A Pair of Cloud-related Talks by Me

I've been procrastinating but it's time to post an update. I've given a couple of talks recently and here are the titles, brief summaries and a little link love:

• BI Over Petabytes: Meet Apache Mahout - I introduced the Mahout project to the SDForum Business Intelligence SIG meeting last month at SAP in Palo Alto. The talk was quite well attended and there was standing room only. After a brief overview of the project in general, I showed a comparison of the various Mahout clustering algorithms on a hypothetical astronomical dataset. Paul O'Rorke, one of the forum chairs, posted a nice blog entry on the talk here. You can get a copy of the slides from here.
• Net Promoter in the Cloud: An Experiment on the Force.com Platform - I had a nice opportunity to fly to Sydney to give this talk at the JAOO conference there. In it I described my experiences building the application that is discussed more in the postings below. The conference was organized into three concurrent tracks so the attendees had to choose between my talk and two others. The talk which won hands down was Patrick Linsky's "How to build an iPhone application in 45 minutes" which, I must admit, I wanted to hear too.
• Salesforce.com was a sponsor of the show and I did get a chance to meet Clayton Brown, their local SE guru, who also gave an amazing example of building a Force.com enterprise application in 45 minutes. Not quite as much sizzle as an iPhone app, but IMHO a far more challenging problem.
  
• Here's another link to Paul O'Rorke's blog where he describes another SDForum talk by Salesforce CTO Craig Wiessman titled "The Data Architecture of Force.com".
  
• One interesting coincidence: Attendees were asked to rate each talk on their way out the door by dropping red, green or yellow slips of paper in a voting container. While not precisely Net Promoter procedure, they calculated a similar score by subtracting the red percentage from the green one. By this metric I had a +66% which left me feeling worthwhile in the end :).

Right now I'm in Brisbane and will give another talk to the JAOO Conference here on Tuesday. The scheduling is different: This time I will be able to see Patrick's talk and, hopefully, get a larger share of the turnout too.