There are several good articles in the NY Times Sunday Business section today that serve to illustrate the coming world of Big Data.
30% of customers opt in to driver monitoring. This is Facebook meets car insurance. I am amazed that this many people willingly subject themselves to this kind of monitoring. Here is my post about how insurance companies have detached themselves from the basic concept of insurance. In short, insurance companies are increasingly able to exit the insurance business. They have always wanted to collect premiums, and not pay claims --- now they can do it.
Building snow skis from skier's DNA. For $1,750 you can get custom skis made to your skiing DNA (not your biological DNA thank goodness). It would be very interesting to know how unique the 1,000 pairs of skis this guy made last year are. I would not be surprised if they all boil down to a dozen or less basic designs. This kind of short run (run of 1 in this case) manufacturing brings to light IP that is actually protectable - the design process and the distribution of actual designs. Very interesting.
Dr. Langer's Lab at MIT succeeds at tech transfer. This one is a bit more of a stretch, but any new medical product involves a mountain of testing data and data proficiency and the cross over from one product to the next is indeed changing very fast due to better data management techniques.
Happy reading.