personal finance happens in real-time offline too. Social data weaves into the broader picture after you build trust with your customers and readers. Howard talks about the poor timing of launching StockTwits during the crash in 2008 and credits its lasting success to reliably consistent data. No matter how good the curation, the content has to be trustworthy. Pulling up a StockTwits slide that demonstrates price and volume of a stock, Howard can identify a commodity. Then StockTwits builds a trusted graph over the data to reflect macro-sense information. Any vertical market’s risk is getting kicked off by the next great success story because the curator of the current hot product can’t adapt to customer needs.

The way companies release their earnings has also changed. In 2012, an audience reads its social streams before it ever sees a company’s website or version of events. “The banks don’t want the rules to go away but they already are,” says Howard. “There are no rules so you just have to dodge bullets. Just because everyone has the potential to listen to you doesn’t mean they will. We will have to learn how to live within the greatness of these massive platforms.”

The master curation aspect of social networks is what interests Howard. People and ideas have a desire to be discovered and they will continue to inundate various channels– Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and other places. That said, it is only those with moxie and skills to survive in that niche that will float to the top. ”Twitter is a blank canvas for you to be hateful, or intelligent, or funny,” Howard says. He believes simplicity can pave the way to success but personally still wants to compartmentalize his life. This means he keeps his StockTwits activity mostly out of his Twitter stream. Social leverage, when used properly, is powerful. Howard thinks the categories most ripe for the vertical market are sports and humor. ”You don’t have to build billion dollar companies,” he reassures us, referring to industry-focused social networks. “Trust is what matters.”

Big Boulder is the world’s first social data conference. Follow along at #BigBoulder, on the blog under Big Boulder, Big Boulder on Storify and on Gnip’s Facebook page.

Big Boulder: The Social Cocktail with Chris Moody

Posted on June 21, 2012 by Clare Tischer, Guest Blogger

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Chris Moody, the COO of Gnip, kicks off Big Boulder by talking about the social cocktail and the ingredients that go into it.

Chris Moody tells us Gnip is founded on the idea that social data represents unlimited innovation. “This full room proves that there will be unlimited, exciting applications,” he says. 100 billion pieces of data are created each month and Gnip is going to understand what makes each set of data unique. Over 90% of Fortune 500 gets content indirectly from Gnip. The variety of people in attendance at Big Boulder is representative of the dense social data ecosystem.

There are many different data sources, which is good news and bad news. New coverage platforms added by Gnip this year inclue WordPress, IntenseDebate, Disqus, Tumblr, and Sina Weibo. So how does an entrepreneur or company prioritize and organize the data that is important to a specific set of customers? This is what Gnip does.

Chris and his team focus on two different dimensions of social data:

Reaction Time: ranging from ultra-fast (example: Twitter at events) to slow (example: the comments on a blog post or a shared video.)
Depth: Data is about the what. Twitter is concise and deals with the immediate, “This is so adjective!” It’s difficult to get into the reasons in only 140 characters. Platforms like YouTube and Tumblr are at the other end of the spectrum and tend to boast deep, personal content. When you begin to overlay business use cases over these different data sources, you see the social cocktail. On one side is public relations and crisis management. If you have a client looking to manage a crisis, the priority is your speed in rectifying the situation. If a person complains that their cell phone is on fire, you don’t need to ask them how they feel about it. It just needs to be immediately addressed. On the other side is brand management: what does the collective universe think about not only you but also your competitors? If you’re the cell phone provider with the faulty and explosive device, what was said about you and what was your response?

Chris brings up an example slide of the market response to Netflix earnings last year. The world’s reaction to the opening bell on Twitter was very fast and factual. It demonstrated information based around how correlated the stocks were performing, or the what. Blogs had a half-life on the curve, well past the end of the trading day when blog content and a variety of opinions began to go public, or the why. Comments to this kind of content peaked much later by comparison, the next day in this case.

There are two noticed patterns in social data: expected and unexpected. It’s also important to observe whether the occurrence is a routine or an event. Generally speaking, no one expects a hurricane. Likewise, the social data around a natural disaster spikes drastically as soon as it occurs. We’re continuing to understand this action because new sources are constantly adding new conversations. As a second example, JP Morgan’s surprise trading loss illustrated a strong story in the comments of its articles, animated political .gifs for humor, and theories. The story shared was factual and the reaction to the story was highly narrative and emotional. As a third example, a recently shared image of the new Urban Outfitters line went viral not only because of Urban Outfitters’ huge market but also because the image was so easily sharable in a micro-blog format.

The message being driven home at Big Boulder today and tomorrow is, “Where is this industry going?” In an interview style format, Big Boulder is Gnip’s first conference and panels are conducted around the data science of what we collectively think and feel.

Big Boulder is the world’s first social data conference. Follow along at #BigBoulder, on the blog under Big Boulder and on Gnip’s Facebook page.

Coming to Big Boulder and Looking for Things to Do?

Posted on June 15, 2012 by Elaine Ellis, Marketing

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I was putting together a list of some of my favorite things to do in Boulder and Denver for a reporter coming to Big Boulder, and I wanted to share some on the blog. We know some visitors are coming for the weekend!

Boulder is a small town with a great restaurant scene and many Gnip employee’s have favorite restaurants to enjoy downtown. If you’re looking for something nicer, we recommend Frasca, Oak, Black Cat, Kitchen and Salt.If you’re looking for something more casual, some favorites include: Kitchen Next Door (super affordable and healthy), Cafe Aion (on CU Boulder’s hill), Dushanbe House (restored tea house), Pizzeria Locale, Mountain Sun (micropub with good beer) and Rio Rooftop. Check out Downtown Boulder’s website for a complete list of restaurants, shops and fun events going on!

You may not know that Colorado brews more beer than any other state. If you’re up for a brewery tour, we recommend:

Also, great micro-distilleries:

303 Vodka in Boulder
Stranahans in Denver

And as a lark, Celestial Seasonings has a tour too.

If you’re into the outdoors, you can rent cruisers from Boulder’s bike sharing program or mountain bikes from University Cycle. Easy-to-access hikes are Chautauqua and Mount Sanitas (hard hike). If you’re up for a day trip, there is Rocky Mountain National Park and Estes Park, which also has the Shining Hotel. Evergreen is a fun mountain town about an hour away and you can rent paddle boats and then do a wine and cheese tasting by the creek. If you’re willing to travel further, Breckenridge and Vail are two hours away and you can often find hotel deals on Jetsetter this time of year.

If you get out to Denver, the Denver Art Museum has an incredible Yves St Laurent exhibition going on right now that no one else in the US is getting. I also like Riverfront Park in Denver with some cute shops, a flagship REI and you can even try kayaking in the river. The Lower Highlands area is popular as well. Linger used to be a mortuary and is a popular restaurant and then you can follow it with ice cream from Little Man. Baseball games in Denver are downtown, and you can take the bus from downtown Boulder and get dropped off right by the field.

If you have any other suggestions for things to do in Boulder, please leave them in the comments.

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Tag Archives: Big Boulder

Wrapping Up Big Boulder

Big Boulder: Transition at a Massive Scale with Ken Little of Tumblr

Coming to Big Boulder and Looking for Things to Do?