It was very refreshing to have the lovely Julie Steele – Content Editor, O’Reilly Media, Chair, Strata Rx Conference join us on theCube last month at the Strata event.  Show hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante got to see some really cool gadgets that O’Reilly had created for Strata 2013, all of which enable Strata organizers to eat their own dog food.  Turns out, Strata is a data conference that is in fact collecting real-time data on its attendees.

The first item Steele showed off was one of the remotes from its Data Sensing Lab. The remote is an Arduino Leonardo (microcontroller) Board, connecting wirelessly with a XB digital radio. The remotes, placed throughout the conference, were collecting data that measured temperature, humidity, sound, and motion from the passive inferred sensor on the remote.  It was a very clever device that Steele said they wanted to use to remind the conference attendees (mostly data scientists) that, before information gets to a spreadsheet, the data first comes from somewhere very physical.

Next up, Steele showed off the Awesome Button, which was placed outside of each conference room.  Here’s the gist of the Awesome Button: if you thought the presentation you just heard was awesome, hit the button!  Steele and O’Reilly Media were interested to see the data compare against the online web form for each presentation to determine things like, which format generated more participation? Now of course, they will have to correlate the data — headcount per session, and normalize out the data … but I will be very interested to see which performed better. As Steele suggested, my bet would be on the Awesome Button.

Furrier asked Steele if there was anything interesting they were doing at their next conference, Strata NY, later this year. Her response sounded very fun:  Flow meters to see how much coffee people are drinking, and whether the temperature of the room or time of the day correlates to how much coffee. That makes you wonder doesn’t it — what if I had data collected from my monthly habits … are there specific things that correlate to how much Red Bull I consume? How much food I eat? How much TV I watch? I know your gut tells you yes — but wouldn’t it be cool to see the data thats proves it?

O’Reilly puts on a truly enjoyable conference, and Steele and her team have set out to ensure this. I’ll leave you with this quote from Steele,

“It’s an exciting time in healthcare, to be applying some of the analytics to that and trying to change this thing that matters so much to all of us.”

See the entirety of Steele’s great interview below: