Mark Kelly knows a thing or thirty about the music industry. He's served as keyboardist of the English band Marillion for more than three decades. Today, few musicians have his perspective on the business of music.

Shahab Zargari has published two photography books-one art anthology and a science fiction novel. His forte is editing film and video for sketch comedy, music videos, national TV commercials, and other film projects. Recently, he has stepped into the role of Director for the first time on...

About a year and a half ago, I interviewed Marillion's Steve Hogarth about his band's then-forthcoming album, the excellent Sounds That Can't Be Made. Aside from fronting the English band with quite possibly the most dedicated and passionate fan base in the world, Hogarth keeps a...

Jordan Rudess is a fascinating amalgam of a musician. He's primarily known as the keyboardist, Continuum-player, multi-instrumentalist for the Grammy-nominated prog rock/metal icons Dream Theater. Beyond that, the classically trained Julliard pianist has a fascination with technology. His company, Wizdom Music, has also released a...

The events last week were nothing short of horrible, although Bostonians and Americans together rejoiced on Friday as the second bombing suspect was captured. I for one shed a tear Friday night while watching citizens cheering police officers and government officials. You just...

In The Age of the Platform, I wrote extensively about the leadership exhibited by leaders from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. Leadership is a fascinating subject and thousands of books have been written about the subject. An interesting new text comes from Navi...

Big Data is nothing less than fascinating, as many books on the subject evince. There are so many applications, so many facets of our lives that will be changed. To this end, I recently sat down with fellow Big Data author Rick Smolan to talk about...

I didn't know what I wanted to study in college. When forced to declare a major in my sophomore year, I ambivalently chose English.

I remember taking several English theory classes. Some of the texts that I had to read were beyond intimidating, confusing, and incomprehensible. Long, drawn-out sentences with...

In its quest to kill Apple, has Google inadvertently empowered its rivals-and created new ones?

We know that Google has created a monster in Samsung. Giving away Android has certainly hurt Apple, but what are the other consequences of the move? Amazon has benefited: Kindle runs on a forked version...

Excerpted from Too Big to Ignore: The Business Case for Big Data (John Wiley & Sons) by Phil Simon.

I've been attending and speaking at conferences for a while now. I've noticed over my career that speakers tend to fall into one of three buckets:

• Sponsor


• Practitioner


• Professional Speaker/Thought Leader

While researching Too Big to Ignore: The Business Case for Big Data, it became pretty obvious to me pretty quickly that we don't know nearly as much as we think we do. As countless studies have shown, we're not very good at making decisions-and what we know today may not...

Yahoo!'s recent announcement to end telecommuting has caused quite the stir. It's hard to be neutral on the topic. (Put me in the 'bad idea' camp.)

I recently spoke about this with Terri Griffith, Professor at Santa Clara University and the author of the award-winning book, The Plugged-In...

Yahoo!'s recent announcement to end telecommuting has caused quite the stir. It's hard to be neutral on the topic. (Put me in the "bad idea" camp.) To this end, I recently spoke about this with Terri Griffith, Professor at Santa Clara University and the author of...

Data science is one hot field these days. In a 2011 article in the Harvard Business Review, DJ Patil and Thomas H. Davenport stated unequivocally that "Data Scientist" would be "the sexiest job of the 21st century." A tidal wave of discussion, dissension, and downright contrarianism ensued as technical...

Over the course of researching Too Big to Ignore: The Business Case for Big Data, I came across Kevin Pho, MD. Pho is a social media-savvy primary care physician and the founder of the medical blog KevinMD.com. (Klout named among the most influential social media voices in

I often write about how technology permeates every aspect of our lives. Today it seems as if nothing remains unscathed from the avalanche that is technology. To that end, I sat down down with Paul Roetzer, author of The Marketing Agency Blueprint and founder of PR2020.

The following is excerpted from "Too Big to Ignore: The Business Case for Big Data" (John Wiley & Sons, now available).

Unstructured data is more prevalent and bigger than ever. This does not change the fact that relatively few organizations have done very much with it....

I recently spoke about Big Data at IBM PartnerWorld in Las Vegas. At the conference, I finally had a chance to meet Ed Brill, author of the new book Opting In: Lessons in Social Business from a Fortune 500 Product Manager. Ed and I...

We live in an era of Big Data and predictive analytics, and Nate Silver's not the only one who's noticed this. I recently sat down with Dr. Eric Siegel to talk about new book, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or...