Last week, O’Reilly Media held the inaugural Strata “Making Data Work” Conference. The buzz of the conference was well beyond the 1400 people on-site (originally capped at 1000). SiliconAngle and Wikibon covered the event with a live video broadcast with over 30 guests (see the videos here). This wave has strong ties to the other big technology trends of the day: cloud computing, mobile and social. Big data is still nascent, so the definitions and boundaries of what is and isn’t big data are up for debate. What is clear is that a lot of people and companies believe that we can flip the challenges of the explosive growth of data into opportunities by creating new products and services.