Google has released its latest transparency report on government requests for data, claiming a 150 percent surge in demand for more information.“We’ve seen a 15 percent increase since the second half of last year, and a 150 percent jump since we first began publishing this data in 2009.

SAN FRANCISCO — Apparently, it’s OK to follow your whimsy sometimes when designing games.
That’s the spirit at online game studio Kixeye, where data analysis plays into about 40 percent of the decision-making, with the rest based on intuition, said chief executive Will Harbin.

Today cash register and small business management software company Square is adding a new partner called SumAll to integrate with its analytics platform. SumAll provides small and medium businesses with sales metrics, including sales made from social media campaigns and information about payment processors.

Based on the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) 2013 report “Formula for Growth — (Innovation) Big Data & Analytics", a CPG manufacturer pinpointed data analytics as a strategic imperative to double its top-line over the next decade.

The use of personas in sales and marketing has long been a standard practice, though it probably first entered mainstream awareness years ago when Best Buy’s sales profiles of its typical customers were leaked.In sales and marketing, the use of these typical customer archetypes helps to refine and target messaging to these specific customer types (so that the pitch to the soccer mom is different from the pitch to the gadget geek).

A new report on big data and big decisions was released today by PwC. The report sheds new light on the impact of big data on enterprises today, and how it is changing the process of decision making by senior executives. The PwC report, titled “Gut & Gigabytes: Capitalising on the art & science in decision making,” is based on an Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) worldwide survey of 1,135 senior executives.

Scientists striving to cure Alzheimer’s disease and other brain disorders are turning to a powerful new tool they hope will light the way to effective treatments: big data. The idea is to use supercomputers to search through reams of patient data – everything from MRI scans to the results of cognitive testing to lipid levels – for patterns that might reveal the precise cause of neurodegenerative disorders, which have so far proved stubbornly difficult to predict, halt or even slow down.

Enterprise software giant Salesforce.com has made its offerings into a sort of platform that other software companies can build on. And if Salesforce is indeed about to launch a business-analytics tool, the move could jeopardize a whole bunch of startups and even publicly traded companies that sit in the Salesforce ecosystem.