Editor’s Choices for Week Ending Aug 10, 2012

Article of the Week
How is big data faring in the enterprise?  (ZD Net)
Big Idea: With the hype sometimes seeming to reach a fever pitch, Hinchcliffe takes a look at how enterprises are really using big data along with the overall maturity of the new industry itself.    He examines adoption rates (more companies think big data will have an impact than are actually implementing big data solutions) and trends in technology, infrastructure, and business solutions.

Editor’s Choice Articles
Shopper Alert: Price May Drop For You Alone (NY Times)
Big Idea: Grocers are beginning to offer personalized pricing, varying the prices available to shoppers based on their shopping history.

Meet The Research Scientist Who Is Turning YouTube Into A Data Goldmine (Fast Company)
Big Idea:  Research scientist Louis-Philippe Morency scoured YouTube to find practical applications for the problem of reading human behaviors. Here’s what businesses can learn from how people behave on camera.

Microsoft’s Workplace Social Network Becomes Emotionally Aware (MIT Technology Review)
Big Idea: Bosses who want help gauging employees’ morale can now turn to Microsoft’s workplace social network, Yammer. A new feature offers managers a kind of emotional surveillance system, showing which feelings workers are expressing in messages posted to a company’s Yammer network, which has similarities to both Facebook and Twitter.

For Google, keeping search relevant means baking big data into everything (Gigaom)
Big Idea: Google has opened its Knowledge Graph to the English-speaking world and has made intelligent voice search possible on mobile phones. Underneath it all, of course, are ever more-complex methods of analyzing data to make search smarter and easier than it has any business being.