Tom Clancy, the founder of San Diego-based Tao Venture Capital Partners (and not the author of “The Hunt for Red October”), recently gave me a glimpse of advances in analytics software that will be on stage next week at the San Diego “Supermath” conference on analytics.
As the conference chairman, Clancy has a job that might be described as “Get Them to the Geek Fest.” He’s been working with other organizers to broaden this year’s analytics conference, previously known as the San Diego Forum on Analytics. More than 100 companies in the San Diego area are developing pattern recognition software, neural networks, and related technologies that are used to analyze data and to predict certain types of outcomes—such as the likelihood that a credit card application is fraudulent. Yet Clancy says the world of software development doesn’t recognize how the specialized analytics expertise in San Diego can be integrated to dramatically enhance the user experience with social media, mapping, and other types of everyday programs.
“We made a conscious decision to focus on practical applications this year,” Clancy told me over coffee. “At the same time, we wanted to encourage people who are building apps to interact with the developers who are building analytics software. What we’re trying to do is open the minds of the broader application community as to how analytics can be incorporated in their programs.”
Analytics software is being used these days to dissect everything from hospital infection rates to runaway wildfires and urban traffic patterns. “San Diego has an incredibly rich history of producing analytics innovations and talented teams, and this is the first conference to bring
