Mohr Davidow Partners, Portfolio Company Executives to Speak on Big Data’s Impact on the Financial Services and Advertising Industries

MENLO PARK, Calif., March 17, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Mohr Davidow, a leading early stage Silicon Valley venture firm, announced today that its partners and portfolio company executives will be featured speakers at GigaOM’s Structure Big Data 2011 on March 23 in New York. The conference will bring together venture capital investors and leaders representing major technology companies as well as startups focused on next-generation solutions for today’s “big data” challenges. Together they’ll provide insights and strategies to more efficiently gather, store, manage, and analyze vast volumes of information to attain better business outcomes.

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Mohr Davidow has long had an interest in “big data” problems, ways in which companies can make better use of the mountains of data collected and stored during the course of doing business. Mining for usable data in those vast repositories has been called the Holy Grail of computing. “The first five years of the Internet was all about connecting people who, in turn, created vast amounts of content,” said Jim Smith, Mohr Davidow General Partner. “Now the challenge is accessing and making sense of the data – whether in the advertising, energy, financial services, or life sciences industries --in ways that help people and businesses alike.”

MOHR DAVIDOW WORKSHOP:  DATA-DRIVEN ADVERTISING

The advertising world is undergoing rapid change as advertisers and their audiences spend increasing amounts of time online. New ways to inform and engage also creates incredible demands on infrastructure for data storage, analytics, and real-time delivery.  Mohr Davidow Partner Katherine Barr will lead a discussion on how advertisers, consumers and companies are responding,  as well as where and how “big data” is reinventing advertising online.

Joining Katherine on the panel will be Brian Shin, CEO, Visible Measures; Basem Nayfeh, CTO, AudienceScience; Jason Feffer, Founder of Soda Head; and Joe Marchese, founder and former president of SVnetwork/SocialVibe.

GENERAL SESSSION: THE BIG BIG BIG PICTURE: QUANTIFYING THE AGGREGATE RISK IN BANKING

Wall Street and its banks create some of the most critical demands on infrastructure for data analysis. They manage numerous and broad investments that are individually gauged for risk. How can a bank now aggregate those investment projects, often running into thousands of silos and each with their own decision infrastructure and derive a real time indicator of the real exposure that a financial institution has? Leading infrastructure experts will share insights about how to architect systems to gain these insights and crack the big problems of data mining.

Joining Jim Smith on the panel will be Barry Zane, Founder and CTO, ParAccel; Thomas Chippas, Managing Director, Barclays Capital; and Minder Cheng, Board Member, Investment Technology Group.

For more information on the GigaOM Structure Big Data 2011 event, visit http://event.gigaom.com/bigdata/.

About Mohr Davidow

For more than 25 years, the Mohr Davidow team has invested in early stage startups and worked closely with exceptional entrepreneurs to move innovation forward, and to develop and deliver new, technology-based ideas, products and services. The firm’s investments result in companies that transform industries whether through better infrastructure for our rapidly evolving data-intensive digital world, more efficient power for our planet, or better, more personalized medicine. Category-leading companies funded by Mohr Davidow include: Agile (ORCL); AudienceScience; Brocade (BRDC); Echelon (ELON); GridIron Systems; Nanosolar; ONI Systems (CIEN); Rally Software; Recurrent Energy (acquired by Sharp Corporation); Pacific Biosciences (PACB); Panasas; ParAllele (AFFX); ParAccel; Proofpoint; OPXBIO; RainDance Technologies; Rambus (RMBS); Sabrix (acquired by ThomsonReuters); Visible Measures; and ZeaChem. The firm has $2 billion under management. For more information, visit http://www.mdv.com.

SOURCE Mohr Davidow