Today is Om Malik’s #bigdataconf, a special one-day event he’s holding under the umbrella of his series of cloud-centric Structure conferences. We’ve been following the emergent trend of Big Data here at SiliconANGLE for well over a year now, and a lot of the questions posed as themes for the conference have been addressed by folks we’ve talked to in our research, and many of his speakers are alum from #theCube.

Big data has been one of the hottest topics in the enterprise space throughout the past couple of years or so, and according to some – for a very good reason. Big data is the first step towards gaining business insight –into consumer trends, cloud systems, ad campaigns and everything in between. This insight can be translated into results, says Technology and Strategy EVP Jean-Luc Chatelain to SA at Extraction Point.

Chatelain noted data is the currency of the future enterprise, and described the value chain from the raw resource to competitive edge: data put in context, information, insight and results. He continued to say that the most of current analytics offerings are not yet complete due to the early stage of the adoption cycle, and noted the financial, hospitality and oil & gas industries are however very advanced in this space.

SiliconANGLE also sat down with Gary Orenstein at Strata Conference 2011, and talked about data mining and big data. He noted that open-source have matched the costly, more traditional offerings in these segments. He forecasts that people will add value to cheap or even free data – put in the right context, and with the right tools.

“We’re using more of the Internet, so every click on the Internet is trackable. So, the more we get involved with e-commerce or whatever we do…all those percentages of business conducted on the Internet is increasing, and lat leads to clicks and clicksteams, and measurable data we can take action upon.” – Gary Orenstein

Companies have been working hard around trying to monetize the potential big data has for the enterprise, with the latest one being CrowdFlower. The human cloud company raised $7 million, and also used the opportunity to announce its new big data analytics tool, Product Categorization, which harnesses the power of a 1.5 million users sized human cloud. The HuffPo also got took off its gloves to introduce a new non-Flash big data web app, which aggregates and visualizes users’ political views from social network.

Another company, or start-up to be accurate which had a big data upgrade is Viralheat, which launched Social Trends. The latest affordable and handy big data analytics /visualization addition to the young start-up’s extends its already impressive portfolio.