Bio-inspiration

For the last 6 months, i have been closely following trends in information management. Below are few of my observations.

Data source explosion: Business Problems are gaining complexity day by day, hence there is a huge demand for analyzing data from multitude of sources to help companies frame strategies for growth. GPS data accumulated by Telecom companies offer insights into customers current location and provide context aware recomendations. Infact, some of the telecom companies have introduced location based pricing. Sensor data helps identify security threats to secure networks. Social network data has opened up as a channel for marketing services/product. Analysis of such closely knit data leads to behavioral & Contextual targeting. Traditional data analysis tools/algorithms fail to perform efficiently because such data are of huge sizes and needs newer datastructures for efficient analysis.
Databases going beyond relational is gaining popularity. NoSQL dbs and Graph/Tree/XML based databases.
Open Source tools continue to emerge.(R, RapidMiner, Weka)
Growing need for massive dataset analysis.
Artificial Intelligence(AI) and NLP gaining popularity among data analysts( in additional to ML techniques)
Multimedia Analytics: Need for gathering critical metrics like customer footfalls, quantifying customers satisfaction by using facial expressions. All these applications demand high end signal processing( both Image & Video). There is a lot of scope for innovation in this area.
Privacy preserving techniques for data analysis. This in turn encourages companies to outsource some of the critical data analysis to third parties.
Agile Methodologies for Analytics Project to cope up with rapidly changing customer/business needs.
Bio-Inspiration/Bio-Imitation: To learn from nature/natural processes and develop analogous techniques which could potentially solve a real-world problem. Some classic examples are development of Neural network inspired by working of a human brain, solving path optimization problem from Ant colonies, 280 degree view of honey bee(vision) etc.
More and more data are made publicly available.
Real Time data integration, insight generation and business decision.
Complex visualization techniques through new technology like Adobe Flex , MS Silverlight,etc which are known for generating RIA.(Rich Internet Applications)