Friday, March 02, 2012

Pinterest Competes With Twitter, Instagram With FourSquare

InstagramImage via WikipediaLies, Damn Lies And Statistics: Instagram hits 25 million users – you heard it here first

I am talking in terms of my web diagram. I think Pinterest has the potential to surpass Twitter just like Instagram has surpassed FourSquare.

Pinterest feels mainstream like Twitter never did. Twitter has always felt a little nerdy. A very smart friend once asked me what the hashtag was. The idea of checking in can be a barrier. But sharing photos? Photos with twists and tinges? That old adge about a picture being worth a thousand words. And the whole thing about social. Fred Wilson once derisively referred to Facebook as "a photo sharing network." Another way to look at it is that was a compliment.

At universal gigabit speeds there might be video versions of Pinterest and Instagram. But something tells me photo has staying power. A photo can be consumed in a split second. But short videos can play. And there are so many details to a video. There is room. There will be room.

Thursday, March 01, 2012

Eric Schmidt: Mobile World Congress

Kim DotCom On Outdated Business Models

AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND - FEBRUARY 22:  Kim Dotc...Image by Getty Images via @daylife
Kim DotCom: "Piracy comes from, you know, people, let’s say, in Europe who do not have access to movies at the same time that they are released in the US. This is a problem that has been born within this licensing model and the old business model that Hollywood has where they release something first in one country but they show trailers to everyone around the world pitching that new movie but then the 14-year-old kid in France or Germany can’t watch it for another six months, you know? If the business model would be one where everyone has access to this content at the same time, you know, you wouldn’t have a piracy problem. So it’s really, in my opinion, the government of the United States protecting an outdated monopolistic business model that doesn’t work anymore in the age of the internet and that’s what it all boils down to."
I had never heard of the guy before his arrest, although there was no avoiding the MegaUpload name. I agree with the statement above. Movies should be released globally online at once. For $1 per viewing. The movie studios would make tremendous money at that price point.

The Movie Industry's Non Innovation
What Price A Movie?

Sunday, February 26, 2012

Chicago


Earlier in the day I got an email from a guy in Chicago who set up a Google alert on some topic and received a blog post of mine in his inbox. Thank you, Google. The post felt very relevant to a startup idea he had been toying with during what he thought might be a year off between startups, but two months in and he is raring to go again. We exchanged a few emails and we talked for half an hour.

I shot a quick email to my team. Can we do this? Yes. There was a quick reply.

Tech consulting with style.






Alex Turner: Piledriver Waltz



Via Fred Wilson

Friday, February 24, 2012

Ron Wayne


Thursday, February 23, 2012

New Technology And Old Media

Earlier I got back from a dinner party at Arianna's place. (Dinner At Arianna's) If it had been a private party it would have been bad taste to blog about it.

I had no idea The Huffington Post has major international expansion gameplans. I am so impressed. The Huffington Post is still very much a startup, just with more resources.

Paramendra, I very much hope you can join me for a dinner for Juan Luis Cebrian, who heads El Pais, our partner in launching The Huffington Post in Spain. It is at 7pm at my home at _________ 17th Street_______. Let me know if you can make it. All the best, Arianna.
The Huffington Post has been in Canada for a while now. I did not know. It even has a French edition in Canada. And it has already teamed up with the top French newspaper. I did not know. And I thought Arianna bought a yacht and went on a world tour after selling The Huffington Post to AOL. Not so. She is hard at work. If you think the newspaper is dead, talk to Arianna. I did not know El Pais was the biggest newspaper in the Spanish speaking world. I had never heard of that brand name.

I got to meet a whole bunch of people on the El Pais team. And I congratulated each of them. I told them I was not with The Huffington Post, although looks like I might do a few projects for them. ("How do you know Arianna?" "I met her at a party a few days back.")

