A mounting body of evidence finds that the spread of mobile technology is adding to news consumption, strengthening the appeal of traditional news brands and even boosting reading of long-form journalism. But the evidence also shows that technology companies are strengthening their grip on who profits, according to the 2012 State of the News Media report by Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Report from the the Pew Research Center

Cloud computing will create more jobs than the early Internet did, because cloud applications and platforms will transform the entire IT landscape. The recent Sand Hill study confirms it.

report from Sand Hill (pdf) and from Forbes

Canadian businesses and governments are lagging several western nations in the “Internet economy” and are being warned that they risk falling even further behind unless they take immediate and more aggressive action. The Internet contributed $49-billion to Canada’s gross domestic product last year, representing 3 per cent of the country’s economy, a report to be released Monday by the Boston Consulting Group estimates. It is projected to hit $76-billion by 2016, or 3.6 per cent of GDP.

from the Globe and Mail

This escalating numerology has been necessitated by an explosion in the volume of data surging round our digital ecosystem from developments in science, technology, networking, government and business. From science, we have sources such as astronomy, particle physics and genonomics. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, for example, began amassing data in 2000 and collected more in its first few weeks than all the data collected before that in the history of astronomy. It's now up to 140 terabytes and counting, and when its successor comes online in 2016 it will collect that amount of data every five days. Then there's the Large Hadron Collider, (LHC) which in 2010 alone spewed out 13 petabytes – that's 13m gigabytes – of data . The story is the same wherever you look. Retailers such as Walmart, Tesco and Amazon do millions of transactions every hour and store all the data relating to each in colossal databases they then "mine" for information about market trends, consumer behaviour and other things. The same goes for Google, Facebook and Twitter et al. For these outfits, data is the new gold.

from the Guardian