It’s time to rethink the who, what, where, why and how of big data. After a surge of important news in the past couple weeks, we’re approaching a period of relative calm and can finally assess how the space has evolved in the past year. Here are five trends shaping up that should change almost everything about big data in the near future, including how it’s done, who’s doing it and where it’s consumed. Feel free to share the trends you’re seeing in the comments.

read the complete article @ 5 trends that are changing how we do big data — Data | GigaOM.

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researcher at MIT claims to have developed an algorithm that can accurately predict what topics will trend on Twitter. But Twitter being a relatively minor business in the grand scheme of things, the algorithm might end up being more useful elsewhere, predicting stock prices, ticket sales and other dynamically changing quantities.

According to a release from the MIT News Office, Associate Professor Devavrat Shah says his model has been 95 percent accurate during testing and has been predicting trends hours before they appear on Twitter’s list. The algorithm incorporates a new approach to machine learning that compares real-time data with historical data and predicts outcomes based on past events that most closely align with the current situation. So, rather than analyzing a topic’s chances of trending equally against the entire historical corpus of topics, it will assign more weight to topics whose paths followed similar trajectories up the ranks of top trends.

read the complete article @ MIT researcher says he can predict Twitter trends — Data | GigaOM.

Mobile technology and social networks aren’t just disruptive to existing industries like communications and media, they are also helping the change the way that students learn and how education is delivered both in North America and around the world. And the disruption is just beginning.

read the complete article @ The disruption of education: How technology is helping students teach themselves — Tech News and Analysis.

On October 24, the country of Georgia took an unusual step: it posted to the Web a 27-page writeup PDF, in English, on how it has been under assault from a hacker allegedly based in Russia. The paper included details of the malware used, how it spread, and how it was controlled. Even more unusually, the Georgians released pictures of the alleged hacker—taken with his own webcam after the Georgians hacked the hacker with the help of the FBI and others.The story itself, which we covered briefly earlier this week, is fascinating, though it remains hard to authenticate and is relayed in a non-native English that makes for some tough reading. But what caught my eye about the whole cloak-and-dagger tale is the broader points it makes about hacking, jurisdiction, and the powerful surveillance devices that our computers have become.Its also an example of how hacks and the alleged hackers behind them today play an increasing role in upping geopolitical suspicions between countries already wary of one another. Georgia and Russia have of course been at odds for years, and their conflict came to a head in a brief 2008 war; Russia still maintains a military presence in two tiny breakaway enclaves that Georgia claims as its own.

read the complete article @ How Georgia doxed a Russian hacker and why it matters | Ars Technica.

Apple has introduced their lighter, thinner, more “concentrated” iPad mini but they certainly weren’t first-to-market with a small tablet. Most recently, Google and their partner, Asus, launched the Nexus 7, the best Android tablet to date.

Still, the Nexus 7 hasn’t really caught on beyond Android aficionados and gadget geeks. And that’s despite it’s decent build quality, ultra-modern operating system, and the full-on Google support only Nexus-class devices enjoy. It remains to be seen if Apple’s small tablet will fare any better in the thus-far completely big iPad dominated market, but if you’re looking for an alternative, there’s very few other places to look.

So what happens when you put Apple’s iPad mini up against Google and Asus’ Nexus 7? Apple’s engineering precision up against Google’s Android power? Let’s take a look.

read the complete article @ iPad mini vs. Nexus 7: Which should you get? | iMore.com.

Our most iconic products dont spring fully formed from their designers minds. Even Jony Ive had to attack the iPhone more than once a lot more than once. But the earliest drawings of some now-classic designs help show the process their creators went through to make something recognizable and definitive.

read the complete article @ From AT-ATs to iPhones: Early Sketches of 10 Iconic Objects | Wired Design | Wired.com.

Big Data is on every CIO’s mind this quarter, and for good reason. Companies will have spent $4.3 billion on Big Data technologies by the end of 2012.But here’s where it gets interesting. Those initial investments will in turn trigger a domino effect of upgrades and new initiatives that are valued at $34 billion for 2013, per Gartner. Over a 5 year period, spend is estimated at $232 billion.What you’re seeing right now is only the tip of a gigantic iceberg.Big Data is presently synonymous with technologies like Hadoop, and the “NoSQL” class of databases including Mongo document stores and Cassandra key-values.  Today it’s possible to stream real-time analytics with ease. Spinning clusters up and down is a relative cinch, accomplished in 20 minutes or less. We have table stakes.

read the complete article @ Big Data Right Now: Five Trendy Open Source Technologies | TechCrunch.

Indeed, we are the last generation to know privacy as it was. It is now something that will have to be taught. And more importantly, what we share online, will now require thoughtful curation to deliberately construct a more accurate and desirable portrayal of who you are and how you wish to be perceived.

read the complete article @ The Erosion of Privacy and the Rise of Publicness…and why it’s a good thing – Brian Solis.

Technical details are scarce, but based on Schillers descriptions, the answer to both of those questions appears to be “no.” Apples Fusion Drive does not appear to function like an SSD-backed disk cache, but rather seems more like a file-level implementation of a feature that has existed for some time in big enterprise disk arrays: automatic tiering.

read the complete article @ Apple Fusion Drive—wait, what? How does this work? | Ars Technica.

For years, the Silicon Valley company has been caught between being an online content and news provider and a supplier of technology tools. If it embraces the latter, the company will inevitably butt heads with Facebook and Google.

As originally reported by Reuters, Marissa Mayer, the company’s audacious CEO, is slowly steering the giant back to its tech roots. A source told me that Mayer has been taking meetings with promising startups in the mobile and social media space, evidence of an aggressive M&A strategy.

read the complete article @ Marissa Mayer’s grand vision for Yahoo is in technology, not media | VentureBeat.