Possibly you're questioning the term "Big Data" and wonder what it represents, so let's start small. You can find definitions through a Google search of course, but I happen to appreciate this Quora submission by David Vellante that states:

"...data that is too large to process and manage using conventional database management technologies. Big data has numerous attributes in addition to its large size, including it is typically unstructured and often dispersed."

With the emergence of web 3.0 - chip enabled every "thing" - the data we humans are set to collect will dwarf the amazing amount of data we already collect. There are industries that are interested in this data and I think they innately make sense.

Bust out the programming textbooks or head to Codecademy and learn Java right now, because that's how you're going to get paid big time in New York.

That's what CyberCoders, a recruiting firm in California, found in a new study it released today of the top tech jobs in New York.

CyberCoders gathered data from job postings and clients and found the average salary for tech positions in New York and, no surprise, the software engineers are getting paid better than just about everyone else, StaffingIndustry reports.

If you're a small startup without a sizable engineering team, it's going to be much harder to get venture capital backing, Deborah Gage at the Wall Street Journal reports.

Gage notes that this has always been a problem, but unlike in the past it's much easier to do a startup by yourself, or with a few partners.

Silicon Valley has a long history of "hacking."

Some of the Valley's best known names like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started out as a hackers building the Apple computer in their garage. They also did other hacker projects like selling blue boxes that would trick pay phones so you could make long distance calls.

Other people like Sergey Brin and Larry Page could be considered hackers, too. Those guys were stealing network power from Stanford to support Google in its early days.

For decades, science has suggested that when people make decisions, they tend to ignore logic and go with the gut. But Wim De Neys, a psychological scientist at the University of Toulouse in France, has a new suggestion: Maybe thinking about logic is also intuitive. He writes about this idea in the January issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Psychologists have partly based their conclusions about reasoning and decision-making on questions like this one:

“Bill is 34. He is intelligent, punctual but unimaginative and somewhat lifeless. In school, he was strong in mathematics but weak in social studies and humanities.

Which one of the following statements is most likely?

Many people have played important roles in the sustainment and growth of the SBIR and STTR programs. However, one person stood out above the rest in 2011. That person is Senator Mary L. Landrieu (D-LA), chairman of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship (SBE).

Not since the early days of the creation of SBIR has one Senator or Congressman invested so much of themselves and their staff in saving the SBIR and STTR programs. Senator Landrieu’s actions successfully concluded the most protracted and hard fought SBIR reauthorization in the history of the program.

Our standard supermarket banana, a variety called Cavendish, may be at the brink of disaster. Chosen for its resistance to a fungal pathogen that wiped out its predecessor, the Gros Michel banana, the popular fruit has long battled a related fungus, which has all but devastated the banana industry in certain parts of the world. Now, it appears the Cavendish variety is facing a new threat—the very same fungal disease that drove Gros Michels off the market.

Cavendish bananas account for about 45 percent of the fruit’s global crop, with an annual export value of US$8.5 billion, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. It was chosen to replace the original Gros Michel banana after a deadly fungal infection, known as Panama disease (Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. Cubense), wiped out much of the world’s banana crop in the first half of the 20th century.

The global economy is a human construct--a tool. And every so often, it gets radically updated, as it did after World War II at the historic Bretton Woods conference, where a new global monetary and financial architecture was laid down.

Already, economists at governments, universities, and international agencies are hard at work laying the groundwork for the next global economy. Its contours? New systems of national accounts that explicitly count not just gross product, but the full spectrum of wealth creation.

Ask any venture capitalist what they're looking for when funding a startup, and without fail they'll say they're looking for a "disruptive," idea, i.e., one that will shake up the status quo. With that in mind, we've turned the tables and looked for venture capitalists that were themselves disruptive in 2011. That doesn't necessarily mean they raised the most money or funded the coolest company. It just means that, well, they were different.

If you had to describe your company’s mission in a single sentence, what would your pitch read or sound like? One good way to summarize what you do and boil it down to one clear sentence, in my opinion, is following the advice of Founder Institute founder Adeo Ressi (see above).

This is how it’s done: “my company, _(insert name of company)_, is developing _(a defined offering)_ to help _(a defined audience)_ _(solve a problem)_ with _(secret sauce)_”.

Simple, right? In your dreams. Now, I know that the sentence above is somewhat vague (and I also realize that we’ve posted Ressi’s advice over a year ago already) but it’s spot-on, and even just thinking about this is a very useful exercise. In the short video below, you can watch Ressi talk more about his proposed one-sentence pitch setup along with some concrete examples.

For venture capital, 2011 was a year of recovery. Investors in venture funds (called Limited Partners) wryly pointed out in 2010 that venture capital had not produced returns in the past decade. 2011 may have corrected that, but investors still continue to shy away from VC. But let's start with the good news first.

A Year of IPOs and returns: For most VCs, the big payday is when a company gets acquired or goes public. Of course, going public has its own cachet, not to mention returns. On an average, IPOs generate at least 5X the rate of return as compared to an acquisition. Some worthy tech IPOs of note in 2011 were LinkedIn, Groupon and Zynga. Others included ZipCar (Short term car rentals), RenRen (China's Facebook), Yandex (Russia's search engine) Fusion I-O, (Hardware) to name a few. Venture funds that had at least two IPOs include Accel, Andresseen-Horowitz, Benchmark, Greylock, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Technology Crossover Ventures and New Enterprise Associates. Others of note include Foundry Group and Union Square Ventures (Zynga) and Battery (Angie's List). Indeed, the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) US VC Index showed one year returns of 26.3% as of Q2 2011. This number will continue to beat other indexes, including S & P 500 in 2012, but will that help VCs?

