The Shift Index 2011, published just over a month ago, shows that while there has been a modest improvement in the rate of return on assets (ROA) over the past couple of years as the downturn eases up, this appears to be a short-term adjustment similar to the improvements in ROA seen in previous economic cycles. The long-term deteriorating trend is still an underlying reality. The authors see no reason to believe that these short-term adjustments, achieved largely through significant layoffs, mark a reversal of the long-term trend.
* The ROA Performance Gap between winners and losers continues to increase, with the “winners” barely maintaining previous performance levels, while losers experience rapid deterioration in performance. * The “topple rate,” the rate at which big companies lose their leadership positions, has more than doubled, suggesting that “winners” are in a precarious positions. * Competitive Intensity in the United States has more than doubled during the last 40 years. * The exponentially advancing price/performance capability of computing, storage, and bandwidth is driving an adoption rate for our new “digital infrastructure” that is two to five times faster than previous infrastructures, such as electricity and telephone networks. * The full study also shows how these disruptive forces are affecting US industries at varying speeds. Ironically, those least affected by disruption are those industries most controlled by regulation: aerospace, defense, and health care.
'YouTube is now streaming more than four billion online videos each day, representing a 25% increase in the past eight months, reports Reuters.'
This infographic shows the security features of Android and iOS mobile devices, including their strengths and weaknesses.
Almost half of enterprise IT departments in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific plan to invest in big data analytics in the near future, according to research analyst firm, Ovum.
As we do more online — shop, browse, chat, check in, "like" — it's clear that we're leaving behind an immense trail of data about ourselves.
Safeguards offer some level of protection, but technology can always be cracked and the goals of data aggregators can shift. So if digital data is and always will be a moving target, how does that shape our expectations for privacy?
Terence Craig (@terencecraig), co-author of "Privacy and Big Data," examines this question and related issues in an interview with Audrey Watters (@audreywatters)
Mark Suster (@msuster) on identity, object communications, predictive data and augmented data.
Companies are learning to use large-scale data gathering and analytics to shape strategy. Their experiences highlight the principles — and potential — of big data.
A new IBM Cognos Mobile free app from IBM's Cognos division makes it easy to explore any type of data on the go with location-aware analytics.
'Whether it is generated on mobile devices or via computer browsers, big data has the potential to transform our lives, according to Reid Hoffman, a partner at venture capital firm Greylock as well as co-founder and executive chairman at LinkedIn.'
A team of researchers at the University of Iowa used a computer program to cut through the Twitter hype about H1N1 and better use tweets as a real-time indicator of disease activity.
Increasingly these days, when people get sick, they're announcing it to the world using Twitter. It might seem self-indulgent, but it's also a practice that may revolutionize public health research.
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'Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp announced today at the Digitial Life Design (DLD) conference that the service is now serving 120 million people and 15 billion pageviews every month.'
Businesses that want to stay ahead of the competition will have to monitor and measure almost everything. That means oceans of datin order to glean nuggests of business intelligence gold.
Matthew Panazrino (@mpanzarino) writes:
'Mike Schropp’s Lego-encased machine is liquid cooled and incorporates 3 CPUs with 12 total cores across 3 motherboards and power supplies.
It contributes its time to IBM’s World Community Grid, a distributed computing project that utilizes the aggregated power of its members to help perform intense computer calculations which help it to solve scientific problems related to cancer research, treating malaria, improving solar energy technology and more.'
'We live in an age of data. It’s everywhere. From the basic metric package that tells you how many people visited your blog on cheese to the thousands of pieces of data and analytics that flow daily into the clutches of Big business – it’s everywhere we look and shaping everything we do. And now, we want to see it.'
'Social media could be used to track an event or phenomena such as flu outbreaks or rainfall rates, according to new research.
A team from Bristol University’s Intelligent Systems Laboratory built a predictive model that was able to identify key words in messages posted to the website Twitter associated with elevated levels of flu and estimate the severity of the disease in a specific area.
Although Twitter does not represent the general population, the researchers said the study suggests the website could be used to track such an event.'
Largely because of the broad use of iPads and other mobile tablets, which are heavy users of video streaming, the guest room Wi-Fi networks that most hotels thought they had brought up to standard just a few years ago are now often groaning under user demands.
'By this time next week, the world will have 7 billion people in it, and this population growth will fundamentally change the way populations use resources like energy, water and food'
'Big data refers to vast amounts of diverse, unstructured data that are difficult for traditional analytical systems to handle. Social media networks such as Google (ticker: GOOG) and Facebook, for instance, collect massive amounts of data—text, photographs, charts—that come steadily from all directions.
Companies from a range of industries are digging through information mountains like these in search of patterns and competitive edges. Pursuits like genomics, astronomy, military surveillance and radio-frequency identification technology are also contributing to the explosive growth of the field.'
'When evaluating big data technology, it can be valuable to ask companies about their ability to deliver some of these fundamental capabilities. If you get an unsophisticated answer, you may find that the company is not as serious or capable as you might have expected.
Some general questions to begin the evaluation process:
* Does the solution allow for stream processing, and incremental calculation of statistics? * Does the solution parallelize processing and take advantage of distributed computing? * Does the solution perform summary indexing to accelerate queries of huge datasets? * What are the solution’s data exploration and evaluation environments that enable a quick understanding of the value of new datasets? * How does a solution directly provide or easily integrate with visualization tools? * What is the strategy for verticalization of the technology? * What is the ecosystem strategy? * How does the solution provider fill the gaps in its capabilities through partnerships?'
A study, based on millions of articles, charted deteriorating national sentiment ahead of the recent revolutions in Libya and Egypt.
By sifting through Twitter's flood of data, is it possible to track important public health trends? Two Johns Hopkins University computer scientists would respond with a one-word tweet: “Yes!”
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