High-Speed Data Analytics, Web Scraping and Open Data with Silk.co

High-Speed Data Analytics, Web Scraping and Open Data with Silk.co: Spreadsheet to Maps, Visualizations and Insights in Minutes

Speaker: Alex Salkever, Head of Marketing and Data Evangelism at Silk. Salkever has spent most of his life in data analysis of some sort or another. His experiences rangesfrom an early forays into data journalism as the technology editor at BusinessWeek.com to data-driven product marketing leadership roles at green tech startup Picarro and cloud computing company Joyent to his current role at Silk, where he oversees the companies rapidly expanding data-driven content team. He continues to contribute articles on Big Data to widely read publications such as ReadWrite.

Silk.co is a cutting edge open data publishing platform that lets anyone convert a spreadsheet into an online database in less than a minute. Backed by New Enterprise Associates, one of the largest and oldest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, Silk simplifies basic analytics by making visual exploration incredibly intuitive and fast. The use cases include data journalism, rapid-fire BI, content marketing, and more.

In an era where data literacy is increasingly paramount, there is a growing need for tools and processes that are accessible to anyone, including those with no real technical skills. Fortunately, a confluence of Open Data, easy-to-use web scraping tools, and platforms that simplify publishing data online as databases or visualizations is opening up this realm. For experts, these tools offer new ways to very quickly harvest and analyze data. This session will cover the convergence and provide some demos on how to use some of the leading tools in this realm. Participants are also invited to bring their laptops to build a live web database with Silk using data harvested from successfully funded Kickstarter technology projects and to analyze the data on a wide variety of parameters.

Silk's free data publishing platform has been used by a wide range of major news organizations (CNN, The Atlantic, Mashable) and NGOs (Human Rights Watch) to convert data trapped in spreadsheets into richly interactive maps and visualizations. Most recently, Silk was used as the data publishing platform by Bellingcat, a leading citizen journalism organization, as their open data store for the Ukraine Conflict Vehicle Tracking Project.