With the rise of mobile phones equipped with GPS, we're meeting many more data scientists at start-ups and large companies who specialize in spatio-temporal pattern recognition. Analyzing “moving dots” requires specialized tools and techniques. A few months ago, I sat down with Rajiv Maheswaran founder and CEO of Second Spectrum, a company that applies analytics to sports tracking data. Maheswaran talks about the tools and techniques required to analyze new kinds of sports data.

For more on our interview, visit O'Reilly Radar: http://oreil.ly/1t7EcOQ

The science of moving dots

O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators. At O’Reilly, a big part of our business is paying attention to what’s new and interesting in the world of technology. We have a pretty good record at having anticipated some of the big technology developments in recent history. For instance, we launched the first commercial Web site, GNN, in 1993; we organized the meeting at which the term “open source” was first adopted; we were early investors in Blogger, which helped launch the blogging revolution; and more recently, our Web 2.0 conference launched a world-wide meme. We call this predictive sense the “O’Reilly Radar.” And while we’re certainly not always right, we are, at least, good at making interesting guesses.

Our methodology is simple: we draw from the wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst, paying attention to what’s interesting to them, amplifying these weak signals, and seeing where they fit into the innovation ecology. Add to that the original research conducted by our Research team, and you start to get a good picture of what the technology world is thinking about.