A framework for Media Convergence

For those of you who don’t normally think in data, what that means is that past a certain point, your return on adding more data diminishes to the point that you’re only wasting time gathering more.

One reason: The “bigger” your data, the more false positives will turn up in it, when you’re looking for correlations. As data scientist Vincent Granville wrote in “The curse of big data,” it’s not hard, even with a data set that includes just 1,000 items, to get into a situation in which “we are dealing with many, many millions of correlations.” And that means, “out of all these correlations, a few will be extremely high just by chance: if you use such a correlation for predictive modeling, you will lose.”

(Source: qz.com)

While he did not characterize Azure IaaS as an “Amazon killer,” Azure GM Bill Hilf did say Microsoft will match AWS on price for any of its base-level infrastructure — storage, compute instances, etc. — continuing a price war that flared last November when AWS, Google and Microsoft traded price cuts on their respective cloud storage offerings.

(Source: gigaom.com)

The firm also sounds a note of caution about whether the search giant will ever embark on a nationwide effort: it could cost up to $11 billion to build out gigabit Internet and TV service to another 20 million homes to achieve a medium-to-large rollout to compete with other providers.

(Source: TechCrunch)

Data is a physical entity that takes up space and feeds on energy. What will be the cost with a growing demand of speed, access and real time transactions?

(Source: The New York Times)

And these days, there’s always more data. We gather far more of it then we can digest. Nearly every transaction or interaction leaves a data signature that someone somewhere is capturing and storing. This is, of course, true on the Internet; but, ubiquitous computing and digitization has made it increasingly true about our lives away from our computers (do we still have those?). The sheer scale of this data has far exceeded human sense-making capabilities. At these scales patterns are often too subtle and relationships too complex or multi-dimensional to observe by simply looking at the data. Data mining is a means of automating part this process to detect interpretable patterns; it helps us see the forest without getting lost in the trees.

(Source: Mashable)

Over the course of 2011, we’ve seen a steady uptick of venture investment into cloud-based software and services. In Q4, cloud-based companies comprised 26.5% of internet deal volume and 34.5% of internet investment dollars. Dollar share skewed higher than deal share due to mega deals including Dropbox and Box.net.

(Source: gigaom.com)

as well as 2.1% of web traffic in the U.S.(..)

(Source: Mashable)

‘The central bank is turning to internet search data as it seeks to widen its understanding of unemployment, consumer spending and the housing market.

Research has shown evidence of a correlation between the volume of certain search terms on Google and economic data from traditional surveys. Although the Bank admits that the approach has its limitations, it believes online search data can be an increasingly useful source of intelligence about the state of the UK.’

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/jun/13/bank-of-england-google-searches