Like yesterday, the second day of Money:Tech was stuffed with early signals on everything from using website visits to predict the unemployment rate to the emerging market for catastrophe bonds.
Here are just a few of the choice lines today:
Michael Stonebraker, Streambase, on why fast-moving financial firms must keep their data in memory, not on a hard disc: “The minute you store the data, you lose.”
Devin Wenig, Reuters, on how the speed problem may be solved: “Latency is not the burning issue in our industry anymore.” To which Tim O’Reilly responded, “there is a lot of room to collect the data earlier,” before that latency period even starts.
Martin Wattenberg, IBM, on what he’s learned painting the future of data visualization: “There’s more to life than AI and fancy machine learning.”
Brian O’Keefe, Panopticon, on the limits of software: “You can’t ask questions in Outlook.”
Henry Blodgett, Silicon Alley Insider, on an eternal truth in equity research: “The only research that’s valuable is the stuff nobody else has.”
Nouriel Roubini, RGE Monitor, describing his business model: “We filter what’s available for free on the Web and people pay us for that.”
Cathleen Rittereiser, Alternative Asset Management, on how hedge funds persevere: “It’s better to be wrong together than to be wrong alone.”
And I didn’t even quote my own panel, on collective money management. I’ll return to that in a future post.
I’ll let Money:Tech conference chair Paul Kedrosky weigh in definitively about the event on his own blog when he catches up on sleep, but from this vantage point it feels like we’re still quite early on in the interactions between financial markets and Web 2.0 markets. We’ll continue to chronicle them here, in Release 2.0, and at future Money:Tech events. This was a very exciting beginning.
Update: Paul Kedrosky has written about his conference: here’s a post-mortem and a personal note.