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about these types of databases because I think we wasted a lot of time doing
relational queries inside Hadoop—and not only wasted time but also accumu-
lated a lot of technical debt. I am done with that. I think the future really is an
era of tools that enable more people to do interesting work faster.
Lastly, I also see a many quantitative fields forming a much more symbiotic
relationship between industry and academics. Many of these quantitative fields
were initially pushed by the heavy lifting of academics first and then later
pushed by the work done in the industry side of things. Lately, I get the sense
that the tension that there used to be between industry and academics is
thawing. For example, industrial physicists and academic physicists are now
working in a much more collaborative environment. You actually have confer-
ences that everybody goes to. That is something that you did not used to see
in the physics world. I think that entente will continue to spread in many other
quantitative fields.
Gutierrez:
What is something you see daily that you think other people do
not quite get yet?
Lenaghan:
When people think about the power of location, what they are
really thinking about—and I get this all the time when I talk to people—is that
what we do is give you an ad for Starbucks as you walk past a Starbucks. Or
that what we do is give you a personalized advertisement as you walk past
one of those digital out-of-home billboards at a bus station and it reads some
identifier on your phone. I see that as the flying car version of the future. It is
what everybody thinks it is going to be, and it is not going to be. The way the
future is going to look on the outside is pretty much what the present looks
like—just as the '80s looked on the outside more or less like the present.
A Boeing 747 from 1968 looks just as it looks today.
But the world is very different. We have these mobile devices and access to
information. I think on the location side, where you currently are is important,
but where you have been is where a lot of the interesting products are going
to come from in the future. So it is not a matter of instantaneously changing
a billboard because you just happen to be standing there. It is that—not to
sound too
Minority Report
—your life and preferences are going to be contex-
tualized in a much richer way than they are being contextualized just from the
web sites that you visit.
Web search is a great indicator. As Google has proven, it is a great indicator
of intent. But even greater than that is where you are. So I may be looking for
things at the Mayo Clinic because my brother is sick or something like that, but
it really does not have anything to do with me. But what does have to do with
me is where I have been the past six months. That is much more indicative of
my tastes and interests. I think the difference is everybody knows location is
going to be important. What I think people do not really see yet is that it is your
location history that is important, not necessarily where you are right now.