I told them, this is a really smart move for both of you to be making. You have the content and the culture and the local reach that The Huffington Post does not have. The Huffington Post has the magic that you don't have. They do not embrace new technology, they have not mastered new technology, it is more like they were born out of new technology. Being big will not save you. RIM of Blackberry fame was big. The Huffington Post does new technology better than any newspaper in the world. Teaming up with them will rub off on you.

And I got to meet Joe Klein, the Time columnist. "You are Joe Klein, right?"

And - take this - I got to meet Charlie Rose, the man himself. "Charlie, I am a huge fan of your show." So true. Nobody quite like Charlie in the business.

I also met the president of MSNBC, but he had to tell me that.

I met a Danish guy out of London who sold a video startup to AOL for $100 million, and another guy who sold a startup to AOL for an undisclosed sum.

Towards the very end I got to meet Arianna's sister: "I am the artist in the family."

Meeting Arianna Huffington

Ends up Arianna did not buy a yacht. She bought something better. She has a great, great apartment. The big, open space of the living room, the view of the Freedom Tower, the white coloring of the walls. It is nice.

Mike Arrington and Arianna Huffington are a study in contrasts. One sold the top tech blog in the world to AOL, another sold the top blog in the world to AOL. And the similarities kind of end there. Arianna's is the biggest startup newspaper in the world, a newspaper for the digital era. In short, you ain't seen nothing yet.

If AOL remakes itself in Arianna's image, it will more than thrive. It will not end up a Yahoo.

Dinner At Arianna's



What should I wear? I think I am going to wear my boots.

My Favorite Black Dress: Love Story or Cautionary Tale?
Black Friday
Wearing Black
Black Buddhas: The Madhesis Of Nepal: Documentary

Meeting Arianna Huffington

Manick Bhan: The BhanMan Of TicketMonkey

Image representing Spotify as depicted in Crun...Image via CrunchBaseI met Manick at a Spotify event, my second Spotify event. I looked at his name tag and said, "That's an Indian name!" (Spotify Now Advertising On Netizen, Spotify Vision Specialist: A No Go, The Spotify CTO Talk, The Spotify Event Was Great, Sean Parker's 2009 Email To Spotify)

The guy impressed me immediately. Not all fast talkers are smart, but this one was out of the ballpark. I could tell. Immediately. He was a high energy packet. If you can deal with people, if you can make decisions on the fly, if you are a quick study, you are CEO material. This guy is.

Duke to Goldman to startup. They work out of an apartment not far from the Port Authority bus terminal, or Penn Station, for that matter. The view out the window is beautiful.

I have offered to shift the office to some garage, and put them on noodle diets. They order in lunch, good stuff.

I am always looking for projects for my tech consulting operation. And so I thought I might insert one of my techies into his operation. Other than that it was just going to be nice knowing him. He was to go on my to watch list.

TicketMonkey "Monk-A-Thon": I showed up for this. It was a nice opportunity to get to know Matt.

But Manick got me on board before he would even look at my techie. By now it looks like my tech team that I am keeping warmed up to launch my own microfinance startup later this year might play a pretty prominent role in TicketMonkey itself. We have been exploring options.

TicketMonkey hopes to take selling tickets to a whole new level. You make your name on platforms like Spotify and you make money through live performances. I think that is going to be a dominant business model for music bands. And TicketMonkey could end up to selling tickets what Yipit is to daily deals: an aggregator.

Many of the leading ticket selling sites are like malls. They show you those two things you maybe maybe might be interested in, and then they show you 100 other things as if to distract you. TicketMonkey will be a more personalized experience.

Manick, a self taught programmer, has this beautiful, beautiful landing page. The site is pre launch. He has also been doing a lot of back end work. My lead techie is about to step in and help with launch.

Vintage Nepal

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Meeting Arianna Huffington


I still don't know how I got invited to this event, but there I was. I was the first person to show. The second two people to show asked me, "How do you know Reid?" Reid, as in Reid Hoffman.

