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Quantity has a quality all its own, as the saying goes. That's especially true of information. The more you've got, the more useful it becomes. Knowing sensitive facts about one person, or a dozen, may be trivially useful. But analyze the same facts about 100 million people, and you can cure diseases, win elections, or earn billions of dollars, because unpredictable insights emerge when you turn computers loose on vast storehouses of information. There's a nickname for the concept: "big data." It's one of the buzzwords of corporate executives, tech-savvy politicians, and worried civil libertarians. If you want to know what they're all talking about, then "Big Data'' is the book for you, a comprehensive and entertaining introduction to a very large topic. By analyzing huge amounts of information, it's possible to discover patterns and relationships that up to now have been invisible to us. In this way, we can find new solutions to tough problems, and opportunities we'd never otherwise have suspected.

"A Seattle data technology startup is taking the phrase "know your customer" to a whole new level. Versium Analytics today introduced a new analytics platform called LifeData. Led by former InfoSpace executives Chris Matty and Kevin Marcus, the 12-month-old company is trying to help organizations learn more about their customers by using a patent-pending technology that verifies and cross-indexes large sets of data."

"Do you want to get more control over your data? Anyone who works with data can benefit from learning SQL, whether you're an online campaigner, a voterfile manager, an analyst, a pollster, or anyone else who works extensively with data."

The notion of "externalities" has become familiar in environmental circles. It refers to costs imposed by businesses that are not paid for by those businesses. For instance, industrial processes can put pollutants in the air that increase public health costs, but the public, not the polluting businesses, picks up the tab. In this way, businesses privatize profits and publicize costs. While the notion is incredibly useful, especially in folding ecological concerns into economics, I've always had my reservations about it. Environmentalists these days love speaking in the language of economics - it makes them sound Serious - but I worry that wrapping this notion in a bloodless technical term tends to have a narcotizing effect. It brings to mind incrementalism: boost a few taxes here, tighten a regulation there, and the industrial juggernaut can keep right on chugging. However, if we take the idea seriously, not just as an accounting phenomenon but as a deep description of current human practices, its implications are positively revolutionary.

No, Blab's new platform can't necessarily predict the future. But what the Seattle-based social analytics company did debut today is software that will help brands determine which of the millions of social media conversations they should focus on. Using Blab's patented technology, the company analyzes 50,000 news and social media sources, including more than 60 million posts per day. Blab then organizes that information into a "Conversations Canvas dashboard" and predicts where those conversations may go up to three days in the future based on past data and current social media chatter.

"Seattle big data startup SpaceCurve announced today that it has set a real-time Big Data performance record for ingesting streaming data and spitting out numbers immediately for queries. SpaceCurve ran a full-blown analytics test on Tweet records that averaged 2,500 bytes in size and included location, user and time information. The rate of operation was done at millions of records per second, hundreds of billions of records per day and petabytes of data per day - a new record, according to SpaceCurve."

"In a post-fact era, you can be an elected official and have a remarkably flexible relationship with the truth. Take climate science: more than 97% of scientists agree that climate change is a man-made phenomenon, but conservative politicians--and more than 65% of Republicans in Congress--outdo one another to demonstrate just how little they believe in science."

A non-profit tech company that develops free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping.

Recorded Future offers robust tools for temporal and predictive analysis including advanced visualizations, data for predictive modelling, and fine-grain Future oriented alerts. Customers around the world are using Recorded Future Premium to monitor media on the web, understand news and forecast a variety events, track sentiment surrounding events and more.

Big data might very well be the tech buzz word of the year. And just how hot is it? Consider this:  Data scientist Stephen Purpura - an expert in artificial intelligence, machine learning and predictive analytics who is studying for his PhD in information sciences at Cornell University - has received no fewer than 45 job offers in recent months. And they just aren't any fly-by-night offers, with some rolling in from big-name companies touting salaries of $300,000 or more.

How Big Data Became So Big By STEVE LOHR Published: August 11, 2012 This has been the crossover year for Big Data - as a concept, as a term and, yes, as a marketing tool. Big Data has sprung from the confines of technology circles into the mainstream. First, here are a few, well, data points: Big Data was a featured topic this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, with a report titled "Big Data, Big Impact." In March, the federal government announced $200 million in research programs for Big Data computing.