Residents in Boston, Massachusetts are automatically reporting potholes and road hazards via their smartphones. Progressive Insurance tracks real-time customer driving patterns and uses that information to offer rates truly commensurate with individual safety. Google accurately predicts local flu outbreaks based upon thousands of user search queries. Amazon provides remarkably insightful, relevant, and timely product recommendations to its hundreds of millions of customers. Quantcast lets companies target precise audiences and key demographics throughout the Web. NASA runs contests via gamification site TopCoder, awarding prizes to those with the most innovative and cost-effective solutions to its problems. Explorys offers penetrating and previously unknown insights into healthcare behavior. How do these organizations and municipalities do it? Technology is certainly a big part, but in each case the answer lies deeper than that. Individuals at these organizations have realized that they don't have to be Nate Silver to reap massive benefits from today's new and emerging types of data. And each of these organizations has embraced Big Data, allowing them to make astute and otherwise impossible observations, actions, and predictions. It's time to start thinking big. In Too Big to Ignore, recognized technology expert and award-winning author Phil Simon explores an unassailably important trend: Big Data, the massive amounts, new types, and multifaceted sources of information streaming at us faster than ever. Never before have we seen data with the volume, velocity, and variety of today. Big Data is no temporary blip of fad. In fact, it is only going to intensify in the coming years, and its ramifications for the future of business are impossible to overstate. Too Big to Ignore explains why Big Data is a big deal. Simon provides commonsense, jargon-free advice for people and organizations looking to understand and leverage Big Data. Rife with case studies, examples, analysis, and quotes from real-world Big Data practitioners, the book is required reading for chief executives, company owners, industry leaders, and business professionals.

This book is an investigation of the Swedish microchipping phenomenon and seeks to explain why, despite its many negative connotations in an international context, microchipping is relatively popular in Sweden. The author maps out the movement, examines its key drivers, and delves further to discover why Swedes generally have a high trust in technology, and show little resistance to testing it. The Swedish case is studied from the three main themes of surveillance, science fiction and transhumanism, and is built around interviews with Swedes who have embraced the technology. The arguments for and against microchipping are contextualised culturally and explained against a background of the long established Swedish relationship with advanced technology, and with their unique level of trust in the government. The book will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate students in digital culture related disciplines.

As media becomes more readily available in the digital age, it also becomes more vulnerable to tampering and manipulation, making techniques for verifying reliable news and media sources essential. Understanding online technologies' role in shaping the media environment allows for insight into the correlations between the rapidly transforming media landscape and its unwanted effect on news and content tampering. Cross-Media Authentication and Verification: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a collection of innovative research on the methods and applications of verifying the newsgathering and publishing process. While highlighting topics including human authentication, information evaluation, and tampered content, this book is ideally designed for researchers, students, publishers, and academicians seeking current research on media authenticity and misinformation.