"I don't know Reid," I said.

And then Reid Hoffman was the fourth person to show and he stood next to me and waxed eloquent for a full 10 minutes or so. To the person who asked how I knew Reid. Apparently they knew each other.


Mayor Bloomberg showed up not long after. He walked a step towards me and shook my hand. I was about to say, Mr. Mayor, I was Barack Obama's first full time volunteer in all of New York City. But with Bloomberg you don't know if you are talking to an entrepreneur or a politician or a soon to be full time philanthropist.

Arianna must have showed up fashionably late. Because I only spotted her when I thought I might leave soon, and the room was by then two thirds empty. She has the cutest accent.


This woman has enough money to bail out Greece.

I had teamed with Mike who I met at the event for the first time. Let's go say hello to as many people as possible, I said. One person we said hello to was president of MTV, or so he said.

When I spotted Arianna across the room, I dragged Mike along.


"Hi. We just wanted to say hello," I said. The guy who had been talking to her for the prior 15 minutes or so disappeared within a second. And Arianna engaged me, Mike and three, four other people who quickly gathered around her for a comfortable 15 minutes or so.

I am going to say Arianna was the most interesting person I met at the party.

I want to write for The Huffington Post. And I don't want to get paid. I think I could make more money through the publicity and exposure writing for The Huffington Post could give me than the Post could pay me.

The top blog in the world. Arianna turned it into a powerhouse right before my eyes, it feels like. I remember watching her debate The Terminator. I mean, the guy is an action hero, and Arianna couldn't have cared less. Next thing you know she had launched the Post. Next thing you know she had sold it to AOL for hundreds of millions. That is an entrepreneur.

Wikipedia: Arianna Huffington
Huffington Post: Arianna Huffington
Twitter: Arianna Huffington
Facebook: Arianna Huffington

HuffPost + AOL: The First Year in Numbers
My Favorite Black Dress: Love Story or Cautionary Tale?

London Paris New York

Monday, February 20, 2012

Blogger Khosla

Vinod KhoslaImage via WikipediaVinod Khosla: TechCrunch: The “Unhyped” New Areas in Internet and Mobile
a whole new world of platforms, a post-PC era, which I’d more aptly describe as the always/everywhere era, finally, and that means a whole new set of opportunities ..... the cost of experimentation has gone down dramatically ..... raw computing power is taken for granted. ..... What else new has the potential (nothing is certain!) to be truly disruptive or establish a new category in the domain of consumer Internet/mobile/services (which to me are fast becoming interchangeable)? ...... AirBnB and Instagram would be examples of companies whose categories existed prior to their entry, but they are meaningfully different. ...... I call them the “unhyped dozen” (to go with my energy investing activities, which I call the “clean dozen”) ...... (1) Data Reduction or Filters (Siri) (2) Big data or Analytics ... There will be countless new types of data streams .... Much has been written about big data and it and may be getting past the unhyped label! (3) Emotion (Foodspotting, Ness, Instagram) (4) Education 2.0 (Khan Academy) ... “Education models that dramatically reduce the cost and increase the availability of quality learning.” The puzzling question is why education has not already changed. (5) TV 2.0 (6) Social Next (7) Interest-based networks (Twitter) (8) Health 2.0 (9) Internet of Things/Universal ID/NFC/Smart sensors.... The network of things is supposedly growing faster than any other network, social or otherwise. (10) Personal Collaborative Publishing (Pinterest, Tumblr) ... Self-publishing on Amazon is becoming real, removing the gateway of traditional editors and the tax of traditional business models. Where will this lead? Books, especially non-fiction, can become more interactive, crowdsourced (ck12.org), social and collaborative. (11) Utility Apps (Siri) (12) Marketplaces & Disintermediation (Etsy) .... Why does Tom Freidman need The New York Times to get readers ................. We as investors have seen Square take off at an unprecedented rate (so far) for a payments startup, but in terms of relative scale, even Square is dwarfed by Mpesa — it is 20% of Kenya’s GDP already (using a totally different model than Square). Meanwhile in India, their UID system could remake the concept of “cash”....... Tools and services that used to be inaccessible to all but large manufacturers are now available to everyone. Foreign factories that were impenetrable before are now an email away. Design software costing thousands of dollars per seat is freely available (or very cheap). Hackers are mixing all of these elements together and re-imagining entire industries from the ground up. ..... the next industrial revolution ...... “The under 25” who don’t know what they don’t know, mostly have not worked at what traditionalists would call a “real job” and are not afraid to try new things ..... the rate of change is accelerating and the possibilities are endless!
The Clean Dozen
Artificial Intelligence
Teachers Or Algorithms

