Hilary Mason , a big-data rock star , aims to make her quarterly newsletter a must-read for executives looking to capitalize on big data. In a recent survey by Forrester Research Inc., more than 90 percent of respondents expressed significant interest but said they had no plans to implement a big-data project in the coming year.

Mason and her three Fast Forward colleagues intend to detail successful strategies in their newsletter and then consult with customers directly to implement them. And she’s looking beyond the usual tech suspects.

Mason is exploring alternatives to current products such as Hadoop, that stores data in chunks, she’s interested in the ability to analyze data streams in real time. She developed a system at Bit.ly to analyze Twitter and Facebook updates as they arrived. The same approach could be applied to logistics, where it might analyze packages moving through a warehouse to eliminate surges and bottlenecks.

A recent newsletter examined software that generates written content such as news reports. Two startups developing this technology, Automated Insights and Narrative Science, offer computer-generated financial reports for consulting companies and news articles about Little League games. Associated Press plans to put Automated Insights’ bots to work “writing” corporate earnings stories. The Fast Forward team spent months building software to identify commonly used real estate adjectives and determine whether terms like “cozy” and “spacious” correlate with actual ranges of square footage (it does). Then they showed clients how to use such tools to generate copy for online real estate listings and other ads.

Priced at $35,000 for an annual subscription, Mason’s newsletter isn’t intended for young entrepreneurs, academic researchers, journalists, or anyone else with shallow pockets. She’s betting that companies are so eager for good ideas – and so lacking in expertise to develop them – that they’ll happily pay up.

Source: blogs.wsj.com