Thanks to software, scientists now have the ability to record massive amounts of audio samples from ecologically diverse areas and use technology to help in the species-identification process—a labor-intensive task, given the difficulty in deciphering the sounds in many hours of recordings.

On May 9, 2013, President Obama signed the Open Data Executive Order, which mandates that open government data is now the standard—not the exception. The public will be able to access government datasets rendered in open, machine-readable formats and, when appropriate, expose data via APIs.

Cloud storage consumer subscriptions are targeted to exceed 625 million this year. A new generation of cutting edge data storage, modeled on the distributed database rather than the traditional hierarchical file system paradigm, is revolutionizing how storage is built and delivered in the cloud.