SociaLens

"The Institute's director, Dr. Michael Rappa, spoke today in Washington, DC with senior IT executives across Federal agencies and state government about the looming talent shortage in Big Data. The panel included Jeff Butler, Director, Research Databases, with the Internal Revenue Service and Micheline Casey, former Chief Data Officer, State of Colorado. This past summer Dr. Rappa served as academic co-chair of TechAmerica Foundation's Big Data Commission, which examined strategies for transforming government through the application of Big Data."

"Alongside this, we wanted to gauge wider views across the sector into charities' use of digital and how else they think it could help them. So today we're launching the results of our Charity Digital Survey at our sold out Charity Digital Summit, part of our Google funded programme of technology events for charities. Many of the 334 charity sector professionals who responded to the survey view digital as essential to their work, but fear they could miss out on opportunities for fundraising and income generation due to a lack of digital skills."

Despite all the headlines about billion-dollar exits and IPOs, growing too quickly or too much is not always the most desirable outcome for a startup. Fifteen entrepreneurs, members of Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), offer their perspective on why, in some cases, smaller means mightier.

"On the day of the United Nations General Assembly's vote on upgrading Palestine to non-member observer status, the @UN official account sent out a tweet that seemed to undercut support for the move. The tweet was deleted soon after posting and a correction issued, but not before it received around 100 retweets, as well as comments and screenshots for the record."

Walmart, the world's largest retailer, embraces social, mobile, and the startup spirit to compete against Amazon. Will it be enough?

"With Hurricane Sandy approaching the New York metro area, the nation's eyes are turning to its largest city. Photos of storms and flooding are popping up all over Twitter, and while many are real, some of them -- especially the really eye-popping ones -- are fake.  This post, which will be updated over the next couple of days, is an effort to sort the real from the unreal. It's a photograph verification service, you might say, or a pictorial investigation bureau. If you see a picture that looks fishy, send it to me at alexis.madrigal[at]gmail.com. If you like this sort of thing, you should also visit istwitterwrong.tumblr.com, which is just cataloging the fakes. The fakes come in three varieties: 1) Real photos that were taken long ago, but that pranksters reintroduce as images of Sandy, 2) Photoshopped images that are straight up fake, and 3) The combination of the first two: old, Photoshopped pictures being trotted out again."