Economist:

In the past information consumption was largely passive, leaving aside the telephone. Today half of all bytes are received interactively.

Wal-Mart, a retail giant, handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes.

Hal Varian, Google's chief economist, predicts that the job of statistician will become the "sexiest" around. Data, he explains, are widely available; what is scarce is the ability to extract wisdom from them.

Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, and Fernando Pereira:

Follow the data.

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

Bruce Schneier:

Data is the pollution of the information age.

This is wholesale surveillance; not "follow that car," but "follow every car."

More is coming.

Will not wearing a life recorder be used as evidence that someone is up to no good?

Sense Networks:

We asked ourselves: with all this real-time data, what else could we do for a city?

Nightlife enhancement was the obvious answer.