As Austin continues to thrive, making Top 10 Lists for everything from innovation to affordable housing, President Obama himself came to see what’s going on. “I’ve come to listen and learn and highlight some of the good work that’s being done,” Obama said during his visit to Austin. “Folks around here are doing something right.”

We are doing something right – these lists speak for themselves:

• Best City for Small Business nationally by The Business Journals
• #1 large city for young entrepreneurs according to Under30CEO
• #1 among the 100 largest U.S. metros based on amount recovered from pre-recession peak to the present based on employment, unemployment, output, and house prices according to Brookings Institution
• #3 fastest-growing tech job market according to Dice.com
• #3 ”Best Cities for Good Jobs” list according to Forbes

In his recent visit to Austin, President Obama stopped by Capital Factory, an incubator for technology startups where he learned about Austin’s technology community, and was introduced to Infochimps. Wanting to move to Austin?

Come Work With Us >>

Source: http://austintexas.gov/rankings

Here at Infochimps, we value the developer community. From Founder and CTO Flip Kromer being named by GitHub as one of the Top 100 Contributors in 2012, to hosting community discussion webinars, Infochimps tries to keep developers’ needs and interests in mind.

Here are some resources catered towards the developer community:

In case you missed it: Knowing analytics tools designed for developers’ needs are in high demand, Derrick Harris writes an article highlighting the top 12 Big Data tools developers need to know: “A programmer’s guide to big data: 12 tools to know”

Pre-Order Now – Big Data for Chimps: In addition to being a prolific code contributor and one of the nations’ leading data scientists, Flip Kromer is the author of Big Data for Chimps, A Guide to Massive Scale Data Processing, published by O’Reilly, and available for pre-order now.

Upcoming Webinar: Ironfan – A Community Discussion
Thursday, January 31 @ 10a P, 12p C, 1p E

Join Nathaniel Eliot, DevOps Engineer and lead on Ironfan, in this community discussion. Ironfan is a lightweight cluster orchestration toolset, built on top of Chef, which empowers spinning up of Hadoop clusters in under 20 minutes. Nathan has been responsible for Ironfan’s core plugin code, cookbooks, and other components to stabilize both Infochimps’ open source offerings, and internal architectures.

Last Friday, we hosted our famous Big Data Love Event at Capital Factory‘s snazzy new co-working space.

Aside from the great view from the 16^th floor of the Omni Hotel, neatly organized office space, and a secret meeting room behind bookshelves (so cool), we had the opportunity to catch up with Austin’s most successful entrepreneurs and many friends. For those of you who made it out, thank you. Hope to see you at the next event!

This week, Infochimps is presenting at Intel Developers Forum in San Francisco and moderating a panel at Big Data Innovation Summit in Boston. You can also find us at the following events coming soon:

• DataWeek, Tues, Sept. 25: We’ll present “Big Data as a Service” with executives from ThinkBig Analytics, Macy’s, GigaOm, and Cloudera.
• CXO Big Data Seminar, Wed, Sept. 26: Apply now to join us for our Seminar with thought leaders from PARC, ThinkBig Analytics and VMware, to explore strategies, best practices and technologies for building a Big Data roadmap for competitive advantage.
• CloudCon, Oct. 1-3: We’re presenting three sessions, “Tao of Data Science,” “Power Panel 1: Big Data Warehouse vs. Enterprise Data Warehouse,” and a closing Keynote “Infinite Monkey Theorem.” See you there!

If you’re in Austin, join us for these upcoming community events:

• Austin R User Group, Thurs, Sept. 27: We love our local Meetup created to support and share R experience and knowledge among the Austin community
• ATX Startup Crawl, Thurs, Oct. 11: A chance to mingle in Austin’s hottest startups’ office space, chat with some of Austin’s most renowned entrepreneurs, and drink a free beverage – all at the same time

For other Austin community events:

• Lean Startup Machine, Fri, Sept. 21: A 3-day workshop where attendees use Customer Development and Lean Startup principles to validate an idea for a new product or service
• Girl Hacker Drink-up, Wed, Sept. 26: An informal group of female developers in Austin who meet once a month to discuss projects, share new insights, do some coding
• Austin CTO, Tues, Oct. 2: An opportunity for members of Austin CTO to discuss strategies and thought-leadership over dinner

Much gratitude to Joshua Baer and Capital Factory.

One. Week. Left.

You’re familiar with South by Southwest (SXSW) held in Austin each March, yes?

SXSW panels are up for voting and we’d love your support. Read the panel submissions below and be sure to vote!

Voting ends August 31st.

