Puzzling over big data.  Can a presentation about analytics, big data and algorithms be funny.. and perfectly understandable to those of us who know nothing about higher math? Absolutely! Inspired by the way people put puzzles together, Jeff Jonas, chief scientists, entity analytics at IBM, challenges teenagers to a puzzle project. Unbeknownst to them, some pieces are duplicates while others are missing (just like the data you need in real life). Jonas shows how he studies human approaches to problem solving to devise better ways to mine big data. He also explains why you get better information when you co-mingle social network data with other data, rather than analyze it separately. See also Gigaom

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Social Media, Genomics Driving Data Tsunami Source: Wall Street Journal The social media wave is being followed by a big data tsunami. Ok, the imagery is getting a little outlandish, but the flood of information that must be stored and analyzed is generating excitement, especially in Boston, where many in the tech world worry that they were at the beach while Silicon Valley and New York enjoyed the fruits of the Web 2.0 revolution.  Social networking companies such as Facebook and Twitter are generating terabytes of content, IDC analyst David Reinsel said during a keynote Thursday at the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council’s Big Data Summit in Burlington, Mass. For example, 3 billion photos each month are uploaded to Facebook for a total of 3,600 terabytes per year. (A terabyte equals one trillion bytes.) More important than content creation, he said, is content consumption, which involves vaster amounts of data: “Consumption is what’s driving big IT…Consumption is what drives traffic to your website, and that’s what gets you ad revenue…It demands analytics. “The future opportunity is around social networks and how to drive that commerce, how to drive that revenue, and then, even beyond that, smart technologies.” Reinsel said. “It’s really about finding answers where we haven’t even asked questions yet.”

Social Media, Genomics Driving Data Tsunami

Source: Wall Street Journal

The social media wave is being followed by a big data tsunami.

Ok, the imagery is getting a little outlandish, but the flood of information that must be stored and analyzed is generating excitement, especially in Boston, where many in the tech world worry that they were at the beach while Silicon Valley and New York enjoyed the fruits of the Web 2.0 revolution.

 Social networking companies such as Facebook and Twitter are generating terabytes of content, IDC analyst David Reinsel said during a keynote Thursday at the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council’s Big Data Summit in Burlington, Mass. For example, 3 billion photos each month are uploaded to Facebook for a total of 3,600 terabytes per year. (A terabyte equals one trillion bytes.)

More important than content creation, he said, is content consumption, which involves vaster amounts of data: “Consumption is what’s driving big IT…Consumption is what drives traffic to your website, and that’s what gets you ad revenue…It demands analytics.

“The future opportunity is around social networks and how to drive that commerce, how to drive that revenue, and then, even beyond that, smart technologies.” Reinsel said. “It’s really about finding answers where we haven’t even asked questions yet.”

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