He did say that today many aspects of the input and ingress of data will end up being automated, much like systems administrators responsible for running the data center have seen many of their tasks automated.

Patil, who is now a data scientist in residence at Greylock Partners, was a bit more focused on end users. He shared his visit to a nonprofit called DoSomething.org earlier today, and said that people there had plenty of curiosity and a desire to play with data and ask questions, but they didn’t always know what to ask to get the insights they seemed to want. “We need another layer to help those people figure out what they want to ask,” he said.

From Patil’s perspective we need tools that will help us tell stories with data and let people play with it in ways that can help people come to new conclusions or see new relationships. “This is less of a machine learning problem than a ‘Can I try a bunch of things with the data?’ kind of problem,” said Patil.

And for those who are still intimidated by playing around with big data Patil has this to say, “Most people doing sophisticated analysis they don’t really know what they are doing.”

Check out the rest of our Structure:Data 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

A transcription of the video follows on the next page

Go to page 2 (of 2) on GigaOM .

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At first glance, it might not look like Nextdoor and Patch are even in the same game: after all, Nextdoor describes itself as “the private social network for your neighborhood,” while AOL has always described Patch as a source of news and information, more like a community newspaper. But when it comes right down to it, these are really just two different ways of looking at the same problem: how to get important information about a community to the residents who care most about that information — whether it’s school closings or local government ineptitude or criminal activity.

Blurring the line between news and social network

That kind of content has always been the core of what small town and community-level newspapers have done, and the best ones have been similar to a social network in many ways as well — in the sense that readers pay more attention to the birth and death notices and the letters to the editor than they do to the actual “news.”

This is the goal that EveryBlock was going after, first as a data-driven startup launched by programmer/journalist Adrian Holovaty with a grant from the Knight Foundation, and then as a subsidiary of NBC after it was acquired in 2009. In 2011, the service added a lot more human-powered and community features — which Holovaty said he had come to believe were crucial for such a network to succeed — but it wasn’t enough to keep the service afloat.

Patch recently did something similar: instead of relying exclusively on journalists, it is opening up the service in an attempt to make it more of a community noticeboard. The main goal seems to be to cut the costs of the network, which AOL has poured more than $150 million into. According to comments made during its latest conference call with analysts, Patch is doing well — but it is still well short of the revenue targets that AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong has repeatedly promised to hit.

Instead of starting with the news and then trying to add social-networking aspects later, Nextdoor started with the social networking side: the idea behind the service is that you and your neighbors need a place to talk about those school closings or crime reports or even where to find a good mechanic or babysitter, and doing it on Facebook or Twitter or another public network isn’t appealing for a variety of reasons, including privacy concerns.

High barriers to entry improve the signal

So what Nextdoor does is make it as difficult as possible to join — the exact opposite of what Facebook and even Patch try to do. Only people who actually live in a specific neighborhood can join the Nextdoor network for that area, and the service doesn’t just accept your word: it verifies it by checking your credit-card information, calling your home phone or sending a postcard directly to your house with a special registration code on it.

Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia says the company is sending out about 15,000 of these postcards every day, and admits that the service builds in “a lot of friction to join” the network.

In part because of Facebook, we are used to thinking of social networks as being more powerful the more open they are, but in the case of Nextdoor the private and restricted nature of the network could be its biggest strength — and it’s almost certainly why David Sze of Greylock, an early investor in LinkedIn, was interested in the company. In many ways, Nextdoor is like a LinkedIn for your neighborhood, but even more restrictive: so if you are interacting with someone on the site, you have a high degree of confidence that what they say is going to be relevant to you.

When it comes to monetization, Nextdoor and its backers say there are some fairly obvious advertising or e-commerce tie-ins to such local content — and given the network’s focus on keeping the signal-to-noise ratio high, an argument could be made that it is more likely to succeed at this strategy than either Patch or the existing hyperlocal media players (newspapers, etc.) in those regions. Nextdoor says it has doubled in size in the last six months and now covers over 8,000 neighborhoods in all 50 states.

Images courtesy of Flickr users Jason Parks and Pew Center

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The new funding is led by Greylock Partners and includes existing investors Benchmark and Shasta Ventures, as well as new investors Bezos Expeditions and Google Ventures. Greylock’s David Sze, who has invested in Facebook, Digg, and LinkedIn, is joining Nextdoor’s board. The company just raised $18.6 million in July 2012, which at the time put the startups valuation at over $100 million. The company did not disclose a valuation based on this funding round, but a spokeswoman said:

“It’s a healthy step up from the last round and reflects the optimism of our experienced investors.”

