Earlier this year, when BGI sequenced the strain of E. coli that had infected 3, 000 people in Germany, it instantly posted the data online, enabling a global crowdsourced analysis that identified the strain within a week.

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Other companies include BillFloat (online lending), Martini Media (online advertising), Personal Capital (online financial management) and Retail Solutions (data analysis for grocery retailers).

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Every day Zynga, the company that produces the online farm-tending game, runs extensive statistical analysis of reams of data.

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GigaSpaces provides a commercial alternative that has also won fans among some Web, cloud computing and online gaming firms, as well as financial services and telecom players with very large data analysis problems.

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Palantir offers highly sophisticated data analysis software that grew out of PayPal technology designed to detect fraudulent activity online.

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This is especially true in online analytical processing, which stores the data in an optimal form to support specific types of analysis.

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