Data is the most important and valuable thing in the world. Diamonds and gold are just rocks in the ground by comparison. Want proof? Look at Google. Collecting information and storing data creates power and has huge value.

The problem with data, however, is that it only has value when it tells a story. In other words, you have to actually use the data you collect at some point. You can have giant SQL tables full of the secrets of the universe, but you need to be able to utilize and share it. Tableau is a popular visualization solution in the data analysis world, but it is clunky and confusing. Microsoft's solution, Power BI, looks much more promising and useful. Today, the company announces that it is exiting Preview and will be generally available on July 24th.

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Moore's Law, the rule describing the steady growth of computing power, seems to have been under threat of late. But work by an alliance led by IBM research could see it safe for a few years yet.

Researchers have produced the first 7nm (nanometre -- one billionth of a meter) test chips. What does this mean? Current chips have components with a width of 14 or 20nm so a 7nm chip will allow many more components to be included.

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User data compromises and leaks are very unfortunate events. As a result of a hack or improper security, a person's identity could be stolen. Sadly, it is all too common for someone's social security number, date of birth and more to get into the hands of evil-doers.

Sometimes though, it can be a bit silly and funny. In mid-March, Mozilla had a contest, where it asked developers to come up with a t-shirt design. In mid-June, a winner was chosen and the developers were invited to reserve a t-shirt online using Google Form. Unfortunately, someone at Mozilla pulled a boner, and the t-shirt sizes of 70 developers were made public. Oh, the humanity!

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We hear a lot about the potential benefits of big data, but a new study reveals that those benefits are won at a cost of considerable time spent in cleaning up and preparing raw information.

The study by data integration company Xplenty surveyed over 200 business intelligence professionals and finds that a third of them spend 50-90 percent of their time just cleaning raw data.

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Thanks to the Internet of Things and the growth in the use of mobile devices, network traffic is growing faster than ever. But the tools used to manage and monitor that traffic haven’t kept pace.

Network visibility specialist Kentik (previously known as CloudHelix) is launching a SaaS platform to enable full visibility into networks of any size giving real-time, actionable insights into network traffic activity, DDoS attacks and peering efficiency.

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While some businesses saw an increase in revenue of more than £6 million, others struggle mining big data archives, a new study has shown.

The landmark study Mining for Insight: Rediscovering the Data Archive is an IDC white paper, just announced and published by Iron Mountain.

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Marketing departments today operate across multiple channels from traditional routes to digital campaigns and social media. That means they're dealing with more data than ever before.

But being data rich isn't an answer in itself as the information can be fragmented and difficult to analyze. Big data insights specialist Datameer is launching its Multi-Channel Marketing Analytics App which offers an end-to-end view of the marketing process from lead-to-customer.

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It's reckoned that 90 percent of the world's data has been created in the last two years and that every two years the amount of data will continue to double.

Existing data management solutions aren’t designed to cope with this rapid explosion of data. However, San Franciso-based startup company Komprise is building a platform uses analytics-driven adaptive automation to manage massive data growth transparently across all storage.

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Modern businesses invariably have access to lots of data, but deriving simple straightforward insights from that can be difficult, especially if it's stored across multiple applications or extracted from the web.

SaaS analytics provider FirstRain is unveiling a new analytics platform that lets enterprise customers deliver business-critical and actionable insights to departments, teams and individuals.

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As data volumes grow managing them and being able to extract meaningful insights in a timely manner becomes more and more difficult, especially for small and medium businesses.

Latvian database-as-a-service (DBaaS) company Clusterpoint is looking to expand its innovative technology to developers and small to medium sized businesses in North America by opening a new server cluster in Dallas.

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Traditionally benchmarking organizations or parts of an enterprise against each other has been a complex process involving a team of specialist analysts. But the amount of data available to modern businesses means that they're increasingly looking for ways to automate gaining insights information.

Pittsburgh-based OnlyBoth is launching a new commercial benchmarking engine based on artificial intelligence principles. It enables business-services providers to offer comprehensive, automated benchmarking services to their end customers.

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The blurring of technology and sport is something that I have written about several times before and now have another perfect example to add to the list, this time in motorbike racing.

To celebrate the final day of the Isle of Man TT races, EMC Corporation is announcing the results of a data analysis competition designed to reveal exactly what makes one of the riders so fast.

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With technologies like cloud systems and big data increasingly in demand the role of the chief information officer (CIO) is evolving and throwing up new problems all the time.

Enterprise search company Lucidworks has produced an infographic looking at the changes most affecting CIOs and what can be done to embrace them.

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Big data infrastructure specialist BlueData has announced that it's introducing support for Docker containers in its BlueData EPIC platform.

It will allow organizations to quickly and easily deploy Apache Hadoop or Apache Spark in a lightweight container environment making it simpler to deploy big data infrastructure.

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IT departments face increasing demands for self-service applications to enable users to manipulate data themselves, but this often conflicts with the needs of the enterprise.

Enterprise software provider MicroStrategy is addressing this with the launch of its latest software which combines self-service analytics and data visualization with enterprise-grade infrastructure.

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