CEO Nirav Tolia said the company is now launching more than 30 neighborhoods a day, which is not an easy process when a minimum threshold of users need to verify their address to join, both ensuring security around the site and making sure no one experiences the “empty party” phenomenon that can kill a social network’s success:

“This is not a West Coast thing or affluent or tech savvy or young person thing,” he said. “Everyone wants to connect to their neighborhoods.”

In June the company partnered with National Night Out to promote neighborhood safety, and it has further plans for expansion. The new version of Nextdoor will include divided sections (including one for crime and safety), the ability for police officers in large metro areas to connect with residents and give safety tips, and the ability for users to send urgent alerts to fellow neighbors in case of emergency.

The new version of Nextdoor will also allow users to share information like a lost cat with nearby neighborhoods, rather than limiting them to their own location, and will divide up the types of posts into sections, like crime and safety and classifieds. The company launched in October 2011, and aims to capture a new market for social media outside of LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter. The question is whether users will continue to flock to Nextdoor as the company’s competitors keep growing and moving into new territory as well.

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Now, however, it looks like the time for slow expansion could be over, as the business prepares to step up its game massively thanks to a new €24 million ($31 million) round of funding.

The investment round is being led by Greylock, out of its London office, and Scandinavian venture firm Northzone, best known for its stakes in companies like Spotify and Lastminute. Other investors joining in include private equity firm SEB, as well as existing backers Creandum and Index Ventures. But perhaps most interestingly, Mastercard has gone from being a partner to a strategic investor — especially intriguing given that Visa made a similar pact with Square last year.

This doesn’t mean that iZettle is actually going to go head-to-head with its rival in San Francisco — not least because there is a huge technical difference between the two. Although they look pretty similar, Square works on the American system of magnetic stripe cards, while iZettle is focused on the payment cards with embedded chips that are popular in the rest of the world.

But CEO Jacob de Geer told me that it was time for his company to take what it had learned in the Scandinavian region and go big, with launches in France, Germany and other major European markets on the cards. There is even, he hinted, the potential for rollout even further afield.

“The world is changing fast,” he said on the phone from New York. “I wouldn’t say this is us going into battle — it’s us going to market. All the other guys are doing great products for their users… it’s all about expansion.”

“The major markets are what we’re going for,” he added. “Fifty percent of cards in the world are chip-equipped — so we are looking into that. But right now we’re focusing on Europe, because it’s the region we understand.”

And while Square has shown little interest in expanding internationally, iZettle won’t be out there on its own for long. Its chief competitors are more likely to be companies like PayPal, which wants to move fast with its PayPal Here service, and NFC payment services, which are being pushed hard by a lot of the banks and card companies.

Oh, and then there is always the threat of Germany’s Samwer brothers, who are said to be working on a similar system called Zenpay.

But iZettle may be hoping it can use the money it’s just raised to get a jump on the rest, at least in Europe. It’s already said it wants to go beyond iOS, and de Geer confirmed that the next version will, unsurprisingly, be for Android. But there’s still a lot of testing, re-education and explanation that the business has to do before it can become mainstream. And for parallels, he looks to another Scandinavian startup you may have heard of.

“When I talk to merchants or cardholders, they get it, there’s not too much pushback… but the industry and banks don’t really know what we do. We’re facing the same kind of problem as Spotify did when it had to negotiate with the record labels.”

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But that doesn’t mean Germany’s investors are just sitting around and accepting their fate. Take Berlin-based Earlybird, which recently set up a $100m seed fund with a focus on the city: it has just made a hire that should make it a lot more competitive. The firm has taken on LinkedIn co-founder Konstantin Guericke as a venture partner based in Silicon Valley, with the aim that he can act as a bridge between the two hubs.

Guericke, who was born in Germany, used to head up LinkedIn’s marketing efforts and was also CEO of VoIP firm Jaxtr. The idea now is for him to work his magic on Earlybird’s Berlin investments, advising them on product and marketing strategy and helping them to break into the U.S. market.

But how much of a chance does a Berlin startup have getting recognised in the Valley?