Why the Interest Graph Will Reshape Social Networks (and the Next Generation of Internet Business)

Vinod Khosla At MIT
When Vinod Khosla Took A Break From Tweeting
Vinod Khosla's Entry Into New York City
Vinod Khosla: For Profit Poverty Alleviation
Vinod Khosla's Green Tech Sweep
The Microfinance Fishing Net

Saturday, February 18, 2012

Long Walk

I went for a long walk today: 6 hours. A great way to go offline, get disconnected. I did not eat or drink the entire time.


Pictures

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Social Media Week Day 3 Tweets


















Social Media Week Top Outreacher

Dennis Crowley: FBI Background Check

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - OCTOBER 18:  Foursquare co...Image by Getty Images via @daylifeI knew there was something special about this guy. Now I know.

Dennis Crowley: I Underestimated Him
Craig Newmark, Dennis Crowley, Jennifer 8 Lee: Koreatown
FourSquare Should Rent A Stadium
Dennis Crowley: Role Model For Kids?

Business Insider: The $600 Million Social Life Of Foursquare Founder Dennis Crowley
..... his success didn't happen overnight .... a series of failures and disappointments .... Crowley convinced the school to let him blog for the remaining credits. Teendrama, where Crowley was already writing about his college antics, became his independent study...... "People flocked to Dennis. He wasn’t up in the front of the room saying, ‘Hey, follow me.’ He just did stuff that was fun and people wanted to be with him. He’s always been that way, and that has never changed.” ....... “I remember thinking, what a cool life this guy lives,” says Jonathan (J) Crowley of his brother. “He was working at a hot tech company, going out all the time, he had lots of friends … and then it all disappeared.” ....... In 2001, the week Crowley turned 25, Vindigo went through a series of layoffs and Crowley was let go. That same week he was evicted from his apartment. .... Crowley spent the summer trying to line up interviews, but jobs were scarce. ...... On September 11, Crowley watched the twin towers crumble before his eyes. ..... Crowley's life, it seemed, followed suit. ...... In a matter of months he lost his job, his girlfriend, his home, his direction and eventually New York City and all the friends it held. Crowley was forced to move home to New Hampshire. He hadn’t a clue where life would take him next....... Crowley remained in New Hampshire for the next seven months. It was a tough transition and his spirits were down. ...... “He went from living in New York to living in a tiny little ski house in New Hampshire, and from making a good amount of money to making about $6 per hour teaching kids to snowboard,” says J.......... Dodgeball had continued to transform as Crowley’s side project, but up in New Hampshire he didn’t have the heart to work on it. ....... Bored, alone and broke, Crowley survived by making a few ground rules. From his blog:

Note to fellow unemployed kids: (aka Rules to Live By)
1. Leave your apt before noon every day.
2. No drinking before 5pm.
3. No watching TV before 5pm (except during lunch).
4. No taking taxis.
5. No eating meals when drunk.

