I had the pleasure of being invited to blog at the MassTLC unConference on Friday. The event was a full day of diverse topics and discussions ranging from the latest in recipe sharing sites, to entrepreneurial CEO war stories, to hot trends in venture investing. An excerpt covering Big Data from my MassTLC blog is below.

Big Data and Analytics in MA

Hosted by Steve O’Leary of Aeris Partners and Bob Zurek (@bzurek) of Oracle

First question – what is Big Data? While often debated, Steve had a working definition of “big” in terms of Volume, Velocity and Variety. Fritz Knabe of IBM noted that Big Data can come from even the most unexpected places, such as the point-of-sale coupons at checkouts as managed by Catalina (an IBM customer). …

Review of Thursday’s Cloud Events in Boston

Everyone is well aware by now of the EC2 outage that Amazon had back in April and it would have surprised no one if that high profile had put a damper on cloud adoption. But judging what we heard yesterday at Boston’s two cloud events (MassTLC’s Cloud Computing Summit and Vilna’s Moving Your Data to the Cloud Panel), cloud solutions can work just fine. For example, there was the customer story told by Douglas Kim, Managing Director, Global Head, PaaS & Cloud Computing at PegaSystems. Pegasystems is a Boston tech company that started …