This week’s freebie is O’Reilly’s Data: Emerging Trends and Technologies.

Celebrating 5 years of the Strata + Hadoop World Conference, the four chapters and 16 pages of pdf cover a brief overview on a variety of technology topics while providing links for further information. Although dipping into tech speak at times, by and large it is colloquial to anyone with a basic understanding of Big Data.

Chapter Overview:

• Cheap Sensors, Fast Networks & Distributed Computing – an interesting step through computational history of central versus distributed trends.
• Computational Power and Cognitive Augmentation – Quite a mouthful, the section on “Design for Interruption” was probably the best of the book. Read this if nothing else because design of any product, service or process is going to need to get this in order to succeed.

“There’s a process of social refinement that takes place when new things become widespread enough to get annoying.” – Jon Bruner

• The Maturing Marketplace – NO, this isn’t about the Baby Boomers, but technologies that sport relative white hair … and considerable presence.
• The Promise and Problems of Big Data – the unanswered questions of Big Data’s dark side.

This week’s Friday Freebie is a great 10-20 minute read for non-techies (and maybe techies too) interested in an overview of some of Big Data’s current trends and issues.