Resilient, Crowley turned the bad times into jokes and wrote haikus for his troubles:

unemployment check.
you never showed up this week.
please come again soon.

every month i throw
eighty dollars towards this gym.
towels should be free.

atm machine
i already know i'm poor
keep your damn receipt

hello girl from nerve
i wish you were half as cute
as you looked online

99 cent nugs,
junior bacon cheeseburger
and a frosty, please.

ex-girlfriend. birthday.
send a card - or just "forget"?
my heart she broke. twice.

...... Crowley introduced the game to other NYU students and worked with a professor, Clay Shirkey, to develop it during an independent study. Rainert and Crowley refer to Shirkey as the Patron Saint of Social Media. With his help they tested out social and mobile features for Dodgeball, like Shouting, where messages were sent within a 15 block radius. ......... That summer Crowley learned about finance and angel investing. Their pursuit of capital led them to Google’s doors in September........ Google was fresh out of its IPO and it wasn't in the habit of investing in startups. When Crowley and Rainert met with Google they were told, according to Dennis, "We don't really finance companies but maybe you guys should just come and work here."
That moment was one of the high points in Crowley’s career........ He wrote about it on his blog, of course......... “Hey kids, my grad school thesis project (and what seems like my life's work), dodgeball.com, was acquired by Google today!........“Special shoutouts to everyone that's helped out. Tallboys for everyone. Forever!”..... But the high didn’t last, and selling to Google ultimately put Crowley at another low point....... “Everyone sees this side of Dennis that's so electric but there was a phase when he was in a rut. He was in a tough position. I don't think he could find the energy to get himself excited.” ..... Selvadurai had a desk around the corner from Crowley....... “He was the one guy who knew how to make iPhone stuff. He liked hacking city apps,” recalls Crowley. “I was doing a lot of mobile work and I also liked city stuff and we just started working together. We were experimenting for four to five months. It wasn't until January 2009 when we said, ‘Let's get serious about this and launch it for SXSW.’”....... The ordinarily social Crowley became reclusive.......“When Dennis stops socializing, you know he’s working on something really big,” says J. ......One week in January, a rare event occurred: A Friday and Saturday night passed with no sign of Crowley. ......An entire week passed and J still hadn’t heard from his brother.......“Then a group of us got an email that said, ‘Hey guys, I built this, what do you think?’ It was the first version of Foursquare; it was originally called Jimmy Disco,” says J. ...... Foursquare wasn’t always smooth sailing for Crowley. ..... “Everyone thinks the Foursquare experience is this rocket ship that started at SXSW 2009 and it hasn't let up, when in reality it was a little spike and then a summer of nothing,” says Crowley...... It took him and Selvadurai about nine months to raise the first round of capital for Foursquare. ...... “Then it spiked back up and it plateaued, and it spiked back up and it plateaued,” he says. “Of course if you average it out [the Foursquare experience] looks like a nice hockey stick curve. If you zoom in a little bit it is super, super rocky.” ....... “My whole career is a bunch of sizzles and spikes,” says Crowley. “I'm still trying to make sense of all of it, but when you look back it all starts to connect. Everything connects in hindsight. Of course you don't realize any of that going forward, you only realize that when you look back.” ...... last month he traveled across the country with five ridiculous-looking corn cob pipes to surprise his friends in Lake Tahoe. ...... "I've been trying to solve the same problems for many years and build software that helps optimize downtime. Of course the problem set keeps evolving and changing."....... Perhaps Crowley’s life-long wrestle with Foursquare stems from the fact that he so deeply embodies the product. Life, for him, is a constant game of checking in with people he loves. The personal reward he gets from being with friends and discovering new ways to have fun is what he wants every Foursquare user to experience.

Body Doubles



Social Media Week: The Social Media Way





The Bourne Legacy







Like Bourne

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Mike Bloomberg Wants Me Here

Social Media Week: Day 2: 120 Tweets

















Social Media Week: 100 Tweets Later

Monday, February 13, 2012

Social Media Week: 100 Tweets Later

Social Media Week: The Social Media Way








It has been a good feeling, but I also have this lingering feeling that I want to show up in person. And so I am headed to this event in a few hours.

