Follow the Data podcast, episode 2: King of BigData

ftd-podcast – Follow the Data

In the second episode of the FTD podcast, we talked to big data consultant Johan Pettersson (his company is actually called Big Data AB; what a catch to be able to obtain that name despite the Swedish trademark regulations!) and Thomas Hartwig, CTO of King.com, a company that produces “skill games” where you can win money by being more skillful than your competitors.

We knew practically nothing about King.com coming into the interview and were surprised to learn that they are the second biggest game producer on Facebook! Some other things of note from the interview:

• King.com currently captures about 1.5 billion game events each day from about 12 million users per day;
• They don’t have a dedicated data analysis group but rather an “embedded analyst” in each developer team (each game has its own team);
• Johan Pettersson does not think the demand for big data specialists or data scientists in Sweden is that high at the moment (although everyone is talking about “big data”, almost no one is really working with it), but it will probably be in 1-2 years.
• However, good data analysts are in high demand and therefore hard to find.

Podcast link: Follow the Data | Episode 2 – King of BigData Podcast

The “AfterDark” discussion afterwards (in Swedish)
Follow the Data | Episode 2 – King of BigData After Dark