Big data debate and international investor to go on the road for Startup Spring Festival

An event to unite and empower app developers and the burgeoning tech start-up scene is taking to the road this month as part of the Startup Spring Festival.

Silicon Valley-based investor Bill Tai and director of Intellectual Property Commercialisations at Curtin University, Rohan McDougall, will take part in the OzApps award roadshow.

OzApps, a West Australian-based competition for app developers, will be visiting co-working hubs and incubators in five Australian state capitals, and Singapore.

Tai and McDougall will be speaking about future trends for user interface design, the impact of cloud computing on infrastructure, and why Silicon Valley is still important to scaling but no longer has the monopoly on starting up.

McDougall told StartupSmart the big emerging trend he and Tai would be discussing was big data.

“People who can extract the value from these data sets will be the winners of the future. There is a lot of information out there, and making sense of it is the challenge,” McDougall says.

He says Australian developers are increasingly aware of the opportunities for big data apps.

“Because the huge amount of data stored in these various warehouses, people are starting to think more about how they use that for companies, such as for customer or consumer behaviour of their own or prospective customers,” McDougall says. “There have been quite a number in Australia that are drawing on these data sets.”

The tour begins in Brisbane on September 17 at co-working space RiverCity Labs, followed by two events in Sydney: At Google HQ on September 18 and co-working space Fishburners on September 19.

The roadtrip then goes to Adelaide and the ANZ Innovyz Start accelerator on September 19, and Melbourne and the York Butter Factory co-working space on September 21, before returning to Perth on September 23 for an event at Spacecubed co-working space.