MetaLayer is excited to be participating in this year’s Startup Day on the Hill. Startup Day on the Hill is an annual event put on behind the people at Engine.is which focuses on issues at the intersection of Technology and Politics. We’ll be talking about how data-mining, semantic search, and data visualization can be powerful tools for improving service delivery during times of wide-scale disaster. 

We also hope to speak to congressmen about how critical open data policies are to enabling this kind of real-time response by governments, humanitarian groups, NGOs, and first-responders. Other topics of the day include smart immigration reform and how startups are creating jobs.

From the Engine website:

Over the last year, Engine has worked to improve the entrepreneurial environment by providing knowledge to both lawmakers and startups about the issues that impact our community. We’ve released our first paper, met with officials in our offices, and brought entrepreneurs together around issues. One of our most successful events has been Startup Day on the Hill. Last year, we took 18 startups from all around the country to talk about the products and services startups are creating and how archaic laws are impacting their ability to innovate. Now we’re gearing up to do it again.

This year, Startup Day on the Hill is aimed at showing lawmakers that startups are creating jobs all across the country and spurring economic growth across many sectors of the economy. On February 26th and 27th we are taking Congress by storm. We’ll be meeting with the Chief Technology Officer at the White House, talking to Senators and Representatives about how immigration reform impacts the technology community, and educating our elected officials about the issues that directly affect our ability to invent, start companies, and create jobs.

The startups coming to Washington are making the next generation of educational toys and inventing new approaches to semantic search. They are pioneering medical devices to help detect and prevent heart disease, and building low-cost satellites to provide universal access to information about the changing Earth. These are just a few examples of the work that we’ll showcase for legislators — work that is disrupting industries, creating new economic opportunity, and creating greater social good.

MetaLayer CEO and Director of Product Jon Gosier will be holding a speed geeking session and two-day long workshops on the subject of data visualization at TechCamp Philadelphia. 

TechCamp Philadelphia is being held Saturday, February 23 and Sunday, February 24, 2013 at the Drexel University URBN Center at 3501 Market St.

TechCamp Philadelphia: Education is a two-day conference hosted with the School District of Philadelphia where leaders across Philadelphia’s education community will share the current challenges they are facing with peers and technologists and brainstorm and build technology solutions to address these challenges. This event is hosted at the new URBN Center (3501 Market Street), a state-of-the-art design and arts center and new home to Drexel’s Westphal College of Media Arts & Design.

TechCamp will create a tangible step forward in building an engaged network between K12 educators and civically-engaged technologists that care about education in Philadelphia.

Leaders in the District, in education-related nonprofits and startups and in related offices of government and policy will attend alongside Philadelphia’s talented technology community of developers, engineers, designers and more.

The event is organized by Technically Philly in partnership with the School District of Philadelphia and the federal State Department. TechCamp is a program as part of Secretary Clinton’s Civil Society (CS) 2.0 initiative.

“Leveraging algorithms to learn and then spot things like ‘Bad weather =  disease’ is pretty easy, what is fucking hard is training a system to spot ‘something = something’.”

- Matthew Griffiths, CTO & Chief Data Scientist, MetaLayer

MetaLayer, along with our friends at VentureF0rth and Aweber are excited to co-sponsor the DataPhilly MeetUp group for data enthusiasts and data scientists in the Philadelphia region. The event will be held at VentrueF0rth’s co-working space at 417 North 8th Street, Second Floor, Philadelphia, PA 19107 on Wednesday, January 30, 2013 at 6:30pm.

The event’s talks will cover:

• An overview of the different types of machine learning algorithms.
• Some of the problems you can solve with each type of algorithm.
• The toolkit and workflow of a data scientist.

DataPhilly is a group for anyone interested in gaining insights from data. Topics include predictive analytics, applied machine learning, big data, data warehousing, and data science.

Event Link

Where does MetaLayer sit in the big data ecosystem and what is the stack behind our products? (Hint: it’s more code than magic)

MetaLayer builds practical big data products that make working with large, disparate datasets easy for technical and non-technical people. This allows companies to turn their entire staff into data heroes!

Today we’re making it even easier for our customers and users to deploy our data solutions by offering an integrated suite aptly titled the ‘MetaLayer Enterprise Suite’! 

So what’s in the suite? 

