The power of Big Data technology is being successfully applied to understanding such complex unknowns as consumer sentiment and even intent. That understanding then vastly improves how retailers and myriad service providers manage their users' experiences -- increasingly in real time. Fortunately, today's consumers are quite willing to share their intents and sentiments via social media, if you can gather and process the information. Hence the rapidly developing field of social customer relationship management, or Social CRM.

Delivering information as an actionable asset in a widely collaborative and increasingly mobile environment has become a top business priority. Business architects need the agility enabled by such unshackled information sharing and contextual collaboration to keep pace with distributed services and a boundaryless enterprise approach to their operations and commerce.

Adventure games, which play out much like an interactive story, have had an adventure in their own right. These games peaked in popularity during the late 1980s to the mid-1990s but in recent years have been in decline. When action and online role-playing games gained mass market appeal, story often became secondary. However, story-driven adventures could be making a comeback. Jane Jensen, game designer of the popular and critically acclaimed Gabriel Knight series in the 1990s, is back with Moebius: Empire Rising.

Heartland Payment Systems has successfully leveraged software-assurance tools and best practices to drive better security within its IT organization -- and improve its overall business performance. In this podcast, Ashwin Altekar, director of enterprise risk management at Heartland, shares his insights and knowledge with Amir Hartman, the founder and managing director at MainStay. They discuss how Heartland has improved governance results across the organization, thanks to both security best practices and HP's Fortify tools.

As developers are pressured to produce mobile and distributed cloud apps ever faster and with more network unknowns, the older methods of software quality control can lack sufficient predictability. And as Agile development means faster iterations and a constant stream of updates, newer means of automated testing of the apps in near-production realism prove increasingly valuable. Fortunately, a tag-team of service and network virtualization for testing has emerged.

One of the UK's go-to spots for selling entertainment products online, Entertainment Magpie is now setting its sights on the U.S. with the launch of Decluttr.com. In this podcast, we chat with CEO Steve Oliver about how the digital revolution affects a business model predicated on physical entertainment media; the global network that underpins his company's business model; and how Americans' unfamiliarity with a black and white bird that collects shiny things forced Entertainment Magpie's stateside name change.

In the past, "it was about detection, and you had reaction technologies," said HP Network Security Architect Jim O'Shea. "Then we evolved to trying to detect things that were malicious with intent by using IDS. But that was a reactionary-type thing. It was a nice approach, but we were reacting: Something happened, you reacted. But if you knew it was bad, why did we let it in in the first place?"

"Many organizations have experimented with numerous approaches," said Tom Kendra, Dell Software's vice president and general manager for systems management. "Now we've gotten to the point where we have the unique opportunity to think about how we consolidate these approaches into a more integrated, holistic mobility solution that elevates data security and mobile workforce productivity."

Earlier this month, researchers published a report discussing global forest coverage. While that alone might not be eminently noteworthy -- a lot of scientific papers get published about a lot of topics -- these findings were supplemented by a first-of-its-kind interactive mapping tool that was created in partnership with Google. In this TechNewsWorld podcast, we discuss the research, the findings and the use of cutting-edge technology with the study's lead author, Matthew Hansen, a geographer at the University of Maryland.

Aggressive use of cloud-computing strategies can significantly improve delivery of applications to end users. Healthcare patient-experience improvement provider Press Ganey and project and portfolio management provider Planview are both exploiting cloud efficiencies and agility. Their paths have been different, but the outcomes speak volumes for how cloud transforms businesses.