Techweek KC to feature Big Data Summit

Techweek, the nation’s leading technology conference and festival, gathers local industry heavyweights and emerging tech voices to showcase the city’s technological prowess and forthcoming innovations. Network, learn and explore through 12 standard events, including a 2-day technology conference and expo, startup competition, hackathon, hiring fair, and much more.

This January, Techweek announced the addition of Kansas City to its 2015 program. This September, Techweek will host the final round of the inaugural LaunchKC grants competition.

LaunchKC is grants competition for tech entrepreneurs to apply and compete for one of up to 10 (ten) $50,000 grants and a leg up in growing their business enterprises in Kansas City, Missouri. The 90-day application window opens on Tuesday, March 31. For more information, visit www.launchkc.org.

“Techweek continues to be impressed by the dynamic tech community in Kansas City,” says Allison Konkel, chief strategy officer at Techweek. “In partnering with the BigDataSummit, we continue to work toward bringing the community together around a common goal to support entrepreneurship.”

Last year the BigDataSummitKC drew more than 500 attendees for a 3-day event and proudly welcomed industry leaders IBM, Intel, Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR, Bime Analytics, Datastax and others. Regional tech leaders and universities rounded out the Summit, which focused on education, hands-on experiences and use-cases for Big Data.

“Our goal has always been to produce an inclusive, content-rich experience for attendees and presenters around the emerging technologies that make Big Data the hottest topic in IT today,” said Don Peterson founder and organizer of the BigDataSummitKC.

“Like any growing endeavor, combining with a national organization like Techweek brings resources and reach that will accelerate our growth and push the quality of our Summit to even greater heights. We are incredibly excited to become a partner with Techweek as they launch their KC presence,” Peterson said.

BigDataSummitKC was founded in 2013 by Don Peterson with support from DST Systems and LaunchKC. Don is the founder of the Kansas City Big Data Meetup that he launched in 2011 and has grown to more than 600 members. The Kansas City Big Data Meetup meets about monthly and showcases local Big Data projects, presentations by leading technology providers and sponsors two annual long-tail Big Data Hackathons.

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