Zero to One

I just finished reading Peter Thiel's book, Zero to One.  Overall I found it to be a unique point of view about startups, where new many new technologies are created.

While I felt his comments about Ayn Rand show a misunderstanding of her philosophy, I do believe Thiel's overall philosophical views are solid.  I share his perspective, that they way to fix many of our world problems is through innovation and invention.  Successive technologies that improve performance of existing technologies by 10X or better will be the path to human success.

The figures on new job growth and venture capital are staggering.

Big Data for Everyone

Interested in getting started with Big Data? Don't have a Hadoop cluster or Data Science team? 

Some very cool data science capabilities are available in preview from Microsoft:
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/machine-learning/

Also - there is a great book by Microsoft to get you started on it: 
http://www.amazon.com/Predictive-Analytics-Microsoft-Machine-Learning/dp/1484204468

Pluggable science technology with the full power of Hadoop and the R programming language!  It would have been great to have this when I was in Statistics graduate school.