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2011

A crazy Savas trip :-)

When Lee Dirks asked me to represent the Microsoft Research Connections team at a Digital Public Library of America meeting at Harvard Law School in Boston, I immediately checked my calendar. The DPLA folks are starting a wonderful new journey of defining a platform for digital libraries so they needed …

XLDB 2011 conference – Observations

Granted, Netflix had to build their own pipeline based on open source technologies. They used the right tool for the job. They used a NoSQL solution for reliably gathering/recording their data at scale. They used an RDBMS where it made sense.

Netflix is a big company. They can build their own data processing infrastructure from the various pieces. However, what about all those smaller companies that want to collect and process data that is critical to their growth, competitiveness, survival? Wouldnt they benefit from cloud solutions that are scalable, reliable, and NOT managed by them!

Steve Jobs, 1955 – 2011

/**/ To me Steve represents the perfect example of a visionary, a creator, leader, an artist, a world changer. In my eyes, the world is a better, more beautiful place, because of Steve. Source: apple.com, Oct 5, 2011 Steve Jobs Read more [...]

Glastonbury 2011

Another year, another Glastonbury!!! And as always, it didn’t disappoint. This year it was a different experience for me but it was still a lot of fun! :-) It was the first Glastonbury since 2004 that I didn’t experience on my own. Mary was with me, which meant that camping …

New challenge

It was more than 18 months that I moved to the Technical Computing organization inside Microsoft. I had joined a startup team that worked on building a platform for large-scale compute and data processing on top of Azure. It was an amazing experience. We worked hard, produce great results, and …

Squaw Valley skiing weekend

The last weekend of January I traveled to California to meet with Jim and Emil for a weekend of skiing at Squaw Valley. We were treated with an excellent weather on Saturday and amazing new 20-30cm snow on Sunday. Soooooo much fun! I hadn’t seen my pal Jim for a …

“The Joy of Stats”

Happy New Year everyone! The first blog entry of 2011 is about an 1-hour BBC documentary on the “Joy of Stats” (video on YouTube) with Hans Rosling as the presenter. Hans Rosling is a great inspiration to me. He always talks about the power of data and its analysis, a …