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What were current consumer confidence readings? It would take weeks or months to find out, and even then only selected countries would be reported on.I kept asking myself, what is the point of having a forward indicator when it takes so long to get the data?Remember that consumer confidence is not drawn from government data that needs to be tallied in highly secure data rooms.It is just an aggregation of our views Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/crowdsourcing-the-future-introducing-global-real-time-consumer-confidence-tracking-2011-5?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+businessinsider+%28Business+Insider%29#ixzz1NtezvKXE

DataSift offers the most powerful and sophisticated tools for extracting value from Social Data. The amount that Internet users are creating and sharing through Social Media is exploding. DataSift offers the best tools for collecting, filtering and analysing this data. Social Data is more complicated to process and analyse because it is unstructured. DataSift's platform has been built specifically to process large amounts of this unstructured data and derive value from it.

"They are computer scientists, statisticians, graphic designers, producers and cartographers who map entire oceans of data and turn them into innovative visual displays, like rich graphs and charts, that help both companies and consumers cut through the clutter. These gurus of visual analytics are making interactive data synonymous with attractive data. "

" Consider the disruption that technology has already introduced. The big data company BeyondCore can automatically evaluate vast amounts of data, identify statistically relevant insights, and present them through an animated briefing, rendering the junior analyst role obsolete. And the marketing intelligence company Motista employs predictive models and software to deliver insights into customer emotion and motivation at a small fraction of the price of a top consulting firm. These start-ups, though they lack the brand and reputation of the incumbents, are already making inroads with Fortune 500 companies-and as partners to the incumbents. "

"A NEW citizen science project will be launched next month to help researchers assess how our marine ecosystems are changing in response to ocean warming. Currently each year over three million Australian's go fishing, diving and boating and scientists want to enlist their help to collect valuable data for the RangeExtension Database and Mapping Project. Redmap invites recreational and commercial fishers, scuba divers, boaters and scientists in Western Australia to spot, log and map any uncommon marine species not usually seen in their particular coastal areas."

ONE of humanity's ultimate dreams, to peer into the future, may be moving a step closer with a controversial €1 billion ($1.3bn) EU plan to recreate the entire world in a computer system. The Living Earth Simulator project would take the vast streams of data pouring into the internet, ranging from Facebook and Twitter to dry-as-dust government statistics, and try to spot the economic and social trends that will shape the future.

International Futures (IFs) is a large-scale, long-term, integrated global modeling system. It represents demographic, economic, energy, agricultural, socio-political, and environmental subsystems for 183 countries interacting in the global system. The central purpose of IFs is to facilitate exploration of global futures through alternative scenarios. The model is integrated with a large database containing values for its many foundational data series since 1960. Through this web site IFs is freely available to users both on-line and in downloadable form.

Over the next decade, cities will continue to grow larger and more rapidly. At the same time, new technologies will unlock massive streams of data about cities and their residents. As these forces collide, they will turn every city into a unique civic laboratory-a place where technology is adapted in novel ways to meet local needs. This ten-year forecast map, The Future of Cities, Information, and Inclusion (PDF), charts the important intersections between urbanization and digitalization that will shape this global urban experiment, and the key tensions that will arise. 

Taken together, these discoveries mean that one can write out a life code, manipulate a cell, and execute a specific desired function. It means we can convert cells into programmable manufacturing entities. But this software builds its own hardware, allowing companies to begin using bacteria to produce chemicals, fuels, medicines, textiles, data storage, or any series of organic products.

"Thousands of museum professionals gathered Sunday in Houston to mull their futures and contemplate ways to recast their missions and audiences. Participants at the American Association of Museums' annual conference pondered possibilities that included a multiple-voucher system in which museums compete to meet certain components of a public school child's education. They even discussed a "Facebook update from hell" that would simultaneously publish everyone's personal data - including information museums have gathered in order to personalize visitor experiences."

We (Cognitive Edge) would be really grateful if you would be prepared to share your thoughts, fears and hopes about the current state of the world post the financial cris. What are the implications for public service? How will our institutions adapt? What will be important for the public service in the future? What is going to happen to public service anyway? We want your micro-narratives, you mini-scenarios as part of a crowd sourcing project. Anyone who participates can have access to the data, results will be published here. Basically you click here and contribute your ideas, then you signify their meaning. The signifier (or index) set was produced in conjunction with experts in strategic foresight. We want to demonstrate the power of networks, the ability of the voice of the person on the metaphorical Clapham Omnibus, Jo Public (or whatever yiyr cultural phrase is) to stand up there with the views of experts. One is not better than the other, we need both! Also we want them fast - as many as you can over the next couple of days. The first report will come out on Sunday, then more over next week. Please participate please pass this on in your blog, Twitter, Facebook, emails lists or good old word of mouth.

" The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a message from one corner of the internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times. IT companies make a lot of money selling equipment that facilitates this ceaseless copying. Every bit of data ever produced on any computer is copied somewhere. The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies. Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap, they are free. "

"To address this and similar challenges, we're developing Open Foresight - a social response to accelerating change. It's a new process that crowdsources the future of given topics, as demonstrated by the Future of Facebook pilot project. It's different because it structures data around established futures categories and methods, then synthesizes that information into easily digestible video format."

Who will own the brains of smart cities--citizens or corporations? At stake is an impending massive trove of data, not to mention issues of privacy, services, and inclusion. The battle may be fought in the streets between bands of Jane Jacobs-inspired hacktivists pushing for self-serve governance and a latter-day Robert Moses carving out monopolies for IBM or Cisco instead of the Triborough Bridge Authority. Without a delicate balance between the scale of big companies and the DIY spirit of "gov 2.0" champions, the urban poor could be the biggest losers. Achieving that balance falls to smarter cities' mayors, who must keep the tech heavyweights in check and "frame an agenda of openness, transparency and inclusivness."

" Enipedia is an active exploration into the applications of wikis and the semantic web for energy and industry issues. Through this we seek to create a collaborative environment for discussion, while also providing the tools that allow for data from different sources to be connected, queried, and visualized from different perspectives. "

2 million photographs are uploaded to Facebook each day. As of this week, every new image will be processed by automatic face recognition software, designed to identify the people in the photographs. It's not the addition of this new function that has caused the creeping sense of unease, but the covert manner with which it has been activated

Mosman council in Sydney offers open datasets to the public.

The TrendWiki engages your networks to study problems of interest and communicates the results to the decision makers and experts. The TrendWiki is different from typical Wikis in two ways: it is designed to support selected business processes and contains the data and text mining tools to study the content of the wiki pages. Click the balls on the left to study more; click the logos below to study our references.