LONDON and SAN FRANCISCO, CA and NEW YORK, NY and CHICAGO, IL and SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA -- (Marketwire) -- 04/18/12 -- Big Data Week, a series of community-led events and hackathons relating to Big Data, kicks off on 23rd April in the UK, US, Germany, Finland and Australia. With the exploding volume, velocity and variety of digital data being created, how companies can manage and analyze this Big Data is emerging as a growing imperative and opportunity. Big Data Week will bring together the communities of data scientists, data visualizers, data technologists and CIOs to gain a better understanding of the diverse aspects of Big Data, from the technology challenges to the commercial opportunities.

Founded by DataSift, the social data platform company, Big Data Week is set to become the largest global community of Big Data practitioners. It will also feature the world's first Global Data Science Hackathon on April 28th, a 24-hour challenge taking place in eight cities around the world, where teams will compete to solve specific Big Data challenges by creating new analytical and predictive insights from public data. Details on the event can be found at http://datasciencehackathon.com/.

With more than 50 events on three continents, Big Data Week is open to anyone who wants to understand the emerging trend of Big Data, the transformational impact it will have on business, and the role of social media in Big Data. The full list of events can be found at http://www.bigdataweek.com with highlights including:

• April 24: Big Data, Social Data Panel Session (London) - An all-star line-up of the brightest minds in the Big Data industry including Doug Cutting, the co-founder of the Apache Hadoop project and creator of Nutch and Lucene, Edd Dumbill, co-chair Strata Conference, and Nick Halstead, founder and CTO of DataSift.
• April 24: Data Mining Group (San Francisco) - An introduction to Hadoop and experiences in using it, with Joe Adler, a senior data scientist at LinkedIn.
• April 26: Digital Analytics Symposium (New York) - The event will showcase how data is becoming the critical focus of almost every angle of every industry: venture capital & private equity, customer insights, media enhancement and beyond and how the NY environment is becoming the crucible driving this growth.

Big Data Week is the brainchild of Stewart Townsend, head of client services at DataSift, with the goal of bringing together the various Big Data communities to provide a platform for networking and learning.

"The vision behind Big Data Week is to bring together the best and brightest people from across the Big Data industry and deliver an opportunity for all to increase knowledge and develop a greater understanding of the different aspects of Big Data," said Nick Halstead, Founder, DataSift. "We're extremely excited about the events that will be taking place around the world and the amazing people who have agreed to be a part of this inaugural event."

"Big Data has huge promise for business, science and society," said Edd Dumbill, Program Chair of Strata Conference who will moderate the expert panel session on the 24th April. "Big Data Week will help create the community of practitioners across the data science industry that is needed to deliver on this potential."

For more information about the events taking place in London and across the globe visit: http://bigdataweek.com/ or follow Big Data Week on Twitter at @bigdataweek, #bdwldn and #bigdataweek.

About DataSift
DataSift Inc. is a social data platform company, enabling enterprises and entrepreneurs to aggregate, filter and extract insights from the billions of public social conversations on Twitter, leading social networks and millions of other sources. Through a licensing agreement with Twitter, DataSift provides companies with both real-time and historical Tweets to filter and uncover insights and trends that relate to brands, businesses, financial markets, news and public opinion. DataSift is an on-demand platform with a flexible pricing scale that makes enterprise-level data accessible to companies of any size. DataSift has offices in San Francisco and Reading, U.K. It has received investment from IA Ventures (Roger Ehrenberg), a fund that is focused exclusively on Big Data, and from GRP Partners (Mark Suster). For more information, visit http://www.datasift.com and follow us on Twitter @datasift.