How much cutting-edge tech does it take to organise a coffee queue?
For some reason, the type of merchandise I was looking for wasn’t on sale. It would have said something like this: “I went to a big data conference and all I got was confused.”
Big Data LDN, apparently Europe’s biggest data conference, came to Olympia in London this week, featuring several hundred companies (and a few charities and public bodies) doing amazing, cutting-edge things that are basically mystifying.
A glance at the conference programme left me none the wiser. Kicking us off in the “data ops theatre” was a talk entitled: “Why Cockroachdb in the kindred platform?” Another declared: “The future of BI isn’t a tool.” Another promised to take us “from waterfall to agile”.
A lot of the talks focused on speed. Getting data to do things in real time is, I gather, increasingly important. “Insights at the speed of thought”, promised one talk (“Whose thought?” I thought.
“Probably not mine.”) “Stream if you wanna go faster”, advertised another, sassier option.
Unfortunately, no one had worked out how to speed up the queue for coffee. The long queue for the gents, meanwhile, cried out for some sort of fast-streaming solution. Ladies were scarce enough that, for once, we didn’t have to wait.
I admit that I was perversely pleased to encounter a few technical issues. Several of the “theatres” were only cordoned-off areas with no walls, so audiences had to wear headphones to hear the speaker. This created a slightly odd effect, as if 100 people had sat down to listen to the same podcast while a speaker mimed it all from the stage. During another presentation, the screen displaying the slides kept flickering. While the techies tried to fix it, a brilliant mind in the audience called out: “Try turning it off and on again.” That’s my sort of troubleshooting. For all its impenetrability, however, this was a formidable showcase of British convening power, a congregation of geeks from Manchester to Kenya, Berlin to Taiwan, gathered to sell to one another, share ideas, compete, collaborate and debate the best way to migrate a lake into a cloud.
It underlined the point that you only have to leave Westminster to feel a bit better about this country’s future. And I even managed to find a few talks conducted using the English language.