Last week, I attended the GigaOm Structure: Data event here in New York City - an energetic and exciting gathering for businesses dealing with Big Data. At appssavvy, we are learning how to utilize Big Data to deliver a superior activity-based advertising experience. Here are some takeaways that are helping us hone the adtivity by appssavvy platform:

- At appssavvy, we capture a vast amount of data, non-stop, in real-time. Our systems need to be able to grow with the velocity, volume, and variety of digital signals that we collect. We define the requirements of our technology infrastructure in terms of these quantities, and measure the success of our implementation based on how efficiently we are handling this growth.

- The adtivity platform has the unique ability to engage users in the midst of an activity, whether on the web, in social media or on mobile; it is a confluence of context, timing, and attention that provides us with a rich amount of information. We are maximizing this advantage by using data to constantly improve our business.

- Handling big data requires some recognition of tradeoffs between scalability, cost effectiveness and operational ease. If we want to scale in a cost-effective way, we have to plan ahead and streamline our systems and workflows.

- And finally, on a more philosophical note, I love the quote, “In God we trust, all others must bring data,” by William Edwards Deming. When we talk about the value of the adtivity platform, we need to communicate based on hard analytics, but make it easy and intuitive to understand.

So far, I think our efforts speak for themselves. Thanks to GigaOM for a great event and “Go adtivity!”