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Social Media Week: The Social Media Way

Image representing Livestream as depicted in C...Image via CrunchBaseI just revisited the Social Media Week schedule page to prepare for the events I have said I will go to tomorrow and the rest of the week.

And it's amazing to me how many of the events will be on LiveStream, and each event has its own hashtag. And so I am tempted to stay home for quite a few of the events and consume them from my laptop. Tweeting is so much easier on the laptop.

This event by Sree at Columbia comes to mind.

Twitter Blocks Me: Sree's Loss
Social Media Weekend: Columbia Journalism School: Sree Srinivasan

I guess I can "go" to even more events than I was planning to if I go the LiveStream way. Nice.

Social Media Week: Registration Now Open

Does Twitter have limits to how many times you can tweet per hour, per day?

Know Your Limits: How Many Tweets Can You Post Per Day?
How many Tweets can you send Twitter per hour?

1,000 tweets per day, 100 per hour? Twitter blocked me way before that when I was trying to "cover" the Sree event. Maybe it was my rate. If you are tweeting two times a minute, five minutes in a row, the Twitter servers think you are going to end up with 120 tweets for the hour, or something like that.

Of course I am going to show up in person, for at least one event per day. But now I think I am in mind to attend many of the Social Media Week events over LiveStream.

Me: Top Internet Week Influencer?

Wow, there are so many more events since I last checked, like so many, many more.

If it is about absorbing knowledge, the LiveStream way might be the better way. It is you and the speakers, and that's it. But would you be paying a social price because you are not there in person? Some of that can be offset by actively tweeting. You will be found. If you tweet.

But then, it is not like I am not going to show up in person. It is just that all plans I made a few weeks ago about which of the Social Media Week events I will go to are now out the window. I am having to start from scratch.

I am guessing the fact an event is going to be on LiveStream also says to its importance.

Heck, over LiveStream you could be attending events in Miami. Why only New York?

By now I know Social Media Week is primarily going to be a LiveStream and Twitter experience for me. And then I get to make guest/cameo appearances at some select events. I am thinking one per day.

An event that is on LiveStream and has its own hashtag earns major points from me. I am most likely to view those events.

