“The field of [big data] draws on findings from statistics, databases, and artificial intelligence to construct tools that let users gain insight from massive data sets.” – Michael Pazzani, Intelligent Systems Pazzani’s quote was originally published in February 1999 and did not reference big data; it referenced knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD).

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Is big data just a fad, or something much more profound?

Comcast Tower We’re at a flashpoint in the evolution of television, and the battle lines are getting clearer. We have the pay TV providers who want to keep their high-dollar cable packages going even as broadband has the potential to break their bundle of channels. We also have content companies, some of whom are owned by the cable providers and others who are independent.

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7 ways Comcast is killing the cable killers

Sahil Lavingia has a gift for building what people want. A look at his resume reveals he was a designer for Pinterest , built the iPhone app for Turntable.fm , and now he’s the founder of Gumroad , a startup with the modest ambition of enabling people to sell anything (a song, a snippet of code, an icon design) to anyone

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Gumroad’s CEO on great design and advice for young entrepreneurs

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels Let it never be said that the cloud computing wars are boring. Within hours of being blasted for locking developers into its ever-rising cloud stack , Amazon announced new managed database services  and Elastic Beanstalk support targeting thousands upon thousands of Microsoft-centric developers. Late on Tuesday, Amazon posted on its AWS blog that Microsoft SQL Server is now part of AWS’ relational database service (RDS) program

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Amazon woos Microsoft devs with .NET, SQL Server support

As various levels of government both in the U.S. and around the world have stepped up their attempts to track down dissidents through social networks , the pressure has intensified on companies like Twitter and Facebook to comply with these demands — even at the expense of their users’ privacy. Despite that pressure, Twitter at least seems determined to fight these incursions wherever possible

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Twitter: We’re still the free-speech wing of the free-speech party

Google’s “open” approach to Android has certainly helped build the platform’s user base: Android powers more than half of the world’s smartphones .

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Hey Google, take control of Android already, will ya?

Lucas Carlson, CEO AppFog Positioning his company as David to Amazon’s Goliath, Appfog CEO Lucas Carlson blasted Amazon Web Services for locking developers into a closed ecosystem.

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Appfog takes Amazon to task for cloud lock-in

Microsoft is joining a growing number of tech companies that want to do something about their growing carbon emissions due to power hungry data centers and office buildings. The software giant on Tuesday announced a plan to become carbon neutral by fiscal year 2013 (which starts this July), and said it plans to do so by putting a price on its emissions, using energy efficiency measures and buying renewable energy and carbon offsets. Microsoft will also consider investing in renewable energy projects, the company said .

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Microsoft pledges to be carbon neutral starting this summer

This article first appeared on GigaOM Pro our premium subscription research service. The tragic story, reported by The New York Times’s Ron Lieber last month, in which a man rented a car in Boston via peer-to-peer car sharing company RelayRides and wound up seriously injuring four people while losing his life, raised a familiar question for the share economy: Who’s responsible? Addressing liability and security have become paramount issues as business models based on sharing items have emerged

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Who’s liable in the share economy?

Performing a few mental calculations during his keynote at CTIA Wireless on Tuesday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski quickly concluded that the same amount of mobile spectrum exists in the U.S. today as existed before the FCC slapped down AT&T’s merger with T-Mobile .

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FCC Chairman questions AT&T’s merger math