I was fortunate enough to attend the Big Boulder Conference (about a month ago) with a star studded cast of data geeks and it was yet again, an amazing experience. The focus this year was decidedly international and if I had only one word to sum it up, that word would be: Brazil. (I’ve posted in the past about the Brazilian culture and it’s passion for social, here. There is and will continue to be a metric-ton of opportunity in Brazil.)
It’s important to note that I’m a real fan of Big Boulder, Gnip and the power that social data brings to business. It’s unstructured. It’s messy. But it’s essential to listening; something businesses had lost touch with over the last thirty years but due to social media have recently been fortunate enough to “rediscover”. Now is the era of big data and social data is as big as it gets. As I sat there taking copious notes for my students/clients, I kept thinking about Big Boulder 2014. What would be the perfect topic to cover? Then it hit me.
Context
Data is the DNA of context and it just so happens that @scobleizer and @shelisrael are currently writing a book, tentatively titled, The Age of Context. It would be amazing to have Robert Scoble and Shel Israel at Big Boulder 2014 and the focus be the contextual world we all live in. Robert and Shel could start the conference by talking about the book and then, at the end of day two, give an hour of Q&A. The remainder of the speakers could talk about what context means for their business/business models. (@mharkey of Foursquare gave us some real insight this year.) LinkedIn, Twitter, Tumblr, GetGlue, Pinterest, Klout, WordPress and Facebook would certainly provide some amazing perspectives on context. This would be a conference to remember!
