How to gauge the wisdom of the crowd and avoid spending billions doing it

One need look no further than the latest uproar in politics, or the quick spread of a brand’s ill-advised move to know the flash-flood speed of social media’s swell. Social media is the modern Town Crier, multiplied, amplified, and accelerated by the power of the Internet. Traditionalists may bemoan the demise of the Trading Pit. Take heart: The Trading Pit is not dead – it has merely migrated on to the Internet. And Open Outcry has transitioned from a few hundred traders communicating at the speed of sound to millions of traders communicating at the speed of light. At any given second, over 50 Trillion bytes of “stuff” is sent and received over the Internet. How does one extract actionable intelligence from this volume of Open Outcry without incurring billions of dollars of operational expense? Having spent over 25 years at the bleeding edge of cloud computing and intelligence extraction, I hope to provide some pragmatic insights and provoke a spirited debate.