Tomorrow, Shareaholic founder, Jay Meattle, will be talking about our publisher network and how companies should be using big data at the Xconomy Forum: The Future of Big Data. The event is sold out, so we wanted to make sure you did not miss out on some of the good stuff. I got a chance to sit down with Jay to chat about big data and what it means for our company:

What actually is “big data” and how does Shareaholic fit in?

At Shareaholic, we’re at the forefront of “big data”. Shareaholic reaches more than 300 million people each month through Web browser extensions, open platform APIs, and one of the largest and fastest growing networks of content publishers. We aggregate data points such as influencer, influencee, level of influence, intent, topics of interest (based on proprietary Natural Language Processing (NLP), semantic, etc. analysis of shared content) at massive disruptive scale to power our end user experience.

How much of Shareaholic’s “big data” secret sauce is about acquiring data vs. using the algorithms and architecture to make sense of it?

At Shareaholic, we have and continue to invest in 3 key areas of focus — 1. creating and expanding access points to valuable data sets at scale, 2. building foundational and easily scalable infrastructure to collect and ingest this data, and 3. proprietary technologies to make sense of these data sets, to transform them into usable information that is extremely valuable and actionable (which is the hardest of the three).

What technologies does Shareaholic use to analyze, measure and make sense of “big data”?

Shareaholic uses a range of technologies to do all this. This includes a combination of Hadoop (via Amazon’s Elastic Map Reduce), the Riak distributed data store, proprietary classification and machine learning algorithms, and more.

To learn more about the technology we use at Shareaholic, head over to our new Shareaholic Dev blog!