The 3rd Industrial Revolution : Digital Disruption

This interview is part of our ongoing look at the people, tools and techniques driving data journalism. I first met Justin Arenstein (@justinarenstein) in Chişinău, Moldova, where the media...

As successive waves of digital disruption churn the consumer goods and retail industry, companies need to embrace the change and move forward with digital strategies. ...

SAN RAMON, Calif. -- When Sharoda Paul finished a postdoctoral fellowship last year at the Palo Alto Research Center, she did what most of her peers do -- considered a job at a big Silicon Valley company, in her case, Google. But instead, Ms. Paul, a 31-year-old expert in social computing, went to work for General Electric.

Ms. Paul is one of more than 250 engineers recruited in the last year and a half to G.E.'s new software center here, in the East Bay of San Francisco. The company plans to increase that work force of computer scientists and software developers to 400, and to invest $1 billion in the center by 2015. The buildup is part of G.E's big bet on what it calls the "industrial Internet," bringing digital intelligence to the physical world of industry as never before.

The concept of Internet-connected machines that collect data and communicate, often called the "Internet of Things," has been around for years. Information technology companies, too, are pursuing this emerging field. I.B.M. has its "Smarter Planet" projects, while Cisco champions the "Internet of Everything."

But G.E.'s effort, analysts say, shows that Internet-era technology is ready to sweep through the industrial economy much as the consumer Internet has transformed media, communications and advertising over the last decade.