Livestream + Twitter Hashtag = Great Way To Experience An Event

Another Ode To Big Data


New York Times: The Age of Big Data
an explosion of data — Web traffic and social network comments, as well as software and sensors that monitor shipments, suppliers and customers — to guide decisions, trim costs and lift sales ...... the United States needs 140,000 to 190,000 more workers with “deep analytical” expertise and 1.5 million more data-literate managers, whether retrained or hired ...... The story is similar in fields as varied as science and sports, advertising and public health — a drift toward data-driven discovery and decision-making. “It’s a revolution” ...... the march of quantification, made possible by enormous new sources of data, will sweep through academia, business and government. There is no area that is going to be untouched ...... Welcome to the Age of Big Data. ...... data a new class of economic asset, like currency or gold ...... Big Data has the potential to be “humanity’s dashboard,” an intelligent tool that can help combat poverty, crime and pollution. Privacy advocates take a dim view, warning that Big Data is Big Brother, in corporate clothing. ........ a lot more data, all the time, growing at 50 percent a year, or more than doubling every two years ....... It’s not just more streams of data, but entirely new ones. ....... there are now countless digital sensors worldwide in industrial equipment, automobiles, electrical meters and shipping crates. They can measure and communicate location, movement, vibration, temperature, humidity, even chemical changes in the air. ........ the Internet of Things or the Industrial Internet. ....... Data is not only becoming more available but also more understandable to computers. Most of the Big Data surge is data in the wild — unruly stuff like words, images and video on the Web and those streams of sensor data. It is called unstructured data and is not typically grist for traditional databases. ........ the computer tools for gleaning knowledge and insights from the Internet era’s vast trove of unstructured data are fast gaining ground. At the forefront are the rapidly advancing techniques of artificial intelligence like natural-language processing, pattern recognition and machine learning ....... The wealth of new data, in turn, accelerates advances in computing — a virtuous circle of Big Data. Machine-learning algorithms, for example, learn on data, and the more data, the more the machines learn. Take Siri ....... The microscope, invented four centuries ago, allowed people to see and measure things as never before — at the cellular level. It was a revolution in measurement. ....... Data measurement.... is the modern equivalent of the microscope. Google searches, Facebook posts and Twitter messages, for example, make it possible to measure behavior and sentiment in fine detail and as it happens. ....... decisions will increasingly be based on data and analysis rather than on experience and intuition. “We can start being a lot more scientific” ........ the low-budget Oakland A’s massaged data and arcane baseball statistics to spot undervalued players. Heavy data analysis had become standard not only in baseball but also in other sports, including English soccer, well before last year’s movie version of “Moneyball,” starring Brad Pitt. ...... Walmart and Kohl’s, analyze sales, pricing and economic, demographic and weather data to tailor product selections at particular stores and determine the timing of price markdowns. Shipping companies, like U.P.S., mine data on truck delivery times and traffic patterns to fine-tune routing. ....... Police departments across the country, led by New York’s, use computerized mapping and analysis of variables like historical arrest patterns, paydays, sporting events, rainfall and holidays to try to predict likely crime “hot spots” and deploy officers there in advance. ....... data-guided management is spreading across corporate America and starting to pay off. ...... studied 179 large companies and found that those adopting “data-driven decision making” achieved productivity gains that were 5 percent to 6 percent higher than other factors could explain. ...... The predictive power of Big Data is being explored — and shows promise — in fields like public health, economic development and economic forecasting. Researchers have found a spike in Google search requests for terms like “flu symptoms” and “flu treatments” a couple of weeks before there is an increase in flu patients coming to hospital emergency rooms in a region (and emergency room reports usually lag behind visits by two weeks or so). ....... sentiment analysis of messages in social networks and text messages — using natural-language deciphering software — to help predict job losses, spending reductions or disease outbreaks in a given region. The goal is to use digital early-warning signals to guide assistance programs in advance to, for example, prevent a region from slipping back into poverty. ...... trends in increasing or decreasing volumes of housing-related search queries in Google are a more accurate predictor of house sales in the next quarter than the forecasts of real estate economists ....... social-network research involves mining huge digital data sets of collective behavior online. Among the findings: people whom you know but don’t communicate with often — “weak ties,” in sociology — are the best sources of tips about job openings. They travel in slightly different social worlds than close friends, so they see opportunities you and your best friends do not. ...... Researchers can see patterns of influence and peaks in communication on a subject — by following trending hashtags on Twitter, for example. The online fishbowl is a window into the real-time behavior of huge numbers of people. ...... Big Data has its perils, to be sure. With huge data sets and fine-grained measurement, statisticians and computer scientists note, there is increased risk of “false discoveries.” ...... “many bits of straw look like needles.” ...... Big Data also supplies more raw material for statistical shenanigans and biased fact-finding excursions. It offers a high-tech twist on an old trick: I know the facts, now let’s find ’em. ..... Data is tamed and understood using computer and mathematical models. These models, like metaphors in literature, are explanatory simplifications. They are useful for understanding, but they have their limits. A model might spot a correlation and draw a statistical inference that is unfair or discriminatory, based on online searches, affecting the products, bank loans and health insurance a person is offered ...... Veteran data analysts tell of friends who were long bored by discussions of their work but now are suddenly curious. .... “The culture has changed” .... “There is this idea that numbers and statistics are interesting and fun. It’s cool now.”

Big Data Democratization By Wolfram Alpha
Big Data
Facebook And Big Data
Big Data + Smartphone = New Generation Smartphone
Big Data: Big News