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Companies that can harness big data will trample data-incompetents. Data equity, to coin a phrase, will become as important as brand equity.

big data could save the American health-care system $300 billion a year and the European public sector €250 billion

The data revolution is clearly handing power to the little people as well as the big ones.

Google fusion tablesThis online database and mapping tool has become our default for producing quick and detailed maps, especially those where you need to zoom in. You get all the high resolution of google maps but it can open a lot of data - 100mb of CSV, for instance. The first time you try it, Fusion tables may seem a little tricky - but stick with it.

Tableau PublicIf you don't need the unlimited space of the professional edition, this is free - and means you can make pretty complex visualisations simply and easily with up to 100,000 rows. We use it when we need to bring different types of charts together - as in this map of top tax rates around the world, which also has a bar chart too.

After something simple - like a bar or line chart, or a pie chart? You'll find that Google spreadsheets (which you create from the documents bit of your Google account) can create some pretty nice charts - including the animated bubbles used by Hans Rosling's Gapminder. Unlike the charts API you don't need to worry about code -

It’s pretty hard to do anything beyond a gift. It’s more like organ donation, where you don’t get to decide where the organs go. What I’m working on is basically a donation, not a conditional gift.

people’s attitudes toward risk and benefit change depending on their circumstances. Their own context really affects what they think is risky and what they think isn’t risky.

I believe that the early data donors are likely to be people for whom there isn’t a lot of risk perceived because the health system already knows that they’re sick. The health system is already denying them coverage, denying their requests for PET scans, denying their requests for access to care. That’s based on actuarial tables, not on their personal data. It’s based on their medical history.

The Open Data Pilot seeks to improve the ability of the public to find, download and use Government of Canada data. You are invited to search the catalogue, download datasets and explore the possibilities of Open Data.

According to the HHS, the program is "a public-private collaboration that is encouraging innovators to utilize community health data to develop applications that help raise awareness of community health performance and spark action to improve health."

In Kenya, if you charged women just 50p for an insecticide-treated bednet (one of the most effective low-cost prophylactics against malaria) demand dropped 75 per cent. Uptake of deworming drugs—an important factor in child development—dropped 80 per cent if a small charge was applied. And in October 2005, the Bamako initiative received a fatal blow from a paper in the British Medical Journal. The study took epidemiological data from 20 African countries and projected what would happen if user fees were removed. The conclusion was that, each year, the lives of 233,000 children under five would be saved.

Open Data in Canada describes the capacity for the Canadian Federal Government and other levels of government in Canada to provide online access to internal data in a standards-compliant Web 2.0 way. Government 2.0 is a way to engage individuals and businesses in government decisionmaking and services. Integration of tools such as wikis, development of government-specific social networking sites and the use of blogs, RSS feeds and Google Maps are all helping governments provide information to people in a manner that is more immediately useful to the people concerned.[1] There are also aspects of improving Freedom of information in Canada but the main focus of Government 2.0 is citizen engagement.

Il governo-wiki, ovvero l’amministrazione che prende a modello ed utilizza gli strumenti collaborativi usati per esempio ogni giorno da migliaia di estensori anonimi e volontari di Wikipedia, è ormai oggetto di discussioni tutt’altro che accademiche; e la Wikicrazia (termine lanciato un paio di anni fa da un dirigente dell’Unione Europea ad un barcamp di hacker in Danimarca e poi adottato da Alberto Cottica per intitolare un libro fondamentale sul tema), è molto più dell’ultima nuova idea: per molti è l’unica via per ridare slancio all’azione di governo al tempo di Internet.

La stessa che consentì ad un gruppo di hacker di mettere su in poche ore e gratuitamente Katrinalist, un sito che aggiornava in tempo reale la lista dei sopravvisuti all’uragano di New Orleans, mentre il governo Bush annaspava.

grazie alla progressiva diffusione della banda larga e all’inevitabile arrivo al potere di una generazione di nativi digitali, è convinzione comune che entro il 2020 “le forme di cooperazione online accresceranno la disponibilità di governi, aziende, istituzioni ed organizzazioni no-profit a recepire e soddisfare più apertamente le necessità della popolazione” (conclusione del report 2010 della Elon University e del Pew Research Center).

The new system has been embraced by nurses and technicians as a great time-saver, and has proven a convenient tool for doctors as an access point to all patient data for analysis and diagnosis," the report said.

"Dr. Watson," says he expects the computer, which can respond to questions with answers instead of data and spread sheets, to radically improve doctors' care of their patients.

Watson is expected to be able to take a patient's electronic medical records, digest them, summarize them for the doctor and point out any causes for concern, highlighting anything abnormal and warning about potential drug interactions.