There's no question that healthcare is an industry yearning for the advancements promised by Big Data analytics. Healthcare data is expected to grow between 1.2 to 2.4 exabytes per year — about 1,000 times the amount of data the human brain is capable of storing. This data is disparate and unstructured, making the extraction of useful information almost impossible. It is here that Big Data analytics promises to save the industry billions of dollars. This week Ricky Ribiero at Biz Tech Magazine joins the many voices investigating this trend. In his article, “Will Big Data Become the Big Savior of Health?” Ribiero illustrates how analytics can improve health outcomes and how tracking personal health, even down to the genome, can radically improve health. Ribiero cites a 2011 McKinsey & Co. report that states, “If US healthcare were to use big data creatively and effectively to drive efficiency and quality, the sector could create more than $300 billion in value every year.”

“While it’s true that analytics can reshape the way healthcare operates at an individual level,” Ribiero writes, “companies are hard at work trying to figure out how to leverage Big Data to improve health at the population level, too.”

For Immediate Release
BOSTON, MA – April 29, 2013 – Bytes and Atoms, a micro conference exploring the Internet of Things and the interaction between the physical and digital, today announced the speakers for its inaugural program.

Organized by software and emerging technologies design firm Involution Studios and agile development consulting firm Pivotal Labs, and sponsored by O'Reilly Media and IxDA Boston, Bytes and Atoms is a one-of-a-kind event exploring the next great shift in interaction design and celebrating the region's groundbreaking technological accomplishments.

Involution client uTest has launched Applause, an analytics tool that offers clear, explicit data about what users truly feel about mobile apps. Applause enables app-owners to see how each version of their app measures up and the ability to compare their app to those of their competitors. Applause features sleek multi-version app graphs and a revolutionary rating scheme, with user interface design and development by Involution.

Energy is the industry that IT forgot — or at least until recently. While sectors as varied as finance and healthcare, entertainment and communications have roared ahead with digitization, automation, and analytics, the energy industry has not evolved as rapidly. Despite this fact, it's clear that the future of energy lies in software. In both conservation and sustainability, software offers great possibilities for innovation — enabling companies to understand consumption trends, make better decisions about energy usage, and improve efficiency and performance over time.

Last week, at the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council seminar "New Tools for the Energy Challenge", panelists discussed the opportunities and challenges facing the fledgling energy software space. The panel, moderated by Gabe Cole, SVP Transformation Services at technology consulting firm Telwares, included: Badri Raghaven, CTO of FirstFuel; Ganesan Ravishanker, CIO of Wellesley College; Lillian Smith, Principal User Experience Designer at Autodesk; and Kevin Johnson, CEO of Outsmart Power Systems.

Involution client Segterra is doing its part to prepare US athletes for the upcoming 2012 Olympic Summer Games in London. Segterra's innovative software product, Inside Tracker, is being used by champion track cyclist Sarah Hammer and triathletes Jarrod Shoemaker and Sarah Haskins to learn about nutritional deficiencies and excesses via bloodwork analytics and optimize and boost performance based on diet recommendations. When training for the Olympics, every advantage, no matter how small, can make a difference; and InsideTracker provides data and analysis that many athletes have, up to this point, had access to only on the occasions when they interacted with their physicians.

Massachusetts has the dubious distinction of spending the most money on healthcare per person of anywhere in the world. At the Mass Technology Leadership Council healthcare community meeting on Tuesday, April 24, "The Need for Technology Solutions for Providers Under Payment Reform", held at WilmerHale in Waltham, MA, keynote speaker Sarah Iselin, President of the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation, reviewed some of the startling facts and figures related to healthcare coverage and costs, such as this one.

A few hours ago GigaOm published an article declaring "Marketing is the next big money sector in technology". In the first paragraph, the author, Ajay Agarwal of Bain Capital Ventures, sets up the future of the industry this way: "For the first time in history, businesses can leverage big data for the benefit of driving marketing insights. We are at the very beginning of this wave, but this fundamental shift will create several multi-billion dollar winners. And a set of technology companies will emerge as the marketing equivalents of Salesforce and SAP."

The Mass Technology Leadership Council held its annual Big Data Summit yesterday at the Microsoft New England Research and Development Center in Cambridge, MA. The sold out event was attended by a broad cross-section of the Boston tech community with engineers, designers, venture capitalists and business managers all coming together to discuss the future of Big Data in the Bay State. Massachusetts is well positioned to take advantage of the coming boom in big data according to a recent MassTLC white paper that reviews both the current lay of the land and future opportunities.