• 21st Century MadMen: Big Data for Big Agencies – Dhruv Bansal
• Tao De Chimp: A Principle Driven Approach – Joe Kelly
• The Call of the Culture: Chimpy Lessons Learned – Hollyann Wood
• DevOps: Empowering Developers with Infrastructure – Nathan Eliot
• How to Win at Scale and Its Influence on People – Flip Kromer
• Pivoting Your Start-Up: A Cautionary Tale - Tim Gasper

A huge thank you to those of you who supported us on Twitter:

• @hashonomy_gus: SXSW PanelPicker hashonomy.com/ybgd/ #bigdata #sxsw (via @infochimps)
• @dteten: RT @ffvc RT @infochimps: SXSW 2013 PanelPicker: Vote Today for @josephkelly: The Tao Te Chimp: A Principle Driven Approach
• @eldonnn: SXSW 2013 panelpicker under way. wanna go! waah! panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/5500 this panel by @infochimps

The American Community Survey is an ongoing statistical survey that samples a small percentage of the population every year. It’s one of our most popular APIs in the Data Marketplace and the data within it provides the key data for the Digital Elements IP Intelligence Demographics API.

Learn more about the importance and usefulness of this annual supplement to the US Census.

(via Flowing Data)

When it comes to predicting the future, your best resource (short of a soothsayer) is historical data.  As data collection, storage and processing has become more sophisticated, the volume of data has exploded. A recent article in the McKinsey Quarterly, states that in the US, across most business sectors, companies with more than 1000 employees store, on average, over 235 terabytes of data – more data than contained in the entirety of the US Library of Congress.

What does this mean?  It means that companies are sitting on a goldmine of insights for competitive advantage.  The McKinsey Quarterly article mentions this example:

The top marketing executive at a sizable US retailer recently found herself perplexed by the sales reports she was getting. A major competitor was steadily gaining market share across a range of profitable segments. Despite a counterpunch that combined online promotions with merchandizing improvements, her company kept losing ground.

When the executive convened a group of senior leaders to dig into the competitor’s practices, they found that the challenge ran deeper than they had imagined. The competitor had made massive investments in its ability to collect, integrate, and analyze data from each store and every sales unit and had used this ability to run myriad real-world experiments. At the same time, it had linked this information to suppliers’ databases, making it possible to adjust prices in real time, to reorder hot-selling items automatically, and to shift items from store to store easily. By constantly testing, bundling, synthesizing, and making information instantly available across the organization—from the store floor to the CFO’s office—the rival company had become a different, far nimbler type of business.

The amount of data we produce is staggering and the underlying possibilities are incredible, but that doesn’t necessarily mean companies have the ability to extract true value from their data.

Looking to understand how Big Data can revolutionize how your organization does business?  Sign up for a free Big Data consultation with some of our leading data scientists to get started today!

Join us for our first Big Data Love Happy Hour of 2012. Now that we’ve completed the big announcement of our new Infochimps Platform and things have calmed down post-SXSW, we are looking forward to reconnecting with our local community.  So, if you’re in town this Thursday, swing by our office at 1214 W. 6th Street between 6:30pm and 9:30pm for some brews and nerdery.  We’re looking forward to the hang time!

Using major macroeconomic indicators, Russell Investments has created a dashboard to capture a snapshot of the state of our economy.  It’s updated on the 22nd of each month with data from Bloomberg.

You can click through the “Historical Details” links to read more about each indicator and its see its changes over time.  Check out the legend below for complete details on how to read the chart.

So, what does this dashboard tell us about the current state of our economy?  For starters, we are growing at a modest 1.8%.  As you can see from the chart, most indicators are well within “typical” range and even mortgage delinquencies and corporate debt are slowly coming down.  I’ll be sure to keep my eyes peeled for updates to this slick little dashboard.

Two days after the Internet Blackout that saw supporters of SOPA and PIPA changing their minds, a new bill was introduced into the House of Representatives by Rep. Darrell Issa of California. Issa was one of the most vocal critics of SOPA and PIPA and his proposed bill, known as the OPEN Act (Online Protection & ENforcement of Digital Trade Act) offers a more laser-focused solution to online piracy by foreign rogue sites.

What is most impressive about this new bill is the approach taken by Issa and the clearly superior understanding he has of the web than many SOPA supporters. Issa’s office has set up a website, Keep the Web Open that offers numerous resources for understanding the bill, as well a new tool called “Madison”, which allows users to read, share, edit and comment on the text of the bill. A politician who adds transparency to the conversation and listens to the nerds?  That sounds pretty sweet to us.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

In case the flood of information from yesterday’s Internet Blackout didn’t sufficiently clarify and explain the potential impacts of PIPA and SOPA on the web as we know it, check out this video. Even though SOPA appears to have successfully been killed with 121 representatives opposed or leaning no and only 27 supporters remaining (as of the time of this post), there is still a great concern around PIPA, which retains the support of 37 senators with opposition expressed by only 27.

While we can all take a collective breath as more senators come out against PIPA following yesterday’s barrage of public opinion, but the battle isn’t over.  The PIPA vote is scheduled for January 24th and it is crucial that we continue to make our voices heard and protect our Internet.

Act Now!

• Contact Info for PIPA Supporters | Open Congress
• End Piracy, Not Liberty | Google
• Web Goes on Strike | Fight for the Future