Hypecycle: Turning data into dollars

Search

Generating and storing data is fairly useless unless there is a way to retrieve it. This the secret that Sergey Brin and Larry Page stumbled on more than 10 years ago while at university and it grew into the immensely successful Google, which has reshaped much of society and business.

But search is also important in organisations and it was for this reason that the Google Appliance was born. It helps organisations connect workers with documents stored with metadata, to each other and Web 2.0 and social search such as Twitter and Google Apps as well as Microsoft Sharepoint. The latest version searches and indexes up to 30 million documents.

Companies: Google.

Analytics and business intelligence

Dan Bricklin, inventor of the spreadsheet, could not have foreseen what putting data analytics in the hands of users would have created.

Visualisation of numbers is a growing need especially where massive data sets are called for. Services such as Tableau and Wolfram Alpha help massage numbers into a form understandable by all.

Companies: Cognos, Tableau, Vertica (HP), SAS, IBM

Processors

Intel’s Sandy Bridge multiple-core processor was intended to provide high-performance graphics on an integrated chipset, ideal for visualising and manipulating big data sets.

Unfortunately, Intel ran into some trouble last month and the general rollout was delayed. AMD, which launched its own Fusion integrated CPU at about the same time, capitalised on Intel’s misstep.

Mobile chipsets are also becoming more powerful and providing what was desktop performance just a handful of years ago in low-power devices.

Companies: Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Marvell, Texas Instruments