The last of the major global financial markets will close for the year in just a few hours.  The S&P 500 started the year at 1,257, and it's trading right around that level now.

So does this mean nothing happened in the financial markets this year?

Of course, not.  Perhaps the most surprising asset class of 2011 was US Treasuries.  Between QE2 ending and the US credit rating getting downgraded, most bond experts thought Treasuries would collapse.  But the exact opposite happened.

The Stop Online Piracy Act has been a topic of intense interest online this year, involving myriad interest groups and placing Hollywood, Congress and Silicon Valley heavy-hitters and everyday Internet users in a fierce debate over how best to counteract online piracy. Ideas@Innovations blogger Dominic Basulto wrote about the “ugly message” the legislation sends to the world. This prompted commenter “alance” to write, “We are surrendering all of our rights, freedoms and liberties to an authoritarian police state formerly known as the USA.” Read “SOPA’s ugly message to the world”

This year in Southern California, Barry Paulk's Pasadena Angels funded 12 companies, raising $3 million in angel capital.  Across the country in New York, angel investor David Rose of angel investing sourcing platform Gust  took an interest in companies like PublicStuff.org, that uses technologies to “revolutionize non-tech older industries.” In Miami, Timothy Cartwright's Tamiami Angels Fund completed its first year with a $50,000 investment, leaving the angel capital group $2 million to invest in 2012.

While angel capital deals continued at a consistent pace this year, there was still hesitation in the marketplace. "We are stuck in an environment with volatility," warned Greg Hext of Chapman, Hext, & Co. in Texas, "If the (entrepreneur's) equation has too many unknowns, then we are not comfortable investing."

For all intents and purposes, 2011 was a vibrant year for the global technology business. However, it was one tinged with sadness at the passing of the visionary Apple leader Steve Jobs. It was also the year that saw Twitter decide it was coming to Dublin.

The death of Steve Jobs While 2011 was a year of unprecedented growth for the global technology sector around the world, one event towered over everything, the passing of Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs in October.

While Jobs' battle with pancreatic cancer was common knowledge for many years, no one seemed ready for his passing. The year 2011 began with the news that Jobs was taking a leave of absence and then-COO Tim Cook will take responsibility for Apple's day-to-day operations.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Cornell University President David J. Skorton, and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology President Peretz Lavie today announced an historic partnership to build a two-million-square-foot applied science and engineering campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City. The selection of the Cornell/Technion consortium – which pairs two of the world’s top institutions in the fields of science, engineering, technology and research – marks a major milestone in the City’s groundbreaking Applied Sciences NYC initiative, which seeks to increase New York City’s capacity for applied sciences and dramatically transform the City’s economy. Cornell/Technion’s proposal was among the many strong proposals that were submitted to the City from a number of world-class institutions around the globe as part of the City’s groundbreaking competitive process. The Cornell/Technion consortium was ultimately selected due to the large scale and vision of their proposal, the long and impressive track-record of both institutions in generating applied science breakthroughs and spinning out new businesses, the financing capacity of the consortium, the focus of the consortium on the collaboration between academia and the private sector, and the overall capacity of the partnership to execute the project. In addition to the Roosevelt Island site, the City will also provide $100 million in City capital to assist with site infrastructure, construction, and related costs. This is the first selection announcement for the Applied Sciences NYC initiative. Productive discussions are ongoing with other respondents – Carnegie Mellon, Columbia and a New York University-led consortium – and the possibility of additional science and engineering partnerships in the City is still open. Mayor Bloomberg made the announcement at Cornell’s Weill Cornell Medical College, and was also joined by Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Robert K. Steel, New York City Economic Development President Seth W. Pinsky, Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, State Senator José M. Serrano, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, Council Member Jessica Lappin, as well as other civic and business leaders.

There are certain topics that even some of the best journalists can’t fully grok. One of them is profitability.

I find it amusing when a journalist writes an article about a prominent startup (either privately held or preparing for an IPO) and decries that, “They’re not even profitable!”

I mention journalists here because they perpetuate the myth that focusing on profits is ALWAYS the right answer and then I hear many entrepreneurs (and certainly many “normals”) repeating the same mantra.

Readers are bombarded with many "best-of" lists this time of year touting the latest and greatest in technology. Scientific American decided to broaden this idea a bit further, in search of a sampling of technologies that members of our advisory board—a group of highly accomplished scientists, engineers, educators and entrepreneurs—could not possibly live without. "Technology" was defined loosely—it could have been a high-tech personal gadget such as an iPhone or something as basic as a nail clipper. The answers (below) were at times surprising but always interesting.

In the 19th century, artists including Degas, Monet, and Renoir got together periodically to discuss their commissions, their patrons, and their industry. This circle met consistently, and the artists credited these small gatherings with not only making their careers but the rise of the impressionist movement.

There are all sorts of ways to create small groups of advisors in the modern day. But what's the best way to form a circle and get the most out of it?

Measuring an intangible like "most innovative" is tricky, at best. At worst, it's a complete disaster, like measuring "most innovative" by using patents as a measure, like this infographic from Good and Column Five Media.

It's based on Top 100 Global Innovators, which uses the Derwent World Patents Index and looks at patent-related criteria.

This doesn't just use patent volume, but also looks at success in patents granted (as opposed to just patents applied for), global patents (applied for in more than one country) and the "influence" of a patent. (That is, how often it's cited.)