The world is becoming more and more digital every day. Big Data is one of those mega trends that will impact everyone in one way or another.  Welcome to theeveryday world of "Big Data," the explosions of facts, maps, products, books, calls, references, smartphone apps, trends, videos, advertisements, surveys — all of the sense and nonsense that is literally at your fingertips, 24-7, every day from now on.

The Big Data debate is over. Vast data pools being generated every day are in reality treasure troves of information that organizations can leverage through analytics to obtain valuable insights, drive innovation, boost ROI and create competitive advantage. To meet the formidable challenge of analyzing data of massive volume, variety and velocity, Hadoop has emerged as the go-to scalable software solution for processing Big Data.

HedgeChatter has launched an online SaaS dashboard that allows investors, traders and hedge funds to see how key influencers on social media are affecting stock price and view price trends based on real-time social media data (chatter).

Smartphones will soon be able to predict a consumer’s next move, their next purchase or interpret actions based on what it knows, according to Gartner, Inc. This insight will be performed based on an individual’s data gathered using cognizant computing – the next step in personal cloud computing.

Predictive Modeling competitions, once the arena for a few data mining conferences, has now become big business. Kaggle (kaggle.com) is perhaps the most well-known forum for modeling competitions, using a crowd-sourcing mentality: if more people try to solve a problem, the likelihood that someone will create an excellent solution to that problem increases.

It has been made eminently clear that business intelligence conveyed through big data has a majorly significant role to play in the retail business sector. Within this industry, companies of all sizes – ranging from larger enterprises to smaller local chains with only a handful of locations – are using the aggregation and quantification that big data allows for to develop initiatives and best practices that ultimately benefit their bottom lines.

Cars are probably not the first thing that comes to mind when you hear someone talk about data sources, but today’s cars generate approximately 15 gigabytes of data per hour. The reason most of us are unaware of this fact is because most of this data is only stored for a short amount of time, and that data is rarely accessed or utilized.

icrunchdata compiled an interesting index to help visualize the present state and future job growth trends in Analytics, Big Data, Business Intelligence, Data Science, Software Development and Statistics.