“Silicon Valley is very meritocratic,” the veteran told me. “Being from another place doesn’t create any advantage or disadvantage. It’s like, ‘What are you trying to do in the world and what traction do you have, and do we feel we can trust you?’. If you’re looking for investment from Sequioia or Greylock or one of those top firms, that definitely matters.”

Feet on the ground

What the big Californian money-people also want is physical presence. It’s all very well for them to throw their money at a German firm, but how do they keep an eye on it and make their voices heard? For Earlybird’s investments, that’s where Guericke comes in.

“Earlybird wants to build globally successful companies,” he said. “But one reason VC firms in Silicon Valley don’t invest in German companies is the issue of where they have their board meetings. I will be acting as the board member on behalf of Earlybird for those companies.”

And according to Guericke, it’s not just a matter of Berlin firms needing to break into the Valley. He pointed to a technical talent shortage in the centre of the tech world, due to stiff competition between giants such as Google and Facebook, and suggested deals could be struck based on the strengths of “the pool of German engineers.”

So why is it that German companies are only really paddling across the pond now? Why does hardly anyone in the Valley know any German software firm apart from SAP? Guericke’s got an interesting theory on that: the country’s too big.

“To some extent, Germany has had both the fortune and misfortune to be a sizeable market,” he explained. “No Israeli wakes up and says, ‘I’m going to build a great internet company for Israelis’. The same is true for Denmark or Finland or Sweden — a lot of companies there start up to operate on a global scale.”

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The London-based company has quietly closed a fresh injection of funding from Scandinavian VC Northzone, UK/German venture firm Wellington and Silicon Valley’s Greylock Partners — all with an eye to helping build out its online catalog of paintings from artists, galleries and museums all over the world.

The company is remaining tight-lipped on the deal, and the terms are not being disclosed, but I’ve confirmed that the round took place at the end of last year.

The company, which started in 2010, is sometimes described as a “Last.fm for art” — in no small part because of CEO Spencer Hyman’s previous job running the popular online radio service.

But it’s also because, at its heart, Artfinder is a service for discovering and sharing creative work.

As I described in an interview with Hyman last summer, its gamble is that there is enough money in the art market that it can provide a valuable, profitable service to the millions of people who visit museums and galleries each week. It hopes to become the IMDB — or even the Amazon — of art, providing a home for art, and perhaps selling art, on the Web.

To do this, it has developed a smart visual search thats allows it to identify paintings using an iPhone app, while users can use the website to find works they like or share their tastes with others. They’re also able to browse specific collections using one of the bespoke iPad apps that the company has developed in partnership with the likes of London’s Royal Academy.

Those have been doing pretty well — the Quentin Blake catalog for the Foundling Museum is one that did particularly well — and it’s also been expanding its footprint on social networks with an app that integrates the artworks you look at into your Facebook Timeline:

The move represents a follow-on investment for both Wellington and Greylock, who participated in the company’s first round back last year, which brought LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and London angel Sherry Coutu into the fold. Northzone’s Lea Bajc has joined the board as a result, and the involvement of her company — probably best known for its stake in super hot music service Spotify — gives Artfinder some extra punch.

It’s not alone in this market — there is competition of varying kinds, both from smaller upstarts like ArtSpotter and major names like Google, which has its own Art Project.

But this fresh funding should enable Artfinder to stay ahead of the pack, and I’m told that it plans to do that by revamping its offering to drive up engagement and usage.

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Pure Storage CEO Scott Dietzen

With all the excitement around Flash storage in the data center these days, I wasn’t keen to hear about yet another startup that promised to revolutionize SSDs. But with a hot team behind it and the promise to change the economics and infrastructure around storage, I decided to talk to Pure Storage. The company today came out of stealth mode and has raised a $30 million Series C round from Redpoint Ventures, Greylock Partners and Sutter Hill Ventures with Samsung participating as a strategic investor.

Om covered Pure Storage a few months back, primarily because its founding team comes from Zimbra, Veritas and Sun. Plus it counts as angels, the founders behind VMware and DataDomain — both infrastructure companies that contributed big technologies to enterprise IT. Pure hopes to do the same thing by offering a storage array for enterprises comprised solely of Flash memory. Flash memory provides much faster access to data than hard drives, but is far more expensive. However, Pure CEO Scott Dietzen says the Pure array brings the costs of Flash to lower than $5 per gigabyte, which is less than what a similar product from EMC or NetApp that uses hard drives would cost, and far less than a hybrid product such as what’s on offer from Violin Memory or Nimbus Nimble would.

