In this session, we are pleased to present excerpts of a recent panel discussion BIG DATA offered by the MIT Enterprise Forum Software Entrepreneurship Special Interest Group in connection with the Tufts University.  The panel discussion was held on October 25, 2012,  on the Tufts  campus in Medford, Massachusetts

Our panelists were David Dietrich and Jeanne Hopkins.   David is advisory technical education consultant on big data and data science for  EMC Corporation, where he recently co-developed that company's first course in those areass. David has been involved with data analytics for nearly 20 years. Prior to taking on his current role at EMC, he managed a line of analytical software products for regulating the US banking industry, and developed Software-as-a-Service and Business-Intelligence-as-a-Service offerings. He’s worked with many Fortune 500 companies, and collaborated with the U.S. Federal Reserve to develop predictive models for monitoring mortgage portfolios.

Jeanne  Hopkins is chief marketing officer executive vice president of Smartbear Software.  She also authored“Go Mobile,” the #1 best-selling mobile marketing book on Amazon. She has expertise in data-driven on-line marketing. Jeanne’s background is in customer acquisition expertise across channels including SEM, SEO, Email, Display, Affiliate Marketing, Facebook, Retargeting, Customer Referrals, and Partner Marketing.  Prior to joining SmartBear, Jeanne was vice president of marketing for Hubspot, where she was responsible for creating and converting organic and paid demand into 50,000+ new sales-ready business opportunities for the team of 100+ Inbound Marketing Specialists.

The moderator for the program was Shirish Ranjit, a recovered entrepreneur and now software developer with the MIT Lincoln labs. Organizers for the program, in addition to Shirish, were Mark Thirman, former founder and CEO of Air Print Networks and, now, a director of partnerships  for Vodafone; Vineet Sinha and Chris Deschenes, both of Architexa, a software solutions provider where Vineet is founder and CEO and Chris heads up  business development efforts; Sanjay Manandhar, founder and CEO of Aerva, a digitale signage technology company; and yours truly, David Powsner, an intellectual property lawyer partner with the law firm Nutter McClennen Fish.