MetaLayer Dashboard

Our core product and work environment. Turn streams of messy data into well-organized, visual summaries.

MetaLayer Themes

Discover the connections between individual content items, words, or entire datasets.

MetaLayer Globe

Discover macro and micro trends as they spread across the planet.

MetaLayer Survey

Find the hidden connections and relationships in your customer’s survey answers. 

Get your team MetaLayer today! Click Here

From the Guardian:

Today marked the launch of The Human Face of Big Data, with separate events taking place in Singapore, London and New York.

The ambitious project, brainchild of award-winning American photographer Rick Smolan, is based around an eponymous smartphone app and has the goal of gathering data on personal and cultural beliefs from millions of people in countries across the world.

At the time of the London launch event (12 pm GMT) the app had already been downloaded more than 100,000 times across ten countries including the UK, US, Malaysia and India.

Each person who uses the app is asked 50 questions, ranging from “Are you male or female?” to “Which closest fits what you think will happen when you die?”

Their responses are then uploaded, with live results, visualised by Meta Layer, shown here.

Today we’re excited to announce MetaLayer’s support and partnership with Rick Smolan for the launch of the The Human Face of Big Data project. In addition to data analysis and visualization, we also collaborated with Rick’s team to launch an app that’s on display here at the launch in New York.

With this HFOBD app, users can visually explore the large amounts of data being collected by an iPhone app released earlier this year.

How does it work?  Well as with all of our products, exploring data is a drag and drop experience. At the top users have several data sets that they can drop on the canvas below. Instantly the data populates and gives the user a visual representation.  As users add new data sets, they can use those to filter the previously existing data.  

For instance the people who answered the question “Do you feel life has been fair to you?” as ‘No’ tended to be female.  Overlaying even more data, about whether or not those females were religious yielded even more of a contrast.  The conclusion, then, might be made that the females sample in this data set are more likely to somehow feel short changed by ‘life’ the more religious they are.

Another analysis seemed to indicate that the more multi-lingual the audience, the more likely users are to consume news via mobile platforms.

This app is still closed to people outside of the launch event, but we’ll be working with Rick to release it soon!

Like many industry buzzwords, Big Data means many things to many people. In short the concept refers to problems related to ‘information overload’. But let’s explore this concept in detail.

Big Data refers to collections of information that have become unwieldy to store, too massive to sort, and too complex to easily summarize while sometimes growing at exponential rates.  This combination of factors makes it impossible for humans to deal with in a timely manner.

An entire industry has sprung up around these problems - this is the Big Data space we hear so much about these days.

Some ‘big data’ companies focus on the back-end infrastructure needed to help solve these data problems (companies like Vertica, 10Gen, or Cloudera). Other companies focus on collecting data, adding structure to it, and then serving it to users who don’t have the time to do all that (companies like Factual). Some companies focus on analytics and making such data sets actionable by humans (companies like DataSift or Palantir).

Small Data, then, is the last mile. If you picture a pyramid with the infrastructure guys on the bottom (meaning they provide the foundation for the rest) with the data warehouse guys a layer above, and the analytics guys above that, Small Data companies would represent a subsection of the industry that sits at the tip of the pyramid. These companies focus on end user experience with apps and visualization products that appear to be simpler than they actually are.

Thus the term ‘small data’ is a bit of a misnomer. Small data companies often do quite a bit of computational heavy lifting, whether they extend all the way down to the base of the pyramid, or stop somewhere in between.

At MetaLayer, we’re very much focused on the end user’s experience, but we’ve also made it easy for professionals to take our simple tools and sit them on top of big data infrastructure in Enterprise environments.  Big data made small.

We’re excited to welcome Rich Schumacher to the MetaLayer family!  In the time we’ve gotten to know each other, our team has come to agree that Rich is highly personable, a brilliant technical mind, and a great addition to the MetaLayer family.

Rich has had a long career in the tech industry, spending the last four years in a lead position at the recently acquired Digg.com.  While at Digg, Rich led development efforts for the Digg Ads platform, managed development for offsite ads syndication project, and assisted in technical design and implementation of Digg’s service-oriented architecture. 

Rich will work most directly with MetaLayer CTO and Director of Platform, Matthew Griffiths to help build out and scale our visual analytic dashboard products for Enterprise.

We’re looking forward to accomplishing great things together, so welcome aboard, Rich!