Pure also introduces a new product category for those interested in Flash –which is just about everyone. While there are plenty of webscale companies deploying Flash memory in servers using products from Fusion-io and even larger players such EMC trying to deploy Flash memory as part of combo storage arrays along with hard disk drives, Dietzen claims Pure offers the first all Flash enterprise-class array, however Nimbus also offers an all-Flash product. He says the cost of using Flash is lower than hard drives because of the software Pure runs to shrink the amount of data stored in memory. Pure combines technologies such as de-duplication and compression to shrink data so a little Flash can go a long way.

Dietzen says the product works especially well for virtualized servers and other enterprise workloads, such as running Oracle databases. Here’s the marketing slide:

But beyond the hype, if Pure can do what it says it can do, it doesn’t just open the door for widespread Flash adoption inside corporate data centers, it flings it open and drags enterprises right on through. And what about those companies such as Facebook currently using the SSDs inside servers either through products like Fusion-io’s or through attached SSDs that run software to make them easily addressable by distributed nodes? Could webscale operators turn toward storage arrays and Pure?

Unsurprisingly, Dietzen believes they could, especially because such an array makes it easier for distributed nodes to access the storage but also because Pure can make Flash so much cheaper than current offerings. I’m eager to see what the rest of the community thinks.

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DJ and I have been working together to solve data problems for years. DJ led the build out of the data and analytics group at LinkedIn. Indeed, our many conversations about data led me to my “Data is Web 3.0″ thesis, which I presented at South by Southwest this past March. In short, the idea is that people generate a massive amount of data when they use Web 2.0 applications. Creative companies and organizations can use that data as a foundation for a new set of unique and innovative products and services. DJ’s team proved this thesis at LinkedIn by building some of the most highly trafficked applications at LinkedIn, including People You May Know, Who’s Viewed My Profile, Career Explorer and Skills.

Greylock has been listening to Hoffman it seems (as well as our constant beating of the big data drum) and Patil’s role seems to be aimed at helping Greylock portfolio companies figure out how to create business value from the data their users are sharing. Hoffman writes, “…our companies have strong appetites to learn more ways to leverage data as a competitive tool. Finally, we realized we needed an in-house expert.” Patil is that expert, and Hoffmann gives him tons of kudos:

DJ is the natural entrepreneurial leader for this work, as he has built new groups around his ideas and worked with start-ups in multiple capacities. At LinkedIn he worked closely with Greylock-backed Cloudera to implement Hadoop and sponsor technologies like Voldemort, Askaban and Kafka. He has held roles at Skype,PayPal and eBay. As LinkedIn’s Chief Security Officer he partnered with Facebook, Google, Twitter, Zynga and others to take on hackers, spammers and fraudsters. He has also done strategic advisory work for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Department of Energy and Civilian Research and Development Foundation.

However, as Patil teaches startups the “art of data jujitsu” I can’t help but wonder if in addition to creating new products around the data Greylock’s media, mobile and Internet companies are collecting, he can help them create new insights and applications that could boost productivity or improve our lives. Better ad targeting boosts dollars, but mapping searches for flu symptoms and creating a map of the spread of disease could boost the quality of life.

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Hyman takes his inspiration from one obvious source: his previous job as chief operating officer at music recommendation site Last.fm. He helped guide the site through its $240 million acquisition by CBS in 2007 and now wants Artfinder to build a similar service for a different purpose.

“If you want to build one of these great businesses like Last.fm, or IMDB or LinkedIn, you need to get four bits of a virtuous circle working. The first is the catalogue. Once you’ve got the catalogue, you can move on to the next bit, social profiles — curating stuff, building their own collections, meeting people with similar tastes, sharing stuff. If you think about that, it’s never happened to art. If wanted to show me your 10 favorite pictures in the National Gallery, how would you do it? If you wanted to tell me about this great new street artist called Inky, how would you do it?”

“Then the next bit is discovery. It’s the search, it’s the recommendation.” The final piece, he says, is online consumption — providing an alternative to the postcard.

