GigaOM Pro

This week’s GigaOM RoadMap conference featured an all-star speaker lineup discussing a wide range of topics, with the central theme being the intersection of design and connectivity — As discussed in depth at the event, good design is what defines the best hardware, software, and services we use today. If you didn’t get a chance to join us at the show, check out Pro Curator Adam Lesser’s takeaways and wrap-up of the conference.

Of much discussion at the GigaOM Pro booth during the event was analyst Joseph Turian’s report, “Sector RoadMap: crowd labor platforms in 2012.” Pointing to services like Amazon Mechanical Turk and Crowd Computing Systems, Turian defines crowd labor as “outsourced information work that can be provisioned automatically.” Crowd labor is used to perform intelligent tasks — product reviews, invoicing, sentiment analysis — that machines can’t do. Turian goes on to identify major players in this market, the current components in the crowd labor technology stack, and, of course, the major disruption vectors that could impact the crowd labor landscape over the next 12-18 months.

Elsewhere, Paul Duvall provides a close analysis of devops and its role in continuous delivery of features and products in “Breaking down barriers and reducing cycle times with devops and continuous delivery.” While this system is employed by high-profile companies such as Amazon, Etsy, and Netflix, for many companies, switching to a devops and continuous delivery system presents a new set of challenges for dev teams and corporate infrastructure. Duvall presents a nuanced breakdown of these challenges, as well as an overview of how a successful devops implementation can provide both benefits and business value to a company.

George Gilbert takes another look at Hadoop in “Real-­time query for Hadoop democratizes access to big data analytics,” noting that real-time query is making Hadoop accessible to many more users than ever before. Instead of being used primarily by data scientists, “Hadoop can now reach an even wider array of users who are familiar with business intelligence tools such as Tableau and MicroStrategy.”

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