It’s not actually a conference; it’s a trade show, primarily by import.io but with room for its friends & sponsors also. It was not particularly good, but it wasn’t terrible, and it would be easy to improve.

Keynote (*sit)

Pitch for import.io, and some BS about inspiration

How Lyft grew by 5x (*walk)

Not bad. Interview format. Cool to hear about the simulator using read prod data for new algorithms and Line before it became live.

Data science at Etsy (*step)

Cool walkthrough of how they recommend things, and why they do.

WhoSay (*sit)

Crappy marketing pitch, no data

Baidu (*walk)

I missed the first part because I was checking out the workshop upstairs briefly.

DrizzyAI (*sit)

The MC was also a presenter. He really likes a rapper and wrote a twitter bot about it.

Only Data Scientist (*step)

I did watch it. Eh.

Data at Netflix (*hike)

Apparently this one was great, but I had to go to work.

GoodData

Missed it; I was at work

100 best restaurants on Yelp (*bike)

Apparently this one was good, but I had to go to work.

Misfits (*sit)

Crappy long sales pitch

Chegg: death of the Unpaid Internship (*hike)

Missed it, but friends said that it had sounded good.

Kaggle (*hike)

Compeittion website for machine learning competitions- gets great results.

Very cool. I need to do more research. I wish there had been more discussion of algorithms rather than platforms.

Chief Algorithms Officer (of what?) (*step)

meh

Teespring (*hike)

  • He’s wearing a friar costume. :) [https://twitther.com/@allforjesse]
  • Tshirt: “Nurses: we can’t fix stupid, but we can sedate it.”
  • “In my dreams, the conversion rates go up on their own.”
  • People would design a shirt for a category of people on facebook
  • “So our growth went from from amazing to what the hell is happening, and we didn’t know why.”
  • “How in the sweet merciless chaos are they doing this?”
  • Facebook graph search fb.com/graphsearch
  • CollegeHumor: “targeted ads are getting creepier” and then facebook shut them down
  • Great storytelling :)
  • People would share the “I am awesome because I am a MyLastName” with all their family. Seems legit
  • Which part of this was unethical? I’m a little confused by that part.

Moz, Randfish (*hike)

  • https://twitter.com/randfish](@randfish)
  • http://bit.ly/rankslides2015](slides)
  • hat good SEO means (cool graphs)
  • pogo stick” clicking into a link in a google search, then backing up and clicking another one- this means that the - irst link was not good enough, and causes it to be ranked lower.
  • aving a lot of google ads on your site is a small decrement on your search results (probably not significant)
  • ompetitors of moz: ahref index, e(?), similarweb
  • ealth websites that link out, tend to rank better than their competitors. Restaurants have no such correlation.
  • ttps as a ranking signal
  • https://twitter.com/methode](@methode) Someone at google who cares about SEO but was wrong
  • http://refugeeks.com](refugeeks.com)
  • uzzsumo - a company that analyzes content
  • olitical about Trump (nay), real estate (ow SF), etc.
  • ll about google.

MissionPop, 500 Startups, Tammy (*sit)

  • basically basically basically”
  • ata in venture capital “do they have any?”
  • nterview-style talk between the MC and the speaker
  • he MC/interviewer is driving the interview really strongly, but I want to hear from the speaker!
  • uzzy.io is in their current batch

MatterMark (*stroll)

  • Deal intelligence platform
  • Equity financing, VC backing data
  • Not great slides (tiny text, bullet points)
  • “Abid mistakes that would flip our customers’ bozo bit” wat?
  • Reading news articles by hand and entering them into databases by hand
  • Automated system:
  • Rocco’s Basilisk discussion- speaker compares it to news article fact extraction.
  • 775 rss feeds. lots of articles. Fedd them into the classifier- detect articles about funding.
  • Example statup: Oragami Logic
  • Merge reports on the same event

Tableau guy (*step)

  • Long analogy about Russia- the famous data viz
  • Using color, size in showing data for better human brain uptake
  • Pre-attentive features and tasks
  • the 10 forms of data parsing- hue, position, length, width, size, etc.
  • Cholera london map - position, length
  • Position to indicate time- Diagram of the causes of mortality (Florence Nightengale, first woman in the Aacademy of - Statistics)
  • Stick maps omg for navigation among islands. Feeling the waves

import.io (*sit)

  • Recap of sponsor-presenters, including Baidu blind search cool
  • this conference happens twice a year, apparently.
  • CEO says a thing
  • Brought four people onto the stage
  • “Do we want drinks “YEAHHHHHH” lol
  • Drinks at Dogpatch Saloon, 2496 3rd st.

Notes:

  • BigML platform
  • There was very weak/low twitter stream content. Weird.
  • No attendee-available wifi at the conference.
  • “There was a talk that showed a victoria secret commercial and many other commercials for a product where the product was not actually mentioned, and HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH DATA. so. weird things.” - (a friend who also attended)
  • I think I have been “you’guys”-d to death
  • Sandwiches for lunch, bagels for breakfast. Not terrible but no attention paid to being edible for everyone

People

  • Yay Aub!
  • Yay Bill!
  • Hi TWer D :)
  • No other known-people seen
  • Several people with cool colored hair