Hey Graduates: Forget Plastics - It's All About Machine Learning

"Tell me, what would you do if you had 1,000 times more data?" I still remember reading this profound question on December 24, 2007 in BusinessWeek's cover article on Google and cloud computing like it was yesterday. It was an interview question, posed by then senior Google engineer Christophe Bisciglia (later founder of red-hot cloud software company, Cloudera and more recently WibiData) to job applicants. For the first time, I began to think through the practical implications of what the advent of the information explosion (now commonly referred to as "Big Data") really meant to both individuals and corporations. How would this onslaught of information effect decision-making across a range of industries, what were the practical implications to businesses and executives, and what were the resulting investment opportunities?