Couple of articles last week showed how companies are trying to use Data Science to make sense of data they have captured over the years resulting in some great analytics and value being added back into the system. The first one is an WSJ Article which utilizes Google’s Books Ngram Viewer to analyze the use of phrases “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Holidays” over the years. Second one came from Facebook Data team which discovered patterns in how people use status updates differently, and how their friends interact with these status updates. These are great examples of what Tim O’Reilly outlined as “Data is the next Intel Inside” in his famous Web 2.0 article. Mike Loukides wrote a great report back in June’10 trying to make sense of Data Science. He summed up his report as below:

The future belongs to the companies who figure out how to collect and use data successfully. Google, Amazon, Facebook, and LinkedIn have all tapped into their datastreams and made that the core of their success. They were the vanguard, but newer companies like bit.ly are following their path. Whether it's mining your personal biology, building maps from the shared experience of millions of travellers, or studying the URLs that people pass to others, the next generation of successful businesses will be built around data. The part of Hal Varian's quote that nobody remembers says it all:

The ability to take data -- to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it -- that's going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades.

Data is indeed the new Intel Inside.