Editor’s Choices for Week Ending Jun 8, 2012

Article of the Week
Why ‘Big Data’ Is a Big Deal (Inc.)
Big Idea:  In a world generating and storing tons of data every day, business owners need to learn how to harness it to get an edge.  This article provides a good overview of big data opportunities, tools, and potential impact.  Be sure to click the link near the end of the article for some interesting use cases.

Editor’s Choice Articles
The Dark Matter of Data (QlikCommunity)
Big Idea: Driver uses an interesting TED video from Dr. Nathan Wolfe – describing “biological dark matter” as unexplored genetic information – to draw a parallel to unexplored business information and argues that the right tools can help users glean insights from data by highlighting relationships that may not have been visible.

Meet the startup helping sites like Fab and Etsy court their customers (GigaOm)|
Big Idea: A New York-based startup, Custora, uses predictive analytics software to help e-commerce sites get an early read on their customer relationships with the goal of determining which ones will be most valuable over time.  This notion of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is an important metric for retailers to track and manage.

Oracle seeks social net analytics in Collective Intellect buy (GigaOm)|
Big Idea: The large enterprise software vendors continue their push into social networking, as Oracle buys a company offering cloud-based social intelligence solutions.

Kaggle is now crowdsourcing big data creativity (GigaOm)
Big Idea: In a move to expand its utility beyond simply finding better answers to known statistical prole, hot data-science startup Kaggle is now letting its stable of expert data scientists compete to tell companies how they can improve their businesses with machine learning.