Jason started his career by wrote a game programming book at the age of 14 which was published by MacMillan. He worked as a technology executive in the contact center industry where he became enamored with Big Data while mining phone and email contact records (before the NSA as doing it!). He's a published author and subject matter expert on Big Data, having published best-selling books and the writer of of a widely-followed blog (www.jasonkolb.com) on data and data strategy. He founded a software company, Latigent, that built one of the first Web-based analytics platforms. Latigent was subsequently acquired by Cisco and Jason worked at Cisco in Boston for several years. At Cisco he worked as an architect leading the deep dive into emerging Big Data platforms and strategy.