GigaOM’s Structure Big Data 2011 conference spurred quite a few pieces of interesting news, but it also served a great opportunity for us to highlight the big data topics we’ve been following for over a year at SiliconAngle. First of all, we can look at some of the highlights noted by some of the Data Scientists Panel’s members.

EMC Greenplum CTO and co-Founder Luke Lonergan noted how enterprises can gain a much more profound insight from previously unreachable quantities of data, and exemplified a coworker who indexed all the content on Wikipedia in a mere 30 seconds. In turn, Google VP of Initiatives and Special Initiatives Alfred Spector noted the scale is the element holding back all the technical opportunities proper use of big data would bring with is the scaling issue, and OpenHeatMap founder Pete Warden noted that cost efficiency is the “heart of the big data revolution.”

Structure Big Data was a very notable conference for more than reason, and that includes the unveiling of Hadapt. The start-up’s offering aims to bridge Hadoop and advanced databases to be able to analyze both structured and unstructured data in near real-time. Moreover, Yahoo launched its seemingly better alternative to Google’s Instant Search – Direct Search. Direct Search directly displays rich content results including widgets etc while you’re typing, and according to some measurements, it’s actually faster than Google’s alternative.

At the conference, Infochimps CTO Flip Kromer talked about how his company’s goal is to become a marketplace for all data regardless of the vertical. SiliconANGLE set down with Kormer, as well as with big data pioneer Abhi Metha. In an exclusive interview, Metha announced the launch of Tresata, a venture aimed at developing a toolset and framework for building data factories to help enterprises gain better insight from their big data. At the time of Structure Big Data, we also discussed the role of the data scientist now that big data become one of the hottest trends in the industry.

[Editor’s Note: Structure Big Data photo courtesy of @tdavidson. Used with permission. Photo of Abhi Mehta credit to SiliconANGLE. –mrh]