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"Businesses invest billions of dollars annually in market research studies developing and testing new ideas by asking consumers questions they simply can't answer. Asking consumers what they want, or why they do what they do, is like asking the political affiliation of a tuna fish sandwich. That's because neuroscience is now telling us that consumers, i.e., humans, make the vast majority of their decisions unconsciously. Steve Jobs didn't believe in market research. When a reporter once asked him how much research he conducted to develop the iPad, he quipped, "None. It isn't the consumers' job to know what they want." And according to some measures, the iPad became the most successful consumer product launch ever and Apple went on to become the most valuable company of all-time."

"Big Data is watching you. And it's big business. Credit card companies, for instance, are selling the data about what you're consuming. So why is it that you, as the person manufacturing the data, has no say over who's using it or what they're doing with it? "That's got to change," argues Rick Smolan who co-authored the book The Human Face of Big Data (available for download as a tab let app here) an ambitious project that aims to capture the "men, women, and children whose lives are being transformed by this data revolution.""

There's no doubting the cloud invasion. But the research firm Gartner believes the personal cloud will replace the PC as the center of our digital lives sooner than you might think: 2014. "Major trends in client computing have shifted the market away from a focus on personal computers to a broader device perspective that includes smartphones, tablets and other consumer devices," Steve Kleynhans, research vice president at Gartner, said in a statement on Monday. "Emerging cloud services will become the glue that connects the web of devices that users choose to access during the different aspects of their daily life."

There is no proverbial silver bullet to creating a safer city, but analytics technology is assisting law enforcement agencies all over the world to sort through information - part of the 2.5 quintillion bytes of data we create and consume every day - to get ahead of crime. Having access to all that information is an invaluable resource for law enforcement agencies, but it can also be pretty paralyzing. After all, only a fraction of the bits and bytes can actually be relevant, right? But how do you know and, more importantly, how do you find and act on it?

AN FRANCISCO -- The first Project Glass products -- Google's network-enabled, computerized glasses -- are set to ship to a select group of enthusiasts early next year, co-founder Sergey Brin said today. "This is not a consumer device," Brin told thousands in an enthusiastically cheering audience at the company's Google I/O show today here. "You have to want to be on the bleeding edge. That's what this is designed for." The glasses will be available only to Google I/O attendees who are in the United States. The geographic restriction is for regulatory reasons, Brin said. (Different countries have different requirements for radio-frequency emissions.)

Beyond any shadow of a doubt, a shit storm of epic proportions has just gone down. Something which had the potential to affect practically every coder. (Top four stories on HackerNews all related to this crisis).    Every GitHub repository was vulnerable to attack and absolutely nothing was safe.  If you are one of those strange coders that don't use GitHub and think you are in the clear because you use SVN, well the potential damage from the ripples of this vulnerability would of eventually reached you. When the large portion of the technical world all depends on a single service, and that service is vulnerable to a variety of attacks, that makes *anyone* who consumes these services also vulnerable. 

Two years ago this week, ThinkUp was born. Our first year we moved from alpha into beta, and our second year we graduated out of beta to great response. Today I'm thrilled to report that over 15,000 social media accounts are registered on over 5,000 ThinkUp installations around the web. ThinkUp's most well-known users include the White House, Martha Stewart, Steve Martin, Disney, and Pixar. Our birthday is as good a time as any to do an honest assessment of where the ThinkUp product, community, and code currently stands. Here's where we are.