Tech leaders unpack 'big data' label

Imaging Advantage CEO Naseer Hashim explained that educating the public on what “big data” actually means could help solve America’s hesitation toward the subject.

“I think one of the problems is that most people don’t actually know what big data is or what it means, so I think it’s become more of a popular catch-all phrase to refer to data analytics or data mining,” Hashim said. “I think one thing that’s very important is we don’t get caught up in the jargon where people don’t understand what it is, but really to explain the essence of what the objective is, which is to be able to aggregate large amounts of data in order to bring specific solutions to people.”

Burfield added that startups, in particular, are important to understand when learning about big data, as they are beginning to play a larger role in collection and analytics than local governments.

“What we see more of than startups making a bunch of money off of government data is the exact opposite,” Burfield said. “The startups are starting to generate so much data about the cities than the cities themselves have that where we’re seeing the interesting returns is the cities buying the data so that they can actually figure out what’s happening in their city.” In the future, Burfield expects this to change and for the focus to shift to the public sector.