In truth, though, this is the sort of social pitch that has been applied to dozens of sectors, with wildly varying degrees of success. But Hyman says the art market is a sleeping giant just waiting for the moment it can really benefit from being digital. For a start, it’s a huge industry that draws in large audiences. There are varying estimates of the size of the market, which includes auctions and private sales, but even the lowball numbers start at a worldwide value of $50 billion annually. It’s a largely untapped market.

And then there’s an opportunity in what he calls “the Ikea situation”: most people buy their art from home stores like Ikea. Why can’t somebody take a piece of that?

It’s an argument worth putting forward, and the team is polished and well-connected enough to have pushed the idea successfully to a handful of backers: angel investment from the likes of LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and a first round earlier this year from Wellington Partners. On top of that, he has assembled a team of co-founders, most of whom he worked with before, to get the job done.

My takeaway from meeting them was that the way they’re hoping to crack the market is with a three-pronged approach.

• Build a catalogue that really covers the vast majority of art and artists available in the world. Today, Artfinder has details of around 500,000 works — but in the end, to be useful, it will require between 2 million and 10 million works. To get there, it’s partnering with institutions across the U.S., Britain and elsewhere.
• Build image recognition software that allows to be what they call “a Shazam for art”. The system is already working, essentially boiling down a user photograph into a digital fingerprint that can be compared against the database. Making this system infallible and fast is a crucial part of the job.
• Build apps that give users something to do, and a place to do it. I suspect that, in the end, most of Artfinder’s usage may be in galleries and museums rather than on the website. To this end, the company is offering museums and galleries and even individual artists a set of tools that allow them to rapidly build a downloadable catalogue or show guide for visitors to use.

If they can do all this, then Artfinder may be on to something. The proposition will be a lot more straightforward: Find a piece of art you like, whether it’s in a museum, gallery or out on the street, and take a photo of it. The system examines the photo, breaks it down and works out what you’re looking at. From there, the apps can do all manner of things: let you find out more about the artist, see more work by the artist or — crucially — give you the option to buy a print, a book, a postcard right away.

Still, I can’t help but have a couple of reservations.

First, there’s the question of whether there are enough art aficionados to provide the core user base. Art is a difficult sell to the vast majority of people because — even though we are surrounded by art and design all day, every day — it’s largely seen as an elite pursuit. True, the Ikea opportunity could be large, but the fact that it even exists could be because people just don’t care enough about art to worry about making informed decisions. Is the overlap between the hardcore art community and the natural user base for a digital service large enough? A venture-backed business requires dramatic scale.

In addition, most art is about consumption, not creation — yet most successful sharing platforms are based, largely, around things users have created themselves, whether it’s posting your photos to Flickr or writing a witty message on Twitter or ranting on Facebook. Professional work can be a hugely important part of the mix, and it is often where the money lies… but only a tiny minority of us will ever be considered artists by other people.

And even in terms of consumption alone, there’s another problem: The art experience relies on physical presence. There are many recommendation engines out there to let us share our tastes and get us to consume more of the things we like, whether it’s Amazon tips or Netflix recommendations or music services like Last.fm. But most of them rely on media that can be distributed digitally. Nobody has yet produced a good, Kindle-like experience for art, or created the MP3 of sculpture — and for art lovers, merely looking at an image on their screen is a pale imitation.

Are these barriers too much to deal with? They could be awkward, but I’m not sure they are insurmountable. After all, if the last few years of media upheaval have shown anything, it’s that for every problem there is somebody, somewhere, who will crack it.

“If you think of something like music, it doesn’t really lend itself to the PC,” says Hyman. “But if you look at what the PC [has] done to music, it’s completely revolutionized it —it’s completely changed it, both from making, as an artist, as a musician, but also from your ability to find music, to be able to listen to it, to be able to share it. The weird thing is that’s never happened in the world of art: Art hasn’t got digitized. We’re trying to figure out why that hasn’t happened.”

And if they can be the ones to do it, then the team at Artfinder may very well be one to watch.

Photograph used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Joi Ito

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Sarcasm aside, it’s early days in the geo-web, so a big slug of funding from buzz-happy investors could be the strength Austin, Texas-based Gowalla needs. Direct competitor Foursquare, which said it had 60,000 users in October, has just $1.35 million in funding. CNET astutely notes that Gowalla even shares some investors with Foursquare, as well as other fresh location startups like SimpleGeo.

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