The Strata Conference really kicked into high gear yesterday, and the second day of the sold-out event featured multiple speakers, kicking-off with Conference co-chair Edd Dumbill’s opening introductions.  He discussed William Smith‘s map of geological strata in the British Isles and the progress of modernization, which he used to illustrate the world of data.  SiliconANGLE is attending the Strata Conference, and streaming live from the 3-day event.

The first keynote was presented by bit.ly’s Hilary Mason, who discussed the need for more effective means of gathering useful and coinciding challenges, including real-time data operations. She highlighted the benefits of Hadoop in this context, which really seems to be a major topic for many at the conference, including Yahoo and Pervasive.  Mason notes, “Hadoop… amazing ‘because I can run a query and get the result back before I forget why I submitted the query in the first place.”

James Powell from Thomson Reuters followed. Powell discussed the need for more effective data gathering methods; ones that can also scale to enterprise level. Treating behavioral data better rather than continuing consumer trends, he noted, is the key to success, saying the “key problem that needs to be addressed is ambiguity; many systems in this space still rely upon implicit assumptions, whilst the enterprise is used to explicit contracts. Tension – or recipe for disaster?”

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels was next on the podium. He spoke of the transition of data from being a means of collecting answers to being the crude component of composing the questions themselves, and the value of quality over quantity. Speaking definitively about the virtualization process, Vogels emphasizes the need for businesses to embrace the scalable cloud, which is an idealogy many cloud businesses are building around right now.  This is one area that will continue to be fleshed out as customer demands become more prevelant and data gets utilized in multiple ways.

The last keynote was presented by Microsoft’s Zane Adam who discussed data marketplaces, and yet again, the need of good data over and quality over quantity.  We expand on Adam’s call for data marketplaces here, looking at a couple of different ways this concept is being used by varying industries.