With the tremendous advances that industry giants (e.g., Google, Amazon, IBM, Facebook) have been making in service offerings and technologies based on data sciences, machine learning, etc., is there still room for viable innovation on the part of small businesses and startups, without depending on grants or venture capital?
>>960106
Each of the companies you mention occupies a different niche, so I would recommend finding one that isn't occupied.
Nobody's going to catch up with Amazon AWS in the near future on the hardware side. IBM's Watson is pretty much smoke and mirrors, although they have a pretty solid analytics consulting business. Google/Adobe offerings are generally domain specific to marketing analytics.
Having worked in the industry for a while, I would say the biggest opportunity for disruption is in healthcare analytics, because that data is being wwwaayyy underutilized. You might have to jump through lots of hoops because of HIPAA requirements though.
>>960554
Why do you say that about Watson? I work with hotshot from there.
>>960555
I meant the computing system not the research lab.
How would a simple entry level programmer get into the world of analytics? Do you need a statistics degree? Unfortunately I didn't really learn about this at all in school but it is really fascinating to me so I've tried to study statistics and Bayesian probability on my own.
What software / programming languages do you need to know? Where does one start?
>>960617
good programming languages are R , sas, sql, python. study machine learning, that is basically the old word for "analytics/data science"
there are some good books on machine learning for beginners, one I can recommend is "machine learning in action" but just look around.
>>960633
Cool thanks. I thought machine learning was just one small part of analytics/data science? But then again I don't know too much about it.
Also the terms data scientist / data analyst / analytics programmer all confuse me
>>960764
awesome thanks.
I already know logic and how to make basic queries in SQL and some Java so at least I'm not starting from zero.
>>960106
What about courses offered by Coursera or Udemy? Are they worth the time
