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What makes a tweet go viral online? And what does a viral trend actually look like? Those are a couple of the questions that can be answered by a new Microsoft Research project, called Viral Search. The company's researchers are showing the project this week at an internal gathering this week in Redmond. The program crunches large amounts of data from Twitter (and potentially Facebook and other platforms in the future) to analyze and display patterns of distribution on the social network.

Jaron Lanier is a computer science pioneer who has grown gradually disenchanted with the online world since his early days popularizing the idea of virtual reality. "Lanier is often described as 'visionary,' " Jennifer Kahn wrote in a 2011 New Yorker profile, "a word that manages to convey both a capacity for mercurial insight and a lack of practical job skills." Raised mostly in Texas and New Mexico by bohemian parents who'd escaped anti-Semitic violence in Europe, he's been a young disciple of Richard Feynman, an employee at Atari, a scholar at Columbia, a visiting artist at New York University, and a columnist for Discover magazine. He's also a longtime composer and musician, and a collector of antique and archaic instruments, many of them Asian. His book continues his war on digital utopianism and his assertion of humanist and individualistic values in a hive-mind world. But Lanier still sees potential in digital technology: He just wants it reoriented away from its main role so far, which involves "spying" on citizens, creating a winner-take-all society, eroding professions and, in exchange, throwing bonbons to the crowd.

Insight™ by Ignite is the first widely available software tool that provides organizations access to invaluable "unstrauctured data", supplementing traditional win/loss programs with new information about why teams are winning and losing deals. This unique sales optimization software works by quickly capturing, consolidating, and transforming individual sales experiences into collective intelligence. Sales organizations from any industry or region can capitalize on this data to enhance sales approaches and win more deals.

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.

Bing Fund is looking for startups that are building online or mobile experiences that incorporate fresh insights. Participants are not required to use Microsoft technology. We enroll startups into our program on an ongoing basis, investing in and working with a small number at any given time. Here's what we offer: * Subsidized use of unique APIs from Bing's data ecosystem * The opportunity to access certain technology assets developed by Microsoft Research * Assistance from Bing Fund team members who specialize in design, engineering, marketing, and building businesses * Consultations with Subject Matter Experts at Microsoft, some of whom are world experts in their areas * Exposure to Microsoft executives * Connections with our partners and customers * Funding * Co-workspace for startups located in the Seattle area.

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.

"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."